“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.”
