Worth More Dead

item in the back pages. Island County, where he was convicted of murder, was quite a distance away from Kitsap County, where he would be living. He settled into the Bremerton–Port Orchard area quickly. He went to work at the Subaru division of Bay Ford; Greg Meakin was his manager on the night shift.
    To his surprise, Meakin found Roland less than the dynamic, handsome man Cheryl had described to him. “The first time I saw Roland was when he came to me with a car deal he was trying to make. He looked like a fish out of water. I remember he was wearing a 1960s-style plaid sport jacket and a really wide tie. His hair was very short—sandy-colored—and he wore really thick glasses.”
    Meakin was struck by Pitre’s meek demeanor; he was nothing like the “killer convict” Greg had been worried about. “He spoke in a very soft voice, and he sure didn’t look like the judo expert I’d heard about. But it was easy to see the ‘sweet side’ of him that Cheryl had told me about.”
    Cheryl seemed very happy to have Roland back in her life, and they were having a great time. She had always been a practical joker, a trait that balanced her angelic side. With Roland to assist in her elaborate plots, they often caught Cheryl’s fellow employees off guard.
    “She got me a couple of times,” Meakin remembers. “I was brand-new the first time. In walks Cheryl with this ‘cop.’ It was Ed MacNamara, who was a civil deputy for Kitsap County. He told me he had a search warrant for my office for ‘contraband from the other side of the water.’ I was floored and shocked. Ed started searching my desk and all around my office. Then he pulls out a little bag of what looked like cocaine! I have never used drugs, and I didn’t know how it got there.”
    While Meakin sputtered that he had never seen it before, he saw a big grin spread over Cheryl’s face.
    “April Fool!” she shouted, even though April was long past.
    Roland helped Cheryl with her most intricate gag. A customer who was gay appeared to be very attracted to Greg Meakin, who was now the finance manager for Bay Ford, and the other salesmen loved to tease him about it. Philip* always asked for Greg when he came in to look at cars, and he called often to ask Greg questions. Finally, he signed a contract for a new car, and Greg figured he’d seen the last of him.
    Apparently he hadn’t.
    “As the manager who closed the sales, I was the last one to talk to Philip,” Greg says, “I knew Philip had a boyfriend named Ronnie,* who was very jealous. And all of a sudden, I started getting these phone calls from Ronnie, and he wasn’t happy.”
    Meakin didn’t notice that Cheryl was peeking around his office door and listening to his end of the phone calls. “So finally this Ronnie calls me, and he’s mad. He said, ‘I hear you were with Philip, and I don’t like that. You’d better stay away from him—or you’ll be sorry.”
    Ronnie was a big guy, and this sounded like a serious threat. Then Meakin looked up to see Cheryl giggling. She laughed as she admitted that it wasn’t Philip’s lover on the phone at all, it was Roland pretending to be Ronnie. Meakin’s face was red as everyone in the office started to laugh, and then he laughed, too. None of Cheryl’s practical jokes were mean, but she and Roland made quite a pair with their ability to catch someone off guard.
    He didn’t sell many used cars so Roland Pitre didn’t last long at Bay Ford. After he left, he found work here and there. He worked for a while stuffing envelopes for the Port Orchard Independent, a biweekly newspaper in Kitsap County. It paid only minimum wage, but it was something. Although he had never shown any interest in a medical career before, Roland looked into nursing courses at the University of Washington and Olympic Community College in Bremerton. He told Cheryl that in two years he could get a degree as a licensed practical nurse, which would open up many job opportunities. He started the interviewing and paperwork process, saying that he hoped eventually to be an RN. He didn’t feel that his criminal conviction was anyone’s business, so he didn’t mention it.
    As always, Roland’s charm with women helped him. Several supervisors reviewed his application and thought he would be ideal in the medical field, so he was not only admitted to the program but given a scholarship.
    Roland made plans to teach judo classes again, an enterprise in which he had always