J. Jance - Payment in kind

“Would you like one?” she asked guiltily. “I’ve got two more just like it in my purse.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not very hungry right now.”

“Me either,” Kramer added.

When we finally managed to creep up the snowbound hillside to Harborview Hospital and the medical examiner’s office, the two parking spots reserved for police vehicles were both occupied by nonpolice cars.

“Take her on inside,” Kramer said, pausing near the door. “I’ll drop you two off here and then go find a parking place.”

“Thanks,” I muttered to him once Charlotte Chambers was safely on her feet and standing outside the car. “You’re all heart,” I added.

Naturally the receptionist was Johnny-on-the-spot. Naturally there was no wait for an available technician. We were ushered directly into the morgue. Kramer managed to stall his entrance long enough so that by the time he came into the room, a slack Charlotte Chambers had collapsed weeping into my arms. It was all I could do to hold her up.

Despite his widow’s lofty claims to the contrary, Alvin Chambers had indeed been caught dead with another woman.

My job now was to find out why.

Kramer entered the room and impatiently motioned me aside with a jerk of his head.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Doc Baker wants to talk to both of us. Outside. On the double.”

Put that way, it sounded like an invitation to a beheading, but then, Doc Baker’s corpse-side manner has never won any prizes for tact.

Nodding, I led the still-sobbing Charlotte to a nearby chair and eased her into it.

“You wait right here, Mrs. Chambers,” I said gently when she looked up at me in tearful dismay. “We’ll be back just as soon as we can.”

Howard Baker was waiting for us outside. We found him pacing back and forth in the highly polished corridor, pacing and fuming, with his mane of unruly white hair almost standing on end and his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He barely waited long enough for the heavy swinging door to whisper shut behind us before he lit into us full bore.

“Why for God’s sake did you go after the damn security guard’s family first? I thought you’d have better sense. I told you earlier. Marcia Louise Kelsey was highly thought of down at the school district. If you don’t get to her family pretty damn soon, word’s bound to leak out. What the hell are you two guys using for brains these days?”

Despite what the Constitution says, all men are not created equal-not in life and not in death either. Rank hath its privilege, even in the medical examiner’s wagon. In the world of social standing, labor relations specialists may not count for much up against the likes of, say, Lee Iacocca, but they do if it’s a contest between them and a lowly security guard. According to Doc Baker’s rules of order and propriety, Marcia Louise Kelsey’s death demanded a prior claim on the homicide squad’s time and attention. The death of a mere peon like poor old Alvin Chambers didn’t count for much.

Usually I don’t let Doc Baker’s penchant for public relations bother me, but for some reason this time it got me good. After all, Alvin Chambers’ job title may not have sounded as important as Marcia Louise Kelsey’s but he was sure as hell equally dead. I was working up a sarcastic rejoinder, but Kramer spoke up before I had a chance to spit it out.

“We had to go there first, Doc. The Chambers woman was on the phone raising hell in the superintendent’s office because her husband was late getting home for his toast and eggs.”

“Oh,” a somewhat mollified Baker replied. “I see. Well, get the hell out of here now and find Mr. Kelsey. Do it quick before somebody else does.”

“Wait a minute. What about Charlotte Chambers?” I demanded. “After bringing her all the way down here, we can’t very well just go off and leave her like this.”

“Don’t worry about Mrs. Chambers,” Baker replied. “I’ll get someone from my office to drive her home.”

“But we haven’t interviewed her yet,” I objected.

“There’ll be time enough for that later,” Baker said, herding us unceremoniously toward the door. “After you talk with Mr. Kelsey.”

Some things aren’t worth going to the mat for, and this was one of them. I sidestepped Baker and poked my head back into the room where we had left Charlotte Chambers long enough to explain that one of Dr. Baker’s staff members would take her home. Still sitting exactly as I’d left her, she nodded gratefully. I hoped whoever Baker sent would be big enough and strong enough to handle her.

When we got out to the car, I found that Kramer had parked with the rider’s door opening directly onto a pile of dirty sanded snow left behind by a snowplow. By the time I managed to climb inside, my shoes and socks were covered with the stuff. Disgusted, I brushed it off as best I could.

“It’s only snow,” Kramer observed with a laugh. “It won’t kill you.”

I had seen Kramer coming to work both winter and summer in a little blue RX 7 equipped with a permanent set of ski racks. I knew from coffee break chatter around the office that he fancied himself as something of a ski-slope expert. That in itself would have been enough to keep me away from visiting Seattle’s nearby slopes even if I could have overcome that most basic of all objections-the one against breaking your neck.

“Just drive, would you?” I asked. “What’s the address?”

“Thirteen fifty-two East Crockett,” Kramer replied, heading off in that direction. Considering road conditions, we were lucky that the Kelsey home was in generally the same part of town as Harborview Hospital.

East Crockett Street, at the far north end of Capitol Hill, is one of those city planner’s nightmares that hops and skips its way east and west across town from Puget Sound to Lake Washington without ever being a through street. There are little chunks of Crockett on Magnolia Bluff, on Queen Anne Hill, and on Capitol Hill as well, but none of them connect.

We headed east on Boston, aiming for Thirteenth, one of two tiny streets that would take us up the hill to the single, block-long section of Crockett. As we neared the intersection, however, I noticed an aging, burnt-orange Volvo parked haphazardly on the side of the snowy street. The beat-out junker looked more than vaguely familiar.

Not Maxwell Cole, I thought with a sinking feeling in my gut. Please not Maxwell Cole, but as we came even with the car, I caught sight of a series of Seattle Post-Intelligencer parking stickers glued in the back window.

“Damn!” I muttered.

“What’s the matter?” Kramer asked, glancing at me as he swung the car out of the fairly well-traveled snowy tracks on Boston and shifted down for the steeply inclined and much-less-traveled Thirteenth.

“That old Volvo parked back down there. It’s Maxwell Cole’s car,” I answered.

“Maxwell Cole? The crime columnist for the P.-I.?”

“One and the same.”

“But how do you know for sure it’s his car?”

“Believe me, I know,” I told him.

Kramer would have recognized the Volvo too, if he’d spent as many years as I have with Max, a perpetual fraternity brother who has never grown up, dogging my every step.

Kramer groaned. “That’s great! Just what we need, a damn reporter on the scene before we are.”

My sentiments exactly.

The 1300 block of Crockett consisted of a row of three originally identical and ersatz Victorians perched like so many birds looking down on the Montlake Cut, a man-made waterway connecting Lakes Union and Washington. Angular rooflines on the narrow houses seemed to grow up out of the hillside like so many gaunt plants potted in fair-sized two-car garages far below.