Payment in Kind (2 page)

She wore a maroon full skirt of some heavy, wool-like material and a matching long-sleeved turtleneck. The skirt was hiked up around her waist. She wasn’t wearing any panties. Graceful but lifeless fingers almost touched a .38 Special that lay on the white tiled floor a few inches inside the doorway.

Baker knelt down to examine the gun. That’s when I saw the other leg, a man’s leg, underneath the woman’s. I moved to a slightly different angle to get a better look. Other than a pair of socks whose elastic had gone to seed, the man too was naked from the waist down. He was wearing a shirt, however, one that made me think of our own at S.P.D. Then I saw the blue striping and breathed a sigh of relief. A blue shoulder patch identified it as belonging to Seattle Security Service, one of the largest security guard companies in the city.

Baker got up quickly, nearly knocking me over in the process, and glared around the room, searching for someone. He seemed surprised to find me standing directly behind him.

“Hello there, Detective Beaumont. Have you seen that damn photographer? She was supposed to be here a long time ago.”

“Haven’t seen her,” I answered. “I’ve only been here a few minutes myself.”

Shaking his head, Baker headed for the outside door, while I took his place in the doorway of the murky, dimly lighted closet.

I stepped closer and warily examined the dead man’s face. Years before, I too had spent some time working for Seattle Security, moonlighting to earn a little extra money when the kids were young and my meager paycheck never stretched quite far enough. Further investigation might still identify the dead man as another financially strapped police officer, but for now I was relieved that his face wasn’t one I immediately recognized. The name tag pinned to his breast pocket said, “A. Chambers.” That didn’t ring any bells either.

In death, A. Chambers sat with his back propped against a deep janitor’s sink. His slack-jawed chin hung down, resting on an ample chest. A huge brown stain had spread across his lower chest and belly. Blood had pooled on the floor around and beneath him. I’ve seen enough murder scenes to know that A. Chambers had bled to death.

I turned my attention back to the woman who lay in a tangle of fallen brooms and mops, staring sightlessly at Chambers from across the small, evil-smelling closet. The almost delicate hole in her chin was in direct contrast to the spattered gore on the wall and mop handles behind her. The condition of her body had all the earmarks of a self-inflicted wound.

If the woman was a suicide, she was one of the selfish kind—unhappy people who aren’t content to go out alone. They always insist on taking one or two others along with them, the more the merrier.

That being the case, she had taken far more care with the placement of her own bullet than she had with his. The woman had died quickly, probably painlessly, while A. Chambers’ lifeblood had slowly ebbed away.

Repulsed by the woman’s strikingly calm face, which belied the shattered mess behind it, I looked down at the floor where the two sets of naked legs, one wearing pitifully sagging socks, lay both open and entwined together like those of a pair of abandoned rag dolls left behind by some forgetful child.

Baker came hurrying back with the photographer firmly in tow. Unceremoniously he shoved me aside. I let him do it without protest. I went over to a window and stood looking out at the snow-shrouded city below me. It was a glistening, blinding white—beautiful, peaceful, and serene. That pristine beauty seemed totally at odds with the terrible darkness that had exploded during the night and left two people dead in that gory closet behind me.

Who is dead, and why, are the fundamental questions at the bottom of every homicide investigation. What terrible passions and connections drive human beings to kill others and then turn the murder weapons on themselves? I know from firsthand experience that the answers to those questions, once we unravel them, wreak havoc among the living long after the dead are buried and decaying in the ground.

For some unaccountable reason, as I stood looking out at the glistening city, the lyrics from that old Ethel Merman song came bubbling into my head. It’s from
Annie Get Your Gun
, I think, and the words say something to the effect that you can’t get a man with a gun.

You can, actually, but if you do it with a .38 Special, what’s left over won’t be good for much of anything.

S
easoned old-timers on the homicide squad know all too well that there is a time to approach Doc Baker and there is a time to leave him alone. As he talked to his assistants, I heard him mention that he believed the man had been shot in the reception area and then dragged into the closet, where he subsequently died. I looked at the shiny granite floor. Someone had taken the time to clean it very, very thoroughly.

As the irascible medical examiner bustled around the crime scene that bitterly cold morning, rumbling orders at the hapless woman photographer whose misfortune it was to draw this particular assignment, I knew enough to keep a very low profile. Detective Paul Kramer didn’t. Relatively new to Homicide and already saddled with a reputation as a headstrong go-getter, he showed up late and immediately started rocking the boat.

Pausing barely long enough to stomp the layer of crusted snow off his shoes, Kramer, bullnecked and bullheaded as ever, charged up behind Doc Baker with his feet still wet. The medical examiner was still totally involved in working one-on-one with the police photographer.

Seeing the bodies, Kramer whistled. “What were they doing, getting it on in the janitor’s closet?”

Doc Baker reacted like an awakened bear summoned too early from his darkened winter cave. He’s a big man, one who requires far more than the average amount of personal space not only because of his girth but also by virtue of personal preference. He doesn’t like to be crowded, physically or mentally.

Angered now by what he must have regarded as gross impertinence on the young detective’s part, Baker turned and erupted out of the closet in one surprisingly fluid motion. The crook of his elbow caught Kramer full in the midsection, and the younger man doubled over in pain. It could have been an accident, I suppose, but then again…

“Your shoes are still wet, Kramer. Anybody ever teach you to watch out for trace evidence, for Chrissakes? Now, go dry those damn shoes and stay out of my way until I’m ready for you. Understand?”

Diplomacy has never been one of Baker’s long suits, nor is he known in local police circles for professional courtesy. Chagrined, Kramer turned away, glancing around the room to see exactly how many other people had witnessed Baker’s sharp-tongued put-down. There were several.

When Kramer caught sight of two uniformed officers exchanging knowing grins, the detective’s face turned several shades of red. Without a word he retreated to the rubberized mat near the door and, as ordered, thoroughly dried his shoes. Finishing that, he spied me standing near the window. He was seething with suppressed anger as he strode over to me.

“So what the hell are we supposed to do, stand around here all day? Wait with our thumbs up our asses?”

“You’re damned right we’re going to wait,” I counseled reasonably. “Until hell freezes over or until Doc Baker gives us the go-ahead, whichever comes first. The last thing we need to do in this investigation is to get crosswise with Baker at the outset.”

The already florid color of Kramer’s face darkened appreciably. Frowning, he scanned the room until his eyes stopped abruptly at the quietly weeping woman sitting in the corner. Her hyperventilating sobs were slowly subsiding. An emergency medical technician had just walked away, leaving her alone.

“Who’s she?” Kramer asked, directing his curt question at me, but nodding in the woman’s direction.

I shrugged. “A secretary or receptionist, I presume. From her reaction, my guess is that she’s the one who discovered the bodies.”

“Your guess?” Kramer demanded irritably, his tone laced with sarcasm. “Don’t you think we ought to start by finding out for sure?”

She wasn’t going anywhere. “Suits me,” I told him. “Until Baker gets freed up, I don’t have anything better to do.”

Kramer glowered at me and then started off toward the corner where the woman was sitting.

Little more than a girl, twenty or twenty-one at the most, she was a study in contradictions, a walking-talking-breathing oxymoron. She was small and pert, cute almost, despite the muddy tracks left on her face by smeared and smudged makeup. Her shoulder-length straw-blond hair was frizzed around her face in that uncontrolled, finger-in-the-electrical-outlet look affected by so many younger women these days. She wore a high-necked lacy white blouse that would have done a straitlaced Victorian lady proud, but two shapely knees showed several fetching inches of nylon-swathed flesh beneath the hem of a black imitation-leather miniskirt and above the tops of matching winter boots. The tiny skirt left little to the imagination, but the exposed knees and thighs were primly glued together.

Like the paradoxical lace and leather, the tearful shudder that passed through her body as Kramer approached was at the same time both genuinely grief-stricken and poutily sexy. She examined Kramer with a none-too-bashful appraisal that he clearly read as an invitation.

“I’m Detective Paul Kramer,” he said, holding out his identification long enough for her to glance at it. “And this is my…”

Motioning vaguely toward me, he started to say partner and then backed off. At least we were agreed on that score. We may have been stuck working together temporarily, but partners we weren’t.

“This is my associate, Detective Beaumont,” he continued after a somewhat awkward pause. “We’ll be handling this case together. Mind if we ask you a few questions?”

She shook her head. “Okay,” she said huskily. “Go ahead.”

“Detective Beaumont here is under the impression you’re the one who discovered the bodies. Is that true?”

She nodded, vigorously.

With a reluctantly acknowledging glance at me, Kramer took out notebook and pencil. “What’s your name, please?”

“Jennifer,” she replied. “Jennifer Lafflyn.”

“And you work here?”

“I’m the morning receptionist. In the afternoons, I’m a traveling secretary. I go to whichever department needs help at the moment.”

“This is your desk?” I asked.

She nodded and glanced uneasily toward a desk that faced the front door. The side of the desk was almost parallel with the open closet door, and it stood less than five feet from it.

“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.