Worth More Dead

Cheryl’s approval.”
    Isak believed as the Meakins did. “From the outside, they looked very happy,” Greg said. “More so when Cheryl found out she was pregnant.”
    Cheryl didn’t appear to mind the rough pace of her life, even with a new baby on the way, two jobs, and the responsibility of putting her husband through college. Roland had finished his prenursing classes at the University of Washington, where he’d had to commute by ferry between Bremerton and the docks in downtown Seattle, an hour’s ride. It was easier to attend nursing classes at Olympic Community College in Bremerton. Cheryl was proud of him.
    Perhaps she was unaware that he had become quite friendly with a number of female nursing students. Women still liked Roland, and he played on that. He had been unfaithful with Maria, but that was in the past. If Roland talked about other women, Cheryl resisted suspicion; if they were going to make it, she had to trust him.
    Cheryl was delighted to be pregnant; she thought it would make her marriage more solid, and Roland seemed as happy as she was. He wanted a son. And she gave him one. In 1987, Cheryl gave birth to a baby boy, whom they named after his father. Just as he had nicknamed his daughter Bébé, a popular Cajun name, Roland gave his son a Cajun nickname. Everyone called him André.
    The Meakins’ older son, Tanner, took judo lessons from Roland, and he and Bébé were in the same class, wearing the traditional white pajama outfit and barefoot. They were working toward their yellow belts, the first level of achievement. They were too young to even have crushes on each other, but they were great pals. Bébé was a pretty little girl with straight blondish hair who could not pronounce her r ’s.
    Although Bébé and her mother had of necessity formed a very strong bond in the years they were alone, the little girl seemed happy to have her dad back in the family, and she was thrilled to have a baby brother. Whenever they could find the time, Bébé and Cheryl watched NFL football games, an interest they had shared since Bébé was little more than a baby.
    Despite the odds against them and their chaotic history together, it looked as if Cheryl and Roland Pitre were going to make it after all. Many people who knew them were not aware of exactly what Roland had been to prison for. Seeing the clean-cut, athletic man who was so nice to his students, they couldn’t imagine that it had been anything very serious.
    Occasionally, though, even Isak had fleeting doubts about what Roland had confided to him. “One time we were practicing iaido; that’s the quick draw of removing the sword. I said something to Bébé about it, and she said, ‘Daddy’s not allowed to have swords anymore.’ I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded funny. Why wouldn’t he be allowed to have a sword? Just because he’d stolen a couple of things from a 7-Eleven?”
    But the teenager soon forgot his doubts.
    Isak remembers now that Cheryl was “subservient” to her husband. It was always Roland who made the decisions, but she didn’t seem to mind that. She was a plain woman who moved in the shadow of her far more dynamic husband. This Roland was almost the exact opposite of the failed used-car salesman. He was in his element, in charge of his life and the center of admiring attention.
    Roland drove to judo tournaments around the Northwest with his students. Isak recalls going to Spokane, a drive of more than three hundred miles from Port Orchard, and another time to Scio, Oregon. Greg Meakin’s son Tanner often went on the trips.
    “It was kind of funny, really, at one hotel we stayed at,” Isak says. “One weekend in Oregon, the hotel where we stayed had two groups on their reader board: the judo tournament and a transvestite drag queen convention. Roland and Dave, another guy from the dojo, went to the bar to have a drink, and Dave came back to me and said he needed help getting a drunk and combative Roland out of the bar. I was too young to even go in the bar, but somehow we got him out of there and onto the elevator.”
    Roland was very confrontational with three of the transvestites who were dressed in their full regalia with wigs and makeup. In the elevator, he turned around and tried to stare them down. Towering over him in their four-inch heels, they asked him what his problem was.
    “I have no problem,” he said. “You do.”
    “We got him off the elevator,” Isak recalls. “Without a