Payment in Kind

by J. A. Jance

  Kramer was shaking his head in obvious disgust, but I didn't give him a chance to say anything.

  “Why didn't you tell us any of this before?”

  “I was hoping no one would find out, that what went on between Marcia and Andrea Stovall would be a secret that Marcia would take to her grave so no one else would have to be hurt by it. But that didn't work either. It was all over the paper this morning. I couldn't believe it when I saw it.”

  “So how did the murder weapon get in your bedroom, Mr. Madsen?” Detective Kramer asked.

  “I don't know,” Pete replied.

  “And what about Alvin Chambers' trousers and his shoes?”

  “What about them?”

  “We found those in your house as well, out in your garage.”

  “I don't know,” Pete began. “I can't imagine, unless somebody's trying to frame me.”

  “Who would do that? Who would be interested in framing you for the murder of your own wife?”

  “I told you, I don't know. It's a nightmare.”

  “Tell me why you stuck it out with your wife for so long, Mr. Madsen or Kelsey or whatever you call yourself,” Kramer continued. “I sure as hell wouldn't, not under those circumstances.”

  Pete Kelsey's eyes hardened. “We made a bargain, Detective Kramer,” he said. “I'm a man who keeps bargains.”

  “Sounds like a hell of a bargain to me,” Kramer returned derisively. “What did you get out of it?”

  Had I been Pete Kelsey, I think I would have tried to belt that smart-mouthed son of a bitch. Either that or I would have clammed up. Pete Kelsey did neither.

  “It was good enough for me,” he answered softly. “I got what I wanted.”

  “And what was that?”

  Pete Kelsey held Kramer's eyes when he answered. “I got a family,” he said. “A family and a country.”

  “Wait a minute. We already know you're John David Madsen, you already had both a family and a country, so cut the bullshit.”

  “That's not true,” Pete replied. “When I met Marcia Riggs, I was a man without a country, a man who had cut all ties with the past and with my family. Marrying Marcia gave me both. I owed her for that, no matter what. It's a debt I can never repay.”

  “You paid, all right, bud,” Kramer said under his breath. “You paid through the nose, and when you got tired of paying, you got rid of her.”

  “I didn't,” Kelsey said, half rising in his chair. “I did not!”

  Suddenly there was an urgent pounding on the door to the interview room, Kramer turned and opened it. Uncertain of his welcome, the evening desk sergeant stood warily outside the door. “Excuse me, Detective Kramer, but…”

  “I demand to see my client,” said a confidently assertive voice. With that, Caleb Winthrop Drachman the Third stepped past the desk sergeant and Kramer and marched into the interrogation room as if he owned the place.

  Cal Drachman, with his polka-dot bow-tied image is a young (thirty-five-year-old) rising star in Seattle's criminal defense circles. At least among those defendants who for some reason or other don't qualify for a public defender. Cal Drachman III is far too busy with his burgeoning practice and making a name for himself to ever consider working for free. You could rest assured that if Cal Drachman appeared in a case, someone was footing a considerable bill.

  Cal stopped in front of Pete Kelsey and smiled down at him, holding out his hand.

  “Cal's the name,” he said pleasantly. His off-hand demeanor made it seem as though interrogation-room introductions are entirely ordinary. In his kind of work, maybe they are.

  “One of my partners is an old friend of your father-in-law's. He and Belle wanted me to come see how you're doing.”

  “Fine,” Pete said, “but…”

  “Are they treating you all right?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Good. Glad to hear it. Glad to hear it.”

  While he had been speaking to Pete Kelsey, he had been smiling warmly, but now, as Drachman turned back to us, the smile disappeared.

  “I've only just now been called in on this case. Naturally, there'll be no more questions until I've been allowed to consult with my client. What are the charges?”

  Drachman knew as well as we did what the charges were, but he wanted to hear it from our own lips. He wasn't going to stand for our skipping any of the required steps or empty gestures.

  “Desertion from the United States Army,” I said.

  “And when did this alleged desertion take place?”

  “March of 1969.”

  “My goodness, that's some time ago,” Drachman said, shaking his head. “Over twenty years. Surely the Army isn't still interested in pursuing this after all these years.”

  “We've alerted the CID down at Fort Lewis,” I told him. “Someone from there will be in touch to let us know what to do next.”

  Caleb Drachman smiled. “So that's all then? I mean those are the only charges against my client at the moment?”

  “So far.”

  “Very good. What's your name?” Drachman asked, looking at me through stylishly thin-framed horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Beaumont,” I responded. “Detective J.P. Beaumont.”

  “Very well, Detective Beaumont.” He frowned and scratched his head. “You're in Homicide, aren't you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But my client isn't charged with any homicide, isn't that also correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Bearing that in mind, I'm sure you'll agree with me that since there's nothing more serious against my client than this twenty-year-old desertion beef with the Army, then it's perfectly feasible for Mr. Kelsey here to attend his wife's funeral tomorrow afternoon. I've been given to understand that those are his wishes.”

  “I don't agree with anything of the kind,” I began, but Cal Drachman cut me off before I could go any further.

  “Excuse me, Detective Beaumont. He has not been charged with anything more serious than this. It's water under the bridge. I believe there's a good chance that the Army will decide to drop the charges altogether. If that happens, it wouldn't look very good if you had decided to keep him from attending his own wife's funeral, now would it? Now, I think that would seem downright criminal.”

  Cal Drachman shook his head sadly and waved me aside. “You go on, now. I want to consult with my client. I'll let you know when he's ready to talk to you again. He won't be meeting with you without me, is that understood?”

  In the old days, when I was a kid and played cops and robbers with the kids on my block, there weren't any lawyers in the game. Nobody would have stood still for being a lawyer; you were either a good guy or a bad guy. Some days the good guys won and some days the bad guys did.

  I wonder if things are different now, if nowadays when kids play that game, there aren't some who actually want to be lawyers. If not, they're missing a good bet, because these days, it's the lawyers who call all the shots.

  Chapter 22

  We had sent Pete Kelsey back to the jail and were almost ready to go home when Richard Chambers and his mother showed up around seven. Richard was a lean, handsome kid with a short, military-style haircut and ramrod-straight posture. When we had last seen Charlotte Chambers, she had been weeping uncontrollably in the reception area of the medical examiner's office. If I expected a next-of-kin interview with a still-weeping widow, however, I was in for a big surprise. Charlotte Chambers wasn't crying anymore. She was mad as hell.

  “It's all those women's fault,” she raged. “I know it is. It's their wickedness that caused Alvin's death. He should have done something to stop them. When he didn't, God punished him, plain and simple.”

  “Now, Mother,” Richard crooned, patting her shoulder soothingly and trying to steer her away from the subject, but Charlotte Chambers wasn't about to be placated or diverted.

  “You know it's true. If you ignore evil, it sneaks into you and starts eating at your own soul. That's what it does, you see. Alvin
was infected by the evil around him, by the godlessness around him. That's why he's dead.”

  “When did he tell you about this?” I asked, trying to move away from her aimless tirades and extract some useful information. “About the two women, I mean.”

  “I don't know exactly. How would I remember a thing like that? I didn't write it on the calendar. He probably knew about it long before he mentioned it to me. He wouldn't have done that if I hadn't heard him praying about it. Alvin always prayed aloud, you see. It's a habit he sort of got into being a pastor and all, and I sort of got in the habit of listening. Me and God. Whenever Alvin set about praying, me and God were always both listening away, Him up there and me in the other room.”

  “Did he tell you how he found out about them?” Kramer asked.

  Charlotte shook her head. “Nope. He never did.”

  I considered this whole line of questions and answers distasteful. I didn't like delving into someone's private prayer life, asking questions of a third party over what Alvin Chambers had wrongly believed was a confidential conversation between him and his God.

  It soon became apparent that no matter what questions we asked, Charlotte, like cagey politicians being interviewed on talk shows, always came back to the answers she wanted to give, to her private agenda. No doubt she had handled the newspaper reporters the same way, but they somehow hadn't connected with the idea that Charlotte was several tacos short of a combination plate. They had reported her every word in grim detail. As a result, Erin Kelsey and her grandparents were reaping the whirlwind of Marcia's indiscretions.

  Given a choice, I much prefer interviewing killers to interviewing bigots, and I soon found myself agreeing with Alva Patterson's noncomplimentary opinion regarding her former pastor's widow--no matter what sins poor Alvin Chambers might have committed during his lifetime, he had deserved better than Charlotte.

  Finally, giving the interview up as a lost cause, we escorted Charlotte and Richard Chambers downstairs to the crime lab, where we asked them to examine the shoes and trousers that had been removed from Pete Kelsey's garage early that morning.

  Richard declined and hung back, but Charlotte knew just what to look for. She reached into the front pockets of the trousers and pulled them inside out.

  “It's Alvin's,” she announced confidently and at once.

  “How do you know?” I asked, and she showed me the pockets. The seams at the bottom of both pockets had come undone, and both had been mended--with a series of staples stuck through the cloth.

  “Alvin always fixed his pants himself,” Charlotte told us. “And he always did it this way. I don't sew, you see. My mother never taught me.”

  Apparently Alvin's mother never taught him either, but he had figured out a way to get the job done.

  The shoes were tougher. Charlotte studied them for some time without being able to make a decision. They were the right size, but other than that, there were no identifying marks on which to form an opinion. I told her that was all right. Besides, I had every confidence the crime lab would be able to figure it out from trace evidence without the need of a separate identification from a family member.

  I turned to Kramer. “Any more questions?” He shook his head. “Why don't you take your mother home then, Richard,” I suggested. “She probably needs the rest.”

  The truth of the matter is, we were the ones who needed a rest. Richard Chambers probably could have used a break as well, but Charlotte was his mother, and he was stuck with her.

  I dragged myself home on a bus. The weather was definitely warming, but I was too tired to pay much attention. I let myself into my apartment thinking I'd have a long, quiet evening all to myself, but that wasn't to be.

  The blinking red light on my answering machine tells me how many messages are waiting. This time it wasn't too bad--there was only one light flashing when I finally arrived home around eight o'clock that night. As I played the tape back, the voice I heard belonged to Ron Peters.

  “Call as soon as you get home,” he said. “I'll come right up.”

  Noting a certain urgency in the tersely worded message, I called back right away. Ron Peters, without either Amy or the girls in tow, showed up at my door a scant three minutes later. I peered up the hallway toward the elevator lobby to see if anyone else was coming with him, but he was definitely alone.

  “This isn't a social call?” I asked.

  “Hardly.”

  Peters wheeled himself over the threshold into the apartment. I had been in the kitchen pouring myself a seltzer. I offered one to Ron, but he shook his head and led the way into the living room, where he parked his chair next to the window seat. That particular spot offers a panoramic view of Puget Sound, which, even at night, teems with lighted ferries, tugboats, and other shipping traffic.

  I reached to turn on a light, but Peters stopped me. “Leave it off,” he said. “We can see outside better this way.”

  The light stayed off. I settled comfortably into my old leather recliner, which creaked under my weight. “So what's up, Ron?”

  “You want the good news or the bad news?” he asked.

  “Good,” I said. “If I have a choice, I always want the good news first.”

  “I've located the kid behind the bomb threats.”

  That grabbed my attention. My second wind blew in full force. “Hot damn, Ron! That's not good news, that's great news. Who is it?”

  “That's the bad news,” Peters returned grimly. “His name's Todd Farraday.”

  The name was indeed bad news, bad enough to take my breath away. There may have been lots of other Farradays living in the Puget Sound area, but I knew of only one for sure, a lady named Natalie Farraday, who happened to be Seattle's newly elected mayor.

  “He can't be any relation to…” I began, but Peters cut me off.

  “He is,” Ron said. “He's fifteen years old and Her Honor's only son.”

  I whistled under my breath. “No wonder the case was under wraps. Let me guess. He was doing the threats. When mama-san figured it out, everybody down the line got their marching orders to keep it quiet, and everybody played ball, right?”

  Peters nodded. “That's right, everybody, up to and including the media. But then, Natalie Farraday's been a media darling since she first ran for city council. If this had been her opponent's kid, you can bet it would have been a different story.

  “The way I heard it was that once Her Honor found out what he was up to, she was so pissed that she's kept him under virtual house arrest ever since.”

  “How did you find all this out?”

  “I've told you over and over, Beau, it doesn't hurt to become friends with a reporter every once in a while. There are times when they really can help.”

  “Why did he make the threats, and how?”

  “How is the easy part,” Peters replied. “They live up on Kinnear, just a few blocks west of Queen Anne Avenue. So it was no trouble at all to scoot down to the school district office, do the dirty deed, and then make tracks for home again. As to why, I wouldn't even hazard a guess.”

  “What you're saying is that this was done just for the hell of it by some stupid punk who can't even spell?”

  “Actually, that's the funny part. According to what I can find out, Todd Farraday is now and always has been an honors student. That's one of the reasons his mother was able to convince everybody that, except for the glass breakage, it was nothing more than an innocent prank. She's already paid for the broken windows, by the way.”

  “False reporting of crimes is a crime, not a prank,” I said.

  “Unless your mama's the mayor,” Peters returned.

  We sat there silently for several moments, watching two slow-moving ferries lumber past each other as they approached the Coleman dock.

  “Chances are he has nothing whatever to do with my homicides, then.”

  The idea that the bomb threats and the murders were somehow connected had always been a long shot, but it had been my long shot a
nd it hurt to have to give it up.

  “Probably not,” Peters agreed.

  Again we were silent for a time. “But wouldn't you like to tweak him a little?” I asked. “Just for the hell of it?”

  In the gloom of the darkened room, I saw Peters' ghostly face turn in my direction. “What do you mean tweak?”

  “Actually, I mean scare the living shit right out of him, make him think we've connected him to something that his mother won't be able to hush up or fix. Having a homicide detective turn up on his doorstep might light a fire under that little jerk's privileged ass.”