J. Jance - Payment in kind

“And they haven’t been reported?”

For an answer he made a waffling motion with his hand.

“Have they or haven’t they?”

“To the authorities, yes, but we’ve tried to keep it out of the media, and so far we’ve been successful.”

“Why keep it quiet?”

“As I said before, gentlemen, we’re a troubled district.” He sat up straighter in his chair, delivering his words with guarded intensity. “As such, we can’t afford any adverse publicity. We’ve been handling this situation the best we know how, monitoring the situation, keeping things under control.”

“I hate to be the bearer of more bad news,” I told him. “With those two murders downstairs, ”adverse publicity,“ as you call it, is here to stay. You’d better brace yourself for it.”

Dr. Savage seemed to have shrunk into himself. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“When Doris finishes that memo,” I said, “you have her gather up every bit of information you have on those bomb threats and have it ready for us to pick up when we come back later on this afternoon.”

“But why? I thought you were investigating the murders. What does that have to do with the bomb threats?”

“Maybe nothing, but then again, maybe they are connected. I want everything you have, regardless of its seeming importance, understand?”

Savage nodded. “Right,” he said. “Everything. You’ll have it.”

Detective Kramer was already standing poised by the door when I got up to follow him.

“Way to go,” he said under his breath as I followed him out the door and down the hall. “Glad to see you can put the screws to somebody when you feel like it.”

I’m sure Paul Kramer intended that remark as a compliment, but to me it didn’t feel like something to be proud of. My mother wouldn’t have liked it either.

The address Doris Walker had given us for Alvin Chambers was in the North End. With the streets blanketed by snow and ice, getting there proved both difficult and hazardous.

It was midmorning now. The City of Seattle no longer appeared to be a ghost town. Despite the frigid cold, the pale crystal blue sky lit by brilliant sunshine had tempted at least a few intrepid souls into venturing outside. Some were making justifiably belated attempts to get to work, while others, especially children in a holiday mood, took advantage of their unexpectedly lengthened Christmas vacation to play in the morning’s winter wonderland.

Seattle drivers don’t get nearly enough experience at driving on snow and ice to be any good at it. What little they learn during one year’s major storm never carries over to the next. We didn’t even make it off Queen Anne Hill without passing several minor spinouts and accompanying fender benders. A departmental traffic advisory warned us that both Aurora Avenue and northbound I-5 were tied up with accidents, so we cut across town on Mercer Street, aiming for Fifteenth Avenue.

With Kramer driving, we had just passed the intersection where Queen Anne Avenue North meets Mercer when a sled loaded with two laughing kids came flying down Roy Street and zipped across the street directly in front of us. It was sheer luck that we didn’t crush them under our tires. Had the timing been even so much as one microsecond different, there would have been nothing Kramer or anyone else could have done to avoid hitting them.

“Jesus Christ!” Kramer grumbled. “What the hell do those crazy kids think they’re doing?”

“Stop the car,” I told him. “I’ll go set them straight.”

“Bullshit,” Kramer responded. Instead of slowing down to let me out, he accelerated and reached for the radio. “Kids on sleds are Traffic’s problem, not ours. We’re Homicide, remember?”

“If someone doesn’t stop them, it could very well become Homicide’s problem,” I returned grimly.

In fact, during the past few years, the number of snow-related deaths in the city had taken an alarming swing upward, particularly due to sled/motor vehicle accidents.

It would have taken only a moment to give those kids the dressing down they so richly deserved, with the added side benefit of maybe saving their young lives, but Detective Kramer was driving. Intent solely on the case at hand, his type A personality allowed for no diversions or distractions, not even potentially lifesaving ones. Disgusted, I listened while he reported the near-miss incident to an already vastly over-worked traffic dispatcher.

“They’re not going to have time to do anything about it,” I muttered when he finished.

“We’re not either,” he replied.

I could see that working together wasn’t going to be a picnic for either one of us.

It took us more than an hour to make what normally would have been a simple twenty-five-minute-ride to the North End. The object of our drive turned out to be a modest two-storied complex called Forest Grove located a block off Aurora on Linden Avenue. The weathered shingle structures looked like an early failed attempt at condominiums, one that had deteriorated into lower-middle-class apartments with the passage of time and the dwindling of enthusiasm. Even the pristine mantle of snow couldn’t disguise an overall air of near hopelessness, of object poverty held only partially at bay.

The complex’s driveway dipped steeply down from the street, with plenty of spinning tire tracks in evidence to show that those few drivers who had managed to escape the parking lot that morning had struggled mightily to make their way up to Linden. We parked on the street and walked and slid down into the complex past a grove of evergreens, their branches drooping under the weight of fat clods of snow.

Number 709 was in the third building and on the second floor. Unable to use the snow-laden railings, we gingerly climbed a rickety set of stairs that groaned and creaked ominously beneath us and the added weight of heavy snow.

Once on the small landing outside the apartment, we saw that the curtains were solidly closed against the brilliant daylight. The varnish on the flimsy front door was faded and peeling. From inside we could hear the droning hum of a television set. Kramer tried ringing the bell. Predictably, it didn’t work, but Kramer’s determined knock, curiously muffled by the snow around us, eventually produced a reaction-the audible lowering of the volume on the TV.

“What’s the matter? Forget your key?” a woman’s voice demanded as the door was flung open. “Where’ve you been?”

The sour-faced woman standing before us was improbably fat and wearing a terry cloth robe that gapped open over her more than ample boobs. Hastily she pulled the robe shut and stood on her toes to peer anxiously over our shoulders toward the parking lot. I knew who she was looking for. She didn’t know yet that he wasn’t coming. Not then, and not ever.

“Sorry,” she mumbled. “Thought you might be my husband, Alvin. He’s late getting home from work, and he never called, either. Who are you?”

“Police officers, ma’am,” I began, reaching for my ID. “Are you Mrs. Chambers?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind if we came in?”

“Yes, I mind. Couldn’t you come back later? I’m right in the middle of The Young and the Restless.”

“It’s very important, Mrs. Chambers,” I insisted.

“Oh, all right,” she said grudgingly. “Come on in then, but I don’t want you to stay very long, not when Alvin’s not here. People might talk, you know.”

She turned and waddled away from the door, clutching the robe around her. Kramer and I followed, making our way through a heavily curtained room whose only light came from the flickering images on a color television set in the far corner. Before my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, I stumbled into a chair and sent a pile of something crashing to the floor.