J. Jance - Payment in kind

“That’s where I usually sit, but today…” She broke off, and I nodded understandingly. I wouldn’t have wanted to sit there right then, either.

“Where do you live, Miss Lafflyn?” I asked.

She didn’t answer at once. Her eyes became instantly brittle and surprisingly hostile. Despite the virginal blouse, I had the unmistakable impression that this was a young woman with some heavy-duty mileage on her.

“It’s a routine question, Miss Lafflyn,” I added quickly. “We need your address for your incident reports.”

“Ms.,” she corrected sternly. “It’s Ms. Lafflyn, not Miss.”

So that was it. I had unwittingly stumbled into the mystifying Miss/Ms. quagmire.

Old habits die hard, especially those rocksolid edicts of polite behavior that mothers pour into their sons’ innocent minds along with the daily doses of equally solid bowls of oatmeal they pour into growing bodies. Unfortunately, the things mothers brainwash sons into believing don’t necessarily change with the times.

My mother had ordered me to always address a young woman as Miss until absolutely certain she was a Mrs. That may have been true once, but it certainly wasn’t true as far as Ms. Jennifer Lafflyn was concerned, a pissed Ms. Jennifer Lafflyn. There didn’t seem to be much I could do to redeem myself in her eyes.

In the meantime, Detective Kramer was getting a huge bang out of every moment of my discomfort. With an ill-concealed smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth, he wrote down the address of a studio apartment which Ms. Lafflyn told us was located off Broadway near Seattle Community College.

“Tell us about this morning,” Kramer urged.

“Alvin wasn’t here at the door when I got to work this morning.”

“Alvin?” Kramer asked.

“Alvin Chambers. The security guard.”

Kramer nodded. “I see. And what time was that?”

“Seven,” she added. “I was right on time, even with the weather. I come in at seven. That way I can leave at three. Anyway, when I arrived, Alvin wasn’t here, and his table was still out, too. That seemed odd to me at the time. I mean, by the time people started coming in each morning, he usually had his table and chair put away and was there at the door, cheerful as could be, greeting people as they came in, opening the door for anyone who needed it. He was such a nice man.”

Her eyes brimmed with sudden tears and she had to break off for a moment before she took a deep breath and was able to continue.

“Anyway, when I got here this morning and saw the table and chair were still out, I thought maybe he’d just gone to the bathroom or something.”

“Are those them?” I asked, nodding toward a forlorn card table and an equally shabby folding chair that were stacked against the wall behind the receptionist’s desk.

Jennifer nodded. “When he still wasn’t here by seven-fifteen, I put the logbook away in the desk. I started to put the table and chair away too, where they’re stored, in the closet.”

Jennifer’s story faltered to a fitful stop while she sent an uneasy sidelong glance at the still open closet door. Again an involuntary shudder passed through her body.

“Is that when you found them?”

Unable to speak for a moment, Jennifer could only nod while she struggled to regain control. At last she did so and continued in a voice that was little more than a tremulous whisper.

“I’ll probably have nightmares about it for the rest of my life. I mean her leg just fell out at me. Popped out into the room like toast from a toaster. It scared me to death.” She put her hand to her mouth, and for a moment I was afraid she was going to be sick.

“And then what happened?”

“I screamed. At least somebody told me later that I screamed. I don’t remember it at all. And then I guess I fainted. Mr. Jacobs from Curriculum was just coming through the door as it happened. He caught me and kept me from falling. He’s the one who placed the call to 911.”

“What’s this about a logbook?” I asked.

“There’s not much to tell. Security keeps a log of whoever comes and goes after hours and on weekends. People have to sign in and out.”

“You said you put the logbook away. Where is it now?”

She pointed back toward the still unoccupied receptionist’s desk in the middle of the room. “Right there,” she said. “In the bottom drawer. Would you like me to get it for you?”

“No,” I replied. “Leave it there for right now. Did anyone else besides you touch the book or the table or chair?”

“Not that I know of.”

“We may need to have a sample of your fingerprints,” I said.

Up till then, the interview had been rolling along fairly smoothly, but at the mention of fingerprints, Jennifer Lafflyn balked. “Why? What would you need my fingerprints for? I haven’t done anything wrong. I was just doing my job.”

Kramer moved in soothingly to calm troubled waters. “It’s standard procedure, Ms. Lafflyn. We take prints and have them available. For comparison purposes.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding somewhat mollified, but she was still glaring at me when she said it. I hadn’t gotten off on the right foot with the young lady, and it wasn’t getting any better.

“Let’s talk about the victims for a moment,” I said. “Do you know anything about them?”

Jennifer Lafflyn nodded authoritatively, jutting her chin. It was almost as though the stupidity of my question had somehow stiffened her spine. “Of course I do. Everybody here knows them. Alvin’s the security guard I was telling you about.”

“And the woman?”

“Mrs. Kelsey,” she answered confidently.

“Who?”

“Marcia Louise Kelsey, from Labor Relations.”

Doc Baker, finally satisfied with the photographer’s work, emerged from the closet for the last time and directed two of his technicians to cover the bodies. Seeing that, Kramer abruptly snapped shut his notebook and strode off across the room, catching up with the medical examiner as he neared the door.

Kramer may have been ready to cut short the interview with Jennifer Lafflyn, but I wasn’t. She watched with undisguised interest as Kramer walked across the room, and she seemed surprised when she looked back and found me still standing there.

“What time did Alvin Chambers usually get off work?” I asked.

Jennifer frowned. “What do you need to know that for?”

“We have to know what was usual in order to figure out what was different in the pattern, where there are any discrepancies.”

“Seven-thirty,” she answered. “And he always left right on the dot, never early and never late.”

“So you were here together for half an hour or so nearly every morning?”

She nodded.

“How long had you known one another?”

Jennifer shrugged. “I don’t remember exactly. Two or three months maybe. A long time for that job. It seems like all the other guards change every week or so. Everybody but Alvin. He seemed to really like it, to enjoy what he was doing.”

“So is it busy around here in the mornings, or did you two have a chance to talk?”

“Some,” she said. “Alvin was friendly. He liked people.”

Jennifer Lafflyn was as changeable as Seattle’s weather. Once more her eyes filled with tears that spilled over and ran down her cheeks. “I liked him a lot. As a friend, even though he was old enough to be my father. I really respected him, know what I mean?”

“And what did the two of you talk about?”

“Work, the weather, dumb stuff like that. Sometimes we talked about God.”

“God?” I asked.

“Alvin was very religious. He used to be a minister, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. Did he retire?”