Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

faithfully visited her younger daughters at least once a month.
    “But they haven’t heard from her since March 12th,” Mearns told Seattle’s Missing Persons detectives. “Ordinarily, she would have come up for a weekend in mid-April, but they didn’t hear from her at all. One of our girls called the Rockwell house in early May and talked to Raoul. When she asked about her mother, he said she was away on a trip, and he asked to have me call him. But when I did, he told me that Manzy had taken Dolores out of college and the two of them had left him.
    “He said she had called him the next day,” Mearns continued, “and that she asked him to pack all of her clothes and send them to Bekins Warehouse to put in storage, but he said his lawyer told him not to do that.”
    Her two husbands had agreed that if either of them heard from Manzy, they would notify the other. About ten days later, Rockwell had called Mearns to see if he’d heard anything, but he hadn’t. Rockwell said he hadn’t either.
    Although Mearns had been concerned about his daughter Dolores, he wasn’t really worried. “Manzy left me the same way when she ran off with Raoul,” Mearns said. “She just took off without so much as a note. I didn’t hear from her for nine months—not until she wanted to arrange for the visits with our younger girls.”
    It was now five months since anyone had seen Manzy Rockwell. Maybe she had had enough of Raoul’s womanizing, and had chosen to leave him just as she had walked away from her first husband.
    But maybe not.
    The Crimes Against Persons detectives fanned out to talk with those who had known the Rockwells. They found several people who had heard Raoul Guy complain that his wife had stolen more than $5,000 from the antiques gallery’s cash registers.
    Detective Carol Hahn interviewed Karen Yanick, who lived next door to the now-missing couple. She said that she last saw Manzy on March 31.
    “She was coming home from work, and everything seemed to be normal with her. I know I saw Dolores the day before, and she was so excited about registering for spring quarter—she’d gotten into the classes she wanted. Neither of them acted as though they planned to leave Seattle.”
    And yet, on April 3, Raoul had come to the Yanick home and said that Manzy had left him. “He was doing his income tax,” Karen Yanick told Carol Hahn, “and he couldn’t make his books tally. He said he had asked Manzy to help him and she just said, ‘See my lawyer!’ and wouldn’t explain what she meant. I guess she gave him the name of her lawyer, and he said he went to find him—and couldn’t. Then, when he got home, Manzy and Dolores were gone.”
    The very next day, Rockwell had gone to the Yanicks’ again. This time, he said that there was somewhere between $3,000 and $4,500 missing from the books. And $800 in cash missing.
    “I thought this was kind of odd,” Karen Yanick said, “because Manzy told me that they were really in debt—that’s why she went back to work at the bank, to try to catch up on their bills.
    “We invited Rocky over to dinner several times over the next week or so, and he was so sad and worried. We even took turns staying with him at the antiques shop during business hours in the evening so he wouldn’t be so lonesome. And then he just stopped opening the shop very often.”
    Karen said that Manzy Rockwell had worked days at the bank downtown and evenings in the shop—unless the “society women” showed up, and then Manzy would go upstairs because she couldn’t stand to watch her husband flirt with them. “That made her so unhappy.”
    Dolores, too, had tried to help the Rockwells’ financial situation by paying her own way in college. She signed on as a Kelly Girl temp in February, and then went to work full-time for the Pacific Northwest Company, managing to work and still go to her classes at the university.
    Karen Yanick paused. There was more to tell, things that might sound crazy. She and her husband had begun to wonder about some of Raoul’s behaviors.
    “Maybe we just had overactive imaginations,” she said. “But we noticed that one of the windows under their building was open, and it never was before. It was right next to the septic tank. And later on, maybe as late as June, there was a really terrible, foul odor coming from their house. It was so bad that we asked Rocky about it. He said it was only some crab that had spoiled, and he threw it into his garbage