Practice to Deceive

Washington, which wasn’t far from the Mukilteo ferry dock.
    “He told me he left Redmond because he had an argument with his landlady.”
    “Did Eddie Navarre have a gun?”
    “I’m not sure, but he told me several times that he was ‘protected—because you never know.’ He may have actually told me he had a gun—but I never saw one.”
    Eddie Navarre had always seemed paranoid about the police. And he used very bigoted terms for minorities.
    “Black people, gay people, cops, and basically everyone who wasn’t white like him.”
    Although Navarre had purported to be a hippie, Sandra had seen that he coveted a lavish lifestyle and put a price on almost everything.
    His current occupation was with some company that sold healthy juice bar franchises for twenty-five thousand dollars. He said his boss was located in Arizona, and the 2001 van he was driving was a company car.
    It was a nice Chrysler van that was silver and gold. Sandra had written down the license number, and Birchfield had checked it out the first time she reported how strange Eddie Navarre was. It was legally owned by a man who lived in Scottsdale.
    “Eddie said he was very angry with his boss because he wasn’t paying him on time.”
    The thing that brought Sandra Malle to the South Precinct in the first place, however, was that Navarre had come to Whidbey Island on the weekend of December 26 to 29. He appeared at her house in Freeland on the twenty-ninth. He probably was down on his luck because he said he’d been sleeping in his van in a state park for two nights, and she found it strange that he had gone from a penthouse suite to sleeping in his van.
    “He showed me how he had blacked out the van’s windows so the police couldn’t look in on him. He had a TV, computer, feather bed, clothes, and a large black ‘Tupper-ware-style’ tote in there,” Sandra recalled. “He was proud of the way he had it all set up so the van could run his computer and TV. He said he found the feather bed in a bag beside the road someplace.”
    Plumberg wondered if Russel Douglas might have had a feather bed in his Tracker—since he traveled so much for his job.
    Eddie Navarre wove many good stories, including his tale of owning a huge marijuana farm in Gainesville, Florida, his promise of a twenty-thousand-dollar investment from an elderly man in Canada who wanted to help him republish a book/pamphlet he’d written in the eighties called Layman’s Guide to Fasting, and the fact that he had to work only two or three hours a day selling the juice franchises that were making him wealthy.
    And yet Mark Plumberg felt he was a shadow man. Sandra didn’t know where he lived, only that it was supposed to be a garage apartment with “new tile.”
    He asked Sandra if Navarre had ever mentioned a watch to her. She suddenly looked surprised.
    “Yeah—a watch. How did you know—?”
    And then she shook her head as if she’d been about to say something and then stopped.
    “I’ve forgotten the conversation,” she said, but sometime during the first week of spring this year—March 21—Eddie called me to tell me he’d found a ring and asked if I wanted it. I wasn’t interested, and I never saw the ring.
    “During that conversation, he mentioned a watch that he had that he was very proud of.”
    “What kind of watch did he wear?” Plumberg asked.
    She pointed to his Timex “Ironman” black sport watch, and said, “Like yours—a simple black watch like yours.”
    Sandra Malle regretted ever having let Navarre back into her life, and she was frightened that he still might hurt her. He was angry when she and her boyfriend kicked him out.
    “He wasn’t very happy.”
    “Did you ever threaten to call the police?”
    “No, we didn’t. He made it very clear that he didn’t like police and he wanted to avoid them—you—at all costs.”
    Now, Navarre was stalking Sandra Malle, and she was frightened. He was acting weirder and weirder.
    “After Dirk and I asked him to leave, he kept calling my phone. I wouldn’t answer and he’d let it ring off the hook. I’ve seen his van drive by my house several times a day. Once, he came over to my house and sat in the driveway and honked the horn. He sat there for over an hour. I’m afraid to answer the door when I’m home alone.”
    Sandra said she had begun to wonder if Eddie Navarre might have had something to do with Russ Douglas’s murder.
    “Why do you say that?”
    “The stuff he told us. He