J. Jance - Payment in kind

The person standing with her finger poised on the bell preparing to ring it yet a third time turned out to be one of the more attractive distaff members of Seattle’s electronic media. I recognized her from other crime-scene gatherings, but when I opened the door, she didn’t know me from Adam. That was probably just as well.

“Mr. Kelsey?” she asked sweetly.

“No,” I answered.

She gave me a charming, white-toothed smile, a win-friends-and-influence-people-type smile. “I was wondering if I might speak to him,” she said carefully. She was pushy, but doing her best to temper it.

“Mr. Kelsey isn’t seeing anybody right now,” I replied. I started to close the door, but she wasn’t about to be dismissed quite that easily.

“Are you a member of the family?” she asked quickly, somehow insinuating herself between the closing door and the frame. She could have taken her training from Fuller Brush.

Some of the other newsies had worked their way onto the sidewalk, warily edging onto the porch and within earshot.

“I’m a police officer,” I answered shortly. “Mr. Kelsey would like all of you to leave. Now. He won’t be making any statements at this time.”

With that, I bodily elbowed her out of the way and shut the door in her face.

My former partner, Ron Peters, the one who’s working in Media Relations, keeps telling me that I need to learn to cultivate a better interaction with reporters. Not bloody likely, I tell him. I’m too old and too set in my ways.

By the time I got back to the kitchen, Pete Kelsey had refilled our cups with the last of the first pot of coffee and had started another one brewing. Performing those mundane tasks seemed to calm him, to provide some relief in the face of the roiling emotions that swirled around him.

“All right,” he said at last, easing himself onto a stool across the counter from us. “You guys said you had questions. What are they?”

I had been dimly aware that while we waited for Pete Kelsey to finish his phoning and get squared away, Paul Kramer was becoming more and more agitated, although I hadn’t been able to see any reason for it. Now, drumming his fingers steadily on the table, my reluctant partner leaned far back on his stool and eyed Pete Kelsey speculatively.

“You might start by telling us what you know about Alvin Chambers,” Kramer said.

Pete Kelsey had been nothing if not cordial and hospitable to us, and that under the most difficult of circumstances. Yet the first question Detective Kramer lobbed across the net to him was a powerful, game-stopping spike about a man assumed to be the dead woman’s lover. Talk about sensitivity! In that department, Detective Kramer took the booby prize.

But Kelsey didn’t take the bait. “Who’s Alvin Chambers?” he asked blandly, returning Kramer’s hard-edged stare with an unwavering blue-eyed gaze of his own. Pete Kelsey seemed genuinely puzzled.

“Wait a minute,” I said, holding up my hand. “We can get to that later.”

Shaking off my interruption, Kramer continued undeterred. “Who was Alvin Chambers is more like it. He’s the dead man we found in the closet along with your wife.”

Kelsey frowned thoughtfully and shook his head. “The name doesn’t ring a bell. I don’t recognize it at all.”

I could see that it annoyed the hell out of Detective Kramer that Kelsey remained unperturbed. “It’s possible,” Kramer added slyly, “that Chambers and your wife were lovers.”

Kramer dropped his bomb and waited for a reaction. The kitchen around us was suddenly deathly quiet except for the cheerful gurgling of a new pot of coffee as it finished brewing. I more than half expected Pete Kelsey to reach across the counter and punch Kramer’s lights out.

Instead Pete set his cup down carefully on the counter and nodded while the ghost of a bittersweet smile played around the corners of his lips.

“Is that right? It’s entirely possible, I suppose,” he added ruefully. “That woman was always full of surprises. Anybody ready for more coffee?”

I watched Pete Kelsey’s face as he moved across the kitchen, walking that precariously thin line of control between grief and anger. If he fell off the tightrope, there was no telling which side he’d come down on or which side would be more helpful to our questioning process.

“What do you mean, full of surprises?” I asked, holding out my cup for him to refill it.

He poured the coffee carefully, deliberately returning the pot to its stand on the counter before he answered.

“We’ve been married for twenty years,” he replied evenly. “Marcia’s always had a mind of her own as well as her own…shall we say, outside interests?”

Kelsey returned to his chair and flopped into it as though the bones in his body had suddenly turned to rubber.

Talking about a flawed relationship after the death of one of the partners is never easy. No matter how awful the reality may have been, after the fact, survivors tend to idealize their marriages, pretending everything was smooth and tranquil even if it wasn’t. Especially when it wasn’t. There seems to be a generally held belief that a blissfully happy past is somehow a prerequisite for grieving. I gave Pete Kelsey full credit for going against the trend and not trying to duck a painful issue.

“I take it you don’t mean your wife’s job,” I commented.

“No,” Pete replied, staring morosely into the bottom of his coffee cup. “I don’t. It has…had nothing to do with her job, and yet everything, too, I suppose.”

“Look,” Detective Kramer put in sharply. “Two people were found half-naked and dead in a closet. One of them was your wife. Would it be safe to assume that you and your wife were having marital difficulties, Mr. Kelsey?”

Pete Kelsey’s eyes narrowed. “No,” he answered. “I’ve been trying to tell you. That’s just the way things were for us, right from the beginning. Didn’t you ever hear the term ”open marriage‘?“

Detective Kramer snorted derisively. “I’ve heard of it, all right, but I thought it was extinct, gone the way of Hula Hoops and dodo birds.”

Kelsey shrugged. “It probably should have, the way things are going, but ours never did, at least not altogether. Back when we started out, we were the leading edge and well ahead of the times, and that was fine with both of us to begin with.” He paused, then added, “Things change, people change. Maybe…probably I changed more than she did. Eventually I wanted something else, something more than Marcia was capable of giving. And after the AIDS scare…”

He lapsed into a momentary brooding silence. “I haven’t slept with my wife for the past four years,” he added softly. “It wasn’t worth the risk.”

An undisguised look of pained disbelief passed over Detective Kramer’s broad face. “Maybe you should have thrown her out,” he suggested.

For the first time, Pete Kelsey bristled. “What I did or didn’t do is my business and nobody else’s.”

“Let’s just say your reaction’s a little unorthodox,” Kramer allowed, backing off slightly. “All we’re trying to do, Mr. Kelsey, is to get a handle on this situation and on the people involved. It’s important that we establish motivations, that we understand personalities, and so forth. This sounds like a situation that would have driven most men to a divorce court.”

Kramer’s underhanded cut, a psychological jab that said real men don’t put up with this crap, wasn’t lost on Pete Kelsey.

“I’m not most men,” he answered stiffly. “I loved my wife, no matter what. Erin had already lost one mother. I didn’t want her to lose another. Whatever else you can say about her, Marcia is…was a hell of a mother.”