Authors: JA Jance
T
he thing about pain meds is that they work. I dozed off then and didn’t wake up again until we were driving through a residential area in Yakima. Mel had located Frankie Dodd Clark’s address on Douglas Drive before we left home. Given Glenn Madden’s call about Doug Davis on the way there, the irony of going to that particular address wasn’t lost on me.
Douglas Drive turned out to be a neighborhood of upscale brick rambler-type homes with plenty of grassy yards separating one house from another. At a glance it was easy to tell that Frankie Clark had done all right for himself. The door to the two-car garage was open, revealing the presence of two cars—a relatively new white four-wheel-drive Silverado pickup and a spanking-new silver Taurus with dealer plates still pasted in the window. At a time when not many people were plunking down money to buy new cars off the lot, I thought that was telling.
Mel and I had agreed in advance that ours would be a surprise visit with no advance warning. She pulled up behind the two cars and stopped directly behind both of them. Then she came around to my side of the car and handed me the two canes. Using the canes made me feel a little less gimpy. Once on the front porch, she rang the bell, then pulled out her badge and ID.
A young girl with her blond hair in two old-fashioned braids answered the door. She looked to be not much older than her father had been the first time Mac and I met him that Sunday afternoon.
“I’m Special Investigator Mel Soames and this is my partner, Inspector Beaumont,” Mel told the little girl. “Is your father here?”
Somewhere in the background I could hear the sound of a baseball game broadcast. It was September, and it was looking like the Mariners had a chance of making it to the World Series.
“Hey, Daddy,” she shouted into the house. “Some cops are here to see you.”
Frankie Dodd Clark came to the door wearing a pair of blue cutoffs, a Seattle Mariners T-shirt, a pair of flip-flops, and a very concerned look on his face. He was a tall, rangy man—well built and well muscled, with a prematurely receding hairline. His once bright red hair—what he had left of it—was more of a burnished copper now. Other than hair color, I saw very little resemblance between him and the reticent kid I remembered from Sister Mary Katherine’s office.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, stopping in the doorway and not inviting us to step inside.
“No,” I said. “Not at all. We’re with the Special Homicide Investigation Team. My partner, Ms. Soames, and I would like to ask you a few questions about a cold case we’re working on.”
Frank frowned. “Is this about my brother?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “Nothing to do with your brother. It’s about a homicide that happened years ago in Seattle. My partner then, Detective Watkins, and I interviewed you and Donnie about it at the time.”
In homicide investigations, timing is everything. The pauses between the time a question is asked and the time the answer is given are sometimes more telling than the answers themselves. This time, not only was the pause far too long, but so was the glance Frankie shot back over his shoulder, as though he was making sure his family members were out of earshot.
At that point, in most interviews, we’d either be sent packing or be invited inside. In this case neither happened. Instead, Frank stepped out on the porch and pulled the door shut behind him.
“This is about the woman in the barrel?” he asked. He had been so young at the time that the young woman who had been a “girl” to us had been a “woman” to him.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the one.”
“What do you want to know?”
“We’re having difficulty locating the records from then,” I said. “What can you tell us?”
He closed his eyes for a long moment before he answered. “It was late at night. My brother, Donnie, and I were outside, doing something we weren’t supposed to be doing, and we saw this guy drive a pickup into the yard next door.”
“You’re sure it was a guy?”
Frank nodded. “He pushed a barrel out of the back of the pickup and rolled it down the hill. Then he drove off. The next day Donnie and I went looking for the barrel. When we opened it, that’s when we found the dead woman, stuck in there with a bunch of greasy stuff.” He paused, looked at me, shuddered, and then shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s it,” he added. “That’s all I remember.”
It was such a blatant lie that I wanted to poke him with my cane, just to let him know I knew, but I didn’t.
“My partner at the time and I came to school to talk to you about it. As I recall, your brother did most of the talking.”
“My brother’s dead,” Frank offered.
“But why was that?” I asked, ignoring his comment. “Why did you leave it up to him to do the talking for both of you? Or was it always like that? He was sort of the ringleader and you just went along with the program?”
“Why are you asking me about this now?” Frank demanded. “We were just kids back then. You can’t possibly think we were the ones who killed her. That’s crazy.”
“What we think is that you’re hiding something,” Mel said softly. “What?”
The wary look Frank turned in her direction told me that Mel had nailed it. He really was hiding something.
He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about this. As far as my kids are concerned, Howard Clark is the only grandfather they’ve ever known. I don’t want to have to explain all of that other stuff.”
“What other stuff?” Mel asked. “Are you saying your stepfather is responsible for what happened to that girl?”
Frank suddenly drew himself up so that he looked a good three inches taller. “Absolutely not!” he declared hotly. “He wasn’t even in the picture then. At least, if he was, Donnie and I didn’t know it. When he asked Mom to marry him a couple of weeks later, it was all news to us. As for coming back over here to live? That was fine with us, too.”
“So what aren’t you telling us?” Mel asked. “I’m guessing there’s something you and your brother knew that you didn’t tell anyone at the time.”
Mel is great when it comes to talking softly and carrying a big stick. Her tone of voice was gentle but utterly firm. Nothing about her allowed for any wiggle room. I suspect Sister Mary Katherine would have approved.
Frank looked her full in the face and then his eyes slid away. “We were scared,” he said.
“Scared of what?” I asked.
“Not of what,” he answered despairingly. All the fight had gone out of him. “Of who. I saw the face of the man who was driving the truck, the guy who dumped the barrel. I recognized him. He told us if we ever told, he’d come after us, and we believed him. I still do.”
“Who was it?” I asked.
“A cop.”
We already knew that much. I wanted to shake the guy and knock some sense into him. “What was his name?” I insisted.
“I don’t know. We never knew his name. He was our father’s bodyguard.”
“Wait. I thought you said your father wasn’t involved.”
“Howard Clark is my stepfather,” Frank Dodd declared. “He’s my adoptive father and the only one I’ve ever known. The other guy was a rich guy, a sperm donor only. Oh, he paid the rent for the house where we lived. And he paid for food and for us to go to school. But I understand now that he only came by for what people these days call booty calls. Paying for us to go to school was his way of getting his regular rolls in the hay. Donnie and I were a means to that end. He also expected us to be properly grateful, to not talk back, and to do exactly what he said. If we didn’t, the belt came out.”
I didn’t like how this was going. It was like stepping on what you thought was firm ground and feeling the slippage as it gave way to seeping quicksand. Some guy who could ride around town with a Seattle cop serving as his bodyguard was a guy whose name we probably didn’t want to know.
“We need a name,” Mel said softly. “Please.”
Frank took a deep, shuddering breath. “Daniel DonLeavy,” he said, with his voice barely a whisper. “Daniel McCoy DonLeavy.”
I’m sure my jaw dropped. “As in Mayor Daniel DonLeavy?”
Mayor DonLeavy had arrived on Seattle’s political scene in the late sixties with a program for cleaning house in city government, for cutting waste and corruption, for shaping up the police department. Ironically, DonLeavy had done so with enough shady dealings on his part that by the late seventies the former mayor and a number of his “kitchen cabinet” had not only been indicted, but had also been sent to the slammer.
Frank Clark nodded. “That’s the one,” he said. Then, motioning toward a wooden swing on the porch, he added, “It’s a long story. Care to have a seat?”
By then I had been leaning on my canes for what seemed like forever. I gratefully accepted. Mel and I sat together on the swing while Frank took a seat on the front step.
“My mother and Howard Clark were high school sweethearts,” he explained. “They went together during their first two years of college. Then, something happened and they broke up. At that point, my mother dropped out of college and went to work as a cocktail waitress at Vito’s. I suppose you know where that is?”
I nodded.
For decades Vito’s, a combination bar/restaurant, had been the in place for the in-crowd’s wheeling and dealing in Seattle. That’s where the top-tier guys from the cop shop had gone to mingle with the politicos and the well-heeled attorneys, while the guys lower down on the food chain had tended to gather in joints in the International District where the food was cheaper and the atmosphere wasn’t quite as alive with political infighting.
“That’s where she met DonLeavy?”
It was Frank’s turn to nod. “The old story. He was married. Once she got pregnant with my brother and me, he tried to talk her into giving us up, but she wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t agree to an abortion, either, mostly because they were both good Catholics—well, maybe not exactly good. Anyway, DonLeavy ended up setting her up with a place to live. He gave her money to live on and food to eat. And that’s just the way things were. He took care of us. Paid for us to go to that school. He also beat the crap out of us if he thought we were out of line.”
“Did you know the man was your father?” I asked.
Frank shook his head.
“Not really,” he said. “Our mother told us he was just a friend, but it turns out she had a lot of friends.”
Frank Clark drew imaginary quotation marks around the word. It was an admission that didn’t require any more detail than that. The gesture told me that Donnie and Frankie had known what their mother was back then, and that old story didn’t need rehashing now.
“According to our mother,” Frank continued, “the guy was like our uncle—our uncle Dan. The other guys came and went from time to time, but Uncle Dan was different. He showed up on a regular basis, always with a driver who hung around outside while Dan was inside the house visiting.”
His fingers drew another set of invisible quotation marks around the word “visiting.” I took that to mean that the boys had known what was going on. They had understood.
“A driver and a bodyguard, then?” Mel asked.
Frank nodded. “Donnie and I figured out the bodyguard was some kind of cop, even before that night, the night he showed up at the house next door with the barrel in the back of his truck. When he turned around after pushing the barrel down the hill, he saw us. We were hiding under the back porch, but he saw us anyway. He pulled a gun on us and ordered us to come out from under the porch. That’s when he told us that if we ever told anyone that he had been there that night or if we ever talked to anyone about Uncle Dan or him, we were done and so was our mother.”
“So he threatened you, and you believed him?” Mel asked.
Frank nodded. “We were kids. He was holding a gun. Of course we believed him.”
“But you still went down and looked at the barrel,” I said. “Why?”
“It was a dare,” Frank said sadly. “One of Donnie’s famous double dares.”
“When you found there was a body in the barrel, you still called it in. Why?”
“If the guy could do something like that to her—to the woman in the barrel—we were afraid he could do the same thing to our mom or to us. We thought the cops would figure out who had done it on their own—that you would figure it out,” he added, casting an accusatory glance in my direction. “Donnie and I didn’t dare try to help much. We were too scared.”
“This guy you thought was a cop. Did you ever see him again?” I asked.
Frank nodded. “He was there at the house that Sunday evening.”
“The day you found the barrel?”
Frank nodded again.
“What happened?”
“He came to the house and talked to Mom. I don’t know what he told her, but I know she was upset and crying after he left. Five days later, Howard Clark showed up at our house. Within a matter of weeks, he and Mom got married—by a justice of the peace—and we moved back here.”
“What about DonLeavy?” I asked.
“I never saw him again. I didn’t know the whole story—that he was our biological father—until our mother was in the hospital. When she realized she was dying, she decided it was time to tell me the truth. I’m not sure why. It didn’t make any difference.
“She said that at the time we were leaving Seattle, someone was threatening to tell DonLeavy’s wife about us. She was sure there was going to be a terrible scandal. Mom had burned her bridges with her own family years earlier. She was desperate. She called Howard Clark to ask for his advice and that’s when he came riding to the rescue. He brought us back over here. He took care of Mom and of Donnie and me, too. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the only father I’ve ever needed or wanted.
“After Mom died, I went on the Internet to find out what I could. That’s when I discovered that Daniel DonLeavy has been dead for fifteen years. His widow is still around, but I don’t feel right showing up and saying, ‘Surprise, guess who I am?’ So I haven’t done that, and I have no intention of doing so, either.”
The three of us were sitting there in silence when the front door opened and a woman stuck her head out. She looked worried. “Is everything all right?” she asked.
“It’s okay,” Frank said quickly. “Just some old stuff from when we lived in Seattle.”