Don’t Look Behind You

plane for the long flight to Seattle?
    That seemed unlikely—at first.
    Most people would have still been dealing with postsurgical pain and in no mood for a plane trip. Benson didn’t know much about Nick. Apparently he was very close to his sisters and defended them if anyone dared threaten them or said a bad word about them. They were reportedly much sharper than Nick was, but they still doted on him. It looked as though Nick had always run to them—especially Renee—when he was in trouble.
    The infant boy that Geraldine Hesse adopted in 1948 had grown into a grizzled mountain of a man. He was once the baby who was slow to develop sitting, walking, and talking skills. He had polio as a child and that might have delayed some of his physical and mental growth.
    Nick Notaro was termed “slow” by most people who dealt with him in his life. He was a great fry cook, but outside of that and driving souped-up cars, he seemed to have no particular ambitions or hobbies.
    Back in 1978, Geri Hesse had explained to the Alaska state troopers who were investigating Vickie’s homicide that Nick “lived within himself” and was a “dreamer” and somewhat of a loner. She nodded when asked if her son was slow.
    “He
is
slow, like people say, but he isn’t retarded or anything like that; Nick does everything slowly and never seems to be in a hurry. He’s very quiet. He’s Scandinavian, or mostly Scandinavian. He’s not talkative. He’s very slow to anger.”
    Considering that Nick was rapidly becoming the prime suspect in the murder of his wife, this hardly sounded like an apt summation of Nick Notaro.
    Geri had continued painting her only son with a loving and rather strange brush. “He never dated in high school, but he ran with a bunch of boys I didn’t approve of. He wasn’t doing well in school, so I gave him a choice: either stop running with them or join the service.”
    Nick had chosen the second option. Three days after he turned seventeen, he joined the army. He went AWOL soon after because he was homesick. The army meted out a relatively mild punishment, and he was sent to Vietnam.
    “He was there for three tours of duty,” Geri said. “The first time he was assigned there, but he volunteered to go back two more times.”
    Geri Hesse shook her head when asked about young Nick’s interest in guns. “We didn’t have any [in our home]. We never had any. My husband was no sportsman—he didn’t even like a picnic! So we had no firearms. Nick never had a BB gun. He didn’t play cops and robbers like most youngsters do. He was content with games. He’d sit and read a little in his room, so he was a dreamer. He really loves his family.”
    Asked how Nick and Vickie met, his mother said Vickie had moved to the Spokane, Washington, area from a little town in Montana. Nick’s sister Cassie had taken Vickie in as she had no other place to go.
    “That’s where Nick met her. As I say, she was a very good girl—but anything she learned was after she came west and lived with Cassie.”
    Geri’s opinion of Vickie was somewhat ambivalent. She admitted that she hadn’t wanted her son to marry her because she was too young and had no experience in life. “He was twenty-seven and she was barely eighteen.”
    But the two of them had gone to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and gotten married on November 16, 1974. The Notaro women had to accept the surprise wedding and made the best of it, although they would tsk-tsk over Vickie’s talents as a wife—or lack thereof.
    According to Geri, she and Renee, Cassie, and Nick had been quite poor as the three children grew up. She gave no hint of her expensive tastes as she piously said,“Nick always had clean clothes and a neat house. We may not have had much, but we always had clean things.”
    Her mother-in-law’s disapproval of Vickie’s housecleaning and cooking was evident. According to her, Vickie didn’t even know how to separate laundry, and their small trailer was a mess most of the time.
    Yes, Geri had agreed, Nick had come down to Washington State right after he left the hospital, arriving on about September 23. She and her daughters had picked him up at Sea-Tac Airport. All of them felt sorry for him, she said, because Vickie had left him, just run off with another man without leaving a note. Nick had been very sad and brooded about his lost wife. As always, though, he didn’t talk much about Vickie—nothing beyond his recall of her picking him up at the