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mean your wife’s job,” I commented.
    “No,” Pete replied, staring morosely into the bottom of his coffee cup. “I don’t. It has…had nothing to do with her job, and yet everything, too, I suppose.”
    “Look,” Detective Kramer put in sharply. “Two people were found half-naked and dead in a closet. One of them was your wife. Would it be safe to assume that you and your wife were having marital difficulties, Mr. Kelsey?”
    Pete Kelsey’s eyes narrowed. “No,” he answered. “I’ve been trying to tell you. That’s just the way things were for us, right from the beginning. Didn’t you ever hear the term ”open marriage‘?“
    Detective Kramer snorted derisively. “I’ve heard of it, all right, but I thought it was extinct, gone the way of Hula Hoops and dodo birds.”
    Kelsey shrugged. “It probably should have, the way things are going, but ours never did, at least not altogether. Back when we started out, we were the leading edge and well ahead of the times, and that was fine with both of us to begin with.” He paused, then added, “Things change, people change. Maybe…probably I changed more than she did. Eventually I wanted something else, something more than Marcia was capable of giving. And after the AIDS scare…”
    He lapsed into a momentary brooding silence. “I haven’t slept with my wife for the past four years,” he added softly. “It wasn’t worth the risk.”
    An undisguised look of pained disbelief passed over Detective Kramer’s broad face. “Maybe you should have thrown her out,” he suggested.
    For the first time, Pete Kelsey bristled. “What I did or didn’t do is my business and nobody else’s.”
    “Let’s just say your reaction’s a little unorthodox,” Kramer allowed, backing off slightly. “All we’re trying to do, Mr. Kelsey, is to get a handle on this situation and on the people involved. It’s important that we establish motivations, that we understand personalities, and so forth. This sounds like a situation that would have driven most men to a divorce court.”
    Kramer’s underhanded cut, a psychological jab that said real men don’t put up with this crap, wasn’t lost on Pete Kelsey.
    “I’m not most men,” he answered stiffly. “I loved my wife, no matter what. Erin had already lost one mother. I didn’t want her to lose another. Whatever else you can say about her, Marcia is…was a hell of a mother.”
    I had been stunned into shocked silence by Detective Kramer’s ugly insinuations. Now Kelsey’s comment caught my attention and I leaped back into the fray. “You’re saying Erin isn’t Marcia’s natural child?”
    Kelsey shook his head. “No, she’s mine. My first wife died in a car wreck in Mexico when Erin was only two. I came to Seattle shortly after that and was trying to put my life back together. That’s when I met Marcia. In fact, Max, the guy you met at the Trolleyman this morning, is the one who introduced us.”
    I almost choked on a misdirected sip of coffee. “Maxwell Cole?” I spluttered, trying to keep the drips from falling on my sweater.
    “You know him?” Kelsey asked.
    I nodded. “Yes, I do. We went to the U-Dub together.”
    “It’s a small world, isn’t it? At the time I was just starting out doing remodeling jobs. I had stopped by to give Max’s mother a quote on some work she wanted done. I had Erin along with me because I couldn’t afford to leave her with a sitter. Marcia happened to drop by the house that afternoon. She and Max were old friends, you see, from high school. She was back in town after a brief failed marriage and looked him up for old times’ sake. By the time I finished talking to Mrs. Cole, Erin and Marcia had become great pals. That was the beginning of it. Of us as a family, I mean. Max ended up being best man in our wedding. He’s also Erin’s godfather.”
    So Maxwell Cole had been giving it to us straight when he claimed to be a good friend of the family. That was important