Payment in Kind (17 page)

“Is seven too late?”

“No. That’ll be fine. See you then.”

Ron started to hang up, but I stopped him. “Wait a minute, Ron. There’s something I need some help with.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you remember hearing anything about a series of bomb threats at the school district office last fall?”

“Bomb threats? I don’t remember anything about it.”

“Me either,” I told him, “but they happened, and they didn’t get reported. What I want to know is who buried those reports and how they did it.”

“Sounds like something that’s right up my alley,” Ron said. I could hear a smile lighting up his face, an echo of the old enthusiasm leaking into his voice.

“That’s what I thought. By the way, don’t try checking directly with the Firearms and Explosives guys,” I warned. “We don’t want to get Sparky’s tail caught in a wringer on this one.”

“Don’t worry,” Ron Peters responded with a laugh. “I have my own sources, and I’ll be the soul of discretion. See you at seven.”

I left the phone and went back into Maxwell Cole’s living room. He was leaning back with his eyes closed. For a moment I thought he had fallen asleep, but he sat up as soon as he heard me pause in the doorway.

“Did Pete tell you about the harassing phone calls?” Max asked.

“Yes.”

“And he told you that Erin had been getting them too?”

“Yes.”

“Is it possible the phone calls and the murders are related?”

As a loyal friend of Pete Kelsey’s, Max was gently trying to lead me away from pointing an accusing finger in Pete’s direction. Under the circumstances, I probably would have done the same thing. He was also fishing for information.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” I replied evenly, trying not to let any information slip into my words or intonation. “It’s much too early to speculate.”

“Well, I think they are,” Max declared forcefully, maybe trying to convince himself as much as he wanted to convince me. “When you find the person making those phone calls, you’ll find the killer. You mark my words.”

It always sounds so easy when somebody else says it. So easy and so simple. Saying it and doing it, however, are two entirely different things.

“Right, Max,” I said, picking up my coat and showing myself to the door. “We’ll have to see about that.”

We’ll just have to wait and see.

W
hen I stepped out onto the covered porch of Maxwell Cole’s Victorian home, it was such a relief to be out of the hot house that I thought at first it was much warmer. It wasn’t. I was just overheated from the inside out.

My growling stomach said it was lunchtime, and I listened. Rather than go back down the way I’d come, I decided to trek on across the summit of Queen Anne Hill to the upscale little business district at the top of the Counterbalance, the steepest part of the hill, where heavy weights had once been used to aid trolleys going up and down Queen Anne Avenue.

By eleven-thirty I found a comfortable chair in a trendy café called Après Vous and was stuffing myself with a mouthwatering Tower Burger, named after the cluster of radio towers, including one still covered with Christmas lights, that had sprouted like three gangly weeds across the crest of the hill behind the restaurant.

I chewed my food and mulled over my conversation with Maxwell Cole. I couldn’t get beyond the uneasy sense that something was strangely out of kilter in what I was learning about Pete and Marcia Kelsey. There was no one thing I could point to, no one blatantly obvious discrepancy, just an overall sense that what I had discovered about them so far was somehow dim and slightly out of focus. I couldn’t get a clear picture of either one of them.

According to Pete, the marriage had been wrong, at least as far as he was concerned, for a considerable period of time. Yet he hadn’t left. And if, as Max had told me, Marcia had flitted from one meaningless relationship to another, then it hadn’t been right for her, either. Yet something had compelled them to stay together. What was it? And did this elusive “something” have anything to do with the murders at hand? The only way to find out was to gather more information.

While downing my second and third cups of coffee, I wrote up a detailed report on everything I had learned from Kendra Meadows and an equally detailed version of Max’s interview. If Watty wanted reports, I’d plant my butt on a chair somewhere and give him reports until the damn cows came home.

Over dessert I studied my lists of things to do and people to see, both the ones I had made and the ones given me earlier that morning by Kendra Meadows. I tried to prioritize those things that needed to be handled first.

Speculating about Pete and Marcia Kelsey’s kinky marriage was intriguing as hell, but I didn’t want to be as guilty of neglecting Alvin Chambers as everybody else was. He was inarguably part of the puzzle. He was also equally dead, and Charlotte Chambers’ next-of-kin interview was still missing.

That at least was something I could fix, another little trophy I could lay on Sergeant Watkins’ desk to say what a good boy am I. And in keeping with my good-boy persona, I made one pro forma call to the department to check on whether Detective Kramer had turned up for his court appearance or if he would be joining me for the afternoon’s labors. Luckily for him, the son of a bitch was stuck in court for the remainder of the day and possibly for much of the rest of the week. I was free to work on my own for the afternoon with a totally clear conscience.

I walked out of the restaurant fully prepared to head back down to the department and check out a car to take to the North End. Instead, providence stepped into the picture in the guise of a battered Farwest cab.

The ancient green hulk of a taxi was stopped directly in front of me as I stepped out onto the sidewalk. It was disgorging an improbable number of laughing, baby-gift-carrying women on their way to a noontime shower. Without a moment’s hesitation, I climbed into the newly unoccupied taxi and directed the driver to take me north to Charlotte Chambers’ Forest Grove apartment complex.

The heavily traveled streets weren’t nearly as bad as they had been earlier. Sand, slightly warmer temperatures, and friction from passing vehicles had combined to turn most of the roadways to lumpy slush, although driving conditions would probably still change for the worse once the sun went down for the evening.

When we reached the Forest Grove Apartments, I could see that someone had made a halfhearted attempt at scraping clean the driveway down into the complex. Nonetheless, I had the cabbie drop me on the street and I walked the rest of the way.

The rickety stairway and handrail leading up to the Chambers’ apartment had also been scraped clear of snow, but the layer of ice that remained on the slick wooden steps was far more treacherous than the snow would have been.

From inside, I could hear the noise of an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner. No one answered my first knock, or the second. I waited until the vacuum went off before I tried again. This time the door opened immediately, and a wizened man stood before me.

“Yes?” he asked.

I handed him my card. “I’m looking for Mrs. Chambers,” I said.

He glanced uneasily over his shoulder. “Charlotte isn’t here just now,” he said. “She’s expecting some family members to arrive from out of town, and the wife and I are waiting here in case they come before she gets back.”

“I see. Can you tell me where she is or when you expect her?”

The man looked back into the room. “I can’t say for sure,” he replied. A woman wearing an apron and carrying two bulging garbage bags appeared over his shoulder.

“Who is it, Floyd?” she asked.

“A policeman,” Floyd replied uncertainly. “He wants to know where Charlotte is and when she’ll be back.”

“Well,” the woman said impatiently. “Let him in. Don’t just stand there with the door open. It’s cold outside. And go ahead and tell him where she is. If Charlotte Chambers isn’t ashamed of herself, she certainly ought to be.”

Floyd stepped back from the door and motioned me inside. Gravely he held out his hand. “The name’s Patterson. Floyd Patterson, and this is my wife, Alva.”

“How do you do, Mr. Patterson,” I said, glancing over his shoulder into the room behind him. The curtains were open, and an almost miraculous transformation had taken place in the dingy little apartment. It was clean, almost spotlessly so. The dirty dishes were gone, as were the collection of boxes and the wads of clothes. The unmistakable back-and-forth tracks of a vacuum cleaner marched virtuously across the orange and green shag carpeting.

“Well?” Alva Patterson said expectantly to her husband. “Are you going to tell him or am I?”

“The movies,” he murmured.

“Pardon me?” I asked, not understanding.

“Charlotte’s at the movies.”

“Right down here at the Oak Tree,” Alva Patterson sniffed. “The so-called bargain matinee. She took the bus. If it weren’t for Richard, we wouldn’t be here at all, but I can’t imagine him coming home and finding this place the way it was this morning, and with his morning, and with his mother not here besides.”

She shook her head disdainfully and clicked her tongue in matronly disapproval. “Those two men deserved so much better,” she added with a sniff. “Both Richard and his father.”

“So there’s a son?” I asked. “I wasn’t aware they had any children. Mrs. Chambers didn’t mention it yesterday when we talked to her.”

Floyd Patterson nodded. “They have a son, all right. Richard’s in the Navy. Stationed in Norfolk, but he’s been on a cruise in the Mediterranean. He’s getting hardship leave and should be arriving home sometime today. Maybe not until this evening, with the way the weather’s been, but I told him we’d stay around here and come pick him up once he gets in. Charlotte doesn’t drive, you see, and it’s way too expensive for him to take a cab all the way here from Sea-Tac.”

“Driving’s not all that woman doesn’t do,” Alva Patterson remarked pointedly, and flounced off toward the kitchen with a stack of overflowing garbage bags still in hand.

Patterson motioned me toward the couch. “Won’t you have a seat, Detective Beaumont?”

I moved toward the sagging couch. It too had been thoroughly vacuumed. The stray popcorn leavings from the day before had disappeared completely. No dust rose from the cushions as I lowered myself onto them.

“I take it you and your wife are friends of the family, Mr. Patterson?”

Floyd hung his head. “Of Alvin more than Charlotte, I’m afraid. Charlotte’s, well…she’s always been difficult.”

“You can say that again,” Alva offered tartly from the kitchen, where she was furiously scrubbing the counter. The odor of undiluted bleach wafted into the living room. “You should have seen the parsonage after they moved out. I tell you it was criminal.”

“Now, Alva,” Floyd cautioned mildly. “Remember, judge not…”

“That’s easy for you to say, Floyd,” Alva snapped, cutting him off in midsentence. “You menfolks didn’t have to clean those filthy bathrooms. The women did. And the kitchen! We found roaches in some of the kitchen cupboards, can you imagine? And don’t you think for one minute that I’m here working today because of Charlotte Chambers. Absolutely not. I’m doing this for Richard so that when his friends stop by to visit, he won’t have to be embarrassed.”

“So you’re members of the church where Alvin Chambers used to be the minister?” I asked, directing my question to Floyd.

He nodded. “That’s right. The Freewill Baptist down in Algona. I’ve been deacon there for fifteen years. I was on the committee that hired Pastor Al when he first came to us ten years ago. I hated to see him go when he left, especially for a job like that. It’s such a terrible waste, but then…” Floyd left off and shrugged. “It was just one of those things, I guess.”

“Why did he leave?” I asked.

“Because of the remodeling,” Patterson answered without hesitation. “It was all because of that.”

The fall from grace of numerous televangelists as well as that of a few of the less reputable local clergy had prepared me for the worst. I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised by the recounting of any number of peccadillos, but the word “remodeling” definitely wasn’t on the list of what I expected to hear.

“Did you say remodeling?” I asked.

Patterson nodded sadly. “It was all so silly. We…” He paused. “The church had finished paying off the mortgage. In fact, we celebrated with a mortgage- burning at the annual dinner. I remember Pastor Al telling me how much he was hoping we’d be able to spend some of that extra money on a new outreach program that he had in mind. Mission work we could do in our own backyard, right there in Algona. But at the very next board of directors meeting, someone came up with the idea of remodeling the sanctuary, and that’s what the board voted to do. Remodel. I think it broke Pastor Al’s heart.”

Alva Patterson appeared in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on the front of her apron.

“It wasn’t just that, Floyd, and don’t you sit there and say it was.”

“Now, Alva,” Floyd cautioned, holding up his hand.

“Don’t you ”Now, Alva‘ me,“ his wife returned. ”You know as well as I do that the remodeling was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The real problem was Charlotte. She was the problem then, and she’s the problem now.“

Without warning, Alva Patterson pulled the skirt of the apron up to her wrinkled face and sobbed into it. “That poor man. Whatever did he do to deserve the likes of her for a wife! It’s not fair. He should have had better!”

At that precise moment, my pager went off. Floyd Patterson directed me to the kitchen telephone, where I dialed Margie’s number.

“Beaumont here,” I said.

“I’m glad you called right back,” Margie said. “Detective Kramer telephoned before court went into session and wanted me to get in touch with you. He said to tell you ”Bingo.“”

“Bingo? What the hell does that mean?”

“Beats me. That’s all he said.”

I wondered, had he learned something important during the course of his lunch with Jennifer Lafflyn or had the fingerprints from Pete Kelsey’s spoon shown up somewhere on the AFIS system? It was just like my friend Kramer to play games and not tell me exactly what was happening.