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CHAPTER FOUR

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 2023

10:00 A.M.

Not surprisingly Detective Monica Burns had arrived on time at ten on the dot. “Ready?” she asked.

“Just a minute,” Donna Jean replied without inviting her in. “I have to check on the cat.”

She closed the door. In the bedroom she found that the food dish she’d left next to the bed was now empty, but Pearl herself was nowhere to be found. Donna Jean tried calling her but soon gave up. Besides, maybe locking her in the carrier was a bad idea. What if Pearl started yowling again? The last thing Donna Jean needed was to have Sylvia Portillo back on the warpath.

“You be good now,” Donna Jean admonished the invisible cat before heading for the door, all the while hoping Pearl would have brains enough to find her way into the bathroom and the litter box.

“How’s the kitty doing?” Detective Burns asked as they started down the stairs. “She was in pretty rough shape yesterday.”

“She’s still upset,” Donna Jean replied. “I gave her a bath. She hated it, but she looks a lot better without all the blood on her.”

“I’ll bet that was fun,” Detective Burns observed, opening the back door of an unmarked patrol car and gesturing for Donna Jean to enter.

“Not very,” Donna Jean replied.

She crawled into the vehicle and fastened her seat belt. The first thing she noticed was that the doors in the back had no interior handles. This was a police car after all, and she was in the back seat. She had been confined in the same kind of vehicle all those years earlier, and the memory of it made her feel queasy.

Detective Raymond Horn sat in the driver’s seat. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” Donna Jean responded, but she was thinking Which one of you is the good cop and which is the bad one?

This was mid March, so it was rainy and cold in Seattle. No surprises there. They talked about the weather for a moment or two, then Detective Horn, clearly the bad cop and the guy who was evidently in charge, launched into it.

“How long did you work for the Brewsters?” he asked.

Donna Jean understood exactly what was going on here. During the ride to the station they would engage her in seemingly meaningless conversation, every bit of which would be recorded by the vehicle’s interior camera. Later they would analyze everything she’d said to see if there were any discrepancies between what she was saying now and what she said later during their “informal” interview. And no matter what they claimed, she understood that both conversations counted as interviews. Donna Jean also knew that, even though no one had bothered to read her her rights, anything she said could and would be used against her in a court of law.

“For a long time,” she answered finally. “Over twenty years. I started working for Mr. Brewster before his first wife passed away.”

“So you were already working Brewster when he married Clarice Simpson?”

“Yes, I was,” Donna Jean replied.

That’s when she noticed that her hands were trembling. Donna Jean folded them together and placed them in her lap, hoping that would reduce the involuntary movement, and it helped some.

“Do you have any family?” That seemingly innocuous question came from Detective Burns again. Donna Jean knew that detectives didn’t ask questions without already knowing the answers, so they had probably already scoped out her family situation.

“A daughter and a grandson,” she answered. “Yesterday was Jacob’s sixth birthday. I missed his party.”

And I didn’t pick up his birthday cake, either.

From her apartment, driving straight up Aurora was the most direct route to Edmonds, but this time around the trip seemed to take forever. The detectives fired off one question after another, with Donna Jean limiting herself to one- and two-word answers wherever possible. For her part, Donna Jean didn’t bother asking any questions about the progress of the investigation. She understood that no meaningful answers would be forthcoming.

By the time they let her out of the car and led her through police headquarters and into an interview room, Donna Jean’s hands were still shaking, and beads of sweat were forming on the back of her neck.

“The time is ten forty-six a.m.on March 14, 2023,” Detective Horn announced formally once they were settled on chairs in the bare bones interview room. “Present today are Detectives Raymond Horn and Monica Burns, along with Ms. Donna Jean Plummer. Ms. Plummer is a witness in the Charles Richard Brewster homicide. This is an informal interview. How exactly are you connected to Clarice and Charles Brewster?”

“I’m their…” Donna Jean paused before continuing. “I was their housekeeper.”

“Let’s start by having you walk us through what you did yesterday.”

Donna Jean sighed. “I arrived at work around eight-thirty.”

“I notice you used the word ‘worked’, in the past tense.”

Donna Jean nodded. “With Mr. Brewster dead and Mrs. Brewster in jail, they don’t exactly need a housekeeper at the moment.”

Her response seemed to tickle Detective Burns. A frowning Detective Horn, on the other hand, was not amused. Donna Jean went on to describe the remainder of the morning in as much detail as she could remember.

“When you arrived, did someone let you into the house?” he asked.

“I used the garage door opener in my car,” Donna Jean told him. “Then I let myself into the house through the door from the garage that leads into the laundry room.”

“You used the code to turn off the home’s security alarm?”

“I didn’t have to,” Donna Jean replied. “The alarm wasn’t on.”

That response seemed to take Detective Horn by surprise. “You’re saying the alarm wasn’t engaged?”

“Yes.”

“Was that unusual?”

“Not really,” Donna Jean said. “Sometimes they forget.”

Not wanting to speak ill of the dead, she didn’t go on to explain that not engaging the security alarm or the outdoor surveillance cameras was business as usual during and after occasions when the Brewsters entertained. She suspected that Mr. Brewster did so prior to parties so his guests wouldn’t be caught on camera doing something that was either inappropriate or illegal. As for the alarm? Under the circumstances, it wasn’t all that unusual that they’d forgotten to reset it.

“What did you do once you gained entry into the house?”

I’m a housekeeper , Donna Jean wanted to say. What do you think I did?

“I cleaned up,” she answered aloud. “There had been a big party, so the place was a mess. I took care of the leftovers, gathered up all the trash, and dragged it to the outside garbage bins. After that I loaded the dishwashers, washed and dried whatever required hand-washing. Then I did the laundry. I had just started on the ironing when I heard Mrs. Brewster screaming.”

“Did you notice anything unusual while you were doing those chores?”

That came from Detective Burns. Considering Donna Jean was seated in a police interview room with two homicide investigators, she sure as hell wasn’t going to bring up the butcher knife that was missing from the kitchen.

“Nothing in particular,” she answered.

There it was. She had just out-and-out lied to a cop in the course of a homicide investigation. Wasn’t that a crime—a felony even? A new bead of sweat ran down the back of her neck and soaked into the collar of her shirt. The trembling in her hands that had plagued her during the car ride up to Edmonds had abated briefly. Now it returned with a vengeance. Fortunately, since she wasn’t in the interview room as an actual suspect, her hand wasn’t cuffed to the top of the table. She put both hands in her lap once more so they were safely out of sight.

Detective Horn consulted his notes. “It says here that you placed the 911 call at 11:19 a.m. on the morning of March 13. Is that correct?”

Donna Jean nodded. “I was in the laundry room ironing. As soon as I heard Mrs. Brewster scream, I dropped everything and ran to the bottom of the stairs. That’s when I saw her. She was standing at the top of the stairs, covered with blood, waving a knife around, and screaming at the top of her lungs.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She said that Chuck—Mr. Brewster—was dead, that she had stabbed him.”

That was the first thing Mrs. Brewster had said—that she had stabbed him. Later, Mrs. Brewster had said she must have done it, which meant that she didn’t really remember any of it. Did that mean she had done it in her sleep? Yes, she had been holding the damned knife, but Donna Jean knew from things Mr. Brewster had said on occasion, that by the time Mrs. Brewster went to bed at night, she was often too smashed to walk straight. That’s why he’d had the elevator installed, so she wouldn’t have to navigate the stairs while under the influence. If she’d been that drunk on the night of the murder, she might not have remembered exactly what had happened, but how could someone that inebriated have been steady enough on her feet to stab someone to death? And once she did it, how the hell could she fall back asleep as though nothing had happened?

“What came next?”

“I ran up the stairs. When I got to her, she was waving the knife around like crazy, so I took it away from her and put it out of reach.”

“You’re saying you actually handled the murder weapon?” Detective Horn asked. “With your bare hands?”

Donna Jean nodded. “I was afraid someone was going to get hurt.”

“When officers arrived on scene, were you the one who allowed them into the residence?”

“Yes.”

“Did they enter through the garage or through the front door?”

“The front door.”

“Was it locked or unlocked?”

“Locked,” Donna Jean answered. “There’s a dead bolt. The key was right there in the door, but I had to go downstairs to let them in.”

“At the time, besides you, was Mrs. Brewster the only other individual in the home?”

“Yes,” Donna Jean answered.

“Where was she while you were doing all that cleaning?”

“Upstairs, asleep. At first I thought Mr. Brewster was sleeping, too, because his car was still in the garage. But as time went on, I thought maybe he’d gone out of town and taken a limo to the airport. That’s what he usually does. As for Mrs. Brewster? She’s a night owl. She goes to bed late and wakes up late.”

“Our officers saw no signs of forced entry. Did you?”

That’s when Donna Jean remembered the bottle cork, the one she’d found in the track of the patio slider. Until Detective Horn asked about it, she had forgotten about it completely. That could explain the lack of forced entry. But at the time Donna Jean found it, she had simply slipped the cork into the pocket of her apron, and that’s where it remained. If she mentioned it now, would they think she was somehow involved in what had happened? And if she didn’t mention it now and they found out about the cork later, would they accuse her of concealing evidence? And if she told them about it, what if her fingerprints were the only ones to be found on it, what then?

“No, I didn’t,” Donna Jean allowed. “I didn’t see anything like that.”

Another tiny trickle of sweat dribbled down her neck. She’d just told another lie.

“Tell us about the Brewsters’ relationship. Did you ever witness any quarrels between them?” Detective Horn asked.

“Never,” Donna Jean said. That was the truth, but most of the time when she was there, Mr. Brewster had been at work and Mrs. Brewster had been asleep and wouldn’t appear downstairs until after Donna Jean finished her cleaning and was headed to the grocery store.

“Were you aware that Mr. Brewster had recently consulted with a divorce attorney?”

That one took Donna Jean by surprise. Clarice was a difficult woman, and Donna Jean had often wondered why Mr. Brewster put up with her nonsense, but no one had ever mentioned the possibility of an impending divorce.

“I had no idea,” Donna Jean replied. “If that was the case, I knew nothing about it.”

“Isn’t it likely Mrs. Brewster would be better off as a widow than she would be as a divorcée?” Detective Horn asked.

“I suppose,” Donna Jean said thoughtfully, although being a widow had never done her a bit of good.

“What was your relationship with Mr. Brewster like?”

“Mine?” Donna Jean asked. “I cleaned his house and did the weekly grocery shopping. That’s the extent of our relationship. I was his employee, and he gave me a paycheck.”

“But isn’t it true that he also gave you a vehicle?” Detective Burns asked with a bit of a gotcha smirk. “And a brand-new one at that. Doesn’t that strike you as being overly generous?”

Just before Christmas the previous year, when the whole Seattle Metro area had been encased in a thick layer of ice, Donna Jean had been on her way to work one morning, driving slowly and carefully in her aging Prius, when a nutcase in a junky four-wheel drive Jeep Cherokee had come sliding through the red light at an intersection and slammed right into her. Donna Jean wasn’t hurt, and neither was the driver of the other vehicle, but her car was totaled. Naturally the guy driving didn’t have a valid driver’s license, and he didn’t have any car insurance, either.

When she had called Mr. Brewster to tell him what happened, he’d actually left work to come pick her up. For the next two weeks, she’d taken the bus to and from Edmonds—a grueling hour and a half commute each way. By then the insurance company had given her a check for the full Bluebook value of her dead Prius. That was a problem because Bluebook on an eight-year-old Prius didn’t amount to much, especially at a time when purchase prices on used vehicles were through the roof and totally out of range of Donna Jean’s limited buying power.

She had resigned herself to the fact that, for the foreseeable future, she’d be busing it, but then December 26 came along. Since Christmas had fallen on a Sunday, most people had Monday off, but not Donna Jean. Monday was her day to clean the Brewsters’ house, and since they’d had a holiday extravaganza at their house on Christmas Day, she already knew it would be a busy one.

The bus had let her out on the main drag, and she’d trudged her way two steep uphill blocks to get to their house. As she walked up the driveway, she noticed a vehicle with a massive red ribbon parked in front of the garage. Her initial assumption was that Mrs. Brewster had been given a new car for Christmas, although, when she saw it was a RAV4, it occurred to Donna Jean that one of those didn’t seem to be quite up to Mrs. Brewster’s upscale standards.

That’s when Mr. Brewster had met Donna Jean at the door, handed her a key fob, and told her the car in the driveway was hers, free and clear. She had been utterly dumbfounded.

“Why would you do such a thing?” she had asked.

“Because you’ve worked for me for a very long time,” he told her, “and because I think you deserve it.”

But now, because Mr. Brewster had given her the vehicle, did the cops somehow suspect that Donna Jean had been involved in some kind of intimate relationship with the man? Maybe they thought he’d given her the car as a bribe, as a way to keep her from spilling the beans to his wronged wife. Or maybe they thought she was blackmailing him.

“He gave it to me because he was a kind man and knew I needed a vehicle to get back and forth to work,” Donna Jean declared at last, maybe a little more forcefully than she’d intended. “A guy with no insurance crashed into my car, and I couldn’t afford to replace it. I think Mr. Brewster felt sorry for me because riding the bus to get to their place took so long.”

“You worked for the family for more than twenty years?” Detective Burns asked.

He’d already asked that. Instead of answering aloud, Donna Jean simply nodded.

“And yet you always refer to him as Mr. Brewster,” Detective Burns said. “Is there a reason for that?”

“The reason is I know my place,” Donna Jean replied. “It’s a sign of respect.”

“It also might be a way of putting distance between the two of you.”

This whole line of questioning was getting on Donna Jean’s nerves. It sounded as though he was still under the impression that there had been some kind of love triangle going on here and that Donna Jean was somehow responsible for Mr. Brewster’s death. The whole idea was outrageous.

“That’s because there was distance between us,” Donna Jean spouted back. “Lots of it.”

This wasn’t Donna Jean Plummer’s first rodeo, as far police interviews were concerned. She was aware that she shouldn’t have reacted that way. They were getting to her. She knew it, and so did they.

“So there was nothing romantic going on between you and Mr. Brewster?”

“Nothing at all.”

“It says here that you told one of the responding officers that one of the knives was missing from the knife block in the kitchen. In view of the fact that the missing knife turned out to be the murder weapon, it seems odd that you would notice something like that.”

“What’s odd about it?” Donna Jean replied. “That’s what housekeepers are supposed to do—keep track of what’s there and what isn’t. I was afraid someone—maybe someone from the catering crew—had either packed it up or dropped it in the trash by mistake. The problem was, by then the garbage truck had already come and gone.”

“But since you handled the knife, are we likely to find your DNA on the murder weapon?”

“I already told you that I took the knife away from Mrs. Brewster. But even if I hadn’t, my DNA would probably be on it anyway. In fact, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t. After all, I’m the one who does the dishes, and I don’t use rubber gloves for that. My DNA is probably on every knife in the house along with every plate, glass, and piece of silverware.”

“How would you describe your relationship with Clarice?”

That was Detective Burns again, stepping in and changing the subject, probably in an effort to put Donna Jean at a disadvantage.

“I worked there two days a week for years,” Donna Jean said firmly, “but Mrs. Brewster and I weren’t friends.”

Donna Jean could have added that Mrs. Brewster wasn’t a particularly nice person and didn’t have many friends. Most of the guests who came and went from the home were friends of Mr. Brewster, while Mrs. Brewster was more or less a hermit, but Donna Jean held her tongue on that score.

“What was her reaction when her husband gave you that new car?”

“I don’t remember her reacting one way or the other.”

By then Donna Jean was losing patience. She’d already been in the interview room for the better part of two hours. Why the hell were they putting her through the wringer? She was a witness, for Pete’s sake. She wasn’t the one who had been found holding a murder weapon and covered in blood. Were the cops trying to claim that she was the actual perpetrator?

“Am I under arrest?” Donna Jean asked.

“No,” Detective Horn said. “Of course not. We’re just gathering additional information.”

“So can I go now?” Donna Jean asked.

“Of course, if you wish,” Detective Horn said. “But if you don’t mind, would you be willing to give us a DNA swab so we’ll be able to eliminate you as a suspect?”

There was no reason Donna Jean had to make life easy for them. “No,” she said firmly. “I don’t believe that would be in my best interests.”

“What about a lie detector test? Would you consider taking one of those?”

The idea of taking a lie detector test was terrifying. She’d taken one of those once, and even though she’d told the absolute truth, the operator had told her she’d been found to be “evasive.”

“Absolutely not. And I’m not turning my phone over to you, either. If you’re going to arrest me, do it, but I’m not saying another word without my attorney being present.”

Expecting to be placed under arrest, she stood up and looked Detective Horn straight in the eye. He blinked first. “Very well,” he said before adding, “The interview concluded at one forty-five p.m.”

The drive back to Donna Jean’s apartment took every bit as long as the one to Edmonds had, but this one was conducted in absolute silence. Not one of the three individuals riding in the vehicle said a single word.

Back in her apartment, worn to a nub, Donna Jean sank into her easy chair and dropped her purse on the floor at her feet. She was sitting there with her eyes closed when Pearl silently leaped into her lap.

“Thank you,” she said, holding the animal close. “I really needed that.”

It turns out Pearl did, too. A minute or so later, she settled into Donna Jean’s lap and began to purr.