Payment in Kind

by J. A. Jance

  “I certainly would,” I told her. “I can see it was a good deal of work. Thank you.”

  “You're welcome, Detective Beaumont.” Kendra Meadows' dark eyes were suddenly serious. The good humor disappeared from her face and the laughter from her voice.

  “You're right. It was work, hard work. I was here half the night, pulling it all together, but I'm glad to be of use. You see, I knew Marcia Kelsey. We weren't close, but I've known her for years. Something terrible must have gone wrong in her life. I can't imagine what it would have been. Do you know?”

  I shook my head. “We're working on it, Mrs. Meadows. That's all I can say for right now.”

  “You must find out what happened, and quickly too, so we can all put it behind us and go on with the real job of educating children. It's impossible for children to learn to live non-violent lives when they see well-respected adults behaving this way.”

  “That's true, Mrs. Meadows,” I said, rising to go. “I couldn't agree with you more.”

  At the door to her office, I turned back. “One other thing. Do you happen to have a key to this building?”

  She frowned. “Yes. Of course. Why?”

  “Do many other people?”

  “A few. Not many. It's bad for security.”

  “Did Marcia Kelsey have a key?”

  “Probably. I could check the list. It won't take a moment.”

  Kendra Meadows heaved herself out of the chair, hurried over to a file cabinet in the far corner of the room, and extracted a file folder. She moved her finger down a piece of paper inside.

  “That's right. Marcia had a key. It says so right here. And the locks were changed as of the first of October.”

  “Are all the people with keys on that list?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “May I see it?”

  She passed it to me without a murmur and I scanned down it to the S's Andrea Stovall may have had a key, but her name did not appear on the master list.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That tells me exactly what I need to know. May I have a copy of this?”

  Kendra Meadows smiled her gap-toothed smile and shrugged her broad shoulders. “Certainly. I don't see why not.”

  I left Kendra Meadows' office with wonderfully comprehensive lists of people to interview and with one real additional bonus--the sure knowledge that, for whatever reason, Andrea Stovall was a liar.

  It was a lead. Maybe only a small one, but in this business, a small lead is a hell of a lot better than no lead at all.

  I wanted to make a series of phone calls, fairly private calls, so instead of returning to the reception area, I went to the superintendent's suite of offices and threw myself on Doris Walker's mercy. She politely showed me into a small private office and then left me to use the phone, discreetly closing the door behind her. In view of what happened next, I was tremendously grateful for that closed door.

  I called down to the department to check in and got hold of Margie. She sounded relieved to hear from me.

  “It's a good thing you called in,” she said quietly. “Watty's on the warpath. He's looking for you. And where's Detective Kramer? The prosecutor needs him in court this afternoon.”

  “Kramer's on his way downtown; in fact, he should be there by now. What's Watty pissed about?”

  “How should I know? I'll connect you and let him tell you himself.”

  Sergeant Watkins came on the phone a moment later. “Where the hell are you, Beau?”

  “At the school district office. I just finished interviewing Kendra Meadows, the lady in charge of Personnel. We also talked to the president of the teachers' organization.” I was still operating under the faint hope that this could end up as a friendly conversation.

  “Well, I'm glad to hear that you're finally working.”

  The word “finally,” said with that peculiar emphasis, gave me the first hint that I was in deep trouble.

  “Did you say ‘finally’? What's that supposed to mean?”

  “It means get cracking, Beau. It means stop playing around at this and get to work. I saw the reports. Paul Kramer wrote every damn one of them. You stuck him doing the reports; I know that for a fact. You also left him here working long after you went home. Where the hell do you get off treating him like some junior errand boy, sending him around picking up lab reports and autopsies? You think you're too good to do some of the grunt work, Beaumont? Detective Kramer's supposed to be your partner, a full-fledged goddamned investigator, not your personal gofer.”

  “Wait just a goddamned minute here, Watty. Did he tell you…”

  “No, you wait a minute, Detective Beaumont, and don't interrupt. Just because Kramer's a dedicated cop, and just because he's low man on the totem pole here in Homicide, doesn't mean you old-timers get to take advantage of him and stick him with all the shit work. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly,” I responded bleakly.

  From Watty's tone of voice, I could tell it was useless to object or offer any excuses or to suggest that things Kramer had done were things he had appointed himself to do without any kind of request or consultation from me.

  “I want to see results, Beau,” Watty continued. “I want to see reports on my desk with your signature on them. I want to know who you've interviewed and what was said. I want to know what kind of contribution you're making, because this is now, and always has been, a team effort, Detective, and don't you forget it.”

  With that, Watty hung up. It was a good thing Kramer was long gone, because if he hadn't been, I probably would have wrapped the phone cord right around his damn ass-kissing neck. I felt like one of those poor schmucks in the comics who suddenly has a lightbulb click on over his head.

  So that was how Kramer was playing the game, and I'd walked right into the trap like a lamb to the slaughter.

  For several minutes, I stood there seething, my hands shaking with rage, while the blood pounded in my ears. Eventually I got a grip on both myself and my anger. If Watty wanted interviews, then by God, I'd give him interviews, and after a moment's thought, I knew exactly where I'd start.

  My mother was always one to do the worst things first and get them over with. Talking to Maxwell Cole was very low on my list of wonderful things to do. Unfortunately, other than talking to Charlotte Chambers, Maxwell Cole seemed like the next logical interview step.

  But Charlotte Chambers didn't live on Queen Anne Hill, and Maxwell Cole did.

  I knew Max lived only a few blocks away from the school district office. If he happened to be home, it would take only a few minutes to trudge on up there to see him. If not, if he was already at work, then the Post-Intelligencer office was located at the very bottom of Queen Anne, and I could maybe catch him there on my way back downtown.

  I tried calling his office first. No luck. I was told he was ill, out for the day. I looked in the book, but as a public personage, Max naturally has an unlisted phone number. Since I'm hardly on a best-buddy basis with him, I'm not privy to his number any more than he is to mine. That left me only one viable alternative--to show up unannounced.

  In the long run, it was probably just as well that I didn't call in advance. If I had warned him I was coming, chances are Maxwell Cole wouldn't have answered the door.

  On my way past her desk, Doris Walker flagged me down, signaling for me to wait until she finished a phone call. “Dr. Savage wanted to know how to get in touch with you, in case anything comes up that he needs to talk with you about.”

  “Didn't I leave a card?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  It was an oversight. As a penance, I scrawled both my home and cellular number on it in addition to the office one. After all, if the super-intendent of schools couldn't be trusted with an unlisted phone number, who could?

  Chapter 13

  Max Cole lives on Bigelow Avenue North, a gracious, gently winding, tree-lined street that curves around the base of what's known as Upper Queen Anne Hill. I used several sets of
steep stairway sidewalks to make my way up to Bigelow from the school district office on the lower part of the hill. The cold but invigorating climb left me feeling a little winded but quite virtuous by the time I topped the last set of stairs and came out on the snow-covered street.

  Max's house, which I learned had once belonged to his parents, was a stately old Victorian set back behind a pair of towering, winter-bare chestnut trees. I walked up onto the covered porch and rang the bell. A miserable-looking Maxwell Cole, wearing a flannel robe and carrying a huge red hanky, answered the door. His unwaxed handlebar mustache drooped feebly, his eyes were red and runny. Obviously he had caught himself a dandy of a cold.

  “Hi, Max,” I said cheerfully. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood. How're the sick, the lame, and the lazy?”

  He wasn't exactly overjoyed to see me. “What are you doing here, J. P.? Can't you see I'm sick?”

  Actually, I could. There was only a frail hint of the old mutual antagonism in his voice. Feverish and haggard, he was too sick to carry off his customary obnoxiousness with any kind of believability.

  “Just doing my job, Max, that's all. I'd like to talk to you about Marcia and Pete Kelsey, if you have a minute. May I come in?”

  “Suit yourself,” he said gruffly, pulling open the door with one hand while he used the other to stifle a sudden fit of sneezing. As I walked past him, the thought passed briefly through my mind that he was probably contagious as hell right then and I'd most likely end up with a case of pneumonia for my trouble. I accepted his reluctant invitation in the manner in which it was given and went on inside.

  Max led the way into a spacious but overly furnished living room. The place was full of things that looked to me like genuine antiques, quality antiques. The only problem was there were far too many of them. And the room was boiling hot. Max had the thermostat set so high that it was sweltering in there.

  He took a seat in an easy chair in front of a huge empty fireplace. Dropping my coat and gloves at one end of a chintz couch, I put as much distance between us as I reasonably could, settling at the far end of it and facing him across the wide expanse of an ornate, marble-topped coffee table.

  “Wanted to have a fire in the fireplace this morning,” he grumbled, “but wouldn't you know burning restrictions are in effect today? This is the kind of weather when you want to have a fire in the fireplace.”

  That was true. I didn't mention to him that this was exactly the kind of weather when everyone wanted a fire in his respective fireplace and that was precisely why it was a problem. Besides, had the room been any warmer, I would have died of heat prostration. I said a silent prayer of thanks for all those busy little environmentalists who had made burning restrictions possible.

  “I'm sorry to disturb you when you're sick, Max,” I began, “but I really do need to get some background information from you regarding this case. You're pretty much the only one I can turn to so far. I understand you've known Pete and Marcia Kelsey for some time.”

  Much to my surprise, Maxwell Cole slapped the sodden hanky over his face and burst into great lurching, choking sobs. It was several long, noisy minutes before he was able to speak.

  “It finally hit home this morning that she's really gone,” he mumbled miserably at last. “Yesterday, I was like in a dream, a fog. It wasn't real somehow, but today…”

  The day before when I had encountered him in front of the Kelseys' house, I had very much doubted the veracity of his claim of family friendship, but there in that suffocatingly hot living room, with unchecked tears rolling down his pudgy cheeks and dripping from the ends of his sagging mustache, the depth of Maxwell Cole's grief was undeniable. As Max's story spilled out, I found myself missing the old familiar antagonism. His friend's death had taken all the fight out of him, and in spite of myself, I felt a certain grudging sympathy toward the man.

  “From fifth grade,” he added brokenly. “That's how long we were friends. Her family came to Seattle from southern Utah, someplace around St. George, I believe. They moved to the Hill the summer Marcia and I were between fourth and fifth grades. She liked to read and so did I. We met at the library branch up on Garfield Street. We both had permission to check books out of the adult section. All summer long we passed books back and forth. Marcia always turned down the corners of the sexy parts. She was a lot better at finding them than I was.”

  He smiled sadly, tugging with both hands on the wispy ends of his drooping mustache as though hoping to massage them into some kind of order. It didn't work.

  “We were like that,” he went on. Max crossed two fingers and held them out in front of him for a moment to show me what he meant before letting them fall limply back into his lap.

  “I never had a sister,” he said, “and Marcia never had a brother. We were both only children. She was like a sister to me.”

  “You stayed friends from then on?” I asked.

  “More or less. You know how kids are. We had a big fight during eighth grade. I can't even remember now what it was about, but we didn't speak for most of that year. We patched things up once we got to high school, though. We were in journalism together, and our senior year we were coeditors of the KUAY.”

  “That what?”

  “The KUAY,” he repeated. “Queen Anne High's weekly newspaper. That's where I first got interested in journalism. Chris was there too. He did sports.”

  “Chris?” I asked. “Who's he?”

  “Chris McLaughlin. Her first husband. You didn't know about him?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Max said firmly. “Christopher McLaughlin was a creep, the absolute scum of the earth as far as I'm concerned. I never could see what she saw in him other than sex maybe. He seduced her early on, the night of the junior/senior prom, as a matter of fact. She told me about it at the time, we were that close, and I worried that maybe she'd get knocked up. Of course, that was long before anyone knew she was a Downwinder.”

  “A what?”

  “A Downwinder. Haven't you ever heard of them?”

  I shook my head. “They're the people who lived downwind from the Nevada Test Site during the late fifties, when they were still doing aboveground nuclear testing,” he said.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Marcia was staying out on her grandparents' ranch when they set off a particularly dirty test. Unexpected winds blew the radioactive crap right across her grandparents' land. Both grandparents eventually died of cancer. The doctors later attributed Marcia's sterility as well as her female difficulties to that, although nobody's ever proven it in court. You know how that goes.”

  Max paused for a moment, then hurried on. “Anyway, that's why it was so wonderful when Pete showed up with a ready-made family.”

  “You said Chris McLaughlin was her first husband. What ever happened to him?”

  Maxwell Cole snorted derisively. “Who knows? Who cares? Marcia left him in Canada and came back home. Good riddance, as far as I'm concerned. Her folks were absolutely delighted to think she had finally come to her senses and left the creep. They helped her get an annulment--that cost them a pretty penny--and they also helped Marcia get back into school at the university. They weren't wild about Pete to begin with, but they got along fine with him eventually. If it hadn't been for him, they probably would have missed being grandparents altogether.”

  While Max was speaking, I began putting together a rough chronology. Max and I were almost the same age. That meant Marcia Kelsey and Chris McLaughlin were too. Back then there had been only one reason why someone of my generation would disappear into the wilds of Canada and stay there--the Vietnam War.

  “So Chris McLaughlin was a conscientious objector?” I asked.

  Max nodded. “So he claimed. How'd you guess?”

  “It figures,” I said.

  “Chris was one of the very early models,” Max continued. “He took off for Canada in 1967 and dragged Marcia along up there with him. He married her on the
way, just to put a good face on it, I guess, but her folks were heartbroken.

  “I still don't know everything that went on while they were up there. Marcia and I were always close, very close. We told each other secrets that we wouldn't share with another living human being, but she never talked to me about those years in Canada, not the details anyway. It must have been pretty bad. She hinted around about drugs and some kind of commune living arrangement. I'll say this much for him. When it came to scuzzy low-life stuff, Chris McLaughlin was always ahead of his time.”

  “So how did she meet up with Pete Kelsey?”

  Max shrugged. “Kismet. Fate. Whatever you want to call it. I hadn't seen her for almost three years when she just happened to drop by the house to say hello and to tell me that her annulment had been granted. She came by to say she was a ‘free woman.’ Pete Kelsey was there that afternoon, giving my mother an estimate for a remodeling job she wanted done. As soon as they laid eyes on one another, Pete and Marcia hit it off. I've never seen anything like it, and Marcia was wild about Erin. You've heard of whirlwind courtships? Theirs took the cake. They got married three weeks to the day from the time they met. A justice of the peace married them right in this very room, here in front of the fireplace. I was the best man, and my mother was the matron of honor. We took care of Erin while they were off on their honeymoon.”