Payment in kind

Chapter 17

Early Wednesday morning, a steep hill combined with a patch of black ice, a lightly loaded Metro bus, and a fully loaded bread truck all conspired together to help us to locate Marcia Louise Kelsey’s missing Volvo.

The bus, turning off Denny Way onto Broadway, was shoved sideways by the out-of-control truck. The bus skidded backwards, taking out three parked cars as it slid back down the hill and inflicting a good deal of damage along the way. Fortunately, nobody was hurt.

The investigating officer on the scene realized almost immediately that the middle squashed car belonged to Marcia Kelsey. Due to the murder investigation and Pete Kelsey’s subsequent disappearance, that missing Turbo Volvo was right at the top of the Patrol Division’s high-priority list.

Nobody lost any time. As soon as the patrol officer radioed in with the information, Dispatch called me. It was only six-fifteen, and the phone call woke me out of a sound sleep.

“Detective Beaumont?”

The voice wasn’t one of my usual early morning callers. “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Who is this?”

“Lieutenant Congdon with Dispatch. One of our patrol officers found that Volvo you were looking for, if you still want it, that is.”

That got my juices flowing. “You’d better believe I still want it. Where is it?”

“Just west of Broadway, up on Capitol Hill. The tow truck driver’s on the horn right now. He’s been in touch with the owner, and they want it towed to a repair shop up in the University District, but I told him I thought the vehicle was involved in a homicide investigation and that I’d have to check with you first.”

Patrol doesn’t get nearly the credit it deserves. The detective divisions would be lost without them. Routine traffic stops pick up more crooks by accident than detectives do on purpose, but those guys, the ordinary foot soldiers in the war on crime, don’t show up in the press unless they screw up and shoot somebody they shouldn’t have. Or unless somebody shoots them. The only time patrol officers get to be heroes is when they’re dead.

“Good work, Lieutenant. You’re absolutely right. Thanks for checking. Tell the officer on the scene to impound that vehicle and have it taken into the garage to be searched. Nobody’s to touch it until after the crime lab team goes over it, you got that?”

“Got it,” Congdon replied.

“And thanks,” I told him.

“Sure thing,” the lieutenant replied. “Always glad to help out.”

“How long do you think it’ll take to bring it in?”

“About half an hour or so. Not too long.”

“Good,” I told him, glancing at my watch. “I’ll be there by then, too.”

I hurried in and out of the shower and was one leg into the process of putting on my pants when the phone rang again. This time it was Ron Peters.

“Your calling me early in the morning like this seems just like old times,” I said, holding the phone pressed to my ear with one shoulder while I used both hands to zip up my pants and fasten my belt. “What’s happening?”

“Tell me everything you know about the bomb threats,” he said quietly.

I didn’t like the dangerously calm way he spoke, and it wasn’t a request so much as it was a direct challenge.

“Look, I thought we went over all that last night. Captain Harden told you to back off. That strikes me like very good advice.”

“I’m not interested in well-meaning advice, Beau, not from Harden and not from you. And I’m not backing off, either. I’m a cop, Beau, a cop who’s sworn to uphold the law. Bomb threats to public property aren’t something that ought to be swept under the rug, but in this case, not only are we not supposed to investigate it, the public isn’t supposed to know about it either. I won’t work that way.”

“But…”

“No buts, Beau. With just the few phone calls I made yesterday before Harden chewed my ass, I found out that somebody across the street is behind this thing, someone very close to the top in city government. I want to find out who that person is and what they’re up to. If somebody in this department’s in on it, if they’re dirty, too, then I want to know about that as well. I don’t like crooked cops, and I particularly don’t like crooked cops who work for crooked politicians.”

“What about Harden?”

“You mean about him ordering me to lay off? I won’t do anything about the bomb threats during my shift, but nobody tells me what I can and can’t do during my off hours. So tell me what you know, or I’ll have to track it down myself. That might create some real waves.”

And so I told him, because, God help me, I felt exactly the same way he did. During the next ten minutes, I recapped for Peters everything I had learned from Dr. Kenneth Savage and from Doris Walker as well, including all the details I could recall from Sparky Cummings’ off-limits file.

“Do you still think this has something to do with your two homicides?” Peters asked when I finished.

“I can’t say. Maybe the only real connection is that the security guard who was killed wouldn’t have been at the school district office if it hadn’t been for the bomb threats back in September. Whether or not the bomb threats have anything directly to do with his death still remains to be seen.”

“But you don’t have any specific evidence that links the two?”

I laughed. “The only thing linking them so far is pure old J.P. Beaumont cussedness.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Peters replied with a chuckle of his own. “I’d better get going.”

“Don’t stick your neck out too far, Ron,” I cautioned. “You’ve already had it broken once.”

“I noticed. Believe me, I’ll be careful.”

By the time I got off the phone with Peters, my half hour of travel time was almost gone. I was still too damn stubborn to want to bring my shiny 928 out of hiding to take its chances of being smashed to pieces on icy streets. Instead, I ran a full block and a half and crossed against a DON’T WALK light to catch up with a bus. Phone call and bus notwithstanding, I still beat the tow truck to the garage by several minutes.

I tagged along after the driver while he unhitched the crunched remains of the Volvo, dogging at his heels and asking questions.

“Was it locked?” I asked.

“What, this Volvo? Hell no, it wasn’t locked. Somebody from an apartment building around there said it had been parked there ever since the storm came through on Sunday night. Funny, ain’t it,” he added with a bucktoothed grin. “Just goes to show some people don’t even think these here hummers are good enough to steal. I don’t like ‘em much myself.”

Peering in through the windows after he left, I caught sight of a piece of yellow paper protruding from under the plastic seat belt clip on the driver’s side. It looked like another one of those Post-it telephone messages. I was eager to read it. Whatever was written there might very well contain information that would point us in the right direction.

But I had to wait, because nobody, including me, was allowed to touch the vehicle until after the crime-scene technicians did. Eventually the techs showed up, and I paced the floor impatiently while they methodically went through their interminable preliminary procedures. Forty-five long minutes later, they finally let me have a look-look but don’t touch-at the piece of wrinkled yellow paper.

Whoever had driven the car last had sat on the note, probably without even being aware it was there. The paper was crushed and wrinkled, the pencil marks smudged. The message on it hadn’t been written so much as scrawled in obvious haste.

“Mar,” it said. “Somebody’s been talking to Pete. I don’t know who. Be careful. A.”

I knew who Mar was. That had to be Marcia Louise Kelsey. And I knew who Pete was too. So who was A? Alvin Chambers? But then I realized there was one other possibility as well, one other A name in the equation-Andrea Stovall, the lady from the teachers’ union with an unauthorized set of keys to the school district office.

A flurry of questions eddied through my mind. I remembered Andrea Stovall’s obvious discomfort when we asked her about her unsuccessful attempt to see Marcia Kelsey the night of the murder. And I remembered the way she had bolted from the room, using her meeting as an excuse when, as a friend of the victim, she would logically have wanted to help us.

I stood there in the garage for some time, thinking about the message itself and what it meant. According to Pete, Marcia’s romantic escapades were a known quantity to him and had been for years, so what was it that someone had told Pete Kelsey in only the past few days that he hadn’t known before? What was it that had been damaging enough to set him off? And who was doing the talking?

I remembered Andrea Stovall telling us that the reason she went to the school district office was that she was afraid, afraid for Marcia Kelsey’s safety and well-being. Since she hadn’t found Marcia in the building, she could have placed the note on the windshield, but that meant whoever had driven the car away from the office, presumably the killer, had also seen the note. If it was Pete, why hadn’t he gotten rid of such a potentially damaging item?

My instinct about the importance of the paper in the car had been right, but now the problem was finding out who had authored it. Alvin Chambers was dead, so getting a sample of his handwriting wouldn’t be too difficult. If, however, Andrea Stovall had written the note, I would have to be somewhat less direct.

I was already fully convinced Andrea Stovall was concealing something important about that night, something she hadn’t wanted to tell us. It was high time we asked her about that, and this time no urgent summons to some lightweight meeting was going to keep her from answering my questions.

Leaving the crime lab folks to continue their painstaking search of the vehicle, I dashed up to my cubicle, intent on obtaining those two separate but equally critical samples.

My first call went to the Seattle Federated Teachers’ Association office in Greenwood. The secretary there told me that Mrs. Stovall had called in sick and probably wouldn’t be in for the remainder of the week. My second call, to Andrea’s home phone number, went unanswered. She may have been home sick, but she wasn’t taking calls, not even after fifteen rings.

I put down the phone and thumbed through my notebook until I came to the name of Andrea Stovall’s apartment manager, Rex Pierson, the man who had so kindly consented to give her a ride down to the school office the night of the murder. It was possible that this Pierson guy might have a sample of her handwriting on a note or lease agreement in his office.

Andrea hadn’t given me a phone number, but telephone books work far more often than they don’t. I flipped through the pages-Q, R, P, Pe…I turned to the next page, the Pi’s, and glanced at the boldfaced heading at the top of the page to make sure I had the right one.

And that’s when I saw it. The name was printed in heavy capital letters across the top of the column indicating the beginning and ending words on the page: Piedmont-Pioneer. And just below the column heading was the first name: Piedmont, Jonas A., 8445 Dayton Avenue North.

I felt like someone had splashed a bucket of icy water down my entire body.

The phone book was eight months old, and the bold-faced name had been lying in wait for me all that time like a coiled but invisible snake waiting to strike. In all those months, I had never before had occasion to use that particular page, had never stumbled over that unwanted and unlooked-for piece of my personal history. Seeing my grandfather’s name there in black and white hit me with the same power as a fist plowing into my gut.

Against my will, I sat there staring at the line while the name, address, and phone number seared themselves indelibly into my brain.

“What’s the matter, Beau?”

Guiltily I looked up first and then back down, like someone caught doing something he shouldn’t. I had been so stunned by seeing my grandfather’s name that I hadn’t heard Ron Peters’ wheelchair whisper up to the doorway of the cubicle.

I closed the phone book with a decided snap-I didn’t want Peters to see which page it was open to-and tried to brush off the incident with a casual laugh. “I think I just saw a ghost,” I told him.

“Really? How’s that?”

“My grandfather. I just stumbled across his name here in the phone book when I was looking for something else. I didn’t even know he was still alive.”

Peters seemed surprised. “I didn’t realize you had any relatives still living here in the city.”

“Me neither,” I told him.

“Well, that’s great. You two should get together. I’ll bet you’d have a great time.”

“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. “What brings you here?” I asked, changing the subject.

“I figured I’d better bring you the paper,” Peters said. “I know good and well you won’t buy one yourself.”

He handed me a neatly folded copy of the local section of the Post-Intelligencer. “Take a look at this.”

“ Husband Sought in Double Homicide,” the banner headline read.

“Wait a minute,” I objected. “We just want him for questioning at this point. There’s some circumstantial evidence, but the way this lead is written, it makes it sound like we know for sure Pete Kelsey did it.”

“That’s not all, either,” Ron Peters answered grimly. “I think maybe you’d better read the whole article.”

And so I did:

“Late last night city and state authorities continued to search for a Puget Sound area man who disappeared in the aftermath of a double homicide that took the life of his forty-four-year-old wife and that of a fifty-year-old school district security guard. The brutal murders have left Seattle’s educational community stunned and grieving.

“Peter Kelsey, forty-four, a freelance contractor and sometime bartender, is being sought in connection with the slayings of his wife, Marcia Louise Kelsey, head of Seattle Public School District’s Labor Relations department, and of Alvin Chambers, a night watchman employed by Seattle Security. The killings occurred in the district’s Lower Queen Anne area office building late Sunday night.

“Unconfirmed reports from unnamed sources both inside and outside the school district have indicated that Mr. Kelsey became irrational upon hearing rumors that his wife was conducting an illicit relationship with another female member of the school district staff.”

That one stopped me cold. “A female? As in AC/DC?” I remembered Pete Kelsey’s startling reaction when Kramer had told him about Alvin Chambers. He had said Marcia was always full of surprises, and she continued to be so. Maybe he was surprised to hear that his wife had been with a man rather than another woman.

“Read on,” Peters said.

“”I know all about those godless women,“ Mrs. Charlotte Chambers, widow of the slain security guard, stated in an airport interview late last night, where she had gone to meet her son, who is on emergency leave from the U.S. Navy. The younger Chambers flew home to attend his father’s funeral.

“”Alvin told me all about them. He was a man of God, you see, even if he left the ministry. He was burdened seeing the way those two women carried on. It’s a sin and goes against all the teachings of the Bible. It troubled him-he wanted to bring them God’s love and forgiveness, but they weren’t interested. I tried to get him to report them, but he wouldn’t. Alvin was a great one for judging not, you see. So he just prayed about it, is all, and now he’s dead and so is she.“

“Alvin Chambers spent fifteen years as pastor of the Algona Freewill Baptist Church before leaving the ministry to accept a position with Seattle Security.

“Mrs. Kelsey, a longtime employee of the Seattle Public School district…” The article continued with a rehash of the murders themselves as well as capsule biographies of both Marcia Kelsey and Alvin Chambers.

“Do you think it’s true?” Peters asked when I finished reading and looked up. “About the other woman, I mean. That’s going to be pretty rough on the family, especially if they didn’t know about it before.”

“I think they knew,” I said quietly. “At least one of them did.”

I remembered the stark warning scrawled on the Post-it found in Marcia Kelsey’s Volvo. I handed the folded newspaper back to Ron Peters. “I think somebody spilled the beans, just before the murders. I don’t think he approved.”

I went on to tell Peters about the warning message on the note found in Marcia Kelsey’s smashed car. I had just finished when Margie poked her head around the doorway and peeked into my cubicle. “There you are, Beau. Good to see you, Ron. How’s it going?”

She rushed on without waiting for Peters to give a real answer to her pro forma question.

“Detective Kramer was looking for you a little while ago, Beau. He picked up the search warrant early and said to tell you that he was going on up to the Kelsey’s house, that you could meet him there if you want to. He said he had to hurry because he’s due back in court at ten again.”

“Fine,” I said.

Margie frowned. “Are you going to meet him there or not?”

“I’ve got my own stuff to handle. Tell him he’s a big boy and he can take care of the search warrant all by himself.”

“Where will you be?”

Margie’s sometimes as bad as a dormitory housemother.

“I’ll be dropping by Seattle Security and going up to Queen Anne Hill to see a lady named Andrea Stovall.”

Margie started away, then stopped. “She called, by the way. Did Detective Kramer tell you?”

“Andrea Stovall called here?”

“Neither you nor Kramer were in yet. I had nearly finished taking her message when Detective Kramer came in, and I turned her over to him. He probably rushed out and forgot to give it to you.”

Right, I thought. Sure he did. I smiled engagingly at Margie. “You wouldn’t happen to remember any of that message, would you?”

“Let me go get my book.”

Margie writes her messages in a book that makes a carbon copy of each one. She returned carrying the spiral-bound notebook. “Erin called to tell me about her dad, to warn me. I’ve decided to leave town for a few days, just as a precaution, but…”

“But…? That’s it? She didn’t say where she was going or how we could get in touch with her?”

“I told you. Detective Kramer came in just then, and I gave the phone to him. I’m sure he has the rest of it.” The phone on Margie’s desk began to ring, and she hurried to answer it.

“What are you going to do?” Peters asked after Margie left.

“First off, I’m going to try to get those two handwriting samples. I’m sure I can get a sample of Chambers’ writing from Seattle Security, and I’ve got the name and address of Stovall’s apartment manager at a place called the Queen Anne. When I finish with those, I may track down that worthless Kramer down in District Court and clean his clock.”

With an acknowledging nod, Peters deftly maneuvered his chair back out through the doorway. “You do your thing, and I’ll do mine,” he said. “I have to read the chief’s prepared affirmative-action statement to the press at ten A.M. It’s going to be boring as hell, but it’s a job, and it beats doing nothing.”

He wheeled his way on up the corridor, with me trailing behind. “That’s where she lives, the Queen Anne? It seems like a pretty nice place.”

“You know where it is?” I asked.

“Sure. Amy and I thought about getting an apartment there until you talked us into staying awhile longer in Belltown Terrace. It’s really convenient, right across the street from the girls’ school.”

I still couldn’t place the building in my head. “I’ve got the address,” I told him. “I’m sure I’ll be able to find it.”

At that, Ron Peters laughed aloud. “Your memory must be failing, Beau. It’s not that difficult. It’s old Queen Anne High School. Somebody redid the whole thing and turned it into apartments.”

As soon as he said it, I did remember. In fact, I had picked up Tracie and Heather from John Hay Elementary on numerous occasions, but the name of the apartment building directly across the street had somehow slipped my mind. Probably deliberately slipped my mind. As far as I was concerned, Queen Anne High School was forever that, imprinted in my memory as a teeming, cheering gym-the site of my single high school basketball triumph, a last-second dumb-luck basket that won the final regular season game the year I was a senior.

The UP elevator appeared right then, and Peters wheeled himself into it.

“Thanks for jogging my memory, Ron,” I called as he disappeared into the elevator. “Where would I be without you?”

I headed back toward my office, happy in the knowledge that with Ron’s help, there was no need to look up Rex Pierson’s number. I knew where I was going and would simply show up on his doorstep at the Queen Anne unannounced.

I was relieved that for now the PI page of the phone book would continue to be off limits, because I wasn’t tough enough to look at it yet, and I didn’t know if I ever would be.