by J. A. Jance
“Take a cab?” he echoed. “Hell, man, it ain't but six blocks or so. Walkin'll do us both a world of good.”
He hung up on me then, without giving me a chance to argue. But then again, I wouldn't have had the nerve. Lars Jenssen was seventy-nine and ten months. I was forty-four. If he could walk six blocks in that kind of weather, then by God, so could I.
Rather than rush into the contents of Doris Walker's envelope, I sat there with one last cup of cocoa, enjoying the warm quiet of my snug apartment, trying to sort back through the long interview with Pete Kelsey.
Part of the problem was that, liar or not, he was such a likable guy. At least he struck me that way, although the same thing obviously didn't hold true for Detective Kramer. He found something ominous, something underhanded, in Kelsey's forbearance with regard to his messy, and by Kelsey's own admission, sexually promiscuous wife. But atypical reactions do not necessarily a killer make. I tried to put all personal feelings aside and examine only those things we had learned in the interview.
I had to agree with Kramer that there were things about Pete Kelsey that were puzzling and contradictory. He seemed to be a fairly intelligent sort, well spoken, and reasonably well educated, yet he worked at a series of lightweight, pickup jobs, and he had evidently done so for many years, had made a career out of it. Why? Had he gone to college? If so, where, and what had he majored in? I made a note to call Nancy, the lady at the Trolleyman, to find out whatever I could from her.
And then, much as I hated to, I made another note, this one reminding me to call Maxwell Cole. I didn't relish the idea of having to ask him for help, but that appeared to be unavoidable. After all, he had been best man at Marcia and Pete's wedding. And he had been appointed Erin's godfather even though he hadn't laid eyes on the child until she was at least two.
Historically, Max may have started out as Marcia Kelsey's friend, but he obviously felt close to Pete as well, close enough to guess that if Pete wasn't at home that morning, he'd most likely be at the Trolleyman, and he had cared enough to try to break the bad news himself.
I needed Max to tell me what he knew about Pete Kelsey, and also to shed what light he could on Marcia. Other than being less than fanatically neat, what I had learned so far hadn't given me any kind of clear fix on the kind of person she had been.
That's one of the strange things about this job. Homicide detectives always learn about victims after the fact, after they're already dead, through the eyes and words of those they leave behind. Sometimes we learn to love them; sometimes we hate them. Strong feelings in either direction can be valuable motivating tools for keeping investigations focused and energized and moving forward.
With Marcia Louise Kelsey, I was up against an engima. Who was she, this avant-garde proponent of open marriage? What had she been like? What kind of mother had she been? What had she seen in Alvin Chambers? Compared to Pete Kelsey's rugged good looks, a fifty-year-old failed minister turned security guard couldn't have been such great shakes.
What little we had learned about Marcia had come through Pete Kelsey's eyes, and the resulting portrait was a confusing mishmash of love and hate that gave us few clues about the woman herself. Was she some kind of oversexed monster who had somehow kept Kelsey tied to her even though he had more than ample reason to walk away? Or was she something else entirely?
I sensed that there was something important lurking in the tangled relationship between Marcia Kelsey and her long-suffering husband, perhaps even something sinister. Right then and there, I made up my mind to find out what that something was.
The idea that involvement with Marcia Kelsey might have lethal side effects inevitably led me to consider Alvin Chambers. He reminded me of some poor, hapless boy black widow spider who knocks off a casual piece of tail only to wind up topping his lady friend's dessert menu shortly thereafter. Male black widows never get a chance to sit around swapping locker-room conquest stories, and neither would Alvin Chambers. That poor bastard couldn't tell us a thing.
What had gone on between them? What was the appeal? I remembered the Kelseys' spotless kitchen and mentally compared it with Alvin Chambers' slovenly apartment and his equally slovenly wife. It was easy to imagine what the somewhat over-the-hill Alvin might have seen in Marcia Louise Kelsey. It was far more difficult to understand the reverse--what a bright intellectual, a highly thought of professional school administrator, would have gotten out of a clandestine relationship with the security guard. I wondered if Charlotte Chambers would be able to step out of her denial of Alvin's infidelity long enough to help us find any clear-cut answers.
I fully intended to spend some time looking over the contents of the envelope Doris Walker had given me, but by then the warmth of my apartment and the comfort of my familiar chair proved to be too much for me. I fell into a sound sleep with the envelope resting unopened in my lap. I didn't waken until much later when the phone rang. Lars Jenssen was calling from the security door downstairs.
“Hurry up, will you?” he bellowed impatiently into the phone. “It's cold enough to freeze the ears off a brass monkey down here.”
If Lars Jenssen thought it was cold, that meant it was damn cold indeed.
I did as he asked and hurried.
Chapter 9
Despite the weather, there were still twenty or so people at the weekly meeting of the Regrade Regulars. Attendance didn't vary much from what it usually was since most of the regular Regulars live somewhere close by in the downtown Seattle neighborhood known as the Denny Regrade.
Like downtown dwellers everywhere, many refuse to own cars. Some of them attribute their aversion to driving to high-blown philosophical reasons replete with ecological one-upmanship. Others don't own cars because they simply can't afford them. Still others, I suspect, lost their driver's licenses in legal proceedings of one kind or another long before they hied themselves off to their first AA meeting. In the ensuing years some have never gotten around to getting another.
Oddball that I am, I don't exactly fit into any of those specialized categories. My main problem with driving downtown is parking downtown.
Lars and I showed up on foot a few minutes prior to the beginning of the meeting. Ironically, the Regrade Regulars meet in a seedy upstairs room over a restaurant and bar which continue to do steady business with a habitual and often raucous crowd of serious and not-yet-repentant drinkers.
I've been told that there's nothing worse than a reformed drunk. That may well be true, but three months into the program, I'm a hell of a long way from reformed. The whole idea of having to quit drinking pisses me off. When the world is full of spry old codgers, seemingly healthy people like Lars Jenssen and some of his aging cronies, who've been drinking steadily way longer than I've been alive, it irks the hell out of me that here in my midforties I'm stuck with some kind of lame-duck liver.
I don't like going to meetings, and I sure as hell don't look forward to them, but they beat the alternative as outlined in grim physical detail by the inscrutable Dr. Wang. And so I go.
The meeting itself was over by eighty-thirty, and Lars and I made our way downstairs to the smoky restaurant for our ritual postmeeting rump session and greasy spoon dinner.
Lars Jenssen was already in the Navy prior to World War II. He missed being on the USS Arizona because a ruptured appendix had him confined to a room in a naval hospital in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Once he got out of the hospital, his luck continued to hold.
During the war in the Pacific, Lars survived having two other ships shot out from under him. A confirmed nonswimmer, he still carried in his wallet the frayed and brittle one-dollar bill that had floated by him in debris-littered water off the Philippines while he clung to a life preserver waiting to be picked up after the sinking of the second one, the destroyer Abner Read.
Lars stayed on in the Navy after the war, retiring with twenty years of service, and had gone on to a second career as an Alaska halibut fisherman. A lifetime drinker, he had managed to ma
ke it through the death of his only child, a son, who was shot down during the Vietnam War, only to fall apart completely during the five years it had taken for his wife, Aggie, to succumb to Alzheimer's disease.
Sober now for six years, he lived just up the street from me, subsisting on a small naval pension and Social Security in a subsidized apartment building called Stillwater Arms. He prided himself in both his unwavering independence and his good health.
His most prized possession was a videotape copy of a television news broadcast that featured an interview with him done by the local CBS affiliate during Seattle's famed five-day Labor Day Blackout of 1988. A misguided construction project had shut off the electricity to much of the downtown core, paralyzing businesses and stranding high-rise dwellers, many of whom were far too old and frail to negotiate the long, darkened stairways in their buildings.
The camera had caught Lars Jenssen at the bottom of a nine-story stairwell. He had affixed a flashlight to his cane and was loaded with a backpack full of sack lunches, which he was about to deliver to unfortunate and less able high-rise strandees.
“Somebody's got to take care of all those old people,” he had grunted pointedly into the camera, and then set out determinedly to clump up the nine stories to deliver his goodies.
I hadn't seen the interview at the time--hadn't even known Lars Jenssen then--but he had shown it to me once after we met, venturing shyly into my condo to play it for me on the VCR.
“Offered to let that young guy come with me, but he said he didn't want to climb all them stairs. Ha!” Lars had snorted derisively when he showed me the tape. “That's what's the matter with kids these days. No gumption.”
We ordered our usual postmeeting dinners--a chili-burger for me and a plate of sliced tomatoes and cottage cheese for Lars. It was to this unvarying evening repast, cholesterol doomsayers to the contrary, that Lars Jenssen attributed both his good health and his longevity.
Spooning half a pitcher of cream and several heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee, he eyed me thoughtfully.
“How come you never talk about your family none, Beau?” he asked. “You had a chance tonight, and you blew it. Oh sure, you talked about your kids and all, but when it comes to the rest of your family, it's like you fell off a turnip truck somewhere all growed up.”
“That's not too far from the truth,” I told him with an uneasy laugh.
My family history, or lack thereof, isn't something I'm particularly eager to talk about. It's nothing to be ashamed of, I suppose, but it's not something to brag about, either.
“My mother's dead,” I said flatly after taking a forkful of my chili-burger. “I never knew my father. He died during the war. They weren't married.”
With an oath, Lars flung his fork back onto his nearly empty plate, where it bounced on a wilted lettuce leaf.
“See there?” he demanded loudly. Encroaching deafness had disabled Lars Jenssen's volume control years before. “No wonder you're all screwed up, Beau. You never had no men around, did you? You know, what they call one of them role models.”
Rather than being provoked by Lars Jenssen's probing interference, I was instead slightly amused. For a whole lot of money, the department gladly would have paid to send me to a genuine shrink. So here I sat in a dingy restaurant being psychoanalyzed by a meddlesome near-octogenarian who had probably never even heard of Sigmund Freud.
Lars leaned back in his chair and squinted nearsightedly across the table at me. “What about your grandparents?” he persisted stubbornly. “You musta spent at least some time with them.”
My amusement disappeared as I felt my hackles rising. I could talk about my father. The motorcycle accident that had killed him was just that--an accident. And so was I, for that matter. It was a cruel twist of fate that those two young lovers, my parents, had never had the chance to marry. The fact that my mother never married anyone else during the lonely years afterward testified to the enduring love she must have felt for her dead sailor/lover.
And I could talk about my mother, too. She had done it all and done it by herself, with no help from anyone. She had kept me and raised me at a time when that simply wasn't done in polite society. She had brought me up with unstinting devotion and a selfless, gritty determination. I've seen a lot of action in my years on the force, but those two qualities still form the basis for my definition of heroism.
Talking about my mother and father was fine, but I could not, would not, talk about my grandfather--a man whose name I bore--about Jonas Piedmont, that stiff-necked, stubborn Presbyterian son of a bitch who had turned his pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter out of the house and who had never once, in all the difficult years that followed, lifted a single solitary finger to help her.
The sudden unexpected flood of resentment that washed through me made it difficult to remember exactly what Lars Jenssen's question had been, to say nothing of answering it.
“No,” I said finally. “I never did.”
“How come?” Lars wasn't one to let sleeping dogs lie.
“We just didn't, that's all.”
“They dead?”
“Goddamn it, Lars. What's the point of all this third degree? No, they're not dead, not as far as I know, but they could just as well be. For all I know, they probably still live somewhere right here in Seattle, but you couldn't prove it by me. I've never met them, never laid eyes on them, never wanted to. Once they found out my mother was pregnant with me, they crossed us off their list. Permanently.”
“I see,” Lars Jenssen said, nodding sagely. “Maybe you ought to pay them a visit.”
“Like hell I will!” I snorted.
AA has strict live-and-let-live rules that decree members should not interfere in other people's lives, rules that create psychic nonaggression pacts which allow each member, supported by the invisible group behind him, to work his way through his own nightmare of self-imposed darkness.
If anyone had ever told Lars Jenssen about those rules, he had long since forgotten them, or maybe he did remember but was simply ignoring them.
“The thing is, Beau, you gotta give 'em credit for doing the best they could.”
“I don't have to give them anything,” I insisted.
Lars shook his head. “Just a minute here,” he said. “Take my boy Daniel now. He didn't get drafted, you know. He up and volunteered, for Chrissakes. He went over to Vietnam and got hisself blasted to pieces all for nothing. I cussed him for that, cussed him good, too. Not just after he was dead neither, but right then, at the time, when he was leaving.
“I cussed Danny and told him he was too goddamned stupid to be any son of mine. Course, it wasn't true, and it like to broke poor Aggie's heart, me carrying on that way all the while her only son was packing up his stuff to leave home and go off to war. And I cussed him later on, too, when I'd be out in the boat, just me and God and the ocean…”
Lars broke off suddenly, stopped cold, and didn't continue.
Any mention of the Vietnam War always gets to me, because when the war came, I didn't go. It wasn't that I was a draft-dodger or a protester. I simply didn't get drafted, although God knows I was prime cannon fodder material, and you can be damn sure I didn't volunteer, either. By the time I was in college and eligible for the draft, my mother was already sick and dying. I've wondered sometimes if maybe one of her friends wasn't on the local draft board. Maybe that would help explain why I'm still walking around in one piece when lots of other people aren't, including Lars Jenssen's son, Daniel. Lately I've wondered if going into law enforcement wasn't a way to make up for what I have somehow come to regard as dereliction of duty.
We had been sitting there quietly for a very long time when I realized at last that Lars Jenssen was waiting for me to spur him forward. “So what happened then?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I got over it, I guess. Finally figured out that it wasn't doing me no good. All that resentment was just eating up my insides. Except…”
“Except what?” I pr
ompted again.
“By then Daniel was already long dead and buried. Getting rid of all that poison helped me some, but it didn't do poor little Danny no good, or Aggie neither. By then she was so far gone that she didn't understand. I'll tell you this, Beau, if I got me one regret in life, that's it. Once they're dead, you can't do nothing about it, nothing at all.”
For a moment Lars Jenssen seemed adrift again, lost in a sea of thoughts about the past and what couldn't be changed in it. Then he sat up and put both hands on the table.
“How're you doing on your list?” he asked brightly, seeming to change the subject. I realized belatedly that he hadn't changed the subject at all. That cagey old goat was simply taking a run at me from another direction.
Anyone who thinks the Alcoholics Anonymous program is a walk in the park hasn't sat down to do Step 4, which entails making a searching moral inventory of yourself, or Step 8, which involves making a list of all the people you have wronged in your lifetime, people to whom you ought to make amends while you still have a chance.