Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

also told Evelyn that the trip to Portugal was to be their honeymoon! And on the night his bride thought he’d left for Canada, he’d apparently been staying in a motel in Tacoma, Washington, twenty-six miles south of Seattle.
    Blake said she had packed in a hurry, prepared to walk out on her husband on the fourth of August, leaving just a note to say good-bye. She said that she hadn’t wanted to leave him in a precarious financial position, though, and that Raoul had promised to give her $1,000 so her husband could cover some debts she had run up recently.
    “Raoul called me early the next morning and asked if I could be ready to leave my house by 10:45 A.M. —that was Thursday, the fourth. I was all packed so I told him I could do that, and I took a cab to the airport. We caught a twelve-thirty United flight to Portland.”
    “Under Rockwell’s name?” Gail Leonard asked, his normally serious detective’s voice betraying his own incredulity. This guy Rockwell was amazing the way he played women—like puppets on a string.
    Blake shook her head. “No, he bought our tickets as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Rogers.’ I assumed that was in case my husband tried to follow us.”
    After spending three hours in the Portland, Oregon, airport, they had boarded another flight—this time on Western Airlines, bound for San Francisco. Rockwell had given Blake a $50 gold coin and a wedding band—which was far too small for her. “He told me we could get it sized to fit me later,” she said.
    Still using their aliases as Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, Raoul had checked them into the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, where they occupied a posh suite, but only for one night. The next day, they moved to the St. Francis Hotel, but again to a lovely room.
    “It was 1127,” Blake said, her voice a little faint now as she seemed to absorb that she might be the victim of a major hoax.
    The romantic trip began to disintegrate when Blake became ill with a severe sore throat. “Raoul took me across the street to a doctor,” she recalled, “who thought I needed to be seen by a specialist.”
    Raoul had agreed. “The next morning,” Blake said, “Raoul told me that he had made an appointment with a Dr. James Whitman, who was on the staff of the University of California at Berkeley. His medical offices were supposed to be in the Alumni Building there.”
    Blake said that she felt ill and feverish as her lover called a cab, gave her $6 for the fare, and told the driver to take her to the Alumni Building.
    “I was supposed to wait in front of that building until Dr. Whitman contacted me. I did think it was odd that I wasn’t just supposed to go up to the throat specialist’s office, but I did as Raoul instructed. I stood there on the street from 10 A.M. until 11.”
    No one came up to her, and when she went into the building, she couldn’t find a Dr. Whitman on the directory posted near the elevators. Confused and feeling more ill all the time, Blake Rossler took a cab back to the St. Francis Hotel.
    When she went up to room 1127 and opened the door with the extra key the desk clerk had given her, Blake said she’d been stunned. Raoul wasn’t there, and he hadn’t even left her a note.
    It was almost like the familiar story of a couple who check into a hotel in a strange city or foreign country. When one leaves for some errand or other, the other comes back to find the lover missing. In this scenario—made into several movies over the years—no one admits to ever having seen the lover.
    But the staff at the St. Francis Hotel acknowledged that they had seen “Mr. Rogers” when he and Blake had checked in the previous night. They had also seen him when he had left the building with her and put her into a cab a few hours earlier.
    Blake said she’d found their room virtually empty of any sign they’d been there. Raoul had taken all of his clothes, except for a few soiled items left behind. He had also taken the gold coin and the wedding ring he’d given her.
    She had no choice but to gather up her own things, slip out of the hotel because she had no money to pay the bill, and call her husband to ask him to wire money so she could buy a plane ticket home.
    At the airport in San Francisco, Blake dropped all the dimes she had into pay phones as she called the hotel room where she had spent a lovely night with Rockwell. The phone rang emptily for the first half-dozen calls.
    “Finally, on my last try,” Blake recalled, “a woman