Last Dance, Last Chance

Haws.
    “Seattle is my home town,” he told Seth and Sprinkle. “And I graduated from Lincoln High School. I knew this guy in high school—and I saw him in the Triple XXX on the night the waitress was killed. I think he took her home that night.”
    “Tell us about it,” Seth said.
    “I got there sometime before two in the morning,” Haws said, “and this pretty, red-haired girl waited on me. I was kind of kidding—kind of serious—about asking her to go out with me. She said no, but she didn’t say why. She was a nice girl, and I didn’t really expect she would go, anyway.
    “Anyway,” he continued, “this new gray Lincoln sedan pulled in. I was surprised to see that Jack Gasser was driving it. I left my car and walked over and talked to him. I hadn’t seen him for two years. He left high school to join the Navy before he graduated. He told me he was sent to China, and after his Navy service, he finished high school at Broadway High. I didn’t see how he could afford the fancy car, and then he told me the Lincoln belonged to his uncle.”
    Fred Haws said he’d gone back to his own car to eat his sandwich, and he saw the girl he now knew was Donna Woodcock come out of the Triple XXX and go over to the Lincoln.
    “They were talking, and I think Jack was asking her out, or maybe he knew her from before, and he already had a date with her. Anyway, they were still talking when I left.”
    “We think she did go out with him that night,” Don Sprinkle said. “Another waitress saw her leave in a gray Lincoln. Do you know where this Jack Gasser lives?”
    “I couldn’t tell you the address—but I could lead you there,” Haws said.
    Seth and Sprinkle followed the young Marine to a house in the north end, but when they rang the doorbell, the man who answered said that the Gassers had moved two years earlier. He told them that the head of the household was named William Gasser.
    The phone book showed a William Gasser on 35th Avenue West. Seth and Sprinkle felt a thrill of excitement. The address was only two blocks from where the stolen Lincoln had been abandoned a few hours after the murder.
    “We drove there,” Austin Seth remembers. “It was a really hot night—I remember that well.”
    Moths fluttered around the porch light, and a faint breeze made the heavy shrubbery around the steps brush against the railing. When they knocked on the screen door, a good-looking young man who looked to be about nineteen or twenty answered.
    “We walked right in,” Seth says, “and I said, ‘Is Jack Gasser here?’ The boy who answered the door said, ‘That’s me.’ He didn’t seem nervous at all.”
    In the light of the foyer, the two detectives studied Jack Gasser. He was six feet tall and very trim and muscular. His thick dark hair was heavily pomaded and combed straight back, except for one errant lock that he had deliberately curled so that it fell over his forehead in a style popularized by movie star Robert Mitchum. Jack Gasser had clear light eyes, but Seth recalls that there was a “dead” quality about them.
    Of more interest to Seth and Sprinkle was the cluster of scratches on the left side of Jack Gasser’s face. They were deep and had barely begun to heal.
    “Can we talk to you for a minute?” Seth asked.
    “We’re just eating supper,” Gasser said, but he led them into the dining room, where his family sat around the table. His parents and his older brother stared at the detectives in open-mouthed surprise.
    While Jack Gasser seemed to grow tense, his father was angry at the interruption and demanded to know why the two detectives were there. The elder Gasser, who owned an insurance agency in the University District, explained that he had just been elected commander of his district’s American Legion veterans’ group and that his installation was that evening. He didn’t appreciate being interrupted at such an important time.
    “We told him that nevertheless we needed to talk to Jack, and we took him out to our car,” Seth recalls.
    The Gassers were puzzled, but they didn’t object to Jack’s being questioned. Don Sprinkle and Jack Gasser slid into the back seat of the detectives’ unmarked car.
    “It’s about a Lincoln sedan that was stolen last night,” Sprinkle said.
    And, with that, Jack noticeably relaxed.
    “It was found just a short distance from here,” Sprinkle said.
    “Oh, that,” Gasser finally admitted. “I did steal that car. I didn’t hurt it,