J. Jance - Payment in kind

Whoever had driven the car last had sat on the note, probably without even being aware it was there. The paper was crushed and wrinkled, the pencil marks smudged. The message on it hadn’t been written so much as scrawled in obvious haste.

“Mar,” it said. “Somebody’s been talking to Pete. I don’t know who. Be careful. A.”

I knew who Mar was. That had to be Marcia Louise Kelsey. And I knew who Pete was too. So who was A? Alvin Chambers? But then I realized there was one other possibility as well, one other A name in the equation-Andrea Stovall, the lady from the teachers’ union with an unauthorized set of keys to the school district office.

A flurry of questions eddied through my mind. I remembered Andrea Stovall’s obvious discomfort when we asked her about her unsuccessful attempt to see Marcia Kelsey the night of the murder. And I remembered the way she had bolted from the room, using her meeting as an excuse when, as a friend of the victim, she would logically have wanted to help us.

I stood there in the garage for some time, thinking about the message itself and what it meant. According to Pete, Marcia’s romantic escapades were a known quantity to him and had been for years, so what was it that someone had told Pete Kelsey in only the past few days that he hadn’t known before? What was it that had been damaging enough to set him off? And who was doing the talking?

I remembered Andrea Stovall telling us that the reason she went to the school district office was that she was afraid, afraid for Marcia Kelsey’s safety and well-being. Since she hadn’t found Marcia in the building, she could have placed the note on the windshield, but that meant whoever had driven the car away from the office, presumably the killer, had also seen the note. If it was Pete, why hadn’t he gotten rid of such a potentially damaging item?

My instinct about the importance of the paper in the car had been right, but now the problem was finding out who had authored it. Alvin Chambers was dead, so getting a sample of his handwriting wouldn’t be too difficult. If, however, Andrea Stovall had written the note, I would have to be somewhat less direct.

I was already fully convinced Andrea Stovall was concealing something important about that night, something she hadn’t wanted to tell us. It was high time we asked her about that, and this time no urgent summons to some lightweight meeting was going to keep her from answering my questions.

Leaving the crime lab folks to continue their painstaking search of the vehicle, I dashed up to my cubicle, intent on obtaining those two separate but equally critical samples.

My first call went to the Seattle Federated Teachers’ Association office in Greenwood. The secretary there told me that Mrs. Stovall had called in sick and probably wouldn’t be in for the remainder of the week. My second call, to Andrea’s home phone number, went unanswered. She may have been home sick, but she wasn’t taking calls, not even after fifteen rings.

I put down the phone and thumbed through my notebook until I came to the name of Andrea Stovall’s apartment manager, Rex Pierson, the man who had so kindly consented to give her a ride down to the school office the night of the murder. It was possible that this Pierson guy might have a sample of her handwriting on a note or lease agreement in his office.

Andrea hadn’t given me a phone number, but telephone books work far more often than they don’t. I flipped through the pages-Q, R, P, Pe…I turned to the next page, the Pi’s, and glanced at the boldfaced heading at the top of the page to make sure I had the right one.

And that’s when I saw it. The name was printed in heavy capital letters across the top of the column indicating the beginning and ending words on the page: Piedmont-Pioneer. And just below the column heading was the first name: Piedmont, Jonas A., 8445 Dayton Avenue North.

I felt like someone had splashed a bucket of icy water down my entire body.

The phone book was eight months old, and the bold-faced name had been lying in wait for me all that time like a coiled but invisible snake waiting to strike. In all those months, I had never before had occasion to use that particular page, had never stumbled over that unwanted and unlooked-for piece of my personal history. Seeing my grandfather’s name there in black and white hit me with the same power as a fist plowing into my gut.

Against my will, I sat there staring at the line while the name, address, and phone number seared themselves indelibly into my brain.

“What’s the matter, Beau?”

Guiltily I looked up first and then back down, like someone caught doing something he shouldn’t. I had been so stunned by seeing my grandfather’s name that I hadn’t heard Ron Peters’ wheelchair whisper up to the doorway of the cubicle.

I closed the phone book with a decided snap-I didn’t want Peters to see which page it was open to-and tried to brush off the incident with a casual laugh. “I think I just saw a ghost,” I told him.

“Really? How’s that?”

“My grandfather. I just stumbled across his name here in the phone book when I was looking for something else. I didn’t even know he was still alive.”

Peters seemed surprised. “I didn’t realize you had any relatives still living here in the city.”

“Me neither,” I told him.

“Well, that’s great. You two should get together. I’ll bet you’d have a great time.”

“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. “What brings you here?” I asked, changing the subject.

“I figured I’d better bring you the paper,” Peters said. “I know good and well you won’t buy one yourself.”

He handed me a neatly folded copy of the local section of the Post-Intelligencer. “Take a look at this.”

“ Husband Sought in Double Homicide,” the banner headline read.

“Wait a minute,” I objected. “We just want him for questioning at this point. There’s some circumstantial evidence, but the way this lead is written, it makes it sound like we know for sure Pete Kelsey did it.”

“That’s not all, either,” Ron Peters answered grimly. “I think maybe you’d better read the whole article.”

And so I did:

“Late last night city and state authorities continued to search for a Puget Sound area man who disappeared in the aftermath of a double homicide that took the life of his forty-four-year-old wife and that of a fifty-year-old school district security guard. The brutal murders have left Seattle’s educational community stunned and grieving.

“Peter Kelsey, forty-four, a freelance contractor and sometime bartender, is being sought in connection with the slayings of his wife, Marcia Louise Kelsey, head of Seattle Public School District’s Labor Relations department, and of Alvin Chambers, a night watchman employed by Seattle Security. The killings occurred in the district’s Lower Queen Anne area office building late Sunday night.

“Unconfirmed reports from unnamed sources both inside and outside the school district have indicated that Mr. Kelsey became irrational upon hearing rumors that his wife was conducting an illicit relationship with another female member of the school district staff.”

That one stopped me cold. “A female? As in AC/DC?” I remembered Pete Kelsey’s startling reaction when Kramer had told him about Alvin Chambers. He had said Marcia was always full of surprises, and she continued to be so. Maybe he was surprised to hear that his wife had been with a man rather than another woman.

“Read on,” Peters said.

“”I know all about those godless women,“ Mrs. Charlotte Chambers, widow of the slain security guard, stated in an airport interview late last night, where she had gone to meet her son, who is on emergency leave from the U.S. Navy. The younger Chambers flew home to attend his father’s funeral.