Payment in Kind (34 page)

Suddenly she jerked Erin to one side and headed for the guardrail. I knew if she once reached it, we’d lose them both, that they’d fall to their deaths among the hundreds of parked import cars on Pier 91 far below us.

I leaped in from the side and grabbed for Erin’s arm. As soon as my hand closed around her wrist, I dragged both of them back toward the centerline. For a long moment we hung there, caught in a desperate tug-of-war. I heard the sickening pop of joint and tendon and knew we’d dislocated Erin’s shoulder. She yelped with pain, but even as she did, we tumbled back into the center of the roadway. I had managed to pry Erin loose from Jennifer’s deathlike grip.

“Put down the knife, Jennifer,” Pete Kelsey ordered quietly, calmly. “You need help. We’ll get it for you.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t.”

Warily Jennifer backed away from him, swaying back and forth like some cornered wild animal, her eyes locked on him and him alone. One hand still held the menacing knife while the other lovingly caressed the guardrail.

“Daddy, be careful,” Erin sobbed. “She’s crazy. She’ll kill you. She said she would.”

Just then, Jennifer Lafflyn sprang forward, holding the deadly knife in front of her. Pete Kelsey jumped back and dodged to one side, but not quite fast enough or far enough. The knife plunged into his side and he crumpled to the ground.

Shoving Erin away, I went to help, but before I could reach them, Jennifer Lafflyn vaulted over the guardrail.

Her terrible scream keened up to us from the enveloping darkness. It was a long, long fall, and the piercing cry seemed to go on forever, ending with the sickening crunch of metal and explosion of glass as she crashed into the roof of one of the Nissans parked far below.

Jennifer Lafflyn died instantly, taking an unsuspecting thirty-five-thousand-dollar sports car with her, but for long moments afterward, echoes of her piercing scream reverberated off the walls of the bluffs around us. The gruesome sound of her going seemed to linger forever.

In my worst nightmares, I hear it still.

I’m sure I always will.

T
he doctors at Harborview Hospital removed Pete Kelsey’s damaged spleen, and by nine o’clock that night we knew he was out of danger. George and Belle Riggs took Erin Kelsey, her shoulder bandaged and her arm in a sling, home with them. Nobody said much about Jennifer Lafflyn.

While I was at the hospital, Kramer had gotten a search warrant and gone through Jennifer’s apartment. I wanted to wait up and see what he found, but I was too damn tired. I dragged the beat-up old body home and put it to bed.

The next morning, when I climbed out of bed, I ended up hopping on one foot. During the melee on the bridge, I had reactivated my bone-spur. It’s hell getting old.

I was slogging my way through reports when Detective Kramer showed up. “Want to take a trip down to the evidence room and see the jackpot?” he asked.

“Good stuff?” I asked.

“Good enough,” he returned. “Her real name is Julie McLaughlin, by the way. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police up in Vancouver came up with that late last night after you went home.”

We went down to the crime lab, with Kramer dashing off ahead and me limping along behind. At Kramer’s request, the evidence clerk brought out a stack of several boxes. The first contained half a dozen framed pictures—the missing ones from Marcia’s office. On each, the glass had been hammered to pieces, and all faces in the pictures themselves had been totally obliterated by smears of red ink.

When we took the top off the next one, it contained nothing but wastepaper. “You brought the trash along?” I asked. “Isn’t that being a little compulsive?”

“Some trash,” Kramer said. “It’s all Marcia Kelsey’s. Notes, correspondence, grocery lists—things she tossed in her office trash can without thinking about them and which were rescued and studied by Julie McLaughlin as she was making her plans.”

“So this wasn’t something she dreamed up overnight.”

“Hardly. She’s been working on it for a long, long time with single-minded determination, probably since her mother died. Maybe since before her mother died. Look at this.”

He held up a page from a phone book. It was old—yellowed and crumbling. It must have been at least ten years old. The name that was circled in heavy black ink was that of George F. Riggs, listed along with a Queen Anne address and phone number, not of the Riggs’ new condo, but of their old address, the place where Marcia had lived as a child.

“This is how she tracked them down?”

“Evidently.”

“I can see that it wasn’t that hard to find them, since she had the name and address of Marcia’s folks, but how did she end up working for the school district?”

Kramer smiled. “That’s easy,” he said. “Blackmail. She showed up at Marcia’s office, threatened her with exposure, and told her she needed a job. I already checked that out with Kendra Meadows in Personnel. Marcia Kelsey was listed as a reference on Jennifer Lafflyn’s job application. The other two names and addresses don’t exist at all as far as I can tell.”

Detective Kramer may be a pain in the ass at times, but in this case, he had done some astute thinking. I could finally see how it all came together.

“So she settled down to work for the district, and spent all her spare time spying on Marcia Kelsey and gathering information.”

“And garbage,” Kramer added. “There’s a lot of damning stuff dropped into garbage cans these days. Here’s something else.”

He handed me a small, invitation-sized envelope. Inside was a thank-you card with a handwritten note that said:

Dear Alvin,

I can’t thank you enough for all the help and advice you’ve given me about “the problem.” You’re right. What they do isn’t any of my business. That’s between them and God. He’ll have to punish them for it.

Jennifer

The last almost made me laugh. “And in case God forgot, she was fully prepared to take up the slack, but from the sound of this, it seems like she and Alvin Chambers were pals. Do you think she meant to kill him?”

Kramer shook his head. “We’ll never know for sure. I think Marcia and Pete Kelsey were the real targets. Chances are Chambers walked in on her when he shouldn’t have and she decided to incorporate him into the program.”

That made sense. It was one more piece in a foolproof recipe for posthumous character assassination.

There was a separate box filled with nothing but clothing, and a final container with two items, a garage door opener and a set of keys.

“Marcia’s?” I asked.

“According to the monogram on the key chain. Too bad we’re not taking this one to trial. You hardly ever get a case with this much damning evidence. It would be open and shut.”

I disagreed with Kramer there. Wholeheartedly. No matter what the evidence, murder trials are never open and shut, and they always add immeasurably to the pain of the people left alive. Pete and Erin Kelsey, Belle and George Riggs, and Andrea Stovall didn’t need their names and lives dragged through any more mud. They had already been through enough.

Back upstairs in my office, I filled out enough reports to choke even Sergeant Watkins. Kramer was going around the floor, thumping his chest and telling anybody who would listen what a great job we’d done. I didn’t think we were all that slick. After all, Pete Kelsey was in the hospital with a knife wound, Erin’s shoulder was dislocated, and my foot hurt like hell.

Around noon the insurance adjuster turned up to give me the verdict on the Porsche. She recommended that it be totaled, but I’m a sentimental slob and wanted a second opinion. Eventually she gave me a check and let me have the wreck towed to Ernie Rogers’ garage on Orcas Island on the condition that if the rebuild job came to more than the check, the difference was coming out of my pocket. Fair enough. We’ll have to see what happens.

About five that afternoon, just as I was getting ready to leave the office, I had a call from Maxwell Cole inviting me to meet him for tapas at a place called Cafeé Felipe near Pioneer Square. Max sounded real low, and I figured he could use a little cheering up. Besides, I was in the mood for Mexican food, so I agreed to meet him.

It turns out, however, that tapas are Spanish, not Mexican. They could just as well have been Greek, for all I knew. There wasn’t any of it that I recognized, but it was all delicious. In my frame of mind, liberal doses of garlic on everything were just what the doctor ordered.

I may have been wrong thinking Cafeé Felipe served Mexican food, but I was right about Max. He was lower than a snake’s vest pocket. Brooding over everything he had learned about Pete and Marcia Kelsey in the last few days, Maxwell Cole was still in a world of hurt.

“How come Marcia never let on?” he asked plaintively. “How come she and Pete let me spend all these years thinking I was the one who introduced them?”

“They needed you to help create their fictional life,” I told him. “And for twenty years, it worked. Have you seen Erin?”

He nodded.

“How’s she taking it?”

“All right, I guess. After all, Pete’s the only father she’s ever known, and he almost got himself killed trying to save her.”

“Look, Max,” I said, “you and Erin both have every right to feel betrayed, but Pete Kelsey’s always been your friend, the same way he’s always been Erin’s father. Right now he needs both of you in his corner. Don’t let what happened in the past rob you of the present.”

Max thought about it for a while, then nodded. “You’re right,” he said.

Brightening a little, he added, “By the way, Caleb Drachman called today and said he’s arranging for Pete to get a general discharge. At first the Army said he’d have to come to California to be processed, but considering the circumstances, they’re sending the processing to him here. By the time he gets out of Harborview, he’ll also be out of the Army.”

“Good,” I said, and meant it.

Having given Max a rousing little pep talk and after loading up on garlic, I went off to an AA meeting. While there, I started thinking about how easy it is to hand out advice and how hard it is to take it.

A month later, at the end of my ninety meetings in ninety days, I left the Sunday morning breakfast group that meets up near Northgate. Driving my insurance-company loaner, I inexplicably found myself in the 8400 block of Dayton Avenue North.

It was one of those balmy January days, the kind that trick trees into blossoming and sucker crocuses into popping up out of the ground. During the intervening weeks since I had inadvertently stumbled on the name and address in the phone book, I had driven past the place several times, always thinking about Pete Kelsey and the family he had abandoned in South Dakota.

For a time I stood on the sidewalk examining the place. It was hardly more than a clapboard cottage, with shaded front windows and a roughed-in wheelchair ramp going up the two shallow steps onto the front porch.

I had driven past on numerous occasions, but this was the first time I had stopped. There was an old white dog lying on the front porch. She thumped her tail once or twice, but she didn’t get up until I rang the bell, then she got up and limped over to the door. I guess she figured if I got in, she would too.

After I rang the bell, I stood there on the porch with my heart thumping wildly in my chest. I don’t know what I expected. It was several moments before I heard anyone moving inside the house. At last the knob turned and the door opened.

I stood looking down at a bent-over little old lady. Over a cotton housedress, she wore a fulllength apron, made from the same pattern my mother had always used.

“Yes?” she said, peering up at me through thick glasses.

I swallowed hard, unable to say anything. Then she stepped closer to me and studied my face.

“Why, Jonas!” she said.

I thought for a moment that she was calling to her husband, my grandfather, but then she reached up and grasped the lapels of my jacket.

“Jonas? Is it you?”

For a moment, my knees wobbled under me. No one had called me Jonas in the twenty years since my mother died. With a clawlike grip on my wrist, the old woman dragged me into the house. The dog shuffled inside as well.

In the doorway of the tiny living room sat a man in a wheelchair. One side of his face was frozen into a permanent grimace, but the resemblance between us was uncanny. I was, as they say, the spitting image.

The dog went over to the man and eased her head up under a useless, stroke-bound hand. The woman led me forward. My legs seemed made of wood.

“Jonas, look who’s here. Can you imagine after all these years?”

My tongue was welded to the roof of my mouth, but the old woman was used to doing all the talking in the household. I don’t think she even noticed.

“Your grandfather had a stroke two years ago,” my grandmother was explaining unnecessarily, “so he doesn’t talk much. I always told him you’d come someday, didn’t I, Jonas? I told him I wouldn’t go against his wishes and go looking for you, but that if you ever came here…”

She reached up with the hem of her apron, and wiped her eyes. It’s hard to think of a wrinkled old lady in terms of radiant, but her transparent skin fairly glowed. In her aged features I caught echoes of my mother’s much younger and almost forgotten face.

Laboriously the old man lifted one hand and began making mysterious motions with it. He seemed to be drawing a square in the air.

“Oh,” my grandmother said. “You want me to get the box?”

There was an almost imperceptible nod from the man in the chair. The old lady bustled out of the room, leaving the two of us to examine each other in thick silence.

When she came back, she was carrying a box, an old-fashioned hatbox. It was so full that the cover wouldn’t quite shut. The corners were held together with tape so old that it had turned brown and brittle.

She put the box on the dining room table and then came back and pushed the old man’s wheelchair over to the table.

“Well,” she said to me. “Are you coming or not?”