Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

can.”
    Detective Noreen Skagen checked out the women’s clothing left behind in the Rockwell residence. Karen Yanick helped her sort through Manzanita’s and Dolores’s things. There were numerous dresses, suits, coats, blouses, skirts, shoes, and purses. Noreen (who would one day become an assistant Seattle Police chief and then the U.S. Attorney in the Seattle District) wondered what might be missing. Karen Yanick said the only item of clothing that she could see wasn’t there was a rust tweed dress that Manzy often wore.
    Manzanita was a skilled seamstress, and Skagen and Yanick found a wool skirt that was half sewn, along with an almost-finished coat she had been making for Dolores. There was a pair of green high-heeled pumps that Karen recognized.
    “Those are Dolores’s,” she said. “I remember how proud she was of them when she bought them last spring.”
    With an ominous sense of foreboding, the two women went through a barrel in a corner of the back bedroom. There they found full bottles of hair spray, barely touched containers of face cream, expensive perfumes, lipsticks. Dolores’s newly purchased schoolbooks for her university courses were there, too, along with her purse. Her identification was inside; there was cash in her wallet, and all the ordinary things that most women kept in their purses.
    “Why would she leave her purse?” Karen Yanick asked, and then gasped, suddenly suspecting why.
    As the Seattle Police investigators spread out further with interviews of friends and clients of Raoul Guy Rockwell, they heard similar stories from all of them—except that they were never quite the same in the details.
    Raoul had apparently tailored his anecdotes to suit whomever he spoke to.
    He had told another couple who had socialized with Manzanita and him that she had left her packed bags behind, instructing him to have a moving company pick them up. When the husband, Robert Lane, dropped by at the end of May, Rockwell had sharply refused to let him go upstairs, giving him vague excuses why he couldn’t do that.
    It was rapidly becoming obvious that Raoul Guy Rockwell had had a slightly different story for almost everyone about where his wife and stepdaughter were. The amount of money that Manzanita was supposed to have stolen varied with each telling. Sometimes he said her attorney’s office was in the south end of King County—in Kent—and sometimes he gave a Bothell address in the north sector.
    He was fairly consistent, though, about describing his missing ex-wife as a thief, a woman out of control, unfaithful, determined to desert him, and leaving him in a snarl of financial entanglements.
    One customer, a man named George Sparr, told Gail Leonard that he had known Rockwell for three years. He confided that he had been horribly embarrassed sometime at the end of March to be present when Manzy and Rocky had a fight. “They were extremely insulting to one another,” Sparr said, “and I edged my way to the door and slipped out, feeling that this was a private matter and not something I should be witness to.”
    “Did you see Manzanita after that?” Leonard asked.
    “No. I went back sometime around April 16th, and Rocky told me Manzy and Dolores were gone. Apparently, while he was up in Bothell trying to find Manzy’s attorney, he said, she was busy burning all of his irreplaceable papers in their fireplace. He told me that she had stolen thousands of dollars from him, messed up his income tax, and yet she left all of her jewelry behind—even her engagement and wedding rings. He showed me a note she supposedly left, instructing him to put all of her things in storage.
    “But that’s the odd thing,” Sparr continued. “A couple of days later, I noticed some of Manzy’s jewelry in a display case in the shop with a For Sale tag on them. I bought a pair of rare cherry amber earrings for only $5, and I took a friend to the shop later and she bought a necklace that was also underpriced.”
    Sparr had asked for the key to the Rockwells’ upstairs apartment so he could use the bathroom, and then asked “Is Manzanita upstairs?”
    “What did he say?” Leonard pressed.
    “He looked as if he’d seen a ghost, and he said, ‘What the hell do you mean by a remark like that?’ He was totally spooked, and he called me four times the next day, leaving messages for me to call—that it was urgent. When I did call him back, he asked me again why I had asked if Manzy was