Don’t Look Behind You

Tarricone, Gypsy Tarricone received a phone call from a KIRO reporter, Deborah Horne. The Seattle-based CBS reporter was passing on the name of a man who was trying to contact Gypsy.
    “I called him,” Gypsy remembers. “His name was Richard and he lived on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle. He told me he just couldn’t believe the things he was hearing about Renee.”
    Richard explained that he had been the driver for Luther Wallach during the time she lived with her billionaire paramour.
    When Richard knew Renee, she was beautiful, a glamorous hostess at their parties, and everything was “perfect.” She chose gourmet food, the finest wines. In Richard’s eyes—then—Renee was the epitome of class, seemingly born to the upper stratosphere of society in Seattle.
    Richard thought that the old man might have married her in time, but the chauffeur saw that she kept pushing too hard and his boss wasn’t about to be forced to the altar. Perhaps thinking that he would change his mind if he thought he couldn’t have her, Renee packed her things and left Wallach.
    Her tactics didn’t work. Shortly after she walked out of his life, Wallach married a young woman whom Richard categorized as “trailer trash.” The new bride had a small child. Ironically, when the Exxon billionaire died a little more than a month after their marriage, he left everything to the woman who had quickly replaced Renee.
    Renee Curtiss was smart and manipulative—but she had one flaw when it came to ending up with wealth: bad timing.
    Renee wasn’t alone for long. Next, she dated another very wealthy man—Charlie Gunderson.* He wasn’t a billionaire, but he had an executive position in a huge chain of auto parts stores. He was, as was her pattern in the menshe chose, quite a bit older than Renee. Once again, she lived a lush life. But once again, it became obvious that her goal was marriage. Charlie, who had ties to Anchorage, Alaska, wanted only a lovely companion—not a wife with expensive tastes.
    Renee hadn’t learned from her previous relationships. Charlie Gunderson, too, balked. And Renee walked out, just as broke as she was when she’d met him.
    For Renee, the third time was almost the charm. She soon met Henry Lewis, who owned one of the top bail bonds businesses in Seattle and was a beloved local fixture. How she met him—or any of the men in her life—remains clouded. It’s quite likely that she may have gone to Henry’s place of business after one of her DUI arrests.
    Renee was growing older; she was nearing fifty and the men she chose to seduce weren’t that much older than she was anymore. Henry “Fireball” Lewis was eleven years older than Renee and beloved in the black community, and he was a great friend to many big names in the Seattle music world, especially Jimi Hendrix, one of the greatest guitar players of all time.
    Henry had been a baseball star in his younger years, and he’d owned Henry’s Bail Bonds for almost two decades. He had several children who adored him and scores of grateful clients. His bail bond business was one of five or six in Seattle that people who found themselves under arrest or in jail turned to.
    When
Seattle Times
reporter Natalie Singer interviewed Henry in May 2006, she wrote, “It’s too bad you have to get arrested to see the office of Henry ‘Fireball’ Lewis.Tucked inside a historic Pioneer Square building, Henry’s Bail Bonds doubles as a Jimi Hendrix shrine of sorts … [Henry Lewis] reigns over the collection of framed Hendrix posters and T-shirts, just a sampling of the memorabilia he hopes to turn into a museum one day.”
    Some people even called Henry “the Jimi Man.”
    Jimi Hendrix was, according to experts, one of two of Seattle’s massively talented guitar players, singers, and songwriters, both of whom died prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, both under suspicious circumstances where drug use and the possibility of foul play were considered. Kurt Cobain, the front man for Nirvana—one of the first grunge rock groups to fascinate a new age in music—was the other. They both grew up in Washington State and lived, as adult superstars, close to Lake Washington in the Seattle area.
    Kurt died on April 5, 1994, by his own hand, according to Seattle police detectives, as he held a rifle to his head. His fans still dispute the official decision to rule that suicide was his manner of death.
    Jimi Hendrix, widely considered to be the greatest