Max paused to consider. “Wait a minute. Now that you mention it, I think I may have met her once at a Christmas party at Pete and Marcia’s. As I recall, I didn’t like her much. Dykish females tend to rub me the wrong way.”
“Dykish? She didn’t strike me that way, and I thought she was married.”
“Divorced,” Max answered. “A lot of times they get married, but it’s just for show and it doesn’t last. Don’t look so surprised, J. P. It’s not like they have to go around wearing a sign or something.”
An errant thought crossed my mind. “What about Marcia Kelsey?” I asked.
Now it was Max’s turn to be surprised. “Marcia? A les? No way. She was a fun-loving girl, all right, but strictly heterosexual. If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
This time it was my pager that went off and interrupted the process. Max directed me to the kitchen phone, which was far enough away to be out of earshot when I called in, I was given Ron Peters’ number.
“There you are,” he said when he heard my voice. “Amy gave me strict orders to get in touch with you early today, but I’ve been stuck in a meeting all morning long. We just got out.”
“What do you need?”
“We wanted you to come to dinner tonight. Amy’s doing a pot roast. It should be good.”
A pot roast? Real home cooking? It was too good to resist. “What time?” I asked.
“What time can you make it?”
My after-work AA meeting would last from five-thirty to six-thirty in the basement of a downtown church across from Denny Park.
“Is seven too late?”
“No. That’ll be fine. See you then.”
Ron started to hang up, but I stopped him. “Wait a minute, Ron. There’s something I need some help with.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you remember hearing anything about a series of bomb threats at the school district office last fall?”
“Bomb threats? I don’t remember anything about it.”
“Me either,” I told him, “but they happened, and they didn’t get reported. What I want to know is who buried those reports and how they did it.”
“Sounds like something that’s right up my alley,” Ron said. I could hear a smile lighting up his face, an echo of the old enthusiasm leaking into his voice.
“That’s what I thought. By the way, don’t try checking directly with the Firearms and Explosives guys,” I warned. “We don’t want to get Sparky’s tail caught in a wringer on this one.”
“Don’t worry,” Ron Peters responded with a laugh. “I have my own sources, and I’ll be the soul of discretion. See you at seven.”
I left the phone and went back into Maxwell Cole’s living room. He was leaning back with his eyes closed. For a moment I thought he had fallen asleep, but he sat up as soon as he heard me pause in the doorway.
“Did Pete tell you about the harassing phone calls?” Max asked.
“Yes.”
“And he told you that Erin had been getting them too?”
“Yes.”
“Is it possible the phone calls and the murders are related?”
As a loyal friend of Pete Kelsey’s, Max was gently trying to lead me away from pointing an accusing finger in Pete’s direction. Under the circumstances, I probably would have done the same thing. He was also fishing for information.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I replied evenly, trying not to let any information slip into my words or intonation. “It’s much too early to speculate.”
“Well, I think they are,” Max declared forcefully, maybe trying to convince himself as much as he wanted to convince me. “When you find the person making those phone calls, you’ll find the killer. You mark my words.”
It always sounds so easy when somebody else says it. So easy and so simple. Saying it and doing it, however, are two entirely different things.
“Right, Max,” I said, picking up my coat and showing myself to the door. “We’ll have to see about that.”
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Chapter 14
When I stepped out onto the covered porch of Maxwell Cole’s Victorian home, it was such a relief to be out of the hot house that I thought at first it was much warmer. It wasn’t. I was just overheated from the inside out.
My growling stomach said it was lunchtime, and I listened. Rather than go back down the way I’d come, I decided to trek on across the summit of Queen Anne Hill to the upscale little business district at the top of the Counterbalance, the steepest part of the hill, where heavy weights had once been used to aid trolleys going up and down Queen Anne Avenue.
By eleven-thirty I found a comfortable chair in a trendy cafe called Apres Vous and was stuffing myself with a mouthwatering Tower Burger, named after the cluster of radio towers, including one still covered with Christmas lights, that had sprouted like three gangly weeds across the crest of the hill behind the restaurant.
I chewed my food and mulled over my conversation with Maxwell Cole. I couldn’t get beyond the uneasy sense that something was strangely out of kilter in what I was learning about Pete and Marcia Kelsey. There was no one thing I could point to, no one blatantly obvious discrepancy, just an overall sense that what I had discovered about them so far was somehow dim and slightly out of focus. I couldn’t get a clear picture of either one of them.
According to Pete, the marriage had been wrong, at least as far as he was concerned, for a considerable period of time. Yet he hadn’t left. And if, as Max had told me, Marcia had flitted from one meaningless relationship to another, then it hadn’t been right for her, either. Yet something had compelled them to stay together. What was it? And did this elusive “something” have anything to do with the murders at hand? The only way to find out was to gather more information.
While downing my second and third cups of coffee, I wrote up a detailed report on everything I had learned from Kendra Meadows and an equally detailed version of Max’s interview. If Watty wanted reports, I’d plant my butt on a chair somewhere and give him reports until the damn cows came home.
Over dessert I studied my lists of things to do and people to see, both the ones I had made and the ones given me earlier that morning by Kendra Meadows. I tried to prioritize those things that needed to be handled first.
Speculating about Pete and Marcia Kelsey’s kinky marriage was intriguing as hell, but I didn’t want to be as guilty of neglecting Alvin Chambers as everybody else was. He was inarguably part of the puzzle. He was also equally dead, and Charlotte Chambers’ next-of-kin interview was still missing.
That at least was something I could fix, another little trophy I could lay on Sergeant Watkins’ desk to say what a good boy am I. And in keeping with my good-boy persona, I made one pro forma call to the department to check on whether Detective Kramer had turned up for his court appearance or if he would be joining me for the afternoon’s labors. Luckily for him, the son of a bitch was stuck in court for the remainder of the day and possibly for much of the rest of the week. I was free to work on my own for the afternoon with a totally clear conscience.
I walked out of the restaurant fully prepared to head back down to the department and check out a car to take to the North End. Instead, providence stepped into the picture in the guise of a battered Farwest cab.
The ancient green hulk of a taxi was stopped directly in front of me as I stepped out onto the sidewalk. It was disgorging an improbable number of laughing, baby-gift-carrying women on their way to a noontime shower. Without a moment’s hesitation, I climbed into the newly unoccupied taxi and directed the driver to take me north to Charlotte Chambers’ Forest Grove apartment complex.
The heavily traveled streets weren’t nearly as bad as they had been earlier. Sand, slightly warmer temperatures, and friction from passing vehicles had combined to turn most of the roadways to lumpy slush,
