Last Dance, Last Chance

working the Sunday shift in the Homicide Unit back at the office, read a teletype out of Salem, Oregon. It was an all-points bulletin on a convict named Carl Cletus Bowles, who had escaped from a conjugal visit to a local motel. The woman he’d gone to spend four hours with had been introduced to prison officials as his fiancée; in actuality, she proved to be his niece. Authorities believed that Bowles, who had killed a cop, might head for the Canadian border and slip across into British Columbia.
    The Eldorado Motel was right along such a route. Bowles was known as a vicious “over-killer,” and the person who had slain Bertha Lush had struck her approximately 28 times in the head with a hammer.
    DePalmo and Detective Ted Fonis called prison officials in Salem and asked for any information and mug shots available on Bowles and his niece. They learned that the couple had escaped through a rear door of the Motel 6 in Salem while a guard waited in front. The niece’s car was a white Thunderbird.
    It looked good for a while, especially when a patrolman in Seattle’s north end precinct reported that he’d followed a suspicious-looking couple in a 1962 white T-bird on the fatal Saturday.
    But a lot of suspects looked good. Detective DePalmo, along with Ted Fonis and Detective Wayne Dorman—the partners who would be assigned the follow-up work on the case—would have to sift through any number of suspects before they found their killer.
    Another patrolman reported that he’d shaken down and F.I.R’d (Field Investigation Reported) a white male, 32, outside the motel on the night before the murder. The man had given his name as Albert Selleck * and he said he was staying in Unit 2. He explained that he’d had a fight with his wife and moved out of their house in the north end of Seattle. The man had been highly nervous and had driven away in his clunker of a car when the officer turned away for a moment.
    But the cop got the license number. He ran it through auto records in Olympia, and it came back listed to Albert Selleck. At least, he hadn’t lied about his name. Maybe he hadn’t lied about anything.
    After several tries, the detectives found Selleck at his north Seattle address. He had left the motel even though he still had another day paid for. He said he’d made up with his wife, and he had a solid alibi for May 18. Sheepishly, he admitted he’d panicked when the officer stopped him. He felt stupid for driving away.
    Other guests at the motel told detectives that they had come home to find their units double-locked on Saturday afternoon. Bertha told them she’d had trouble with a man who hadn’t paid his bill, and she’d locked the units to be sure he couldn’t sneak back in if he’d had a key copy made. To the best of the witnesses’ recollection, she hadn’t mentioned his name or anything else about him.
    The mystery man couldn’t have been Albert Selleck; his rent was paid well in advance. And reports on sightings of Carl Bowles placed him 300 miles south of Seattle, near Eugene, Oregon.
    Detectives Fonis and DePalmo began a search for the store that had sold the death hammer, carrying a picture of the hammer to show the employees in the many outlets of Ernst Hardware stores. The sales slip showed the hammer cost $3.46. The purchaser had given the clerk a five-dollar bill and a penny and received $1.55 in change. Beyond that was the notation “256 18, May, 74.”
    The manager of the Ernst store in the Northgate area explained that 256 was not the number of the store selling the hammer, but rather the number of the sale in a particular store on May 18. It would be more difficult to find the store where the hammer had been purchased, but he said he would try.
    Unfortunately, many of the motel guests had checked out and gone on their way before the body discovery. The investigators sent letters to everyone listed on the log for May 17–18, asking that the recipients call the Seattle Homicide Unit collect. Within a day all of them had responded, but none of them had any new information to offer.
    Sergeant Ivan Beeson, Fonis, and DePalmo returned once again to the Eldorado, where they carried out a very thorough search. They found a black purse in a closet in Bertha Lush’s apartment. It was empty except for her birth certificate, which showed she’d been born in Harlan County, Nebraska, on September 7, 1909, and two sets of keys for her Studebaker, parked out in back. They searched the car