J. Jance - Payment in kind

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 retired 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.