Payment in kind

Chapter 15

I hurried up to the fifth floor and sat at my desk poring over the AFIS report as if reading the same black-and-white words over and over again would somehow unlock the secrets hidden behind them, because the words gave the bare-bones skeleton of a hell of a story.

John David Madsen, alias Pete Kelsey, had been on deserter status from the United States Army for more than twenty years. Why?

Picking up the phone, I dialed South Dakota information. As I waited for the operator to answer, I thought about how a son’s or brother’s or husband’s sudden reappearance after so many years of unexplained absence might affect the family he had presumably left behind. But the information operator came up empty.

If John David Madsen had any surviving relatives, they were no longer living in the vicinity of Marvin, South Dakota, wherever the hell that was.

Then, since I had come up empty-handed on the first try, I made another wild stab at it. This time I dialed Ottawa information, asking for either a Madsen or a Kelsey. Again, no Madsens, but three Kelseys were listed, one of which was a Peter. It sounded to me like one of the oldest phony ID tricks in the book-assuming the identity of a long-deceased child.

I jotted down the telephone number, but it took several minutes to work up nerve enough to dial it. The woman who answered sounded elderly and frail, and I berated myself for being an uncaring bastard even as I laid the ground-work for asking the painful questions.

“Is this Mrs. Peter Kelsey?” I asked.

“You’ll have to speak up a bit. I can’t quite hear you.”

I upped the volume. “Is this Mrs. Peter Kelsey?”

“Yes it is. Who’s calling, please?”

“My name is Beaumont, Detective J.P. Beaumont, with the Seattle Police Department.”

Had I been on the other end of the line, I probably would have demanded that my caller offer some further form of identification or verification. Mrs. Peter Kelsey did not.

“What can I do for you, Detective Beaumont?” she asked.

“This may be difficult for you, Mrs. Kelsey,” I said gently, “but I’m working on a case where someone has been living under an alias for many years. It’s entirely possible that this person has taken the name and assumed the identity of someone in your family.”

“Yes,” she said. “I see. Go on.”

“What I’m calling for, Mrs. Kelsey, is to see whether or not there was a child in your family named Peter Kelsey, a child who died at a very early age.”

The sharp intake of breath answered my question in the affirmative long before she spoke, her voice quavering tremulously. “Yes. He was my youngest,” she said, almost in a whisper. “My baby. He died of whooping cough when he was only three months old. I sat up with him all night in the hospital, but there was nothing anybody could do. Nothing at all. He died at five past seven in the morning.”

I was struck by the fact that even after all those years, the exact time of her child’s death was still engraved in her heart and brain. Mothers are like that, I guess.

She paused, waiting for me to say something. While I was still fumbling ineptly for an appropriate comment, she continued. “You say someone is living with my little Peter’s name? Someone there in Seattle?”

I didn’t want to drag this particular Mrs. Peter Kelsey, an innocent bystander, any further into the ugly morass. By just making the phone call, I had already inflicted far too much damage.

“It’s a police matter now, Mrs. Kelsey,” I said. “Knowing what you’ve told me, I’m sure we’ll be able to straighten things out in no time.”

“But this person,” she insisted stubbornly. “Has he done anything wrong, I mean anything that would reflect badly on my Peter?”

Aside from being the scum of the earth-a deserter and a suspected killer-how much more wrong can you get?

I said, “It’s nothing serious, Mrs. Kelsey. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”

With that, I rang off. I had said the soothing words, but I didn’t believe them, not for a moment. I put down the receiver, but before I had begun to think about what to do with this new information, the phone rang again.

“Beaumont here.”

“Detective Beaumont?” It was a man’s voice, tight and tentative and uncertain.

“Yes.” I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice.

“My name is George, George Riggs. You don’t know me but…”

I recalled the name from Max’s story. “You’re Marcia Kelsey’s father.”

“Why, yes. That’s right.” I could tell he was enormously relieved at not having to complete his awkward introduction.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Riggs?”

“I’m calling because my wife, Belle, I mean, LaDonna, asked me to. We’re here at Pete and Marcia’s house with Erin, our granddaughter. Pete had told us about you, I mean, he had told Erin at least, and he showed her your card. So when we found it, LaDonna said we should call you right away. That’s why I’m calling. To see if you can come over. If you would, I mean. We need to talk to you.”

I suspected George Riggs was a shy man, a person of few words, who didn’t much like using the phone to talk with complete strangers. His nervousness broadcast itself through the telephone receiver with such force that what he said was almost unintelligible. The desperation was not.

“Of course, Mr. Riggs. I’ll be right over.”

“You know where the house is? The address?”

“Yes, I do. Is this an emergency, Mr. Riggs?”

“Oh no, nothing like that, but if you could come as soon as possible…”

“It may take half an hour or so,” I reassured him, “but I’ll be there just as soon as I can.”

“Thank you so much. I’ll tell Belle that you’re on your way.”

The garage gods were with me. I checked out a car in record time and was parked on the snow-covered street below the Kelseys’ house in something less than twenty minutes.

Sidewalk, stairs and porch had all been carefully shoveled clean of snow and ice. The red-bowed holiday wreath had disappeared from the front door, which was flung open wide by a ravishing young nymph with a wild mop of uncontrolled red hair, vivid green eyes, and milk white skin. Something about the cheekbones and the set of her eyes seemed vaguely familiar to me, but that was only a passing thought, which disappeared as soon as she spoke.

“I’m Erin,” she announced. “Are you Detective Beaumont?” I nodded. “Thank you for hurrying,” she added. “Gran is worried sick.” She turned away from me and called back over her shoulder, “He’s here.”

An older woman appeared in the doorway to the dining room. She was angular and spare, with her arms clasped nervously around a narrow waist. She moved swiftly across the room, reaching out a hand in greeting.

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” she said. “I’m LaDonna Riggs, but everyone calls me Belle. As soon as I found it, I told George to call you. I wanted that thing out of the house immediately.”

I looked from the older woman to the younger one. “What ”thing‘ are we talking about?“ I asked.

“Why, the gun, of course. Didn’t George tell you about it on the phone?”

Now an older man wearing jeans and cowboy boots stepped into the dining room doorway. Sidled more than stepped. He stood there, leaning against the jamb with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

LaDonna Riggs turned to face him. “Why didn’t you tell him about the gun, George? I told you to tell him.”

George Riggs shrugged his shoulders. “I must’ve forgot, sweetheart. I can’t always remember everything, you know.”

“What’s all this about a gun?” I asked.

“Daddy and I came over to get Marcia’s things to take down to the mortuary,” Belle Riggs explained. “She wasn’t married in the temple, you see, so she doesn’t have any temple clothes, but we found her a nice white dress to be buried in all the same. And I wanted to find her some nice white underwear, too. New underwear. Marcia was always particular about her undies, and I knew she’d have some nice things put back. She was a saver, you know. That was one thing she was good at. She’d buy bras and panties on sale…”

“Gran,” Erin interrupted impatiently. “Just tell him about the gun.”

“Well, I’m trying to. Anyway, I checked her bottom drawer, thinking that’s where she’d keep any new things she hadn’t worn yet, and that’s where I found the gun. It was there under a stack of panties that were still in their plastic containers.”

“Maybe you’d better show me,” I said.

Erin led the way up a carpeted stairway and into a cheerful master bedroom. The bed was made, the pillows plumped under a Wedgewood blue spread. I wondered if Pete Kelsey had made the bed-I still couldn’t adjust to thinking about him in terms of John David Madsen-or if that was something Belle Riggs had handled before she went searching for her dead daughter’s underwear.

The bottom drawer of a sleek teak dresser still stood open. I walked over to it and peered inside. The rough checkered handle of a. 25 Auto Browning was partially hidden under a stack of shrink-wrapped panties. The barrel was completely visible. It was an old-fashioned gun, well made-almost quaint-the kind of weapon an eccentric Auntie Mame type might have packed in a dainty purse. Old-fashioned and quaint maybe, but at point-blank range, very, very lethal. I recalled from my cursory reading of Doc Baker’s autopsy that the misshapen slug that had severed Alvin Chambers’ spinal cord before tearing through his internal organs had been from a. 25-caliber something.

“It’s not Marcia’s,” Belle Riggs was declaring firmly to the room in general. “It certainly isn’t Marcia’s. She wouldn’t have allowed a thing like that in her home, to say nothing of in her underwear drawer.”

I took a deep breath and turned to Erin. “Where’s your dad?” I asked.

“Mrs. Damon, one of the ladies he did some remodeling for a few months ago, called early this afternoon. One of her pipes had burst and she wanted to know who to call. She didn’t want to bother Dad, and she didn’t want him to go over, but he did anyway. He should be home any time now.”

“Did anyone here touch this?” I asked.

“No way!” Mrs. Riggs responded at once. “I wouldn’t let anyone near it. You’ll take it with you, won’t you?”

Of the three people in the room, Erin, young as she was, seemed most in possession of her faculties. “Can you find me a shoe box?” I asked her.

“A shoe box?” she repeated with a puzzled frown.

“Yes. A shoe box and some string.”

Erin nodded and hurried away.

“What do you need that for?” Belle Riggs asked indignantly. “A shoe box, of all things.”

“I can’t tell whether or not this weapon is loaded. I’ll have to secure it in the box in order to take it down to the crime lab.”

Erin returned at once with the shoe box. “The string is down in the garage. I’ll be right back.”

Carefully I picked up the Browning, holding the grip gingerly between my thumb and fore-finger as I placed it in the box. Television detectives to the contrary, lifting guns with pencils to preserve fingerprints is not only dangerous-you never know whether or not it’s loaded-it ignores the reality that the rough surfaces on most pistol grips are totally unsuitable for fingerprinting techniques.

“The crime lab?” Belle Riggs asked suddenly as though the words had finally penetrated her consciousness. “You don’t think this is connected to what happened. That’s impossible. It couldn’t be. I just wanted the thing out of the house.”

“It’s possible,” I said grimly.

Much as it pained me to admit it, mounting circumstantial evidence made it look more and more as though Detective Kramer was right, and Pete Kelsey was our man. As the saying goes, I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid, and I wasn’t about to ignore facts that jumped up and hit me in the face.

Erin returned, carrying a ball of string and a pair of scissors. I punched holes in the bottom of the box and immobilized the gun, tying it off with a piece of string. At my request, Erin once more disappeared, returning this time with a Magic Marker. Across the top of the box I scrawled the words “Possibly Loaded” in huge red letters.

A dismayed Belle Riggs had retreated to the bed. She sat on the edge of it, rocking back and forth in a dazed sort of way. George came on into the room and sat on the bed beside her, consolingly patting her hand.

“Now, Mama,” he said. “Don’t you worry. It’s going to be all right.”

“But, George, how can they possibly think that Pete…”

Erin had been out of the room during the first exchange, but now she was back. Squatting on the floor in front of me, she looked at me across the gun-laden shoe box, her green eyes flashing fire.

“My father didn’t do this,” she said in a calm, measured voice that belied the smoldering anger in her eyes. “I know my father. He couldn’t.”

There was a whole lot about her father that I knew that Erin Kelsey didn’t. Somebody was going to have to tell her, and I didn’t want that person to be me.

“Who else besides your father has access to this room?”

“No one, except me, I guess,” she answered.

“What was your mother’s maiden name?” I asked.

“Riggs,” Erin Kelsey replied firmly. “What kind of question is that?”

“Your real mother,” I said. “What was her name?”

For the first time, Erin Kelsey’s lower lip trembled as she answered. “Marcia Riggs Kelsey was my real mother, Detective Beaumont. She was the only mother I ever knew. She changed my diapers and bandaged my knees and taught me how to drive. My birth mother’s name was Carol Ann Gentry Kelsey.”

“Where was she from?”

“Ottawa, like my dad.”

“Have you ever met any of your Canadian relatives?”

Erin shook her head. “No. None of them. My dad was sort of an orphan and there was some kind of trouble with my mother’s parents when my parents got married. I think my birth mother was disowned. That’s why we ended up living in Mexico, and that’s where we were when the car wreck killed my mother. But what does any of this have to do with this gun? I don’t understand.”

“I’m just trying to put together some background information.”

“What kind of background information?” Pete Kelsey asked suddenly from the bedroom doorway, startling us all. “What’s going on here?”

I hadn’t heard or seen him arrive, and I have no idea how long he’d been standing there in the doorway. He was still wearing heavy work boots and his sheepskin-lined denim jacket. His eyes took in the entire room in one long, sweeping glance.

Mrs. Riggs leaped off the bed and rushed to the door. “Oh, Peter, I’m so glad to see you,” she gushed breathlessly. “We found a gun in Marcia’s bottom drawer. I don’t have any idea where it came from, but I wanted it out of the house right away, so I…we asked Detective Beaumont here to come pick it up. So he was…”

“A gun?” Pete Kelsey’s question interrupted his mother-in-law’s harangue. “In Marcia’s drawer?”

Erin and I both stood up, leaving the shoe box sitting forgotten on the floor between us.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Kelsey,” I said calmly. “I’ll need to ask you a few questions about this.” I made no move to draw my weapon. In that crowded bedroom, that could have been deadly for any one of us.

“Daddy,” Erin began, cutting me off in mid-sentence and taking a halting step toward the doorway. Her action, inadvertent or not, effectively blocked my path to the door.

With a stricken look on his face, Pete Kelsey paused, but only for a fraction of an instant, then he turned and bolted back down the stairway. George and Belle Riggs, Erin, and I all leaped for the door like panicked patrons in a crowded theater responding to a shout of fire. We all jammed into the narrow doorway at once, and I heard the front door slam behind Pete Kelsey long before I ever managed to untangle myself from the others.

Breaking free at last, I pounded down the stairway behind him, but to no avail. By the time I reached the front porch, he was gone. I had no way of knowing if he had escaped on foot or if he was driving his Eagle. I turned to go back into the house to call for assistance, but a determined Erin Kelsey barred my way.

“No,” she said firmly, standing before me with her arms folded across her chest and her chin raised in fiery defiance.

“What do you mean, no?”

“You’re not coming back inside this house without a search warrant.”

“But I need to know if your father’s in his car or on foot.”

“That’s your problem.”

I backed off because I could see she meant it. “What about the gun?” I asked.

“It’ll still be right there where you left it when you come back with a warrant,” she said. “Nobody here is going to touch it, but if that’s what you think, if you believe my father’s a cold-blooded killer, I’m not going to lift a finger to help you. My grandparents won’t either.”

I couldn’t blame her for putting up a fight, and there wasn’t time to explain that asking someone questions wasn’t necessarily the same as accusing him of murder, but standing there on the porch arguing about it was splitting hairs and wasting precious time. I hurried back down to my car and radioed for help, feeling foolish that I didn’t know if our quarry was on foot or traveling by car.

Several uniformed patrol officers responded, arriving within minutes. One street at a time, we combed the immediate area at the far north end of Capitol Hill, but it was useless.

By then Pete Kelsey had disappeared completely into cold, thin air.