J. Jance - Long Time Gone

Having learned little, I turned back to the unstintingly boring articles that recorded the growth of the Marchbank-Landreth media empire. In their enthusiasm to tell the local-boys-make-good saga, the writers took the position that bigger was better without ever once mentioning how the local radio stations-the small outlets in Bellingham and Chehalis and Ellensburg-regarded being swallowed up by Seattle’s neophyte media moguls.

One story in particular struck me as significant. On June 16, 1950, Phil and Albert had closed on the purchase of a total of five separate stations. This particular transaction, the largest one so far, was the only one that listed Abigail Marchbank as a partner. Was that why Albert had come to see his mother that day? Had he come to Mimi’s house in order to ask his mother for funds to complete this purchase? If so, Mimi’s standing on her back porch and telling him no might have been what sealed her fate.

The last article I picked up happened to be the one Linda Carter had found for me, a wedding announcement from the June 4 issue of the paper. It was something less than a paragraph in a column called “Comings and Goings.”

On May 13, Seattle residents Faye Darlene Downs and Thomas Kincade Landreth were united in marriage at a small private ceremony in Harrison Hot Springs, B.C. Faye is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Acton Downs. Thomas is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Landreth.

The day leaped out at me-May 13, the Saturday Mimi Marchbank was murdered. Hadn’t there been some mention of a wedding in one of the previous articles I had read? I retrieved my first set of duplicated P.-I. articles and rummaged through it. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for:

Mr. Marchbank told reporters that he last saw his sister and mother on Friday afternoon, shortly before he and his wife left for Harrison Hot Springs in British Columbia, where they attended a wedding.

Attending that wedding had provided Albert and Elvira Marchbank with an airtight alibi at the time of Mimi’s murder. I wondered if Wink Winkler had ever bothered to check to see if they’d actually been there.

I went back to the paltry announcement. Usually the weddings of offspring of local luminaries are given the full journalistic treatment. Mr. and Mrs. Downs may have been social nobodies, but Mr. and Mrs. Landreth certainly weren’t. I recognized at once what most likely wasn’t being said about this “small private ceremony.”

How small and how private? I wondered. And is there anyone around who would still remember the guest list of a shotgun wedding that happened back in 1950?

I put down the papers and reached for my phone book. In the Ls, I found no listing for Thomas Landreth, but there was one for F. D. Landreth. It came with a downtown Seattle telephone prefix but no printed address. I picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hello.” The woman’s voice sounded as if she was probably the right age-a bit more mature than mature.

“Is this Faye Landreth?” I asked.

“Who’s calling, please?”

“My name’s Beaumont,” I said. “J. P. Beaumont. I’m an investigator for the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team. It’s about-”

“Mimi Marchbank’s murder,” she interrupted. “I was wondering if anyone would ever get around to talking to me about that.”

I felt a rush of excitement. Elvira Marchbank’s death had probably garnered front-page treatment in today’s newspapers, but Faye Landreth was more concerned about Mimi’s murder-an unsolved homicide from fifty-plus years earlier.

“Would it be possible to meet with you?” I asked. “Today, maybe?”

“Today would be fine,” she said. “What time and where?”

“Where do you live?” I countered.

“In a condo downtown,” she said. “Cedar Heights on Second Avenue.”

She had no idea that I was calling from only a block away at Belltown Terrace.

“I can be there in ten minutes,” I said.

“Should I put the coffeepot on?”

“That would be great.”

Ten minutes later, she buzzed me into the building, and I made my way up to the ninth floor. The woman who opened the door looked to be in her early seventies. She was relatively tall and unbent. She wore her hair in a short pixie cut, but there was nothing pixielike in her firm handshake.

“Mr. Beaumont?” she said cordially. “Won’t you come in?”

She ushered me into a well-kept room. Her unit was much lower than mine and smaller, but the territorial view of the Space Needle and the bottom of Lake Union was similar to what I see from my penthouse bedroom. The furnishings were simple and not particularly elegant. Large, colorful pieces of inexpensively framed artwork filled the walls. I walked close enough to one of them that I could decipher the signature scrawled in the lower right-hand corner: F. D. Landreth.

“Yours?” I asked.

She nodded.

“They’re very good,” I told her. She flushed slightly at the compliment.

“Thank you,” she replied. “Painting is the only thing that keeps me from running the streets. Help yourself to a chair. How do you take your coffee-cream and sugar?”

“Black, please,” I told her.

Faye Landreth ducked into the tiny galley kitchen while I made my way to a comfortable leather couch at the far end of the combination living/dining room. On the end table next to where I took a seat stood a gilt-framed eight-by-ten photo of a handsome young man wearing his United States Marine Corps dress uniform.

“Your son?” I asked as she handed me a mug of coffee.

Faye nodded. “Timothy,” she said. “Timothy Acton Landreth. He’s been gone for a long time now-ten years. It’s the old story,” she added. “Drugs and booze. He went through treatment a couple of times, but he just couldn’t get his act together. That’s why I keep this particular photo-because he looks so good in it. Being a marine was the best thing that ever happened to him. After that, life was all downhill.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She smiled. “I know. So am I. I wanted to help him, but I just couldn’t. He’s why I’m talking to you now, though. I wouldn’t do it while Timmy was still alive. Things were tough enough between him and his father. I didn’t want to do anything that would make their relationship worse, but now…”

I was impatient. I wanted Faye Landreth to move on to the subject of Mimi Marchbank and how she had known I would be asking questions about that long-ago murder, but good sense won out. Like Sister Mary Katherine, Faye had kept whatever she was going to reveal secret for a very long time. I’d be better off waiting for her to relay the information in her own fashion and in her own good time rather than trying to rush her into it.

“You’re a widow, then?” I asked finally.

“A widow?” she repeated, then laughed outright. “Hardly. I’ve been divorced for years. In fact, Tom announced he was leaving the night before our thirtieth anniversary. He left the house that night and married his secretary, Raelene Jarvis, the day the divorce was final. His second wife, Raelene, happened to be two years younger than Timmy.”

“Which probably didn’t do much to improve father-son relations,” I suggested.

“No, it didn’t,” Faye agreed. “Tim stopped speaking to his father then and there. I always hoped they’d reconcile, but they never did. And I kept quiet because…” She paused and gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Well, I had been quiet for so long by then that it didn’t seem to make much difference. After Tim died, though, I told myself that if anyone ever did get around to asking me about what happened, I was going to tell what I knew.”

“Which is?”

Faye sighed. “Tom and I had to get married,” she admitted.