by J. A. Jance
I couldn’t change Detective Kramer, couldn’t keep him from running off at the mouth, but I could and did get out of the car. I had him drop me at the garage entrance. Bypassing the elevators, I took to the stairwells and pounded my way up to the fifth floor while Kramer parked the car.
Margie, my clerk, had two messages for me. One was from Big Al telling me not to worry, that he was much better, but that he was taking a few days of personal leave to help Molly while she finished recuperating. The other was from a lady named Kendra Meadows, who identified herself as the director of Personnel for the Seattle school district.
It was after three. With the midwinter afternoon waning fast, I figured I’d better hurry and get back to Kendra Meadows before she left her office and headed home.
As soon as she answered the phone, I could tell from the low, husky timbre of her voice that Kendra Meadows was a middle-aged black woman. She was all business.
“I have a memo here from Dr. Savage telling me that I’m supposed to render whatever assistance you may find necessary, Detective Beaumont. Phone numbers, addresses, that sort of thing. I’ll be here the rest of the afternoon if you want to stop by. My directions are to stay as late as you need me to.”
Dr. Savage had pulled out all the stops on this one. Kendra Meadows was ready and willing to help, but I didn’t yet know exactly what help we would need. Not only that, we had a mound of paperwork to tend to before we called it a day. I hedged for time.
“Things have gotten pretty hectic around here today,” I said lamely. “Will you be in your office tomorrow?”
“I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t,” she countered.
If Kendra Meadows had a sense of humor, none of it leaked into her telephone presence. “I come to work every day, Detective Beaumont, rain or shine.”
“Good,” I said. “Either Detective Kramer or myself will be in to see you tomorrow then.”
Over my desk I keep a ribald poster featuring a bare-assed kid sitting forlornly on a pot. The caption says, “The job’s not finished until the paperwork’s done.” The same can be said of police work. I was reaching in one of my drawers for a blank report form when Detective Kramer’s bulky frame appeared in the door of my cubicle.
“Boy, do I have a deal for you,” he said.
“What’s that?” I turned to look at him. He was holding up his own fanfold of messages.
“How about if I push the papers around here and you go back up to the district office and pick up their bomb threat file? Doris Walker called three different times to say it was ready and were we going to pick it up today.”
I found it interesting that although I had been the one who had actually talked to Doris Walker, somehow all three of her messages had been shuffled to Kramer. None had come to me. I had heard rumors from one or two of the other detectives who had been stuck working with Paul Kramer that he had developed a system for hogging important messages and that he loved doing reports. All of them. Believe me, for homicide cops, this is not normal behavior.
Both items had raised eyebrows, although to my knowledge, no one had filed an official grievance on the issue. The report-writing incidents in particular had provoked numerous derogatory comments, the general consensus being that Kramer volunteered to do the paperwork so he could write things his way and make Detective Paul Kramer look good. Officially. That didn’t scare me in the least. No matter what he wrote, it wouldn’t be any skin off my nose. I sure as hell wasn’t lobbying for a promotion, and I hate paperwork.
“You bet,” I told him. “Sold.”
I took long enough to put in a “Locate Car” call to 911 on Marcia Kelsey’s vehicle in the hopes that somebody might stumble across it. The dispatcher took my “Homicide Hold” request seriously, but he didn’t offer much hope of success.
“You want us to locate a misplaced car in this weather? Go ahead and give me the info, Beaumont, but don’t hold your breath. With the streets the way they are, I’d say the chances of our finding it are slim to nonexistent.”
Two minutes later, I was on my way. The streets were still relatively deserted, and the people who were out seemed to be in a jovial holiday mood. I grabbed one of the Queen Anne-bound buses on Third Avenue rather than go through the hassle of checking out a departmental car. That way, once I had Doris Walker’s file in hand, I could go directly home, settle into my user-friendly recliner for a while, and maybe get a little perspective on the day.
It was something to look forward to, a bright spot on the horizon.
Doris Walker was waiting for me at her upstairs desk. The file folder in question had been placed in a large, unmarked manila envelope, which she handed over to me with a relieved sigh.
“Did you ever talk to that poor woman?” she asked.
“You mean Mrs. Chambers?” Doris nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “We told her. Right after we left here this morning.”
Doris seemed immensely relieved. “Good. And is she all right?”
It was a somewhat naive question. I’m afraid my response was more curt than Doris Walker deserved. “As right as she’s going to be, for someone whose husband just died.”
“I’m sure,” Mrs. Walker said with an embarrassed duck of her chin. “It must be terrible for her. I can’t imagine how I’d deal with it if something like that ever happened to my Donald.”
“With a little luck,” I told her, “You’ll never have to.”
Taking the envelope she gave me, I left the office and headed for home. I could have gone to see Kendra Meadows, but I still didn’t know what to ask her. Rather than wait for yet another bus, I wrapped the ugly glow-in-the-dark scarf around my neck, shoved gloved hands deep in my pockets, and set off down the hill, cutting through a winter-wonderland Seattle Center. Except for the muffled shouts of a few children having a snowball fight near the frozen International Fountain, the place was almost totally deserted.
As I walked, my fondest hope was that Belltown Terrace’s recalcitrant heat pumps were once more working properly. I came to the corner of Second and Broad and paused, waiting for the light to change. Suddenly, behind me, somebody yelled, “Look out!”
Luckily for me, my reflexes still work fine. I dodged out of the way just in time to avoid being creamed by a tightly packed snowball that had been lobbed off the sixth-floor running track of Belltown Terrace. I looked up and saw Heather Peters grinning down at me and getting ready to take another potshot.
“Heather,” I yelled, “knock that off before someone gets hurt.”
The happy grin disappeared from Heather’s face. “See there?” I heard Tracie’s high-pitched reproving voice. “I told you we shouldn’t. Now we’re in for it!”
“Meet me at the elevator, you two,” I ordered, fully prepared to march upstairs and chew ass.
“Don’t be too hard on them,” a woman’s voice said. The voice that had called out the timely warning belonged to an elderly lady who, leaning heavily on a cane, was making her way slowly along the snowy sidewalk.
“They’re only young once, you know,” she added with an understanding smile. “Remember, it doesn’t snow here all that often.”
Mollified a little by her wise counsel, I toned down the rhetoric enough so that once I found them, all the girls got was a good talking to about the dangers of throwing anything at all off high-rise buildings. The bawling out was followed, in short order, by steaming mugs of hot chocolate all around.
Disciplinary lines tend to get a little fuzzy when the miscreants don’t happen to be your own flesh and blood, or maybe I’m just turning into a middle-aged softy.
After drinking their cocoa, the girls left my apartment to return to their own, and I retreated to the comforting confines of my ancient recliner, reveling in my living room’s toasty seventy-degree temperature. I was sitting there lapping up creature comforts when the phone rang.
“Hey, Beau. You going tonight?”
At once I recognized the thin voice as that of Lars Jenssen, a ret
ired halibut fisherman who serves as my sponsor in the Regrade Regulars, an AA group that meets each Monday night in a restaurant just up Second Avenue from where I live.
My doctor-ordered stay at the Ironwood Ranch dryout farm in Arizona may have been cut short through circumstances beyond my control, but I had decided that I owed it to myself and to my ailing liver to straighten up and fly right. For the time being, anyhow. Working on my own and with Lars Jenssen’s continuing help, I was halfway through the prescribed ninety meetings in ninety days that are supposed to get boozy lives back on track again.
Lars lived another block up Second in a fourth-floor brick walk-up apartment that was a long way from my penthouse luxury, but he never complained.
“I’ll stop by for you around six-thirty,” he said, not waiting for me to say yes or no.
I thought of my shiny little 928 securely parked in the garage downstairs. It was safe and sound, and considering road conditions, I wanted to keep it that way. Nevertheless, I felt a moral obligation to offer Lars a ride in the frigid weather.
“Look, Lars, I don’t much want to drive. Someone will end up creaming my car if I do, but we could always take a taxi. How about if I grab a cab and stop by to pick you up?”
“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 make 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.