Payment in Kind

by J. A. Jance

  “Were they here together? And if so, why would the head of the teachers' union be cozying up to the district's head of labor relations in a secret midnight meeting?”

  “Why don't we ask her?” Kramer responded.

  Jennifer Lafflyn--Ms. Lafflyn, if you will--the previous day's miniskirted number, was seated demurely at the large reception desk in the school district office. A thick cloud of flowery perfume tainted the atmosphere ten feet in any direction from her desk. She seemed totally recovered from the previous day's emotional roller coaster.

  “Good morning, Ms. Lafflyn,” Kramer said with oily deference when she looked up from her switchboard and saw us standing there. “We're here to see Mrs. Stovall. Her secretary said that you'd know where to find her.”

  I don't know if Kramer actually remembered Jennifer Lafflyn's name and preferred salutation or if he had taken his cue from the nameplate on her desk, but his underscored use of the word “Ms.” earned him a warm smile from the lady in question. The guy walking three feet behind him, me, that is, was totally invisible.

  Jennifer rose quickly to her feet. “Of course,” she said. “One moment. Please wait right here.”

  She turned and disappeared down a long hallway. Her slight but well-built figure was poured into a tightly belted, short black sheath over black panty hose. She may have thought of her basic black getup as appropriate mourning attire, but it was short, exceedingly short.

  Kramer leered after her, watching her every move. “Maybe when we're done here, I'll offer to give her a lift downtown so we can get those fingerprints we need. And I'll throw in an early lunch.”

  He wasn't just talking about lunch, either. “You'd better watch that stuff, Kramer,” I warned him. “She looks like she could blow all your fuses and never turn a hair.”

  Ms. Lafflyn came tripping back down the hallway right then. “They'll be meeting in the conference room. Mrs. Stovall's in the room next door, fourth door on your left.”

  I've always had this image of union presidents as tough-talking, cigar-chewing guys in baggy pants and rolled-up shirtsleeves who negotiate heavy-duty secret deals in smoke-filled rooms. With my introduction to Andrea Stovall, that particular stereotype was about to be pleasantly shattered.

  The woman sitting in the small office was a tiny, immaculately dressed blonde with her hair cut in the short, free-falling style preferred by figure skaters. She had pixielike features combined with the solid handshake of a born politician. She would have been pretty had it not been for the deep shadows under her eyes, ravages of sleeplessness that even the most deftly applied makeup couldn't entirely obliterate.

  “Sorry we're so late,” Kramer said as she motioned us into chairs. “We had trouble getting transportation.”

  She shrugged. “That's all right, but we'd better get started right away. What can I do for you?”

  “This won't take long,” Kramer assured her. “It's about Sunday night. We noticed that you were signed in and out on the logbook.”

  Andrea Stovall nodded. “That's correct. You said as much on the telephone. What about it?”

  “The only other person we have any record of working that night, other than the security guard, the only other person who signed in, was Marcia Louise Kelsey, a woman who died under mysterious circumstances that same night.”

  “I know all about that,” Andrea said wearily. Her whole body sagged and the smooth veneer of her face contorted with grief. “Marcia Kelsey and I were friends. I can't get over what happened. It's such a terrible tragedy.”

  “Actually, Mrs. Stovall,” Kramer said, “that friendship is one of the things we wanted to ask you about, as well as what you were doing at the district office the night before last. Isn't it odd for the head of the union and the head of labor relations to be buddies, as it were?”

  “We started out teaching together years ago, and we became friends then. Through the years our jobs grew in different directions, but the friendship stayed.”

  “What about Sunday night?” I asked.

  “I came down to check on her.”

  “You knew she was going to be working that night?”

  “Not really, but…”

  “But what?”

  “I just thought she might be, that's all.” Andrea Stovall dropped her eyes and wiped imaginary dust off the desktop in front of her. Even though we were treating her with kid gloves, this line of questioning was making Andrea Stovall very nervous. I wondered why and decided to get a little tougher.

  “Look, Mrs. Stovall,” I said gruffly. “It was the middle of the night on one of the worst night we've had in years. The streets were a mess, yet you expect us to believe that you came all the way down here on the off chance that Marcia Kelsey might be here as well? That doesn't make sense.”

  “It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not. That's what happened. I was worried about her and came to check on her. She wasn't here, nobody was. I thought…” She paused.

  “You thought what?”

  “Since her car was still in the lot, I thought maybe Pete had come by and given her a ride home.”

  “Was the guard on duty?” I asked.

  “Probably, but I didn't see him or anyone else, not a soul.”

  “What time was that?” Kramer asked.

  “I don't remember exactly. Around eleven. I wrote it down in the logbook, both the time in and the time out. If you don't believe me, you can ask Rex.”

  She broke off and bit her lower lip while an embarrassed flush crept up her neck and across her cheeks. Clearly she had blurted out something she hadn't intended to.

  “Who's Rex?” I asked.

  “Rex Pierson, the manager of my building.”

  “What building is that?”

  “I live at the Queen Anne. It's just up the hill from here.”

  The Queen Anne wasn't a building I recognized by name. Next to me, Detective Kramer shifted uncomfortably in his chair. There was a good deal the two of us didn't agree on, but he was getting the same reading from Andrea Stovall that I was.

  “How exactly did you get into the building, Mrs. Stovall?” I asked. “You said you couldn't find anyone, not even the security guard. Weren't the doors locked?”

  Andrea Stovall clasped her hands and placed them on the desk in front of her, but not before I noticed a sudden, uncontrolled trembling.

  “Are you cold, Mrs. Stovall?” I asked, feigning sympathy. “Your hands are shaking.”

  “No,” she said quickly, “I'm fine.” But under her makeup, the color of her skin had paled.

  “You still haven't told us how you got into the building,” I prodded.

  She swallowed. “I have a key,” she said in almost a whisper. “I used that to let myself in.”

  Detective Kramer's jaw dropped, and so did mine. Giving the head of the teachers' union a key to the district offices sounded downright crazy, like giving the Big Bad Wolf his own private key to the henhouse.

  “You mean the head of the teachers' union has a key to the building?” Kramer demanded.

  “I probably shouldn't have,” Andrea Stovall conceded, “but I do. I've had one for years. I still sign in and out, the way I'm supposed to. Remember, that's how you found me, from the sign-in sheet. Besides, I was sure Marcia was still here, because her car was parked in the lot outside, but when I couldn't raise the guard with the bell, I let myself in.”

  “There's a bell?” Kramer asked.

  “A night bell, so that if the guard is in some other part of the building, he can still hear that someone's at the door.”

  “Tell us about the car,” I said, switching gears. “You said it was still parked in the lot?”

  “She drove a Volvo, a green Volvo station wagon,” Andrea Stovall answered gratefully, relieved to move away from any more questions about her unauthorized possession of a building key. “It was right there in the lot when we drove up.”

  “We? You mean you and this Rex person?” Kramer asked.

  She swall
owed. “That's right.”

  “And he's your apartment manager, right? How did he get dragged into this?”

  “He offered me a ride, and I accepted.”

  “In the middle of a snowy night? To come check on someone you didn't know for sure would be here?”

  Andrea nodded.

  “Why?”

  Suddenly Andrea Stovall dissolved into tears. “Because I was worried about her. Because I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “That something might happen to her. And I was right, goddamn it! I was right to be afraid.”

  Some women cry daintily and prettily. Andrea Stovall wasn't one of them. Her nose and eyes turned red while her face puffed up instantly.

  There was a gentle knock on the door just then, and Doris Walker poked her head into the room, looking questioningly from one face to another. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said apologetically, “but Dr. Savage and the others are waiting. Would it be possible for you to finish this later?”

  Without waiting for us to answer, Andrea Stovall reached down and scooped up both a purse and a briefcase that had been sitting on the floor beside her. “Tell them I'll be there in a minute. I've got to fix my face.”

  With that, she bolted from the room and Doris closed the door behind her, leaving Kramer and me alone. I'm sure we could have stopped her, told Doris Walker that Andrea Stovall was unavoidably detained and kept the interview going, but the interview had raised some interesting questions, disturbing questions.

  What exactly was the relationship between Marcia Louise Kelsey and Andrea Stovall? More than Andrea had let on, of that I was sure. She had said she was “afraid” for Marcia. Why? It hadn't been just a general fear of someone working late and alone in an otherwise deserted office building. The fear had been more specific than that, and strong enough to make Andrea enlist her apartment manager's help when she went to check.

  We'd be talking to Andrea Stovall again, but before we did, we'd need to do some checking on our own. When homicide detectives ask questions, it's always a good idea to have some idea in advance what the real answers ought to be. It keeps you from being suckered quite so badly.

  “What's with her?” Kramer asked, still staring at the closed door.

  “She's hiding something,” I said. “Something that happened the night of the murders, and she's scared to death we're going to find out what it is, which we'd by God better do before we talk to her again.”

  Kramer nodded and we both rose to go. At least we had found one point we could agree on, and in this case, that counted for progress.

  Chapter 12

  On the way back down the hall, I stopped off long enough to use the rest room. I had thought Kramer was joking about taking Jennifer Lafflyn back downtown with us. By the time I reached the receptionist's desk, she was wearing her coat, and a substitute receptionist had been pressed into service.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “As long as we're here, shouldn't we talk to Kendra Meadows?”

  “Suit yourself,” Kramer replied. “Now's when Ms. Lafflyn can go, and I offered to take her.”

  Which gave me a clear choice of taking it or leaving it. “See you later,” I said. I turned to the substitute receptionist. “Is Kendra Meadows in?”

  “One moment. I'll check. What did you say your name was?”

  Unlike Jennifer Lafflyn, the formidable lady who appeared at the top of the stairs a few moments later was dressed for a very respectable funeral. Kendra Meadows was a middle-aged black lady whose thick, wavy hair was turning gunmetal gray. She was large, in every sense of the word, what the purveyors of women's clothing call “queen-size.” Almost as tall as I was and thickly built, she was attractively dressed in a generously cut wool suit, the skirt of which covered her legs halfway down her calves.

  Moving with ponderous grace, she came down the stairs while her undergarments whispered in that peculiarly feminine rustle of nylon on nylon.

  “Detective Beaumont, is it?”

  Kendra Meadows' welcoming smile revealed a wide gap between her two front teeth. No doubt the school district's dental insurance would have covered a set of braces for the middle-aged lady had Kendra Meadows ever stopped to consider such vain nonsense desirable.

  She held out her hand. When I gripped it, her handshake was firm enough to make me wince.

  “Sorry about that,” she apologized, catching what must have been a pained expression on my face.

  “It's nothing,” I told her quickly. “I hurt my fingers a few months back. They still give me problems every once in a while.”

  “Too bad,” she said with a sympathetic click of her tongue. “Well then, come along. I was just going back to my office.” I followed her back up the stairs and down a long, narrow corridor into a large but nonetheless crowded and messy office. Like Marcia Kelsey, Kendra Meadows seemed to thrive in an environment with the appearance of total chaos. Not only the desk but the credenza, chairs, and several extra tables were piled high with stacks of file folders and loose pieces of paper. She cleaned off one of the chairs and motioned me into it.

  Once Kendra Meadows had seated herself at the desk, she extricated a stack of papers from the general clutter and sat holding it, regarding me with yet another warm smile. Kendra Meadows' natural charm, so obvious in person, hadn't been at all apparent in her abrupt telephone manner.

  “I took the liberty of making a preliminary list for you, Detective Beaumont,” she explained, reaching across the desk and handing me several 8½-by-11-inch pieces of paper with neat handwritten lists of names, telephone numbers, and addresses on them.

  “The first list is of the people who were here at the office on the morning in question, after the bodies were found. You'll find Mr. Jacobs there, but it would probably be better if you didn't try to contact Martin until I get a clear go-ahead from his doctor. You'll notice Jennifer Lafflyn is on that list as well. She's usually on the desk downstairs in the mornings, but she wasn't there just now.”

  “Right,” I said. Under Jennifer Lafflyn's name were five more names I didn't recognize. “Who are the others?”

  “The next few are on our substitute teacher scheduling crew. They come in every morning at five. Even though we already knew school was going to be canceled on Monday, those five you see there are the ones who still managed to make it in. They were here to help handle the extra volume of calls from anxious parents. I thought you'd be interested in talking to them. After all, one of them might have seen something without realizing it.”

  Kendra Meadows should have been a cop. She paused and waited while I ran my finger down the list of names and telephone numbers.

  “Is this the kind of thing you had in mind?” she asked.

  “Absolutely, Mrs. Meadows. This is great.”

  “Kendra,” she said. “Call me Kendra. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. The next list includes the names of most of the people here in the building who worked closely with Marcia Kelsey. Her secretary and the staff members who reported directly to her. That list also contains the names of those she reported to.”

  “Good,” I said. “Having them broken down into groups like this will be a big help when we start the interviewing process. What's the next page?”

  “That's a list of district employees from outside the building who probably worked with Marcia on a regular basis. Some are certified employees, some are noncertified. As director of Labor Relations, she wasn't just responsible for our dealings with the teachers' union. There are several other unionized entities as well. I've put the names of the unions as well as their addresses and phone numbers right there at the bottom of the page.”

  Halfway down this list I discovered the name, address, and telephone number of Andrea Stovall. I'm not sure how Kendra Meadows did it, but it struck me that her sources of information were very thorough. In all my years of doing homicide investigations, I had never before started a case with that kind of comprehensive background material on a victim.

  I tur
ned to the last page. On that one there was only one entry. Seattle Security. Poor dead Alvin Chambers. His death kept being short-changed at every corner of the investigation.

  “This is all you had on the security guard?” I asked.

  “Since he worked for a subcontractor, we don't have any specific information on him. I'm sure you can get that from Seattle Security.”

  Once more I paged through the extensive list. On further examination it proved to be even more impressive than I had at first thought.

  “How did you manage to get all this pulled together in such a short time?”

  Kendra Meadows laughed. “Of course, I had some help from the computer,” she said, “but there are some things people do best, wouldn't you say?”