Betrayal of Trust

“Where’s Josh now?” Gerry asked.

“He’s upstairs with his attorney, Mr. McCarthy,” Mel said. “Your wife saw fit to—”

Gerry turned a disbelieving eye on Marsha. “Does that mean you’ve hired Garvin to be Josh’s defense attorney?”

“He’s good,” Marsha said quickly. “He’s very good.”

“He’s also very expensive.”

Marsha nodded. “He is that, but you need to go back to bed now, Gerry. It’s four o’clock. It’s time for your medication—the one you’re supposed to take with food.”

“I’m not going back to bed,” Gerry said determinedly. “I need to think. If you’ll bring the meds, I’ll take them here.”

Looking depleted, Marsha Longmire stood up. Right that minute she was a long way from being Governor Longmire.

“I’ll go make some sandwiches for everyone, then,” she said. She turned to Mel and me. “Is tuna on whole wheat okay?”

I remembered then that we hadn’t had lunch.

“Sure,” I said. “Tuna would be great.”

I should have thought that the governor would have a cook at her beck and call. There’s a good reason I don’t play poker. Most of the time the expressions on my face are a dead giveaway. That’s what happened this time, too.

“Today is the chef’s day off, and we’ve had to cut back on her helper’s hours. So on Mondays Gerry usually cooks. Not at the moment, however, so you’ll have to settle for what he likes to call my burnt offerings.”

For the first time I saw a look of genuine affection pass between the governor and the First Husband.

“You’re not such a terrible cook,” Gerry said. “I don’t think anyone is going to starve.”

Marsha smiled gamely. Since we had been turned into inadvertent guests who were evidently going to be there for a while, she must have decided that a bit of hospitality was in order.

“What would you like to drink?”

“It’s summer,” I said. “Iced tea if you’ve got it.”

Marsha turned to Mel. “And for you?”

“Iced tea would be great.”

As Marsha walked past her husband’s wheelchair, she gave Gerry a breezy buss on the top of his balding head. Once she disappeared through an open doorway that led into an immense dining room, Gerry Willis immediately turned to us.

“How much do you know about my grandson?” he asked.

Whenever possible, it’s always a good idea to let the subjects of interviews ask and answer their own questions. A lot of times they’ll blurt out exactly what you need to know. Or, by carefully avoiding a topic, they’ll still give themselves away.

“Not much,” I admitted with a shrug.

“This is a second marriage for Marsha and me,” Gerry explained. “We met at a party for lobbyists while Marsha was still in the state legislature. My wife died years ago in a car accident in eastern Washington. Marsha was divorced, amicably so. Sid, her ex, works as a lobbyist for the Master Builders Association. He and Marsha have a joint custody agreement that has gone surprisingly smoothly. It turns out their relationship was a lot better after they were divorced than while they were married.

“Marsha and I got married within a matter of months before she started campaigning for governor the first time. Lucy, my first wife, and I married young. Marsha married much later. Her two daughters, Giselle and Zoe, are only a couple of years older than my grandson.”

As Gerry related the story, some of the details were beginning to come back to me, although I have to admit the idea of lobbyists marrying politicians doesn’t exactly leave me feeling all warm and fuzzy. Gerry looked to be somewhere in his early seventies. Since Marsha was my age, if she had kids who were still that young, she probably hadn’t gotten around to doing the parenting thing until very late in the game, when her biological clock was ticking in overtime.

“When my first wife died,” Gerry continued, “my daughter, Desiree, was still in high school. We were both grieving. She needed more from me than I was able to give her. Long story short, I blew it. I let her down. She ended up falling in with the wrong crowd and went completely haywire. She dropped out of school and made a complete mess of her life. I tried to help her over the years, but there was really nothing I could do. She ended up getting involved in drugs. She married a jerk, a guy who went to prison and is still in prison for drug dealing. Desiree died of an overdose in a meth lab out in the woods down by Long Beach a little over three years ago.”

The regret in his voice over his fatherly shortcomings was heartbreaking, especially when I knew firsthand how fatherly failures stick with you and your kids pretty much forever.

Gerry paused for a moment and then went on.

“Since you’re cops, I suppose you’ve seen meth labs?”

Mel and I both nodded.

“By the time Marsha and I married, I had completely lost track of my daughter,” Gerry continued. “It was just too painful to see what she was doing to herself. I didn’t even know Josh existed until he was nine. That was six years ago, right after Marsha and I got married. When I found out about the squalor he was living in, I tried to get him out of it. Marsha was willing to adopt him, and for a time Desiree was willing, but then, when the father refused to sign away his parental rights, she backed out, too.

“A year later, when Josh ended up in foster care, I tried suing for custody. Desiree found herself a lawyer who managed to make it sound like her Big Bad Powerbroker Daddy and his wife, the Governor, were trying to run all over poor little her. I’ll say that much for Desiree. She was a very capable liar. The social workers at CPS seem to have or at least had a real bias toward keeping families intact.”

“They gave him back to her,” Mel said.

Gerry nodded. “We finally got custody three years later when Desiree died, but I’m afraid it was too late. Josh was twelve by then, and the damage was done. He came straight from foster care. He had the clothes on his back. Everything else was in a single grocery bag.”

I’ve seen kids come out of homes where the parents abuse drugs—crack, cocaine, meth, it doesn’t matter which one. The parents care far more about their next high than they do about their offspring. The kids are lucky to have clothes to wear or food to eat. As for going to school? That doesn’t happen, and once they get into “the system,” that often makes bad situations worse. A lot of foster parents do good work, but there are also some bad apples out there pretending to be do-gooders when they’re not.

The story Gerry Willis related was sad and all too familiar. I found myself feeling sorry for the First Husband and for Josh Deeson, too. I was also feeling a tiny bit sorry for Governor Longmire. Yes, she was beyond exasperation with the kid now, but once upon a time she had been willing to adopt him. When you try to do a good deed, it’s not nice when it comes back years later and bites you in the butt.

Gerry continued. “Josh can read. He taught himself. Used it as a mental escape hatch when he was living in terrible circumstances, but when it came to academics? Forget it. Giselle and Zoe were both in Olympia Prep when he came to live with us. Josh was so far behind his grade level, there was no way he could cut that, so we sent him to a public school. That’s why he’s taking classes this summer—trying to catch up. At least he was supposed to be catching up.”

So Zoe and Giselle went to a private school while Josh was relegated to public. I love it when politicians put their kids in private schools. A little bit of the feeling-sorry stuff for Governor Longmire went away.

“We tried to make him feel like a member of the family,” Gerry went on. “We offered him a room on the second floor just like everybody else. At the time he came to live with us, the girls—Zoe and Giselle—were willing to share a bedroom so he could have one of his own, but Josh wasn’t having any of that. He’s the one who decided he wanted to live up in the damned attic.”

Okay, so now I learned that Josh’s supposed Prisoner of Zenda plight was entirely self-imposed. Two points for Zoe and Giselle. Take one away from Josh. This was like an emotional tennis match, and I was having a hard time keeping score.

“But Josh didn’t want to have a family,” Gerry said. He paused and then asked, “Do you ever read Dean Koontz?”

As far as I was concerned, this was a question from way out in left field. I shook my head. “Doesn’t he write horror stuff, sort of like Stephen King?”

In high school, my son, Scott, was a huge Stephen King fan. Me, not so much. I was a homicide cop. I didn’t need to read about horror. I saw too much of it every day.

“Similar but different,” Gerry said. “One of Koontz’s books is called Watchers. It’s about a DNA experiment gone horribly awry. Two things come out of the experiment and they are the exact opposite. One is this incredibly intelligent golden retriever named Einstein. The other is a terrible monster. They turn out to be Good and Evil personified. And the scene that got to me in that book—”

“I know,” Mel interrupted. “The scene in the cave—the monster’s carefully made bed and his treasured Disney toys.”

“That’s it exactly,” Gerry Willis said.

Then he buried his face in his hands and sobbed. It took some time for him to get himself back under control and dry his eyes. In the meantime I was left thinking about how much more than a purse Mel Soames had brought with us to this interview.

“We noticed the book on the Spanish Inquisition,” I said when Gerry finally had regained his equanimity enough that he could once again answer questions. “Where did that come from?”