I couldn’t help but feel a growing curiosity about the man. News of his wife’s death had rocked him, but it hadn’t kept him from conscientiously closing up the Trolleyman before he left, and it didn’t keep him from properly put ting away his tools and equipment, either.
“Come on in,” he said, leading the way.
As I followed him, I was struck by the contrast between Marcia Kelsey’s messy office and the pristine condition of Pete Kelsey’s garage. Cupid must get a helluva kick from linking up poor unfortunate odd couples and watching while they try to work out a lifetime’s worth of differences.
The door from the garage led to a stairway and up into a back-door entryway that also served as a pantry. From there we followed Pete Kelsey into what the real estate ads always refer to as a country kitchen. This one had been spectacularly remodeled, from the recessed lighting in the ten-foot ceiling to the glossy finish on the hardwood floor. Both the cabinets and the countertops were made from the same light-colored Swedish-finish wood, and both were varnished to a lustrous shine.
I’m not a cook, nor do I consider myself a connoisseur of kitchens, but in my uneducated opinion, this one clearly possessed all the modern conveniences. The whole effect was one of quality design executed by highly skillful workmanship. Maybe Pete Kelsey looked like an oldfashioned hippie, but the house screamed of advanced yuppiedom, and I sensed from his casual pride in ownership that we were looking at a Ph. D.-level do-it-yourself project.
“Coffee?” Pete Kelsey asked, motioning us onto chrome-legged stools grouped around an island counter.
I nodded. It had been a long morning, with no time out for a single cup of coffee, to say nothing of breakfast.
While we watched in silence, Pete ground fresh, gourmet-type beans, started a pot of coffee, and put a hunk of crusty homemade bread on the countertop in front of us along with a container of butter and a pot of homemade apricot jam. He moved with the easy assurance of someone accustomed to working in a kitchen.
“Help yourselves,” he said, handing us knives and napkins. “I’ve got to make some calls first. Our daughter is in school at the U of O down in Eugene. I need to get hold of her. And then there’s Marcia’s parents,” he added bleakly.
Rather than retreating to the relative privacy of another room, Pete made the two calls from a wall phone in the kitchen. He reached Erin, the daughter, first.
Munching on the delicious brown bread and helping myself to the robust, black coffee, I heard only one side of the difficult conversation. Pete Kelsey delivered his shocking news as humanely as possible. After a short pause punctuated by murmured words of comfort, he went on to arrange the businesslike details of how and when Erin should get back home.
His judgment, one with which I heartily concurred, was that the roads were far too hazardous for her to risk driving. He advised her to catch the first available plane and that he’d be sure someone was at the airport to meet her when she got in.
The next call was to Marcia’s parents, who, he explained, were retired and wintering on the Arizona snowbird circuit. Kelsey handled himself well through both difficult calls, but once he got off the phone with his mother-in-law, his face was chalky gray and his eyes red-rimmed. He looked totally drained. For a moment, he stood leaning against the doorjamb, covering his eyes with his hands. When the front doorbell buzzed from two rooms away, he jumped as though he’d been shot.
“Would you mind getting that?” he asked. “I don’t want to see anybody just now, I don’t care who it is.”
I was only too happy to oblige. I had a pretty good idea of who would be ringing his bell right about then. It had taken some time for the locked-out reporters to get organized and work up their considerable nerve.
I’ve always thought it takes a hell of a lot of gall to try for a firsthand interview with someone whose life has just been jolted by some terrible tragedy. In this instance the circling pack of newshounds had evidently decided that sending one emissary was a better tactic than having everybody show up at once.
The person standing with her finger poised on the bell preparing to ring it yet a third time turned out to be one of the more attractive distaff members of Seattle’s electronic media. I recognized her from other crime-scene gatherings, but when I opened the door, she didn’t know me from Adam. That was probably just as well.
“Mr. Kelsey?” she asked sweetly.
“No,” I answered.
She gave me a charming, white-toothed smile, a win-friends-and-influence-people-type smile. “I was wondering if I might speak to him,” she said carefully. She was pushy, but doing her best to temper it.
“Mr. Kelsey isn’t seeing anybody right now,” I replied. I started to close the door, but she wasn’t about to be dismissed quite that easily.
“Are you a member of the family?” she asked quickly, somehow insinuating herself between the closing door and the frame. She could have taken her training from Fuller Brush.
Some of the other newsies had worked their way onto the sidewalk, warily edging onto the porch and within earshot.
“I’m a police officer,” I answered shortly. “Mr. Kelsey would like all of you to leave. Now. He won’t be making any statements at this time.”
With that, I bodily elbowed her out of the way and shut the door in her face.
My former partner, Ron Peters, the one who’s working in Media Relations, keeps telling me that I need to learn to cultivate a better interaction with reporters. Not bloody likely, I tell him. I’m too old and too set in my ways.
By the time I got back to the kitchen, Pete Kelsey had refilled our cups with the last of the first pot of coffee and had started another one brewing. Performing those mundane tasks seemed to calm him, to provide some relief in the face of the roiling emotions that swirled around him.
“All right,” he said at last, easing himself onto a stool across the counter from us. “You guys said you had questions. What are they?”
I had been dimly aware that while we waited for Pete Kelsey to finish his phoning and get squared away, Paul Kramer was becoming more and more agitated, although I hadn’t been able to see any reason for it. Now, drumming his fingers steadily on the table, my reluctant partner leaned far back on his stool and eyed Pete Kelsey speculatively.
“You might start by telling us what you know about Alvin Chambers,” Kramer said.
Pete Kelsey had been nothing if not cordial and hospitable to us, and that under the most difficult of circumstances. Yet the first question Detective Kramer lobbed across the net to him was a powerful, game-stopping spike about a man assumed to be the dead woman’s lover. Talk about sensitivity! In that department, Detective Kramer took the booby prize.
But Kelsey didn’t take the bait. “Who’s Alvin Chambers?” he asked blandly, returning Kramer’s hard-edged stare with an unwavering blue-eyed gaze of his own. Pete Kelsey seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Wait a minute,” I said, holding up my hand. “We can get to that later.”
Shaking off my interruption, Kramer continued undeterred. “Who was Alvin Chambers is more like it. He’s the dead man we found in the closet along with your wife.”
Kelsey frowned thoughtfully and shook his head. “The name doesn’t ring a bell. I don’t recognize it at all.”
I could see that it annoyed the hell out of Detective Kramer that Kelsey remained unperturbed. “It’s possible,” Kramer added slyly, “that Chambers and your wife were lovers.”
Kramer dropped his bomb and waited for a reaction. The kitchen around us was suddenly deathly quiet except for the cheerful gurgling of a new pot of coffee as it finished brewing. I more than half expected Pete Kelsey to reach across the counter and punch Kramer’s lights out.