Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

his name on their manifests.”
    Sergeant Herb Swindler of the Crimes Against Persons Unit was given the chief responsibility to investigate the possible disappearance of Raoul Guy Rockwell. Swindler looked a great deal like actor Richard Widmark, and once he started on a case, he didn’t let go until he found the answers he sought.
    When Sergeant Swindler got this assignment, he had no idea that it would consume his life for many years to come.
    Swindler arranged to interview Evelyn Emerson Rockwell. Dabbing at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, she told him everything she knew about her husband’s trip north across the border. “He called me from the airport that night—August 3rd,” she said worriedly. “He told me he was leaving on a 9:05 P.M. plane and he had to rush to get on board. He planned to come home on a fishing boat sometime the following weekend, but I haven’t heard one word from him since he called me from a pay phone at the airport.”
    Swindler also checked with the airlines that flew out of Sea-Tac on Wednesday at nine. He learned that if Rockwell was on that plane, he either had reservations under a different name or had missed his flight.
    When Herb Swindler contacted Raoul Guy Rockwell’s bank, the Pacific National Bank’s branch near the University of Washington, they remembered him very well. “He recently cashed a $10,000 check written by Mrs. Winkler,” the branch manager said, “and withdrew about $3,000 from his own checking account with us. That left a small balance in the account.”
    “He took it out in Canadian currency?”
    “No, it was in U.S. money. His wife’s name—Manzanita—was still on the joint account.”
    Rockwell’s attorney was surprised to hear that. “After the divorce, I advised him to take Manzanita’s name off that account,” Heiman told Swindler. “She never came back. I understood he’d sold all his antiques at Bushnell’s auction and collected that money, and he wouldn’t want her to withdraw that money from their account. But it looks as if there wasn’t enough left in there for him to worry about.”
    Swindler realized that the popular collector of antiques was virtually cutting his ties to Seattle, apparently planning a whole new life with his bride.
    But where was he? He was carrying $13,000 in cash, a very large amount of money.
    The situation became even more mysterious when the Seattle police investigator checked on Rockwell’s means of transportation. He didn’t own a car; he’d been renting one, and it had been turned in to the rental company at Sea-Tac Airport. But their records indicated it hadn’t been returned on August 3, when Rockwell was supposed to be flying to Canada; Rockwell had driven it to the rental office on August 4, a day after he’d told Evelyn he was running to catch a plane.
    And from that point on, he had disappeared.
    Where had he been during the previous night? Just in case it hadn’t really been Rockwell who returned his car, Swindler questioned the clerk at the rental kiosk, asking for a description of the man who’d dropped off the keys.
    “Very tall, great smile,” she answered. “It was him all right. I know Raoul Rockwell, and I’m positive it was him who brought the car back. And our ledger shows it was the morning of August 4.”
    So Rockwell clearly hadn’t gone to Canada Wednesday night. Nor was his name on any flight lists to Vancouver or Victoria the next day.
    Swindler suggested that the local newspapers might be helpful in locating Rockwell. Evelyn Emerson Rockwell and her mother, Germaine Winkler, agreed to speak to newspaper reporters in the hope that articles on the front pages of the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer might bring forth some information about Evelyn’s missing husband. Even though it embarrassed her to appear in the papers as an abandoned bride, Evelyn was willing to try anything to find him. She was terrified that he might be lying injured—or worse—somewhere in the fields that surrounded the airport.
    With all that cash in his briefcase, Raoul was a prime target for thieves. Just because he’d returned his rental car, that didn’t mean that he ever left the airport area.
    Evelyn’s picture appeared in the papers, a petite woman in a pastel dress with satin piping on the sleeves and a modest neckline, a double strand of real pearls around her neck. She begged readers to call her or Jeffrey Heiman or the Seattle Police if they had any knowledge of