Payment in Kind

by J. A. Jance

  “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 we 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.”

  An undisguised look of pained disbelief passed over Detective Kramer's broad face. “Maybe you should have thrown her out,” he suggested.

  For the first time, Pete Kelsey bristled. “What I did or didn't do is my business and nobody else's.”

  “Let's just say your reaction's a little unorthodox,” Kramer allowed, backing off slightly. “All we're trying to do, Mr. Kelsey, is to get a handle on this situation and on the people involved. It's important that we establish motivations, that we understand personalities, and so forth. This sounds like a situation that would have driven most men to a divorce court.”

  Kramer's underhanded cut, a psychological jab that said real men don't put up with this crap, wasn't lost on Pete Kelsey.

  “I'm not most men,” he answered stiffly. “I loved my wife, no matter what. Erin had already lost one mother. I didn't want her to lose another. Whatever else you can say about her, Marcia is…was a hell of a mother.”

  I had been stunned into shocked silence by Detective Kramer's ugly insinuations. Now Kelsey's comment caught my attention and I leaped back into the fray. “You're saying Erin isn't Marcia's natural child?”

  Kelsey shook his head. “No, she's mine. My first wife died in a car wreck in Mexico when Erin was only two. I came to Seattle shortly after that and was trying to put my life back together. That's when I met Marcia. In fact, Max, the guy you met at the Trolleyman this morning, is the one who introduced us.”

  I almost choked on a misdirected sip of coffee. “Maxwell Cole?” I spluttered, trying to keep the drips from falling on my sweater.

  “You know him?” Kelsey asked.

  I nodded. “Yes, I do. We went to the U-Dub together.”

  “It's a small world, isn't it? At the time I was just starting out doing remodeling jobs. I had stopped by to give Max's mother a quote on some work she wanted done. I had Erin along with me because I couldn't afford to leave her with a sitter. Marcia happened to drop by the house that afternoon. She and Max were old friends, you see, from high school. She was back in town after a brief failed marriage and looked him up for old times' sake. By the time I finished talking to Mrs. Cole, Erin and Marcia had become great pals. That was the beginning of it. Of us as a family, I mean. Max ended up being best man in our wedding. He's also Erin's godfather.”

  So Maxwell Cole had been giving it to us straight when he claimed to be a good friend of the family. That was important to know, although I didn't much like the idea of that scuzzbag being a potential source of valuable information.

  I looked across the table, trying to assess what was going on with Detective Kramer, who sat there tapping his fingers impatiently. “Tell us more about your wife,” he said. “Aside from what you've already told us, what was she like?”

  “What do you want to know?” Kelsey asked hopelessly, rubbing his eyes with both hands. The process was wearing him down. The strain was beginning to show in his handsome but haggard face.

  “Do you want me to tell you that she was bright and ambitious? Funny and singleminded? Stubborn and selfish? Messy as hell and wonderful at the same time? Is that what you want to know?”

  He broke off and didn'
t continue while his eyes clouded over with unshed tears. Letting his shoulders sag, he seemed to shrink back into himself.

  “But your wife never mentioned this Alvin Chambers to you by name?” I asked, feeling like a surgeon unnecessarily probing a tender abdomen to verify the presence of a swollen appendix.

  “No. She didn't.” Pete Kelsey choked back a hoot of involuntary laughter that was anything but funny. “I'm sure this will sound strange to you, considering the circumstances, but Marcia was more honorable than that. A perverted sense of honor if you will, but she never rubbed my nose in whatever it was she was doing, not once.”

  While Kramer remained focused on the sexual implications, I realized that we still hadn't touched on the suicide angle, and despite the doused lights in the closet, it was time that we did that, just for drill.

  “How did your wife seem to you these past few weeks?” I asked casually.

  “She had been preoccupied for several months,” Kelsey admitted.

  “Was it her job?” I asked.

  “No. I don't think so. She loved her work, the more the better.”

  “What about her health?”

  “Good. Excellent, in fact. She had some problems off and on over the years, mostly female-type stuff. She had a hysterectomy when she was barely twenty-one, but generally speaking, she was fine both mentally and physically.”

  “Had your wife ever been despondent?” I asked.

  “Despondent?” He frowned. “Like depressed? You mean as in suicide? Wait a minute, is that where this is all leading?”

  I nodded.

  “Let me get this straight. You're implying that Marcia did this, that she killed herself and this other guy as well?”

  “That's how it looks right now.”

  Kelsey shook his head emphatically. “No. Impossible. Absolutely not!”

  His instantaneous response reminded me of Charlotte Chambers' reaction when we had mentioned the possibility of her husband carrying on with another woman. She hadn't thought Alvin capable of such a thing. Why are husbands and wives always the last to know? I wondered while in the background, Pete Kelsey continued his angry, categorical denial.

  “You don't understand. Marcia was opposed to violence of any kind for any reason. She was a vegetarian, for Christ's sake. She didn't believe in killing animals, not even to eat. How could someone like that take someone else's life, or her own either for that matter?”

  Pete Kelsey wouldn't have liked my stock response to that question. I know from experience that homicide is no respecter of philosophy or religion. At the moment of crisis, those who pull the triggers of murder weapons are far beyond the pale of their own moral imperatives, to say nothing of society's as a whole.

  “Let's set that aside for right now,” I said gently. “Let's go back to last night. Now, exactly what time did your wife leave the house?”

  “Seven-thirty or eight. I'm not sure which. It was right after dinner.”

  “Did she tell you where she was going?”

  “To the office. That's what she said, to work on her report for the retreat.”

  “Retreat? What retreat?”

  “The school district's annual administrative retreat. Once a year about this time they all go out of town and huddle at a resort somewhere to try and figure out what they're going to do next. This year's retreat is scheduled for Semiah-moo, a place up near Blaine. It's supposed to be Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week.”

  “You said annual retreat. So this isn't something out of the ordinary?”

  “Hardly. It's the same old thing every year--declining enrollment, budget cuts. As head of Labor Relations, Marcia was supposed to make one of the major presentations. She liked doing it, thrived on it, in fact. Saw creating order in that kind of mess as a challenge. She had been working on her presentation all during Christmas even though Erin was home.”

  “Didn't it bother you?” Kramer asked.

  “Didn't what bother me?”

  “Your wife working so late on a Sunday night, especially in such terrible weather?”

  Every time Kramer opened his mouth to ask a question, there was a not-so-subtle undercurrent of sarcasm. I'm not sure if Pete Kelsey noticed it, but I sure as hell did.

  “It did bother me, as a matter of fact,” Kelsey answered testily, “but that didn't make any difference. I already told you, Marcia was her own woman. She did what she wanted when she wanted. She liked to ski. She was used to driving in snow. I helped her put chains on the Volvo before she left.”

  Right up until then, I had felt that Kelsey's answers had been straightforward, but this one set off a chain of alarm bells in my head. Why was he suddenly being evasive and focusing on the side issue of the weather without addressing the important part of the question? Detective Kramer noticed it too and wasn't about to be misled.

  “Why was she working?” he asked again.

  A slight tremor came into Pete Kelsey's voice. “Actually, we had a quarrel about it before she left.”

  “What kind of quarrel?”

  “About her going. I really didn't want her to.”

  “But you just said…”

  “It wasn't because of the weather. There was something else.”

  “What?”

  “It's probably not important.”

  Kramer was becoming more and more impatient. “Let us judge what's important, Mr. Kelsey.”

  As Kelsey struggled with how to respond, the atmosphere in the room became so charged with tension, it felt as though someone had flipped a switch. Whatever it was Pete Kelsey didn't want to tell us about was something Kramer and I were both equally convinced we wanted to hear. Had to hear.

  “I was just feeling…well, you know, uneasy. I wanted her to stay home. That's all.”

  “You were feeling uneasy? Why?”

  “We've been having some strange phone calls lately,” he answered reluctantly. “Nothing all that bad, I guess, just worrisome--the kind of thing where the phone rings in the middle of the night and you pick it up and you can hear someone breathing but they won't talk to you. And then…”

  “And then what?”

  “Nothing, just that whole series of harassing calls.”

  “Did you report them?”

  “No. Marcia didn't want to, and they didn't seem all that important at the time, at least not until yesterday afternoon. When Erin left to go back to Eugene. I wanted her to be ahead of the storm.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I was helping her load her things into the car and she happened to mention that she'd been getting calls like that too. At her apartment in Eugene. I told her flat out to change her number. To get one that's unlisted. She was planning to do it today. Before all this…” For some time he sat silently with his chin resting cupped in his hand, staring down at the countertop.

  “Go on,” I urged.

  “So I tried to talk to Marcia about it, tried to talk her out of leaving the house and going anywhere, but she said it was just a weird coincidence and that I worried too much. We had words about it.” He paused for a moment before adding, “I never even kissed her good-bye.”

  Detective Kramer's pager went off right then. There are times when I hate those goddamn things. Kramer asked Kelsey if there was another phone he could use besides the one in the kitchen so he could return the call without disturbing the interview further.

  Interviews are delicate things. Fragile almost, with a rhythm and life all their own. Before the pager sounded, I had sensed that we were verging on something important, but now, with the interruption, I doubted we'd ever get back to it.

  Pete obligingly led Kramer away through a swinging door that opened into a large dining room. They continued on through another door-way, disappearing into the living room beyond that.

  Left alone in the kitchen, I realized that now my coffee cup really was empty. I got up to fill it. The coffeepot sat on the counter next to a state-of-the-art down-draft gas stove top that was very like
my own except for the fact that this one was absolutely spotless.

  Pete came back. He seemed to have lost some control while he was out of the room. He walked over to the sink and stood with his face averted and his shoulders hunched, staring out the window.

  “I'm glad you helped yourself to the coffee,” he said at last. “Your partner said to go on without him. He could be a while.”

  With backhanded swipes at his reddened eyes, Kelsey settled back on his stool while I attempted to pick up the scattered threads of the interview. “So that's the last you talked to your wife? When she left the house right after dinner?”