Worth More Dead

Shown photos of both Roland and Cheryl, he said he didn’t know either of them.
    “You never saw her at PJ’s?”
    “Don’t remember her. I go there to charge stuff and cash checks sometimes, but I don’t remember her face at all.”
    “You were housed close to Roland Pitre during the same time period at McNeil Island,” Gruber said.
    “Naw, I was on D Block. Never met the guy. I was in a whole different place. I was a meat cutter there.”
    “You keep in touch with the guys you knew there?”
    “Nope. I don’t have any contact with them. No mail. Nothing. My mom won’t pass on mail or messages from anyone wanting to talk to me if they’re from McNeil. She doesn’t want me seeing that old gang.”
    Gruber and Harris noted that Short talked a lot but didn’t say much that was useful to them. His demeanor was so confident that they felt he had no guilty knowledge of Cheryl Pitre’s death.
    Perhaps the most peculiar suspects yet in this totally frustrating investigation were the men who had found Cheryl’s purse floating in Lake Union way back in October near where her body lay hidden in the trunk of her own car. They were Native Americans who actually lived in Suquamish, which is in Kitsap County north of Bremerton, not that far from where Cheryl lived and worked. That they should be the ones who spotted her belongings so far from where they—and she—lived could serve to implicate them in the crime. Initially, detectives didn’t know that the men who called to report the purse were not Seattle residents.
    But then this case was becoming infamous for the number of slam-dunk “has to be a connection” suspects, none of whom had panned out.
    And this one didn’t either. Hank Gruber talked to Sant D’Eagle,* who owned a funky and popular antique store in Suquamish. D’Eagle said that he and a male friend had indeed found the things that belonged to Cheryl Pitre drifting near the houseboats as they walked along Fairview Avenue East.
    “What were you doing way over there?” Gruber asked.
    “We went over to see a game on TV. See, we scout out different places around Puget Sound, checking to see which taverns have the biggest TV sets. And Bogie’s has the biggest screen—ten feet diagonally—and the best food. We’ve got a boat with a canopy, and we just take an excursion…”
    “You cross the sound in a small boat to get to a tavern?” Gruber asked incredulously.
    “Sure do. It only takes us about half an hour to get to Seattle and then some more time to get through the locks in Ballard.”
    Apparently D’Eagle and his pals considered taking such an unorthodox shortcut to Seattle, even in bad weather or rough seas, an adventure.
    “We’re going to Camano Island next weekend,” he added.
    It seemed like a long way around to watch a televised game in a tavern, but Gruber had been a detective for years and he’d seen stranger things. He went to the address D’Eagle had given him for another of the Native Americans who made it a point to find the best taverns on Puget Sound via the sea route. Asked if they really did travel that far in a small craft, the man gave the same details D’Eagle had. They didn’t see any need to take the ferries. Cost too much and took too long.
    Neither man had the slightest connection to Roland or Cheryl Pitre (beyond finding her sodden purse near where her body was left) or to Alby Brotzweller, Jack Short, or Bud Halser.
    Although leads continued to trickle in through the spring of 1989, their possible worth in identifying Cheryl Pitre’s murderer diminished steadily.
    One man, a truck driver, said he stopped at PJ’s every morning to buy a cup of coffee, a newspaper, and a pack of cigarettes and sometimes talked to Cheryl there when she worked a rare morning shift. He said he also knew Roland. Like so many others, he had met Roland in prison.
    “Last time I talked to Cheryl was about three weeks before she got killed,” he said. “At the time, there was some guy and a bunch of kids in the parking lot, and I asked her what that was all about. She said she thought the guy was selling drugs.”
    “Can you describe him?” Sergeant Joe Sanford asked.
    The witness shrugged his shoulders. “All I remember is he was older than the kids.”
    “What kind of car was he driving?”
    “I can’t remember.”
    He offered his opinion. “You know, toward the end, Cheryl was having mood swings,” he said. “She was going over the deep end. She was dating