Payment in Kind (9780061749216)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Pete apologized. “I picked the tub up from the refinishing company Saturday afternoon and was supposed to drop it off at a remodeling job today, but with the weather and now this…” His voice trailed off.

  “Don't worry about it,” I said. “Let's go.”

  The four-wheel-drive Eagle may have looked ungainly, but properly equipped with snow tires, the station wagon was as agile and surefooted as a mountain goat, and Pete Kelsey was a capable driver. He knew the streets of the city well enough that we got to Harborview Hospital a good two minutes before Detective Kramer did.

  While we waited for Kramer to arrive, I sat there knowing what was to come and dreading it. You can't be human and not feel some empathy for the people whose broken loved ones lie on cold, hard slabs in morgues waiting for someone to come identify them. Often the survivors' shattered hopes and dreams lie there dead as well.

  Leading Charlotte Chambers through the process had been bad enough. Fortunately for her, the bloody wound on her husband's chest had been mercifully concealed, hidden from view beneath the antiseptic covering of the body sheet. With Pete Kelsey it would be different. There was no way to conceal Marcia's ugly head wound. It would be fully visible. My heart went out to her husband. So far, he was bearing up pretty well, but I couldn't, in good conscience, allow him to walk unprepared into the medical examiner's office. I felt a moral obligation to give him some advance warning about what was coming.

  “Have you ever seen a gunshot victim?” I asked.

  It was a moment before he replied. “Yes,” he answered dully without elaborating as to where or when. “I have.”

  “So you know what to expect?”

  He nodded grimly.

  “It'll probably be pretty rough, Mr. Kelsey. The bullet went in through her chin and came out the back of her head.”

  “Oh.”

  The single word wrenched out of him as an involuntary groan. Pete's fingers closed around the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip, but he kept himself under control.

  “I'll be all right,” he said at last, loosening his fingers from the steering wheel and unclenching his stiffened jaw. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  Frigid air had crept into the car. We were both getting cold. I led him inside, and Kramer caught up with us in the reception area. The three of us walked into the morgue together. When the attendant pulled out the body and removed the sheet, Pete Kelsey took one quick look, then turned away and dashed for the door, his face ashen, his throat working convulsively.

  I found him standing outside the building, gulping in deep, shuddering breaths of the icy air.

  “Couldn't they have done something to clean her up?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “Not until after the autopsy,” I explained. “It's a matter of preserving evidence.”

  He shook his head miserably. “Her hair,” he murmured in a voice choking with raw emotion. “I can't believe her hair. Marcia was always so vain about it. She loved being a blonde, a real, natural blonde. When the gray crept up on her a few years ago, she hated it and started dipping in the dye.”

  Suddenly, thinking about his wife's once beautiful hair proved to be too much. There was no way for him to reconcile the memories of what Marcia Kelsey had once been with the terrible ruin in the morgue behind us. Kelsey plummeted over the edge of control. Leaning against the building, he stood with his face averted from me, sobbing uncontrollably.

  I couldn't help him. No one could have. That kind of wild grief is beyond the reach of comfort. I waited until the worst of the tears had spent themselves.

  Finally he straightened up and squared his shoulders. “I'm all right now,” he said shakily. “What happens next?”

  “We'll need to ask you some questions. It's cold out here, Mr. Kelsey. Let's go back inside.” The frigid air sliced through my clothing, chilling me to the bone, but I don't believe Kelsey even noticed. I pulled open the door and made as if to lead him back inside.

  “No,” he said, jerking his arm out of my grasp. “I don't want to go back in there. I can't.”

  “But we must ask you some questions,” I insisted. “We need to get as much information from you as we possibly can. We'll need you to tell us everything you remember about your wife's activities during the last few days.”

  “Yes, of course,” he answered reasonably. “I understand all that, but just not in there, okay? Can't we go to my house? It's not far from here.”

  I didn't tell him that Detective Kramer and I had been to his house once already that morning. “Just let me tell my partner,” I said. “He can meet us there. Would you like me to drive?”

  “No,” he said. “I'm okay now. Really.”

  Once back in the cars, Kelsey and I led the way in the Eagle, with Kramer following behind. When we turned onto Boston, we found the lower street almost totally blocked with haphazardly parked vehicles. The collection included minivans and cars bearing radio station and newspaper logos. There was also a small knot of people milling disjointedly around on the snowy street carrying video cameras and handheld recording equipment.

  Pete Kelsey's eyes narrowed when he saw them, but he said nothing. Without being told, he knew at once who they were and what they wanted. Moving steadily through the vehicles and people, he turned up Everett, going the wrong way up what was ostensibly a one-way street. A smaller group of people stood in the street at the corner of Crockett and Everett. Grudgingly they moved aside as we came up behind them.

  While we were still a good half block away, he dropped the sun visor and punched the button on a garage door opener. By the time we reached the two-car garage, the door was already open. We pulled into it before the media ambushers realized who he was or what he was doing. Kramer parked in the street and dashed into the garage just as the door started back down. The startled welcoming committee was left stranded on the other side.

  It was a neat maneuver on Pete Kelsey's part. Despite the tragic circumstances, it almost made me smile. In the long-term continuing warfare between J.P. Beaumont and the media, Pete Kelsey's garage-door-opening Genie had just won a round.

  As I climbed out of the car, I glanced around the garage, expecting to see the usual suburban garage clutter, but I was disappointed. In my experience, most people's garages are similar to those old-fashioned rolltop desks whose lids can easily conceal months and years of accumulated junk and disorder. Pete Kelsey's garage was not like most people's. It was, in fact, disgustingly neat and well organized.

  Not only was it totally free of garage-type clutter, it was also a whole lot bigger than I expected. Two thirds of the way down the wall, there was a dividing line between new and old concrete that showed where the side of the hill had been carved away, making the garage deeper by half a car length. A set of ancient yellow kitchen cabinets with all doors removed had been installed in the newly created area. Arranged neatly on the open shelves was an enviable collection of tools and tool chests.

  As Pete Kelsey got out of the car, he paused long enough to extricate a red toolbox and the several sets of blueprints from the back of the Eagle. On his way toward the door that led into the house, he slipped the chest onto one of the shelves, where it fit perfectly into a gap between two others. He shoved the rolls of blueprints into a series of open blueprint-sized openings—slots that had been built into the cabinets where drawers had once been.

  I couldn't help but feel a growing curiosity about the man. News of his wife's death had rocked him, but it hadn't kept him from conscientiously closing up the Trolleyman before he left, and it didn't keep him from properly put ting away his tools and equipment, either.

  “Come on in,” he said, leading the way.

  As I followed him, I was struck by the contrast between Marcia Kelsey's messy office and the pristine condition of Pete Kelsey's garage. Cupid must get a helluva kick from linking up poor unfortunate odd couples and watching while they try to work out a lifetime's worth of differences.

  The door f
rom the garage led to a stairway and up into a back-door entryway that also served as a pantry. From there we followed Pete Kelsey into what the real estate ads always refer to as a country kitchen. This one had been spectacularly remodeled, from the recessed lighting in the ten-foot ceiling to the glossy finish on the hardwood floor. Both the cabinets and the countertops were made from the same light-colored Swedish-finish wood, and both were varnished to a lustrous shine.

  I'm not a cook, nor do I consider myself a connoisseur of kitchens, but in my uneducated opinion, this one clearly possessed all the modern conveniences. The whole effect was one of quality design executed by highly skillful workmanship. Maybe Pete Kelsey looked like an oldfashioned hippie, but the house screamed of advanced yuppiedom, and I sensed from his casual pride in ownership that we were looking at a Ph.D.-level do-it-yourself project.

  “Coffee?” Pete Kelsey asked, motioning us onto chrome-legged stools grouped around an island counter.

  I nodded. It had been a long morning, with no time out for a single cup of coffee, to say nothing of breakfast.

  While we watched in silence, Pete ground fresh, gourmet-type beans, started a pot of coffee, and put a hunk of crusty homemade bread on the countertop in front of us along with a container of butter and a pot of homemade apricot jam. He moved with the easy assurance of someone accustomed to working in a kitchen.

  “Help yourselves,” he said, handing us knives and napkins. “I've got to make some calls first. Our daughter is in school at the U of O down in Eugene. I need to get hold of her. And then there's Marcia's parents,” he added bleakly.

  Rather than retreating to the relative privacy of another room, Pete made the two calls from a wall phone in the kitchen. He reached Erin, the daughter, first.

  Munching on the delicious brown bread and helping myself to the robust, black coffee, I heard only one side of the difficult conversation. Pete Kelsey delivered his shocking news as humanely as possible. After a short pause punctuated by murmured words of comfort, he went on to arrange the businesslike details of how and when Erin should get back home.

  His judgment, one with which I heartily concurred, was that the roads were far too hazardous for her to risk driving. He advised her to catch the first available plane and that he'd be sure someone was at the airport to meet her when she got in.

  The next call was to Marcia's parents, who, he explained, were retired and wintering on the Arizona snowbird circuit. Kelsey handled himself well through both difficult calls, but once he got off the phone with his mother-in-law, his face was chalky gray and his eyes red-rimmed. He looked totally drained. For a moment, he stood leaning against the doorjamb, covering his eyes with his hands. When the front doorbell buzzed from two rooms away, he jumped as though he'd been shot.

  “Would you mind getting that?” he asked. “I don't want to see anybody just now, I don't care who it is.”

  I was only too happy to oblige. I had a pretty good idea of who would be ringing his bell right about then. It had taken some time for the locked-out reporters to get organized and work up their considerable nerve.

  I've always thought it takes a hell of a lot of gall to try for a firsthand interview with someone whose life has just been jolted by some terrible tragedy. In this instance the circling pack of newshounds had evidently decided that sending one emissary was a better tactic than having everybody show up at once.

  The person standing with her finger poised on the bell preparing to ring it yet a third time turned out to be one of the more attractive distaff members of Seattle's electronic media. I recognized her from other crime-scene gatherings, but when I opened the door, she didn't know me from Adam. That was probably just as well.

  “Mr. Kelsey?” she asked sweetly.

  “No,” I answered.

  She gave me a charming, white-toothed smile, a win-friends-and-influence-people-type smile. “I was wondering if I might speak to him,” she said carefully. She was pushy, but doing her best to temper it.

  “Mr. Kelsey isn't seeing anybody right now,” I replied. I started to close the door, but she wasn't about to be dismissed quite that easily.

  “Are you a member of the family?” she asked quickly, somehow insinuating herself between the closing door and the frame. She could have taken her training from Fuller Brush.

  Some of the other newsies had worked their way onto the sidewalk, warily edging onto the porch and within earshot.

  “I'm a police officer,” I answered shortly. “Mr. Kelsey would like all of you to leave. Now. He won't be making any statements at this time.”

  With that, I bodily elbowed her out of the way and shut the door in her face.

  My former partner, Ron Peters, the one who's working in Media Relations, keeps telling me that I need to learn to cultivate a better interaction with reporters. Not bloody likely, I tell him. I'm too old and too set in my ways.

  By the time I got back to the kitchen, Pete Kelsey had refilled our cups with the last of the first pot of coffee and had started another one brewing. Performing those mundane tasks seemed to calm him, to provide some relief in the face of the roiling emotions that swirled around him.

  “All right,” he said at last, easing himself onto a stool across the counter from us. “You guys said you had questions. What are they?”

  I had been dimly aware that while we waited for Pete Kelsey to finish his phoning and get squared away, Paul Kramer was becoming more and more agitated, although I hadn't been able to see any reason for it. Now, drumming his fingers steadily on the table, my reluctant partner leaned far back on his stool and eyed Pete Kelsey speculatively.

  “You might start by telling us what you know about Alvin Chambers,” Kramer said.

  Pete Kelsey had been nothing if not cordial and hospitable to us, and that under the most difficult of circumstances. Yet the first question Detective Kramer lobbed across the net to him was a powerful, game-stopping spike about a man assumed to be the dead woman's lover. Talk about sensitivity! In that department, Detective Kramer took the booby prize.

  But Kelsey didn't take the bait. “Who's Alvin Chambers?” he asked blandly, returning Kramer's hard-edged stare with an unwavering blue-eyed gaze of his own. Pete Kelsey seemed genuinely puzzled.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, holding up my hand. “We can get to that later.”

  Shaking off my interruption, Kramer continued undeterred. “Who was Alvin Chambers is more like it. He's the dead man we found in the closet along with your wife.”

  Kelsey frowned thoughtfully and shook his head. “The name doesn't ring a bell. I don't recognize it at all.”

  I could see that it annoyed the hell out of Detective Kramer that Kelsey remained unperturbed. “It's possible,” Kramer added slyly, “that Chambers and your wife were lovers.”

  Kramer dropped his bomb and waited for a reaction. The kitchen around us was suddenly deathly quiet except for the cheerful gurgling of a new pot of coffee as it finished brewing. I more than half expected Pete Kelsey to reach across the counter and punch Kramer's lights out.

  Instead Pete set his cup down carefully on the counter and nodded while the ghost of a bittersweet smile played around the corners of his lips.

  “Is that right? It's entirely possible, I suppose,” he added ruefully. “That woman was always full of surprises. Anybody ready for more coffee?”

  CHAPTER

  7

  I watched Pete Kelsey's face as he moved across the kitchen, walking that precariously thin line of control between grief and anger. If he fell off the tightrope, there was no telling which side he'd come down on or which side would be more helpful to our questioning process.

  “What do you mean, full of surprises?” I asked, holding out my cup for him to refill it.

  He poured the coffee carefully, deliberately returning the pot to its stand on the counter before he answered.

  “We've been married for twenty years,” he replied evenly. “Marcia's always had a mind of her own as well as her own…shall w
e say, outside interests?”

  Kelsey returned to his chair and flopped into it as though the bones in his body had suddenly turned to rubber.

  Talking about a flawed relationship after the death of one of the partners is never easy. No matter how awful the reality may have been, after the fact, survivors tend to idealize their marriages, pretending everything was smooth and tranquil even if it wasn't. Especially when it wasn't. There seems to be a generally held belief that a blissfully happy past is somehow a prerequisite for grieving. I gave Pete Kelsey full credit for going against the trend and not trying to duck a painful issue.

  “I take it you don't mean your wife's job,” I commented.

  “No,” Pete replied, staring morosely into the bottom of his coffee cup. “I don't. It has…had nothing to do with her job, and yet everything, too, I suppose.”

  “Look,” Detective Kramer put in sharply. “Two people were found half-naked and dead in a closet. One of them was your wife. Would it be safe to assume that you and your wife were having marital difficulties, Mr. Kelsey?”

  Pete Kelsey's eyes narrowed. “No,” he answered. “I've been trying to tell you. That's just the way things were for us, right from the beginning. Didn't you ever hear the term ‘open marriage’?”

  Detective Kramer snorted derisively. “I've heard of it, all right, but I thought it was extinct, gone the way of Hula Hoops and dodo birds.”

  Kelsey shrugged. “It probably should have, the way things are going, but ours never did, at least not altogether. Back when we started out, we were the leading edge and well ahead of the times, and that was fine with both of us to begin with.” He paused, then added, “Things change, people change. Maybe…probably I changed more than she did. Eventually I wanted something else, something more than Marcia was capable of giving. And after the AIDS scare…”

  He lapsed into a momentary brooding silence. “I haven't slept with my wife for the past four years,” he added softly. “It wasn't worth the risk.”