Worth More Dead

Roland’s help. I don’t know if he’ll help me because I switched his medication and then I put, I think, arsenic in his chewing…” (Olan couldn’t tell whether the blurred next word was “gum” or “tobacco.”) The writing ended abruptly.
    Why would Tim need cue cards? Why couldn’t he just call up his mother and talk to her?
    Detective Olan asked Bébé Pitre to look at the cards to see if she could identify the writing on them. She could. It was her father’s. For some reason, Roland Pitre had written a script for Tim to read.
    There were more papers in the white canvas bag. Della Roslyn recognized them, even though she hadn’t seen them for almost two years. They were the documents that had been in her stolen safe. Stuffed in a paper bag were marriage and birth certificates, passports, insurance policies, and legal documents. Roland’s marriage certificate with Cheryl was there, as were birth certificates for some members of Della’s and Roland’s combined family. There were the adoption papers from when she had adopted Bébé and André. And there was a handful of newspaper clippings about Cheryl Pitre’s homicide in Kitsap County and even newspaper accounts of the trial after the murder of Dennis Archer on Whidbey Island and Roland’s conviction on conspiracy to commit that murder.
    Lewis Olan had never believed that Roland wasn’t involved in the theft of the safe back in 1991, but he hadn’t been able to prove his complicity. Now in this bag was proof that he had undoubtedly kept the fruits of that theft while collecting insurance for the loss. The only documents that ever surfaced were papers that Roland needed. All of Della’s, Bébé’s, André’s, Tim’s, and Amy’s important papers were gone, but Roland managed to keep his birth certificate and that of his dead brother, Wade Pitre.
    Olan tended to believe Della Pitre when she said that Roland Pitre was connected to the incident with his stepson, Tim.
    But why? Surely he wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble just to terrorize a kid he didn’t like. Motive is a vital part in an investigation, and so far it was as obscure as a gray ship cruising on Puget Sound in a pea-soup fog.
     
    One older mystery was solved, however: Bébé Pitre had identified her father’s handwriting on the cue cards and also said that the handkerchief in the Slumberjack bag belonged to Roland; now she was finally ready to reveal a secret he had made her keep since she was 13. She cleared up the question of who had stolen the safe from her house in 1991.
    Bébé admitted that she had watched her father and Bud Halser carry the safe out. She explained, to her stepmother’s shock, that at her father’s insistence she accompanied them as they drove to an isolated spot near Panther Lake, Washington.
    She told Lewis Olan and Della Roslyn that she saw the two men remove the contents of the safe before they attempted to bury it near an old outhouse. As they began to dig, they disturbed a nest of angry hornets. They abandoned that plan and drove instead to Renton, Washington, where she thought they left the safe with some relative of “Uncle Bud’s.”
    Roland had warned Bébé that she must never tell that she saw him and Uncle Bud take the safe and bury it. His warning had been very effective; she was so frightened that she hadn’t told the story until now.
    But Roland apparently hadn’t been able to restrain himself from bragging to his daughter about how clever he was. Bébé also told Olan that she knew her father used another name to get his certified nursing assistant’s license from the State of Louisiana. He used Wade Pitre’s name and Social Security number, and he finagled a way to use the Louisiana CNA credits to gain employment in Washington State. Wade had been dead for almost half a century, and apparently no one checked on the authenticity of Roland’s stolen identity.
    Bébé’s admissions were a huge relief to her and proved that Roland Pitre was a liar and a thief, though that wasn’t a surprise to the investigating detective or Roland’s latest estranged wife. But the question of motive— if he was involved in the attack on Tim Nash—remained.
    When Olan looked into the murders of Lieutenant Commander Dennis Archer and Cheryl Pitre, he learned that Roland Pitre had had an alibi in each case. He was far more likely to be a conspirator in a crime than the one who actually committed it. Maybe “Uncle Bud” was the man in black