Payment in Kind (9780061749216)

by Jance, Judith A.

  Baker came hurrying back with the photographer firmly in tow. Unceremoniously he shoved me aside. I let him do it without protest. I went over to a window and stood looking out at the snow-shrouded city below me. It was a glistening, blinding white—beautiful, peaceful, and serene. That pristine beauty seemed totally at odds with the terrible darkness that had exploded during the night and left two people dead in that gory closet behind me.

  Who is dead, and why, are the fundamental questions at the bottom of every homicide investigation. What terrible passions and connections drive human beings to kill others and then turn the murder weapons on themselves? I know from firsthand experience that the answers to those questions, once we unravel them, wreak havoc among the living long after the dead are buried and decaying in the ground.

  For some unaccountable reason, as I stood looking out at the glistening city, the lyrics from that old Ethel Merman song came bubbling into my head. It's from Annie Get Your Gun, I think, and the words say something to the effect that you can't get a man with a gun.

  You can, actually, but if you do it with a .38 Special, what's left over won't be good for much of anything.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Seasoned old-timers on the homicide squad know all too well that there is a time to approach Doc Baker and there is a time to leave him alone. As he talked to his assistants, I heard him mention that he believed the man had been shot in the reception area and then dragged into the closet, where he subsequently died. I looked at the shiny granite floor. Someone had taken the time to clean it very, very thoroughly.

  As the irascible medical examiner bustled around the crime scene that bitterly cold morning, rumbling orders at the hapless woman photographer whose misfortune it was to draw this particular assignment, I knew enough to keep a very low profile. Detective Paul Kramer didn't. Relatively new to Homicide and already saddled with a reputation as a headstrong go-getter, he showed up late and immediately started rocking the boat.

  Pausing barely long enough to stomp the layer of crusted snow off his shoes, Kramer, bullnecked and bullheaded as ever, charged up behind Doc Baker with his feet still wet. The medical examiner was still totally involved in working one-on-one with the police photographer.

  Seeing the bodies, Kramer whistled. “What were they doing, getting it on in the janitor's closet?”

  Doc Baker reacted like an awakened bear summoned too early from his darkened winter cave. He's a big man, one who requires far more than the average amount of personal space not only because of his girth but also by virtue of personal preference. He doesn't like to be crowded, physically or mentally.

  Angered now by what he must have regarded as gross impertinence on the young detective's part, Baker turned and erupted out of the closet in one surprisingly fluid motion. The crook of his elbow caught Kramer full in the midsection, and the younger man doubled over in pain. It could have been an accident, I suppose, but then again…

  “Your shoes are still wet, Kramer. Anybody ever teach you to watch out for trace evidence, for Chrissakes? Now, go dry those damn shoes and stay out of my way until I'm ready for you. Understand?”

  Diplomacy has never been one of Baker's long suits, nor is he known in local police circles for professional courtesy. Chagrined, Kramer turned away, glancing around the room to see exactly how many other people had witnessed Baker's sharp-tongued put-down. There were several.

  When Kramer caught sight of two uniformed officers exchanging knowing grins, the detective's face turned several shades of red. Without a word he retreated to the rubberized mat near the door and, as ordered, thoroughly dried his shoes. Finishing that, he spied me standing near the window. He was seething with suppressed anger as he strode over to me.

  “So what the hell are we supposed to do, stand around here all day? Wait with our thumbs up our asses?”

  “You're damned right we're going to wait,” I counseled reasonably. “Until hell freezes over or until Doc Baker gives us the go-ahead, whichever comes first. The last thing we need to do in this investigation is to get crosswise with Baker at the outset.”

  The already florid color of Kramer's face darkened appreciably. Frowning, he scanned the room until his eyes stopped abruptly at the quietly weeping woman sitting in the corner. Her hyperventilating sobs were slowly subsiding. An emergency medical technician had just walked away, leaving her alone.

  “Who's she?” Kramer asked, directing his curt question at me, but nodding in the woman's direction.

  I shrugged. “A secretary or receptionist, I presume. From her reaction, my guess is that she's the one who discovered the bodies.”

  “Your guess?” Kramer demanded irritably, his tone laced with sarcasm. “Don't you think we ought to start by finding out for sure?”

  She wasn't going anywhere. “Suits me,” I told him. “Until Baker gets freed up, I don't have anything better to do.”

  Kramer glowered at me and then started off toward the corner where the woman was sitting.

  Little more than a girl, twenty or twenty-one at the most, she was a study in contradictions, a walking-talking-breathing oxymoron. She was small and pert, cute almost, despite the muddy tracks left on her face by smeared and smudged makeup. Her shoulder-length straw-blond hair was frizzed around her face in that uncontrolled, finger-in-the-electrical-outlet look affected by so many younger women these days. She wore a high-necked lacy white blouse that would have done a straitlaced Victorian lady proud, but two shapely knees showed several fetching inches of nylon-swathed flesh beneath the hem of a black imitation-leather miniskirt and above the tops of matching winter boots. The tiny skirt left little to the imagination, but the exposed knees and thighs were primly glued together.

  Like the paradoxical lace and leather, the tearful shudder that passed through her body as Kramer approached was at the same time both genuinely grief-stricken and poutily sexy. She examined Kramer with a none-too-bashful appraisal that he clearly read as an invitation.

  “I'm Detective Paul Kramer,” he said, holding out his identification long enough for her to glance at it. “And this is my…”

  Motioning vaguely toward me, he started to say partner and then backed off. At least we were agreed on that score. We may have been stuck working together temporarily, but partners we weren't.

  “This is my associate, Detective Beaumont,” he continued after a somewhat awkward pause. “We'll be handling this case together. Mind if we ask you a few questions?”

  She shook her head. “Okay,” she said huskily. “Go ahead.”

  “Detective Beaumont here is under the impression you're the one who discovered the bodies. Is that true?”

  She nodded, vigorously.

  With a reluctantly acknowledging glance at me, Kramer took out notebook and pencil. “What's your name, please?”

  “Jennifer,” she replied. “Jennifer Lafflyn.”

  “And you work here?”

  “I'm the morning receptionist. In the afternoons, I'm a traveling secretary. I go to whichever department needs help at the moment.”

  “This is your desk?” I asked.

  She nodded and glanced uneasily toward a desk that faced the front door. The side of the desk was almost parallel with the open closet door, and it stood less than five feet from it.

  “That's where I usually sit, but today…” She broke off, and I nodded understandingly. I wouldn't have wanted to sit there right then, either.

  “Where do you live, Miss Lafflyn?” I asked.

  She didn't answer at once. Her eyes became instantly brittle and surprisingly hostile. Despite the virginal blouse, I had the unmistakable impression that this was a young woman with some heavy-duty mileage on her.

  “It's a routine question, Miss Lafflyn,” I added quickly. “We need your address for your incident reports.”

  “Ms.,” she corrected sternly. “It's Ms. Lafflyn, not Miss.”

  So that was it. I had unwittingly stumbled into the mystifying Miss/Ms. quagmire.
<
br />   Old habits die hard, especially those rocksolid edicts of polite behavior that mothers pour into their sons' innocent minds along with the daily doses of equally solid bowls of oatmeal they pour into growing bodies. Unfortunately, the things mothers brainwash sons into believing don't necessarily change with the times.

  My mother had ordered me to always address a young woman as Miss until absolutely certain she was a Mrs. That may have been true once, but it certainly wasn't true as far as Ms. Jennifer Lafflyn was concerned, a pissed Ms. Jennifer Lafflyn. There didn't seem to be much I could do to redeem myself in her eyes.

  In the meantime, Detective Kramer was getting a huge bang out of every moment of my discomfort. With an ill-concealed smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth, he wrote down the address of a studio apartment which Ms. Lafflyn told us was located off Broadway near Seattle Community College.

  “Tell us about this morning,” Kramer urged.

  “Alvin wasn't here at the door when I got to work this morning.”

  “Alvin?” Kramer asked.

  “Alvin Chambers. The security guard.”

  Kramer nodded. “I see. And what time was that?”

  “Seven,” she added. “I was right on time, even with the weather. I come in at seven. That way I can leave at three. Anyway, when I arrived, Alvin wasn't here, and his table was still out, too. That seemed odd to me at the time. I mean, by the time people started coming in each morning, he usually had his table and chair put away and was there at the door, cheerful as could be, greeting people as they came in, opening the door for anyone who needed it. He was such a nice man.”

  Her eyes brimmed with sudden tears and she had to break off for a moment before she took a deep breath and was able to continue.

  “Anyway, when I got here this morning and saw the table and chair were still out, I thought maybe he'd just gone to the bathroom or something.”

  “Are those them?” I asked, nodding toward a forlorn card table and an equally shabby folding chair that were stacked against the wall behind the receptionist's desk.

  Jennifer nodded. “When he still wasn't here by seven-fifteen, I put the logbook away in the desk. I started to put the table and chair away too, where they're stored, in the closet.”

  Jennifer's story faltered to a fitful stop while she sent an uneasy sidelong glance at the still open closet door. Again an involuntary shudder passed through her body.

  “Is that when you found them?”

  Unable to speak for a moment, Jennifer could only nod while she struggled to regain control. At last she did so and continued in a voice that was little more than a tremulous whisper.

  “I'll probably have nightmares about it for the rest of my life. I mean her leg just fell out at me. Popped out into the room like toast from a toaster. It scared me to death.” She put her hand to her mouth, and for a moment I was afraid she was going to be sick.

  “And then what happened?”

  “I screamed. At least somebody told me later that I screamed. I don't remember it at all. And then I guess I fainted. Mr. Jacobs from Curriculum was just coming through the door as it happened. He caught me and kept me from falling. He's the one who placed the call to 911.”

  “What's this about a logbook?” I asked.

  “There's not much to tell. Security keeps a log of whoever comes and goes after hours and on weekends. People have to sign in and out.”

  “You said you put the logbook away. Where is it now?”

  She pointed back toward the still unoccupied receptionist's desk in the middle of the room. “Right there,” she said. “In the bottom drawer. Would you like me to get it for you?”

  “No,” I replied. “Leave it there for right now. Did anyone else besides you touch the book or the table or chair?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “We may need to have a sample of your fingerprints,” I said.

  Up till then, the interview had been rolling along fairly smoothly, but at the mention of fingerprints, Jennifer Lafflyn balked. “Why? What would you need my fingerprints for? I haven't done anything wrong. I was just doing my job.”

  Kramer moved in soothingly to calm troubled waters. “It's standard procedure, Ms. Lafflyn. We take prints and have them available. For comparison purposes.”

  “Oh,” she said, sounding somewhat mollified, but she was still glaring at me when she said it. I hadn't gotten off on the right foot with the young lady, and it wasn't getting any better.

  “Let's talk about the victims for a moment,” I said. “Do you know anything about them?”

  Jennifer Lafflyn nodded authoritatively, jutting her chin. It was almost as though the stupidity of my question had somehow stiffened her spine. “Of course I do. Everybody here knows them. Alvin's the security guard I was telling you about.”

  “And the woman?”

  “Mrs. Kelsey,” she answered confidently.

  “Who?”

  “Marcia Louise Kelsey, from Labor Relations.”

  Doc Baker, finally satisfied with the photographer's work, emerged from the closet for the last time and directed two of his technicians to cover the bodies. Seeing that, Kramer abruptly snapped shut his notebook and strode off across the room, catching up with the medical examiner as he neared the door.

  Kramer may have been ready to cut short the interview with Jennifer Lafflyn, but I wasn't. She watched with undisguised interest as Kramer walked across the room, and she seemed surprised when she looked back and found me still standing there.

  “What time did Alvin Chambers usually get off work?” I asked.

  Jennifer frowned. “What do you need to know that for?”

  “We have to know what was usual in order to figure out what was different in the pattern, where there are any discrepancies.”

  “Seven-thirty,” she answered. “And he always left right on the dot, never early and never late.”

  “So you were here together for half an hour or so nearly every morning?”

  She nodded.

  “How long had you known one another?”

  Jennifer shrugged. “I don't remember exactly. Two or three months maybe. A long time for that job. It seems like all the other guards change every week or so. Everybody but Alvin. He seemed to really like it, to enjoy what he was doing.”

  “So is it busy around here in the mornings, or did you two have a chance to talk?”

  “Some,” she said. “Alvin was friendly. He liked people.”

  Jennifer Lafflyn was as changeable as Seattle's weather. Once more her eyes filled with tears that spilled over and ran down her cheeks. “I liked him a lot. As a friend, even though he was old enough to be my father. I really respected him, know what I mean?”

  “And what did the two of you talk about?”

  “Work, the weather, dumb stuff like that. Sometimes we talked about God.”

  “God?” I asked.

  “Alvin was very religious. He used to be a minister, you know.”

  “No, I didn't know that. Did he retire?”

  Jennifer shook her head. “I don't think so. He told me he quit. Just like that, but he was real religious all the same. Sometimes I thought maybe he was trying to convert me, but mostly we just talked.”

  “Did you ever see him with Mrs. Kelsey?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean did you ever see them together, talking together, coming and going at the same time?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “Never. Why?”

  It was my turn to shrug, surprised that she hadn't put two and two together on her own.

  “If you find two people dead in the same closet, it's not too far-fetched to think that there might be some kind of connection between them.”

  During interviews, detectives are trained to watch for every nuance of expression. The twitch of an eyelid can be vital. A sudden anxiety exhibited by fluttering hands may indicate that questions are probing too near some painful truth. In answer to my comment, I saw a flicker of someth
ing blaze briefly in Jennifer's eyes before she blinked and sent a curtain of disdain over her face.

  She struggled to her feet. “No,” she said. “Absolutely not! There was never anything like that between them. You have a really nasty mind, Detective Beaumont. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go to the rest room and wash my face.”

  I watched her flounce off across the reception area, tottering a little in her high-heeled boots. She disappeared into a ladies' washroom. From her reaction, there could be no doubt that my suggestion of a relationship between the two dead people had sent Jennifer Lafflyn running for cover.

  I wondered why that was, because if Alvin Chambers and Marcia Louise Kelsey hadn't had a relationship before they died, they sure as hell had one now.

  CHAPTER

  3

  I was on my way to the door to join Doc Baker and Detective Kramer when I almost collided with a lady who came rushing down the stairway into the reception area. She was a horsefaced woman wearing a severe suit that matched her iron gray hair. She stopped directly in front of me, pausing uncertainly and looking anxiously around the room.

  “May I help you?” I asked.

  “Oh, my, yes. Are you with the police?”

  “Yes. My name's Detective Beaumont. What can I do for you?”

  “I'm Doris, Doris Walker, Dr. Savage's secretary.”

  Dr. Kenneth Savage, the superintendent of schools, was the one employee of the school district whose name I recognized without any prompting. He had come to Seattle from Boston several years earlier and was trying to help the district cope with its twin perennial problems of decreasing enrollment and decreasing revenues. The fact that Savage had lasted for five whole years in a mostly thankless position not known for job security probably meant he was doing a reasonably good job.

  “I just don't know what to do,” Doris continued distractedly. “With all that's happened here this morning, Dr. Savage is having all the calls routed through us upstairs, and…” She stopped in midsentence, seemingly overcome by indecision.