Payment in Kind (32 page)

He nodded. “I bummed around for a while, first in Asia and then later in South America. I wanted to come home, to the States, I mean, but I didn’t dare. The closest I came was Mexico. I ended up tending bar in a little place in Baja called Puerto Peñasco.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Gringos call it Rocky Point. It’s sort of a poor man’s Acapulco. Anyway, I was bartending in a little beachfront bar there. The guy who owned it thought having a gringo tend bar would pull in the money. That’s where I met Chris McLaughlin.”

“Marcia’s first husband?”

Kelsey nodded grimly. “That worthless bastard.”

“I thought they were in Canada. Is that where you met Marcia?”

“No, Marcia wasn’t there. By then she was already back home with her parents. Chris was the only one I met, although that wasn’t the name he was using at the time. I didn’t find out his real name until much later.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Buying drugs,” Pete Kelsey answered. “Buying drugs, drinking too much, letting himself run off at the mouth. One day when he was half drunk I heard him telling somebody that having the baby along made his work a piece of cake. He called her his little mule. He said he could put whatever he wanted in with that baby and carry it back and forth across the border with no difficulty because the
Federales
never searched her.”

“His own baby?”

“That’s right,” Kelsey answered bitterly. “Chris McLaughlin was a nice guy. A helluva nice guy.”

“So whose baby is Erin really if she wasn’t Marcia’s?”

“Chris McLaughlin and another woman’s Sonja, I think her name was. They all went to Canada together, but Marcia didn’t know that Chris and Sonja were already married. The way I heard it, he had this fantasy about starting his own patriarchy—you know, the old one-man-many-wives routine? Except it didn’t work out quite the way he planned. I think Marcia liked Sonja more than she did Chris, and I think she would have stayed if it hadn’t been for the drugs.”

“Both Chris and Sonja were into the drug scene?”

Pete nodded. “That’s why Marcia came back home to Seattle.”

“But you still haven’t explained how you ended up with Erin.”

“I knew from what I overhead in the bar that McLaughlin was there to pick up a load and take it back. He was only supposed to be there for a week or so. To make it look like an ordinary vacation, he hired himself a Mexican lady to take care of the baby and then he settled down to having a hell of a good time. He found plenty fun, all right, in all the wrong places. He disappeared and turned up three days later down on the beach with a knife stuck between his ribs.

“In the meantime, the baby-sitter, a cousin of the guy who owned the bar, came looking for him too. She was afraid what would happen to her if the cops found her with an Anglo baby with no father anywhere around. I think she was worried about kidnapping. She brought the baby and all her stuff to the bar, and while I was looking through the bags, in among the false bottoms, I found a stash of phoney IDs.”

“Including one for Pete Kelsey?” I asked.

Pete nodded. “Pete and Erin Kelsey and my deceased wife. I also found a half-written letter to Marcia in an address book. From the sound of it, he had planned to assume Pete Kelsey’s ID and disappear, from his drug connections and from Sonja as well.”

“So you took the baby and the ID and came to the States masquerading as a Canadian citizen?”

“That’s right. It was a ticket home and I used it. I thought, from the letter, that Erin was actually Marica’s baby, but I found out differently. She was as outraged as I was by Chris and Sonja using the baby to smuggle drugs, and between us we came up with the idea of getting married and keeping Erin ourselves. Marcia was the one who thought of letting Maxwell Cole believe he was introducing us and playing cupid. She worked behind the scenes and engineered my getting the remodeling job at Max’s mother’s house. He always took full credit for our getting together.”

“And it made things seem like they were all on the up-and-up,” I added.

“That’s right,” Pete said.

My heart went out to poor duped Maxwell Cole. He had spent twenty years taking credit for bringing Pete and Marcia Kelsey together without ever knowing how completely they’d played him for a fool. It made Erin’s calling him “Uncle Max” seem pitiable rather than laughable.

“So you two set out to raise Erin as your own?”

He nodded. “Marcia and I made an agreement that we would stick together for Erin’s sake, no matter what. It was like an old-fashioned arranged marriage, I suppose. We were both happy enough at first, but keeping that bargain got harder as the years went on, especially after Marcia met Andrea. It never occurred to me that Marcia would really run off with her.”

“Maybe she wouldn’t have,” I suggested.

Pete Kelsey frowned. “What do you mean?”

“According to Andrea Stovall, the woman on the phone told you a lie. She said Marcia had no intention of breaking her word to you.”

Pete Kelsey’s hard jawline went slack. “You mean she told me that just to make trouble?”

“And it worked, too, didn’t it?” I returned.

He thought about it a moment before nodding his head. “Yes,” he answered bleakly. “I guess it did.”

I took a second to try to organize my thoughts. “You’re sure Chris McLaughlin died in Mexico?”

“Yes, I saw him. I didn’t stay around afterward, though. I took Erin and headed for the border.”

“What happened to Sonja?”

“I don’t know. We never made any inquiries for fear of drawing attention to ourselves. Marcia went ahead and let her parents get the annulment, even though she already knew Chris was dead. The rest you know.”

“Where did they live in Canada?”

“In a commune-type arrangement someplace up near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.”

“You’re sure this Sonja was Erin’s real mother?”

“As far as I know.”

“What was her last name?”

“McLaughlin too. He was a bigamist. That’s how come Belle and George were able to get an annulment without any problem. Actually, they probably didn’t even need to, but they wanted to wipe the slate clean.”

“And Marcia couldn’t have shown up with an annulment, a clean slate, and a baby.”

“By then Marcia had already had a hysterectomy. Erin was our only chance at having a child of our own.” Pete paused for a moment and seemed to mull an idea.

“Are you thinking that maybe after all these years, Sonja has come after us and she’s behind all this?”

“It’s possible.”

“Would she hurt her own daughter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you stop her? I don’t care what happens to me as long as you keep her from hurting Erin.”

“We’ll try,” I said.

Pete Kelsey reached across the table and grasped my hand, squashing it in a powerful grip.

“Do more than try, Detective Beaumont,” he pleaded. “Once Erin finds out about all this, she may never want to see me again, but I can’t stand for her to be hurt anymore. Maybe she isn’t my real daughter, but she’s the only daughter I’ve ever had.”

Extricating my hand, I went to the door and signaled the guard that I was ready to leave. I was about to walk out when I remembered about the fruits of Detective Kramer’s search warrant and something else Andrea Stovall had mentioned.

“Who else besides you and Erin had keys to your house?”

It was a closing-the-barn-door question in view of the fact that the house had burned to its foundations, and if there hadn’t been so much other pain winging around the room, it might have been a painful one, but I asked it anyway, and Pete answered without hesitation. “We’re the only ones, other than Marcia.”

“Were Marcia’s keys in the envelope of personal effects from Doc Baker’s office?”

Pete Kelsey frowned. “No, I’m sure they weren’t.”

“And the garage door opener?”

“No. That wasn’t there either. Isn’t it still in the car?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to check. One last thing, Pete.” Calling him John David Madsen right then would have amounted to kicking him while he was down.

“What’s that?”

“Did you happen to take the pictures of you and Erin that were hanging in Marcia’s office?”

“Why, no. Aren’t they still there?”

“No. I’m sorry to say they’re not.”

That was the final straw. “I was hoping we still had those,” Pete Kelsey croaked. “I was hoping there was something left, but it’s gone, isn’t it? It’s all gone.”

And he buried his face in his arms.

I left then, quickly, feeling my own eyes fill with tears.

I was still sniffling when I reached the front desk. “I must have caught a cold somewhere,” I said to the guard, who eyed me quizzically as I stopped long enough to sign out.

Maxwell Cole’s goddamned cold, but of course, it wasn’t a cold at all.

B
y three o’clock in the morning, I was back at my desk with an armload of work to do and with no intention or need of going to sleep. I called Paul Kramer, and got him out of bed. He squawked at first, but he listened intently to what I had to say. By the time I finished briefing him, he was up and moving and ready to go looking for Sonja McLaughlin, wherever she might be, because Sonja McLaughlin sounded like someone with a lifetime’s worth of axe to grind. And that was just the kind of person we were looking for.

I certainly don’t like receiving middle-of-the-night calls, and I don’t like making them either, but I made some that morning. I rustled up the crime lab folks who had inventoried Marcia Kelsey’s car. Sure enough, no keys and no garage door opener had been found in the vehicle.

It took some fast talking to get past JoAnne McGuire’s mother in Tacoma, but finally Erin’s roommate came on the phone. In a voice still thick with sleep, she corroborated Erin’s story of their drive to Eugene the previous Sunday—complete with departure time, the stop in Woodland, the wreck in Portland, and the snow-storm by the time they finally reached Eugene.

That meant Jason Ragsdale was mistaken when he said he had seen Erin Kelsey at the school district office sometime Sunday night, but I was convinced Jason, the unauthorized midnight skier, had seen someone, someone who looked like Erin Kelsey and carried a gun. If she wasn’t Erin, who was she?

I hit the wall about five-thirty and went home for a shower and a nap. By ten that same morning I was back in the office and in as good a shape as could be expected for someone running on three hours of sleep, five cups of coffee, and one hot shower. Coming into my cubicle, I was delighted to find a fully recovered Big Al Lindstrom sitting there big as life with his huge feet propped on his desk, munching complacently on an apple.

“Welcome back. Are you ever a sight for sore eyes,” I told him.

“You mean you missed me?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been stuck working with Paul Kramer the whole time you’ve been gone.”

Big Al grinned. “You think you’ve had it bad. With Molly sick, I had to do all the cooking. I musta lost ten pounds. By the way, there’s a message there for you. Came in about five minutes ago.”

The message, written in Big Al’s barely decipherable scrawl, directed me to call Caleb Drachman’s office—at once.

“Good morning, Detective Beaumont,” Drachman said cordially, once I had him on the line. “I’ve got a court order for you. I’m sending a copy over by messenger service to make sure you have it. Since the funeral starts at two, I wanted you to have plenty of time to make arrangements.”

“What arrangements?”

“They’re all listed in the court order.”

“Look, Mr. Drachman, how about saving us both some time and telling me what it says?”

“Certainly. I’ve talked to the criminal investigations folks down at Fort Lewis. They say the only charge pending against my client is one of simple desertion. They’re running an all-volunteer Army these days, and they don’t want any bad PR. In addition, I’ve talked to Mr. Kelsey several times this morning. From what he’s told me about what happened last night, I would assume the chances of your charging him in connection with his wife’s murder are somewhat less today than they were yesterday.”

“Forget the buildup, just tell me what I need to know,” I put in impatiently.

At once Caleb Drachman switched gears. “My client’s wife’s funeral is today. He is to be released long enough to attend the services, and it is to be done as unobtrusively as possible. Do I make myself clear?”

“Completely,” I replied.

“Good. There are to be no restraints and no obvious police presence. The judge ordered one guard. I suggested someone from the jail, but for some reason, Mr. Kelsey would like you to be there. I personally am strongly opposed to that idea, but I have agreed to abide by my client’s wishes, if it’s all right with you, of course,” he added.

If I’d had any lingering doubts about the kind of legal-beagle, Open-Sesame power Caleb Winthrop Drachman could wield, they were totally removed. On those occasions when prisoners are allowed to attend funerals, they usually do it under the aegis of a conspicuous police guard, and they do it wearing restraints—if not leg shackles, then at least handcuffs concealed under a raincoat.

“Well?” Drachman prompted.

“Well what?”

“Will you do it or not?”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“Good. I’ll call down to the jail and tell them to have him ready by eleven. The visitation starts at noon. I’m sure he’d like to be there for that as well.”

“Do what?” Paul Kramer asked, walking into the cubicle and picking up part of what was being said. He asked his question while Drachman was still speaking.

I hung up the phone. “Take Pete Kelsey to his wife’s funeral,” I said. “Drachman got a court order.”

“It figures,” Kramer said. “Better you than me, though. I hate funerals. By the way, I’ve got some bad news for you.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re barking up the wrong tree. Sonja McLaughlin didn’t do it.”

“How do you know that?”

“She’s dead. I’ve been in touch with the authorities in B.C. Sonja McLaughlin died about two years ago in an insane asylum in Vancouver.”

“She went crazy?”