J. Jance - Payment in kind

“Are there any other living relatives?” I asked.

“Not as far as I know, other than the Lunds, the cousins I told you about, the ones living on the farm. But like I said, the Lunds are on his mother’s side. On his father’s, John David was the only child of an only child, so he was the last of the line as far as the Madsens are concerned. Do you want me to call Ruth Lund and see if she knows of anyone?”

“No, I don’t think that will be necessary,” I replied.

“So tell me. Why’s a big-city cop from Seattle interested in all this ancient history?”

Waffling, I said, “I’m working a case that might be connected.”

I didn’t want to admit straight out that I knew for sure John David Madsen was alive and well and living as a fugitive somewhere far away from Marvin and Milbank, South Dakota. Making an informal inquiry was fine, but at that point I could see no need of officially involving another jurisdiction. After successfully eluding his past for over twenty years, I was relatively certain that South Dakota was the very last place where a missing Pete Kelsey/John David Madsen would show up.

When I hung up a few moments later, I sat there in my office cubicle staring at the phone as if the answers to my questions were somehow encoded into the touch-tone numbers if only I had the ability to divine them.

What would have driven a gung ho, patriotic West Point graduate to disappear off the face of the earth as far as both his family and country were concerned? A My Lai incident or some other wartime atrocity? That might have been enough to send him AWOL, but what had driven him underground and kept him there for so many years after the war was over, while in the meantime, back home, his parents died with no word or clue about what had happened to him? What had made someone with a good family leave them all behind without a backward glance? And why would someone with a fine mind, perhaps even a brilliant one, hide out in a lifetime’s worth of low-status, craftsman-type jobs that required some skill, certainly, but didn’t begin to tap his intellect?

No matter how long I stared, the impassive face of the telephone gave me no answers to these troubling questions.

In the course of homicide investigations, I often encounter unexpected pieces of people’s past lives. Sometimes those secrets come from the victim’s side of the aisle, sometimes from the perpetrator’s. Often these pieces of history have little or nothing to do with the case at hand. But in this instance, and for no logical reason I could pinpoint, I had the uncanny sense that Pete Kelsey’s hidden past had everything to do with my unsolved double homicide.

I called down to Seattle Security and was told that Fred Petrie, the owner, was in a meeting and would be out in about half an hour. I figured there was just time enough to pick up a fresh turkey sandwich from Bakeman’s, see Fred Petrie on the way, and make it to a noontime brown-bag AA meeting in one of the missions in Pioneer Square.

Carrying a paper sack containing my made-to-order sandwich-turkey on whole wheat bread with sprouts, cranberry sauce, and mustard-I headed on down Cherry and First, briskly threading my way through a chilly Pioneer Square until I came to Seattle Security’s office in a decrepit building just east of the Kingdome.

Seattle Security was still in the exact same location it had occupied years earlier when I had sometimes moonlighted as a security guard to supplement my meager Seattle P.D. salary.

Within minutes of giving my name to the receptionist, I was shown into the private office of Fred Petrie. Instead of the familiar, portly-bodied and bald-headed countenance of Fred Senior, I encountered Fred Junior, the new owner and much younger son of the original.

I remembered Freddie Petrie from those earlier days as a whiny, miserable adolescent, a loudmouthed and none-too-talented Little League player who dreamed of one day making it in the Majors. He hadn’t made it. From the looks of things, he was having a difficult enough time just trying to fill Fred Senior’s unambitious shoes.

As I listened to him rail on, I was struck by how little he had changed. He was still the very same spoiled and obnoxious shit he had been as a child. Longhaired and clad in a ragged shirt and scruffy tennis shoes, he looked as though he should still be knocking around on some high school campus carrying a civics textbook instead of hanging out in an office with his name on the door and a brass plaque on the desk that labeled him president and CEO.

When I gave him my card, he didn’t remember me from Adam, but then, why should he? After all, security guards are a dime a dozen. Just ask Alvin Chambers.

But I will say this much for Freddie Petrie. He, at least, was prepared to talk about Alvin Chambers.

“I know why you’re here, Detective Beaumont,” he said with a doleful shake of his head. “It’s a terrible thing. In fact, I still can’t believe it happened. We’ve been in business in this same location for nearly forty-five years, and this is the first time we’ve ever had an on-the-job fatality.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said. “I worked for your dad years ago when I was first on the force.”

Petrie looked up at me. “Oh, did you?” he asked vaguely and without much interest.

“How is your father, by the way?”

“You know him?” he asked.

It was a dumb question, and I couldn’t quite believe he had asked it. Back in those days everybody at Seattle Security knew everybody else. It had been a typical mom-and-pop operation, with Fred Senior handling the hiring and scheduling, and his wife, Mazie, doing the books and payroll.

“I knew them both,” I said.

“The folks are off enjoying themselves, cruising the Bahamas,” he said resentfully. “I wish I were too. Seems like I’m always scrambling for money these days. I’m buying out their interest, at least I’m trying to. Having somebody die on the job like this is going to send our insurance costs out of sight.”

I knew for a fact that Fred Senior would have been far more worried about Alvin Chambers’ family than he would have been about his company’s insurance premiums. Fred Senior was a likable guy, a people person. With the changing of the name on the office door, Seattle Security’s bottom line had changed as well. It made me feel old and more than a little sad.

“What can you tell me about Alvin Chambers?” I asked.

It’s always best to start interviews with non-threatening, mundane questions and gradually ease into more substantial inquiries. I figured it would be best to ask for the handwriting sample only after Fred Junior had gotten used to giving me what I wanted. It’s the old door-to-door salesman’s technique of getting the customer accustomed to saying yes.

Petrie shrugged. “Not much. Been with us about six months or so. Hold on while I go get his records.”

Freddie was away from his desk for only a few moments. He returned carrying a file folder, thumbing impatiently through its loose paper contents as he sat back down.

“Like I said, he was only with us for six months. Bounced around from location to location in the beginning and until we put him on the school district job about two and a half months ago. He really settled into that one. Seemed to like it a lot.”

Fred Junior smiled at me indulgently as though I might need some further clarification. “These older dudes generally prefer that, you know. They like going to the same place day in and day out. They like doing the same thing over and over. It’s like they want the continuity. The younger ones like moving from place to place, doing the rock concerts, the more far-out stuff.”

Freddie’s smiling condescension said far more than he realized about where he lumped me. I was right in there with all those unfortunate “older dudes.” That kind of categorizing didn’t endear him to me, and it probably didn’t endear him to his father, either.