Practice to Deceive

Douglas was murdered, and the investigative team from Island County was eager to hear about Peggy’s memories of that day after Christmas.
    Dick Deposit’s guest house was about five miles from Wahl Road, where Russ Douglas was shot, but neither detective betrayed any particular interest when they heard this. They listened intently, however, as she recalled the day after Christmas.
    She said he had returned in that time period, bringing some Swisher Sweets cigars with him. These cigars were an item that few stores carried. Peggy said she still had the receipt for them. However, she hadn’t saved receipts for gas, ferry tickets, or other purchases she and Jim made on December 26.
    Peggy recalled that while Jim was gone, she noticed the sheets from their bed had been washed—but she’d forgotten to put them into the dryer. She rectified that, turning on the dryer and then making the bed.
    When he came back about noon, she said they had left the island again, taking the Keystone ferry to visit a friend, Bill Marlow. After that, they had driven to Vancouver, Washington, to see one of Peggy’s sisters.
    Heading north again, Peggy Sue said she and Jim stayed at the Marriott Hotel near Sea-Tac Airport.
    She had left out one stop on their quick trip down I-5, almost to Portland. Initially, Peggy didn’t mention stopping at the Red Lion in Longview at about 6:30 in the evening of December 26.
    Their friend Rick Early verified to Detective Sue Quandt that Peggy Sue and Jim had stopped to share a holiday dinner there, but they had only eaten appetizers and drank coffee, and left before others in the party ordered dinner.
    In this second interview with Shawn Warwick, Peggy went into more detail about catching the Keystone ferry on the day after Christmas. She said they had missed the noon ferry, and taken the 12:45 to Port Townsend to visit Bill Marlow. But the Washington State Ferry System said there was no 12:45 ferry; the next ferry would have been at 1:30 P.M.
    Detective Quandt reported to Mark Plumberg that she had contacted Bill Marlow in Port Townsend.
    “He said Peggy and Jim didn’t come to see him at all during the Christmas holidays. Jim was supposed to meet Marlow and other musicians for a band practice on the twenty-third, but he never showed up. Jim called him instead and said that he and Peggy were in Seattle.”
    It appeared that Jim and Peggy had attempted to fill the day of Russ Douglas’s murder full of occasions where they had been with people who would validate them. But some of them simply didn’t mesh.
    Peggy’s recall of the vital day placed them around noon at Dick Deposit’s—returning a key, buying Swisher Sweets, drying sheets, and then on the Keystone ferry to see Bill Marlow, next heading south on 101 either to Vancouver (which now seemed doubtful), before going to Kelso-Longview, Washington, to join friends for dinner.
    And then the pair had set out for Las Vegas.
    As Detective Shawn Warwick interviewed Peggy Sue again before he and Ed Wallace left Nevada, Peggy wanted to correct something she had said earlier. She said she had been mistaken when she said that Jim had been gone from Dick Deposit’s house for half an hour to forty-five minutes. Thinking back, she thought he’d been away only about fifteen minutes.
    Any homemaker knows that would not have been enough time to dry a load of sheets and pillowcases.
    Odd.
    Whenever the interview with Peggy began to veer into areas where Gerald Werksman appeared to feel uneasy, he changed the subject. He went into great detail about the baseball games he’d placed bets on since he had arrived in Las Vegas, or asked the detectives about how they liked the hotel where they were staying.
    It was an obvious ploy to take some of the heat off of Peggy Sue’s answers.
    * * *
    T HE DETECTIVES HAD HEARD about that Christmas trip many times.
    They listened patiently, detecting slight changes. And then they showed Peggy a photograph of the death gun found in Radium Springs, New Mexico, only two weeks earlier.
    Peggy Sue denied ever having seen it before, but the stunned look on her face spoke for itself. After this first day of interviewing and finding more items listed on the search warrant, the detectives called it a day. They wanted to give Peggy Thomas time to mull over the fact that the Bersa had been found and perhaps wonder which of her documents and files had been taken into evidence.
    She had also appeared shaken when her prize car was