“And where’s Beaumont in all this? Nowhere to be found, that’s where. Can’t raise him on the radio. Can’t get him to respond to his pager. The guys who brought Kelsey in tell me they left Detective Beaumont up on Queen Anne talking to some lousy reporter. His own partner can’t find out a damn thing, but he’s got time to give some cretin reporter a goddamned blow-by-blow interview.”
No one seemed aware of my stopping in the doorway, except for Captain Powell, who looked at me with one eyebrow raised quizzically. The half smile on his face made me think he was glad to see me. He nodded and gave a brief, welcoming wave, but when he didn’t speak, I did.
“I take it somebody here’s looking for me?”
Kramer swung around, his face simmering with suppressed anger. “You’re damn right I am! Where the hell have you been? Why didn’t you answer your pager?”
“I’ve been working, Kramer. How about you?”
Casually I reached across him and passed Margie the two reports I had completed in the Doghouse earlier that afternoon. “Make two copies of those when you have time, would you please, Margie. Give one to Sergeant Watkins and the other to Detective Kramer here. He’ll want to read them too.”
“Was your pager off, Detective Beaumont?” Captain Powell asked mildly. The captain isn’t the flappable type. If he had been, I would have been bounced out of Homicide long ago.
I took the pager out of my pocket and checked it. Sure enough, the switch had been turned to off. I turned it back on.
“Sorry about that, Captain,” I said. “I don’t have any idea when that happened. I must have accidentally switched it off the last time I used it.”
Captain Powell smiled. “No problem.”
“But it is a problem,” Watty objected. “The point is, you were totally incommunicado for well over an hour while people were looking for you, Detective Beaumont. Your partner was looking for you. This squad isn’t set up to consist of several dozen lone wolves. Teamwork, remember?”
Here I was, back in the wrong with Watty one more time.
I tried to explain my actions. “Look, Watty, I was talking to Max-Maxwell Cole-trying to find out as much about Kelsey as I could before I came back down here to interview him. That’s standard procedure. The more you know before you question a suspect, the better your chances are of uncovering something important.”
Sergeant Watkins stood up with an impatient shake of his head and moved past me into the hallway, where he stopped to deliver his parting remark. “That’s all very well, Beau, and I’m sure we’ll see whatever you learned detailed in your reports, but in the meantime I want you to remember that you owe it to this department and to your fellow officers to stay in contact at all times. That’s why the city invested all that money in electronic pagers. Leave the son of a bitch on! Do we understand one another?”
“Yes.”
Watty nodded curtly to Captain Powell and the others, then he disappeared down the hall-way, with Margie trailing fast on his heels. I could feel my ears glowing hot and red in the bright fluorescent lighting. Tongue-lashings should never be a spectator sport, and Detective Kramer was enjoying my discomfort.
Captain Powell, too, must have noticed the smug look on Kramer’s face. “That’ll be enough of that, Detective Kramer. Sit down, both of you, and let me know a little of what’s been going on today. I don’t want to have to wait for written reports.”
So I told them briefly what I’d learned from Freddie Petrie and Rex Pierson. When I started telling them about my Doghouse meeting with Maxwell Cole, Kramer began squirming impatiently in his chair. He was still operating under the illusion that Max and I were long-term best pals, but the captain knew better than almost anyone in the department that the connection between me and Maxwell Cole was anything but cordial.
“We knew, going in, that Max has been friends with Pete Kelsey for twenty years, and with Marcia Kelsey for a lot longer than that,” I explained. “Last night, after Kelsey ditched us at the house on Capitol Hill, Kelsey went to Max’s house and asked to spend the night.”
“So your friend Cole was harboring a criminal,” Kramer said.
“He’s not my friend,” I objected, “and he was doing no such thing. Cole didn’t know what had happened over on Crockett, because Pete Kelsey didn’t tell him. Cole knew nothing about our finding the gun, and he had no idea Kelsey was a fugitive.”
“And I suppose next you’re going to tell us that Max had no idea about Kelsey’s deserter status.”
“Actually, that’s true,” I said agreeably. “He knew Kelsey, not Madsen, and Kelsey was a Canadian. Why should he think the guy’s a deserter? The first Max knew about any of this was this afternoon.”
“Sounds to me like you blabbed everything you know. The entire city will be dissecting our case over breakfast and the morning P.-I. tomorrow. Terrific!”
Detective Kramer could piss me off in less time than anyone I know. My ears were no longer glowing, but I had an idea my blood pressure was sneaking up.
“Look, Kramer,” I snapped back at him. “It wasn’t that kind of interview. You already know that Maxwell Cole is intimately involved with this case, that he’s the one who introduced Pete and Marcia years ago. He’s not going to be writing a story about this. His involvement here is strictly personal, not professional. I wanted some insight into their relationship, and Max gave it to me.”
When I realized I was defending Maxwell Cole in public, no one could have been more surprised than I was, including Captain Powell.
“Some relationship!” Kramer snorted. “That broad was screwing everything in pants and some that weren’t. What he writes about that isn’t going to help our case either. People will read about it and think her husband’s a hero, that we ought to give him a medal.”
Captain Powell was losing patience. “You do have a point, Detective Kramer,” he said placatingly. “But from what you’re telling us about the friendship between Cole and the Kelseys, it seems highly unlikely that Mr. Cole will put anything in his column that would in any way jeopardize the investigation. So are you two going to interview Kelsey now?”
“That was my plan,” I replied. “I don’t know about Detective Kramer. You’ll have to ask him.”
“I’m in,” Kramer said.
Powell turned to Kramer. “Oh, by the way, did you ever have a chance to tell Detective Beaumont about what the search warrant turned up this morning?”
With that one quiet question, Powell changed the entire tenor in the room, took me off the hot seat and put Detective Kramer there in my place. He was already squirming as he stammered his answer. “I tried, but like I said, I couldn’t raise him on the pager.”
“What?” I demanded, enjoying the idea that Powell’s knife could cut both ways. We’d been so busy discussing what I hadn’t told Kramer that no one had mentioned what he might not have told me.
“A casing,” Kramer replied sullenly. “A. 25 CCI-Blazer casing in the same underwear drawer where they found the gun.”
“That’s not all,” Captain Powell prompted. “Tell him the rest.”
“And a pair of trousers, blue with light blue piping.”
“Chambers’ uniform?”
Kramer nodded. “We’re pretty sure. Charlotte Chambers’ son is going to bring her down here this evening to see whether or not she can identify them.”
“Where were they?”
“Out in Mr. Clean’s garage. The trousers had been freshly laundered, and the shoes had been cleaned and polished. The lab’s checking the shoes especially for blood.”
“And then I have some additional news for both of you,” Powell put in. “The answer to the question of why there were two guns used instead of only one. The Browning jammed on that hollow-point ammo with only one shell expended, so the killer had to find himself another weapon. Chambers’. 38 was the only one available.”
Powell finished and was quiet while I assimilated what we’d learned. “It sounds like a pretty tight case,” I said at last.
“Tight!” Kramer yelped. “It’s not just tight, it’s foolproof, open and shut. Kelsey had motive and opportunity both, we found the murder weapon and some of the victim’s clothing in the man’s house, so will you tell me why the hell desertion is the only damn thing on his booking sheet?”