Empty Promises

talk with him. He had also called Tami Scott and Ruth Rudd, two young women who were Larry’s close friends, and they had rushed to his apartment to help him deal with the shock.
    Gareth Leifbach and the two women spoke to Dougherty and Vasil in Larry’s apartment, their voices hushed with shock. Unable to stop his tears, Gareth volunteered information that seemed way off the subject of their visit. Rather than talk about Larry, his recently deceased roommate, Gareth told them that he was gay, and that he’d been discharged from the army at Fort Lewis for that reason. Before they could comment, he rushed to open his briefcase and pull out a sheaf of clippings detailing his fight with the army. He seemed proud of his notoriety, and very anxious to let the police officers know exactly who they were dealing with. He was, after all, a kind of celebrity.
    Dougherty and Vasil looked puzzled, but they knew that grief and shock could make people behave in unexpected ways. “How long have you known Larry Duerksen?” Dougherty asked Gareth.
    “During the time I was contesting my discharge, Larry wrote to me. We met and became friends. I traveled around after my discharge, and then came up to Seattle about the third or fourth of this month. I moved in with Larry.”
    “Do you know of anyone who might want to harm Larry?”
    “I got a phone call yesterday from a man who asked for Larry. I gave him Larry’s number at work and his work hours. Before he hung up, he said ‘You’re Gareth Leifbach, aren’t you?’ The guy called today too. When I told him Larry wasn’t here, he said, ‘I hate faggots,’ and then he hung up.” Asked for a recap of his activities during the day, Leifbach said he had stayed in the apartment until 11:30 A.M. , and then gone down to the “Ave”—the main drag of the University District, a block away—to have lunch at Pizza Haven.
    “I did some window shopping,” he said, “and got back here about one-thirty, and Larry was here. They gave him the afternoon off from the library.”
    So far, Gareth Leifbach’s and the victim’s day sounded pretty normal, but Leifbach continued. “Around two o’clock, Larry called a cab and we both went to some bridge,” Gareth said. “Larry took this gun from his jacket and handed it to me. He told me to throw it off the bridge, and so I did. Then we came back to the apartment.”
    When the two college policeman asked him to tell them more about the gun, Leifbach said, “Larry and I thought it was a good idea to have a pistol for protection.” To make his roommate feel more secure, Leifbach explained that he had bought the pistol. On December 11 he’d paid $305 for it at a shop in downtown Seattle. He’d also bought a box of bullets. He hastened to tell the investigators that he knew nothing about guns. “Larry loaded it—it was a Beretta automatic—but we changed our minds. We agreed to dispose of it.”
    For a man with more than two years in the air force, it seemed peculiar that he claimed to know nothing at all about guns. And when one of the investigators deliberately referred to the Beretta as an automatic, Leifbach corrected him quickly, “No, it’s a semiautomatic.”
    They asked him why they had thrown a $300 gun off a bridge. Why they didn’t sell it, or take it back to the store, but Leifbach just shook his head. He had no answer for that. Instead, he moved through the rest of the day’s events. He said that he had prepared dinner for the two of them—bacon and eggs—around five.
    “Between 6:00 and 6:45 P.M. Larry told me he had some business to take care of at the University,” Leifbach said. “He didn’t tell me what it was, and he declined my offer to go with him.”
    “You’ve been here ever since then?” Vasil asked.
    Leifbach nodded. The officers looked toward a jacket hanging in the closet, a jacket Leifbach said was his. It had a brown outer shell and a fleece lining. They noted that the cuffs of the sleeves and the bottom of the coat were soaking wet. That seemed odd. Leifbach insisted that he hadn’t left the apartment since he and Larry had come back from “the bridge” at two-thirty.
    Tami and Ruth spoke up, explaining that Larry had been threatened repeatedly by someone and that they thought the threats had been reported to the Seattle Police Department. Gareth Leifbach paced the floor. He seemed very agitated and he nodded as the women talked. He said Larry had told him about the threats, too. All