by J. A. Jance
“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 i
mportant 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?”
“Yes. I never saw her or talked to her after that.”
“Were you here all the rest of the night?”
The minute pause before he answered made me wonder if he was telling the truth.
“Until around ten-thirty or so,” he said. “It was getting late and she wasn’t home. I tried calling her direct line, but there was no answer, so I drove over to her office. Her car was there, but I couldn’t raise anybody, not even the security guard. I checked a couple of other places and went back by her office again around midnight. By then her car was gone from the lot and I thought maybe we had just missed each other in transit, but when I got back here, she still wasn’t home. I realized then that wherever she was, she didn’t want to be found. I went to bed. There was no point in staying up any later. I had some contracting work to do early this morning.”
“You said you noticed her car was missing from the parking lot?”
“That’s right. Marcia has…had an assigned spot, and she always parked there, even at night. It’s a good one, close to the door, and the snow wouldn’t have kept her from using it.”
A possibly devious husband and a missing car were two more things that didn’t fit with Doc Baker’s suicide theory. I asked for the make and model of Marcia Kelsey’s turbocharged Volvo. With vehicles abandoned in the snow all over the city, someone’s misplaced car could be illegally parked directly in front of Seattle P.D.“s headquarters in the Public Safety Building and it wouldn’t be discovered for days.
Kramer returned to the kitchen, announcing that a call had come in for Pete Kelsey, that Erin wanted to give him her arrival times and flight numbers. While Pete went to pick up the phone in the other room, Detective Kramer edged his way over to me.
“I’ve got some news for you,” he said under his breath. “From Doc Baker. They haven’t completed the autopsies yet, but he did have one gem for us, a preliminary finding that he thought we ought to know about.”
“What’s that?”
“The doc says we’ve got a double on our hands.”
“You mean Pete Kelsey’s right? Marcia didn’t commit suicide after all?”
Detective Kramer nodded. “That’s right. And how do you suppose he figured that out before anybody else did? You can bet it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with her being a goddamn vegetarian! It’s because he did it. He caught ‘em in the act and decided to put an end to it.”
Even though I suspected Pete Kelsey had lied to me about something, that didn’t necessarily make him a killer. “Wait just a minute here, Kramer. Did Doc Baker tell you something more about Pete Kelsey, something I ought to know?”
“Doc Baker treats me like shit. He didn’t tell me a goddamned thing, but I’m smart enough to put two and two together. That longhaired freak invites us in here and serves us homemade bread and coffee like we’re some kind of visiting royalty instead of cops investigating his wife’s murder. He admits he knows she’s been whoring around on him, but he still acts grief-stricken. What a load of crap! I’m not falling for it. Kelsey’s cool. Too damn cool, if you ask me. All we have to do is wait. He’s bound to trip himself up.”
Kramer’s absolute conviction that Kelsey was our man caught me off guard. Jumping to those kinds of conclusions so early in an investigation is bad for everyone concerned. It’s too easy to go looking for answers that will match some preset scenario, to create a set of erroneous self-fulfilling prophecies, rather than focusing on what really happened.
“Hold up a minute, Kramer,” I cautioned. “Let’s back off a little.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “I’m not backing off an inch,” he declared. “Not one goddamn inch!”
As he said the words, Kramer reached across the counter to the place where Pete Kelsey had been sitting. Without touching the handle, he picked up a teaspoon that had been lying in Kelsey’s saucer. With a single smug look at me, he placed the spoon in a glassine bag and dropped it into his pocket.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Fingerprints,” Kramer responded with a smile. “Maybe our friend Kelsey has a police record someplace and his prints are on file with AFIS. If not, we’ll happen to have a couple handy. Just in case.”
AFIS is the state of Washington’s new Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a computerized program that’s turning previously unusable fingerprints into valuable crime-solving evidence.
“That’s not entirely legal,” I pointed out.
“Neither is homicide,” Kramer returned. “If you want to squeal about it, Detective Beaumont, go right ahead. Be my guest. Meanwhile, I’m going out to start the car.”
Kramer left, taking the pilfered spoon with him, and I didn’t try to stop him.
Kramer didn’t have to convince me. Between lifting a spoon and nailing some creep who was responsible for the cold-blooded execution of two people, there was absolutely no contest.
Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.
Chapter 8
I waited until Pete Kelsey returned to the kitchen. He paused in the doorway and gave me a long, searching look. It seemed to me that he somehow sensed that things had changed between us. He was right. They had, and not for the better.
“We’re going now,” I said, handing him one of my business cards. “Call me if anything comes up that you think I should know about.”
He nodded, but he tossed the card on the countertop in an offhand, don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you fashion. “Do you need me to show you the way out?” he asked.
“No. I’m sure I can find it.” I made my way down the stairway and through the immaculate garage. I let myself out onto the street, where Kramer was sitting in the already idling Re
liant.
I looked around. The crowd of eager newsies no longer jammed the neighborhood. It was too damn cold. Either they had retreated to the warmth of their vehicles parked a block below on Boston or they had abandoned the field entirely and returned to their individual newsrooms.
“Well?” Kramer asked as soon as I climbed into the car and fastened my seat belt.
“Well what?” I returned.
“What do you think? Do you agree or not?”
“You mean have you convinced me that Pete Kelsey’s our man? No, you haven’t. It’s all conjecture, Kramer, without any supportive facts. He may have lied to us about some things, but so far I can’t see that we have a smidgen of solid evidence.”
Kramer shook his massive head. “Come off it, Beaumont. Show me your stuff. Ever since I got to Homicide, everyone’s told me about you and your terrific hunches.”
“My ”terrific hunches,“ as you call them, sure as hell aren’t telling me that Pete Kelsey is a killer.”
Kramer didn’t bother to mask his disgust. “You know what’s the matter with you? You fell for all that open marriage bullshit. That doesn’t mean the poor bastard wasn’t being led around by the balls. He was. That wife of his must have been a real piece of work, but then, so’s Kelsey.
“I think he fed us that whole line of crap just to throw us off track, to make us think he knew what she was up to the whole time. My guess is, he didn’t. I’ll lay you odds he just found out his wife was two-timing him and decided to put a stop to it once and for all. Where I come from, jealousy’s still a pretty damn good motive for murder.”
We were headed back to the department. I suppose I could have argued with Detective Kramer on the way, told him that he was being premature and lectured him about jumping to conclusions, but I didn’t. Reluctantly, and based on my own observations, I was forced to admit that there was some plausibility in what Kramer was saying.
By then, Kramer was wearing on me, getting on my nerves. I’m basically an impatient person. I always have been, and sobering up hasn’t made any difference. Through my work in the AA program, I’ve been trying to learn to accept the things I can’t change and to change the things I can.