Payment in Kind (3 page)

“And then what happened?”

“I screamed. At least somebody told me later that I screamed. I don’t remember it at all. And then I guess I fainted. Mr. Jacobs from Curriculum was just coming through the door as it happened. He caught me and kept me from falling. He’s the one who placed the call to 911.”

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

“There’s not much to tell. Security keeps a log of whoever comes and goes after hours and on weekends. People have to sign in and out.”

“You said you put the logbook away. Where is it now?”

She pointed back toward the still unoccupied receptionist’s desk in the middle of the room. “Right there,” she said. “In the bottom drawer. Would you like me to get it for you?”

“No,” I replied. “Leave it there for right now. Did anyone else besides you touch the book or the table or chair?”

“Not that I know of.”

“We may need to have a sample of your fingerprints,” I said.

Up till then, the interview had been rolling along fairly smoothly, but at the mention of fingerprints, Jennifer Lafflyn balked. “Why? What would you need my fingerprints for? I haven’t done anything wrong. I was just doing my job.”

Kramer moved in soothingly to calm troubled waters. “It’s standard procedure, Ms. Lafflyn. We take prints and have them available. For comparison purposes.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding somewhat mollified, but she was still glaring at me when she said it. I hadn’t gotten off on the right foot with the young lady, and it wasn’t getting any better.

“Let’s talk about the victims for a moment,” I said. “Do you know anything about them?”

Jennifer Lafflyn nodded authoritatively, jutting her chin. It was almost as though the stupidity of my question had somehow stiffened her spine. “Of course I do. Everybody here knows them. Alvin’s the security guard I was telling you about.”

“And the woman?”

“Mrs. Kelsey,” she answered confidently.

“Who?”

“Marcia Louise Kelsey, from Labor Relations.”

Doc Baker, finally satisfied with the photographer’s work, emerged from the closet for the last time and directed two of his technicians to cover the bodies. Seeing that, Kramer abruptly snapped shut his notebook and strode off across the room, catching up with the medical examiner as he neared the door.

Kramer may have been ready to cut short the interview with Jennifer Lafflyn, but I wasn’t. She watched with undisguised interest as Kramer walked across the room, and she seemed surprised when she looked back and found me still standing there.

“What time did Alvin Chambers usually get off work?” I asked.

Jennifer frowned. “What do you need to know that for?”

“We have to know what was usual in order to figure out what was different in the pattern, where there are any discrepancies.”

“Seven-thirty,” she answered. “And he always left right on the dot, never early and never late.”

“So you were here together for half an hour or so nearly every morning?”

She nodded.

“How long had you known one another?”

Jennifer shrugged. “I don’t remember exactly. Two or three months maybe. A long time for that job. It seems like all the other guards change every week or so. Everybody but Alvin. He seemed to really like it, to enjoy what he was doing.”

“So is it busy around here in the mornings, or did you two have a chance to talk?”

“Some,” she said. “Alvin was friendly. He liked people.”

Jennifer Lafflyn was as changeable as Seattle’s weather. Once more her eyes filled with tears that spilled over and ran down her cheeks. “I liked him a lot. As a friend, even though he was old enough to be my father. I really respected him, know what I mean?”

“And what did the two of you talk about?”

“Work, the weather, dumb stuff like that. Sometimes we talked about God.”

“God?” I asked.

“Alvin was very religious. He used to be a minister, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. Did he retire?”

Jennifer shook her head. “I don’t think so. He told me he quit. Just like that, but he was real religious all the same. Sometimes I thought maybe he was trying to convert me, but mostly we just talked.”

“Did you ever see him with Mrs. Kelsey?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean did you ever see them together, talking together, coming and going at the same time?”

“No,” she said firmly. “Never. Why?”

It was my turn to shrug, surprised that she hadn’t put two and two together on her own.

“If you find two people dead in the same closet, it’s not too far-fetched to think that there might be some kind of connection between them.”

During interviews, detectives are trained to watch for every nuance of expression. The twitch of an eyelid can be vital. A sudden anxiety exhibited by fluttering hands may indicate that questions are probing too near some painful truth. In answer to my comment, I saw a flicker of something blaze briefly in Jennifer’s eyes before she blinked and sent a curtain of disdain over her face.

She struggled to her feet. “No,” she said. “Absolutely not! There was never anything like that between them. You have a really nasty mind, Detective Beaumont. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go to the rest room and wash my face.”

I watched her flounce off across the reception area, tottering a little in her high-heeled boots. She disappeared into a ladies’ washroom. From her reaction, there could be no doubt that my suggestion of a relationship between the two dead people had sent Jennifer Lafflyn running for cover.

I wondered why that was, because if Alvin Chambers and Marcia Louise Kelsey hadn’t had a relationship before they died, they sure as hell had one now.

I
was on my way to the door to join Doc Baker and Detective Kramer when I almost collided with a lady who came rushing down the stairway into the reception area. She was a horsefaced woman wearing a severe suit that matched her iron gray hair. She stopped directly in front of me, pausing uncertainly and looking anxiously around the room.

“May I help you?” I asked.

“Oh, my, yes. Are you with the police?”

“Yes. My name’s Detective Beaumont. What can I do for you?”

“I’m Doris, Doris Walker, Dr. Savage’s secretary.”

Dr. Kenneth Savage, the superintendent of schools, was the one employee of the school district whose name I recognized without any prompting. He had come to Seattle from Boston several years earlier and was trying to help the district cope with its twin perennial problems of decreasing enrollment and decreasing revenues. The fact that Savage had lasted for five whole years in a mostly thankless position not known for job security probably meant he was doing a reasonably good job.

“I just don’t know what to do,” Doris continued distractedly. “With all that’s happened here this morning, Dr. Savage is having all the calls routed through us upstairs, and…” She stopped in midsentence, seemingly overcome by indecision.

“And what, Doris?” I prodded. “We can’t help you if you don’t tell us exactly what the problem is.”

“Mrs. Chambers is on the phone,” she blurted suddenly, nodding toward the janitor’s closet without actually looking at it. “You know. His wife.”

Although she seemed close to tears, she kept her voice discreetly low. I glanced cautiously around the room to make sure I was the only one listening to what she said.

“She told me that she has his breakfast on the table ready for him to eat it but that her husband still isn’t home. He’s more than an hour late, and she wanted to know if he had left here. That means she doesn’t know anything at all yet, and I don’t want to be the one to tell her. I mean what can you say when something this terrible has happened?”

I could have told Doris Walker that years of doing it, years of bringing people that kind of devastating news, doesn’t make it any easier.

Instead I said, “Get the phone number and address of wherever she is right now. Tell her there’s been a problem here at the office, and that you’ll have someone check and get back to her as soon as possible. All right?”

Doris Walker nodded gratefully, heaving an immense sigh of relief. “So you don’t want me to tell her. I don’t have to?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Oh, good. I was afraid it was going to be up to me.”

“Go back and talk to her now,” I urged. “And when you get the information I asked for, come straight back here and give it to me. We’ll handle it from there.”

“Of course. Right away.” Doris Walker hurried toward the stairs with the step of someone whose shoulders had just been relieved of the weight of the world. I in turn joined Kramer and Doc Baker near the door.

“Where’ve you been?” Kramer asked. “We don’t have all day, you know.”

Behind Kramer’s back, Doc Baker gave an almost imperceptible shake to his head. The blatantly sympathetic look told me he found Detective Paul Kramer almost as tiresome as I did.

“What have we got, Doc?” I asked.

“Looks like homicide/suicide so far, although we haven’t found a suicide note yet,” Baker replied. “My guess is she got him first and then turned the gun on herself. She died right away. He took his time.”

“IDs?”

Baker nodded. “Tentative. We’ll have to have them confirmed by relatives as soon as possible. The male was wearing a name badge.”

“I saw that,” I said.

“People here say his whole name was Alvin Chambers. He worked for Seattle Security. They’re the company with the security contract for the school district. The woman’s name is Marcia Louise Kelsey. She was head of Labor Relations for the district here. We noticed her purse wasn’t here. You may want to see if it’s upstairs in her office when you go up to secure it.”

I nodded. “Thanks for letting us know.”

Baker waved and started away. “No problem.”

“By the way,” I added. “Those are the same names we were given by the receptionist.”

Baker stopped and turned, raising one bushy eyebrow. “Who’s that? Jennifer Lafflyn, the young woman who found the bodies?”

“That’s right.”

The medical examiner nodded his massive head. “I see, but we still have to regard the identification as tentative for right now. Did she have any idea about what kind of links might exist between these two people?”

“As a matter of fact, I asked her that very question just a few minutes ago,” I replied. “According to her, there was no connection whatsoever.”

I could have added that Jennifer’s exaggerated nonresponse to my question had made me wonder, but it was such a tenuous hunch on my part that I didn’t bother. I wouldn’t have minded passing the idea along to Doc Baker, but I wasn’t in favor of giving Kramer the benefit of my theory. Sharing hunches with people you neither like nor respect can be lots tougher in the long run than simply keeping your mouth shut.

“Well,” said Baker, “I was just giving your partner here what we assume to be the victims’ names and addresses. After you finish up, you may want to track down next-of-kin, notify them officially, and bring them by my office for the positive ID. Just give us an hour or so to get the bodies back downtown.”

At that point, one of the medical examiner’s technicians came over and waited patiently to be acknowledged. “What is it, Stevens?” Baker asked.

“There was something under one of the stiffs. Thought you and the dicks ought to take a look.”

We walked back over to the closet. Marcia Kelsey’s body had been removed altogether. Alvin Chambers’ body-bagged corpse had been hefted onto a gurney nearby.

“It was under his ankle,” Stevens said. “Anywhere else and it would have been covered with blood.”

On the floor of the closet, in a small area where the tile hadn’t been stained brown, lay a little yellow Post-it sheet. Grunting, Baker knelt down, studied the paper for a moment, then got up and moved out of the way, letting Kramer and me go by turns.

It was one of those cute little notepad things that says “From the desk of Marcia Kelsey.” The handwriting was firm and perfectly legible: “A, See you tonight at the usual time. M.”

“So they were getting it on in the closet,” Paul Kramer crowed once he had read the note. “I told you.”

Baker shot him a withering glance.

Something was bothering me, nudging my thinking. “Why did she do it in the closet with the door closed?” I asked, looking back inside at the grungy room with its dirty, deep sink. The only light was from a dim, unshaded forty-watt bulb hanging on the end of a rubberized cord with a chain pull for turning it off and on.

“You’re right,” Baker agreed. “That closet’s not a very nice place, but maybe she wanted to muffle the noise.”

But I was still studying the hanging lightbulb. Suddenly another bulb switched on in my head. “Wait a minute, Doc, was this light off or on when you got here?”

Frowning, Baker peered at me over the tops of his thick bifocals. “Off,” he said. “Why?”

“Had anybody messed with it?”

“They all said they hadn’t,” he answered, giving me his undivided attention and nodding as the light dawned for him as well. “Now that you mention it, Beau, you’re right. The light was definitely off. I’m the one who turned it on so we could see what we were doing in there.”

“What’s the light being off or on got to do with anything?” Kramer asked impatiently.

“People hardly ever kill themselves in the dark,” I replied.

“Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me that some poor son of a bitch who isn’t worried about blowing his brains out would be scared of doing it in the dark? Get off it. Once they’re dead, what does it matter?”

Paul Kramer had walked me right up to the very edge of my patience. “Let’s leave interpretation up to the shrinks, shall we, Detective Kramer?”

Before Kramer could reply, Baker broke in. “Thanks for pointing out the light thing, Beau. It’ll keep us on our toes when we do the autopsies.”

“And when will that be?”

“This afternoon, probably. With the lousy weather, business is a little slow for us right now. Except for this, it’s been too damned cold for people to be running around killing each other. For a change we don’t have cases lined up and waiting. Even if we did, though, this would be a priority. After all, these people are supposedly fine, upstanding members of the community. There’s going to be a whole lot of heat from the public and the media wanting to see results fast. This one isn’t going to be any picnic for us, or for you either.”