J. Jance - Payment in kind

I had been stunned into shocked silence by Detective Kramer’s ugly insinuations. Now Kelsey’s comment caught my attention and I leaped back into the fray. “You’re saying Erin isn’t Marcia’s natural child?”

Kelsey shook his head. “No, she’s mine. My first wife died in a car wreck in Mexico when Erin was only two. I came to Seattle shortly after that and was trying to put my life back together. That’s when I met Marcia. In fact, Max, the guy you met at the Trolleyman this morning, is the one who introduced us.”

I almost choked on a misdirected sip of coffee. “Maxwell Cole?” I spluttered, trying to keep the drips from falling on my sweater.

“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.”