Usually I don’t let Doc Baker’s penchant for public relations bother me, but for some reason this time it got me good. After all, Alvin Chambers’ job title may not have sounded as important as Marcia Louise Kelsey’s but he was sure as hell equally dead. I was working up a sarcastic rejoinder, but Kramer spoke up before I had a chance to spit it out.
“We had to go there first, Doc. The Chambers woman was on the phone raising hell in the superintendent’s office because her husband was late getting home for his toast and eggs.”
“Oh,” a somewhat mollified Baker replied. “I see. Well, get the hell out of here now and find Mr. Kelsey. Do it quick before somebody else does.”
“Wait a minute. What about Charlotte Chambers?” I demanded. “After bringing her all the way down here, we can’t very well just go off and leave her like this.”
“Don’t worry about Mrs. Chambers,” Baker replied. “I’ll get someone from my office to drive her home.”
“But we haven’t interviewed her yet,” I objected.
“There’ll be time enough for that later,” Baker said, herding us unceremoniously toward the door. “After you talk with Mr. Kelsey.”
Some things aren’t worth going to the mat for, and this was one of them. I sidestepped Baker and poked my head back into the room where we had left Charlotte Chambers long enough to explain that one of Dr. Baker’s staff members would take her home. Still sitting exactly as I’d left her, she nodded gratefully. I hoped whoever Baker sent would be big enough and strong enough to handle her.
When we got out to the car, I found that Kramer had parked with the rider’s door opening directly onto a pile of dirty sanded snow left behind by a snowplow. By the time I managed to climb inside, my shoes and socks were covered with the stuff. Disgusted, I brushed it off as best I could.
“It’s only snow,” Kramer observed with a laugh. “It won’t kill you.”
I had seen Kramer coming to work both winter and summer in a little blue RX 7 equipped with a permanent set of ski racks. I knew from coffee break chatter around the office that he fancied himself as something of a ski-slope expert. That in itself would have been enough to keep me away from visiting Seattle’s nearby slopes even if I could have overcome that most basic of all objections-the one against breaking your neck.
“Just drive, would you?” I asked. “What’s the address?”
“Thirteen fifty-two East Crockett,” Kramer replied, heading off in that direction. Considering road conditions, we were lucky that the Kelsey home was in generally the same part of town as Harborview Hospital.
East Crockett Street, at the far north end of Capitol Hill, is one of those city planner’s nightmares that hops and skips its way east and west across town from Puget Sound to Lake Washington without ever being a through street. There are little chunks of Crockett on Magnolia Bluff, on Queen Anne Hill, and on Capitol Hill as well, but none of them connect.
We headed east on Boston, aiming for Thirteenth, one of two tiny streets that would take us up the hill to the single, block-long section of Crockett. As we neared the intersection, however, I noticed an aging, burnt-orange Volvo parked haphazardly on the side of the snowy street. The beat-out junker looked more than vaguely familiar.
Not Maxwell Cole, I thought with a sinking feeling in my gut. Please not Maxwell Cole, but as we came even with the car, I caught sight of a series of Seattle Post-Intelligencer parking stickers glued in the back window.
“Damn!” I muttered.
“What’s the matter?” Kramer asked, glancing at me as he swung the car out of the fairly well-traveled snowy tracks on Boston and shifted down for the steeply inclined and much-less-traveled Thirteenth.
“That old Volvo parked back down there. It’s Maxwell Cole’s car,” I answered.
“Maxwell Cole? The crime columnist for the P.-I.?”
“One and the same.”
“But how do you know for sure it’s his car?”
“Believe me, I know,” I told him.
Kramer would have recognized the Volvo too, if he’d spent as many years as I have with Max, a perpetual fraternity brother who has never grown up, dogging my every step.
Kramer groaned. “That’s great! Just what we need, a damn reporter on the scene before we are.”
My sentiments exactly.
The 1300 block of Crockett consisted of a row of three originally identical and ersatz Victorians perched like so many birds looking down on the Montlake Cut, a man-made waterway connecting Lakes Union and Washington. Angular rooflines on the narrow houses seemed to grow up out of the hillside like so many gaunt plants potted in fair-sized two-car garages far below.
Two of the houses were a faded gray, but 1352 showed every evidence of having been recently and lovingly repainted, although it must have been a killer of a job. The wooden shingles gleamed like the surrounding snow. The trim was a deep green. Two stately but snowshrouded holly trees stood guard on either side of the old-fashioned front porch, while the wide front door itself was decorated by a huge redbowed Christmas wreath. The place looked as though it might have been lifted from some old-time, gilt-lined greeting card.
The whole effect would have been picture-perfect if it hadn’t been for the overweight man with an open, flapping coat who was clutching the handrail and gingerly working his way back down the steep steps toward the sidewalk. Seeing him confirmed my worst suspicions-mine and Doc Baker’s as well. The media had indeed beaten us to the punch. The man picking his way down the stairs was none other than my old nemesis, crime columnist Maxwell Cole himself.
I scrambled out of the car, intent on stopping Cole before he managed to slip away. We needed to find out exactly how much damage he’d done. He blundered off the steps and was heading back down Crockett toward his car when I stopped him.
“Hold it right there, Max. We want to talk to you.”
At the sound of my voice, Max froze, standing knee-deep in the snow. Slowly he turned back toward me while an expression of profound dismay washed over the reporter’s face. He looked like the kid caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar.
I didn’t waste time on polite formalities. “What are you doing here, Max?”
He glanced anxiously from me to Kramer and back again. Max was out of shape and puffing from exertion just from walking back down to the street. “I stopped by to see Pete,” he man-aged.
“Pete who?” I demanded.
“Pete Kelsey,” he replied.
“Why?” I asked.
Max took a deep breath and tried to regain a little of his dignity. “He’s a friend of mine,” he replied, squaring his shoulders. “A very good friend.”
That didn’t sound likely, not coming from the Maxwell Cole I knew.
“Is he now,” I responded. “And how is it that you just happened to stop by to see him today of all days?”
“I did, that’s all,” Max insisted petulantly, his voice lapsing into its characteristic whine. “You can believe that or not.”
“I choose not, Max. I know you too damn well. Your stopping by here wouldn’t have anything to do with Pete Kelsey’s wife, now would it?”
He eyed me warily. “What if it did?”
“This is a police matter, Max. Don’t screw around with us.”
Shrugging, Maxwell Cole caved in. “I heard about Marcia as soon as I got to work,” he said. “You know how these things get around. I stopped by to see if Pete needed anything. That’s all.”
“Am I to understand that you know these people? As in friend of the family?”
He nodded.
“So tell me the truth, Max. Was this really a Good Samaritan call, or are you really out here chasing after a scoop, an exclusive interview maybe?”