Payment in Kind (22 page)

“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.

I
didn’t head out of the building as soon as I intended. Instead, I got stuck making phone calls, spending time talking with various lawenforcement authorities in Grant County, South Dakota. We needed to know something more than just a name about John David Madsen, aka Pete Kelsey.

After my request for information had been passed around the sheriff’s office there for some time while I cooled my heels on hold, I finally ended up talking to Undersheriff Hank Bjorensen, a man who had actually attended high school with John David Madsen, although Bjorensen had been two years younger.

What he told me was every bit as baffling as all the other puzzle pieces involved in what the media was now calling the school district murders.

According to Bjorensen, John David was the only child of a local and once well-to-do farming couple, from the nearby town of Marvin, a couple named Si and Gusty Madsen. John David had graduated from Milbank High School as valedictorian of his class and had gone on to an appointment to West Point. Shipped to Vietnam as a second lieutenant immediately after graduation, he had mysteriously disappeared during an R and R period in Saigon. The Army listed him first as AWOL and later as a deserter.

“That whole episode almost drove the old man crazy,” Bjorensen said. “Si Madsen was one of those old-time God-and-country men. He set out to prove the Army was wrong, insisting that his son should have been listed as an MIA, not as a deserter, but you know how that goes. The bureaucracy wears you down, grinds you down. They have all the time in the world; Si didn’t.

“It was like an obsession with him, took over his whole life until he hardly knew which end was up. To the Army he probably wasn’t much more than some pesky gnat. Mrs. Madsen died about five years ago. Old Si kept right on after it for a while, writing letters to his congressmen, writing letters to the editor, but when Gusty died, that took most of the spunk out of him. I think he just lost heart, finally, and gave up. After he died, the farm went to a niece and nephew on his wife’s side.”

“Are there any other living relatives?” I asked.

“Not as far as I know, other than the Lunds, the cousins I told you about, the ones living on the farm. But like I said, the Lunds are on his mother’s side. On his father’s, John David was the only child of an only child, so he was the last of the line as far as the Madsens are concerned. Do you want me to call Ruth Lund and see if she knows of anyone?”

“No, I don’t think that will be necessary,” I replied.

“So tell me. Why’s a big-city cop from Seattle interested in all this ancient history?”

Waffling, I said, “I’m working a case that might be connected.”

I didn’t want to admit straight out that I knew for sure John David Madsen was alive and well and living as a fugitive somewhere far away from Marvin and Milbank, South Dakota. Making an informal inquiry was fine, but at that point I could see no need of officially involving another jurisdiction. After successfully eluding his past for over twenty years, I was relatively certain that South Dakota was the very last place where a missing Pete Kelsey/John David Madsen would show up.

When I hung up a few moments later, I sat there in my office cubicle staring at the phone as if the answers to my questions were somehow encoded into the touch-tone numbers if only I had the ability to divine them.

What would have driven a gung ho, patriotic West Point graduate to disappear off the face of the earth as far as both his family and country were concerned? A My Lai incident or some other wartime atrocity? That might have been enough to send him AWOL, but what had driven him underground and kept him there for so many years after the war was over, while in the meantime, back home, his parents died with no word or clue about what had happened to him? What had made someone with a good family leave them all behind without a backward glance? And why would someone with a fine mind, perhaps even a brilliant one, hide out in a lifetime’s worth of low-status, craftsman-type jobs that required some skill, certainly, but didn’t begin to tap his intellect?

No matter how long I stared, the impassive face of the telephone gave me no answers to these troubling questions.

In the course of homicide investigations, I often encounter unexpected pieces of people’s past lives. Sometimes those secrets come from the victim’s side of the aisle, sometimes from the perpetrator’s. Often these pieces of history have little or nothing to do with the case at hand. But in this instance, and for no logical reason I could pinpoint, I had the uncanny sense that Pete Kelsey’s hidden past had everything to do with my unsolved double homicide.

I called down to Seattle Security and was told that Fred Petrie, the owner, was in a meeting and would be out in about half an hour. I figured there was just time enough to pick up a fresh turkey sandwich from Bakeman’s, see Fred Petrie on the way, and make it to a noontime brown-bag AA meeting in one of the missions in Pioneer Square.

Carrying a paper sack containing my made-to-order sandwich—turkey on whole wheat bread with sprouts, cranberry sauce, and mustard—I headed on down Cherry and First, briskly threading my way through a chilly Pioneer Square until I came to Seattle Security’s office in a decrepit building just east of the Kingdome.

Seattle Security was still in the exact same location it had occupied years earlier when I had sometimes moonlighted as a security guard to supplement my meager Seattle P.D. salary.

Within minutes of giving my name to the receptionist, I was shown into the private office of Fred Petrie. Instead of the familiar, portly-bodied and bald-headed countenance of Fred Senior, I encountered Fred Junior, the new owner and much younger son of the original.

I remembered Freddie Petrie from those earlier days as a whiny, miserable adolescent, a loudmouthed and none-too-talented Little League player who dreamed of one day making it in the Majors. He hadn’t made it. From the looks of things, he was having a difficult enough time just trying to fill Fred Senior’s unambitious shoes.

As I listened to him rail on, I was struck by how little he had changed. He was still the very same spoiled and obnoxious shit he had been as a child. Longhaired and clad in a ragged shirt and scruffy tennis shoes, he looked as though he should still be knocking around on some high school campus carrying a civics textbook instead of hanging out in an office with his name on the door and a brass plaque on the desk that labeled him president and CEO.

When I gave him my card, he didn’t remember me from Adam, but then, why should he? After all, security guards are a dime a dozen. Just ask Alvin Chambers.

But I will say this much for Freddie Petrie. He, at least, was prepared to talk about Alvin Chambers.

“I know why you’re here, Detective Beaumont,” he said with a doleful shake of his head. “It’s a terrible thing. In fact, I still can’t believe it happened. We’ve been in business in this same location for nearly forty-five years, and this is the first time we’ve ever had an on-the-job fatality.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said. “I worked for your dad years ago when I was first on the force.”

Petrie looked up at me. “Oh, did you?” he asked vaguely and without much interest.

“How is your father, by the way?”

“You know him?” he asked.

It was a dumb question, and I couldn’t quite believe he had asked it. Back in those days everybody at Seattle Security knew everybody else. It had been a typical mom-and-pop operation, with Fred Senior handling the hiring and scheduling, and his wife, Mazie, doing the books and payroll.

“I knew them both,” I said.

“The folks are off enjoying themselves, cruising the Bahamas,” he said resentfully. “I wish I were too. Seems like I’m always scrambling for money these days. I’m buying out their interest, at least I’m trying to. Having somebody die on the job like this is going to send our insurance costs out of sight.”

I knew for a fact that Fred Senior would have been far more worried about Alvin Chambers’ family than he would have been about his company’s insurance premiums. Fred Senior was a likable guy, a people person. With the changing of the name on the office door, Seattle Security’s bottom line had changed as well. It made me feel old and more than a little sad.

“What can you tell me about Alvin Chambers?” I asked.

It’s always best to start interviews with non-threatening, mundane questions and gradually ease into more substantial inquiries. I figured it would be best to ask for the handwriting sample only after Fred Junior had gotten used to giving me what I wanted. It’s the old door-to-door salesman’s technique of getting the customer accustomed to saying yes.