Ring in the Dead: A J. P. Beaumont Novella Read online

  Anne Marie waved aside my attempted apology. “I’m not talking about what you did that day,” she said brusquely. “Not when Daddy had his second heart attack. Mother and I blamed you because he went back to work after the first one.”

  What can you say to something like that? Pickles was a grown man, and grown men get to make their own decisions. We were partners, but I didn’t make him come back to work. He wanted to. He insisted on it, in fact, but that was all ancient history. That first had happened back in 1973, almost forty years ago. Even if it had been my fault, what was the point in Anne Marie’s bringing it up now? Since I had nothing more to say, I kept quiet. For the better part of a minute an uneasy silence filled the room.

  “I’m in a twelve-step program,” she explained finally. “Narcotics Anonymous. Do you know anything about them?”

  I smiled at that. “Unfortunately I have more than a passing acquaintance as far as twelve steps go,” I said. “I’m more into AA than NA, if you know the drill.”

  Anne Marie nodded. “So I suppose this is what you’d call an eighth step call.”

  The eighth step in AA and NA is all about making amends to the people we may have harmed. At that moment, I couldn’t imagine any reason why Anne Marie Gurkey Nolan would possibly need to make amends to me, but then she continued.

  “I did the same thing,” she said. “Like Mom, I blamed you. As far as we were concerned, you were the reason Daddy died because you were also the reason he stayed on the job. This week, I found this and discovered we were wrong.”

  She opened her purse and pulled out a manila envelope. When she handed it over, I could tell from the heft of it that the envelope contained several sheets of paper.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “These are some of Daddy’s papers. He always said that after he retired, he was going to write a book. Since he never retired, he never completed the book, either, but on his days off, he was always down in the basement, pounding away on an old Smith Corona typewriter. This is the chapter he wrote about you. I thought you might want to see it.

  “It was while I was reading this that I finally realized you weren’t the reason Daddy kept working. He did it because he was worried about money and about what would happen to Mother if he died. It turns out he had been working a case where some old guy murdered his ailing wife and then took his own life for the same reason—because he didn’t think there would be enough money to take care of his widow after he was gone. Daddy wanted to work as long as he could so he could be sure Mother and I wouldn’t be left stranded.”

  I vaguely remembered the case Anne Marie had mentioned, but at that very moment I couldn’t recall the exact details or even the names of either victim. What I did remember was that case was the first combination murder-suicide I ever worked. Unfortunately it wasn’t the last.

  A few minutes later, Anne Marie finished her coffee and abruptly took her leave. After showing her out, I returned to the window seat in the living room, with a brand-new cup of coffee in hand. That’s when I finally opened the envelope and removed the yellowing stack of onionskin paper. The keys on the typewriter Pickles had used had been worn and/or broken. Some of the letters in the old-fashioned font had empty spots in them. The ribbon had most likely been far beyond its recommended usage limits as well. The result was something so faded and blurry that it was almost impossible to read.

  I expected the piece would focus on the murder-suicide Anne Marie had mentioned earlier. To my surprise, it began with the day Pickles and I first became partners.

  IT WAS A big shock to my system to come back from my wife’s family reunion in Wisconsin to find out that a new partner had been dropped in my lap. As soon as I clocked in, Captain Tompkins dragged me into the Fishbowl, the glass-plated Public Safety Building’s fifth-floor office from which he rules his fiefdom, Seattle PD’s Homicide Unit, with a bull-nosed attitude and an iron fist. The powers-that-be are trying to discourage smoking inside the building, but Tommy isn’t taking that edict lying down. He smokes thick, evil-smelling cigars that stink to the high heavens. For my money, pipe smoke isn’t nearly as bad, but Tommy says pipes are too damned prissy. Prissy is one thing Captain Tompkins is not.

  Because he smokes constantly and usually keeps the door to the Fishbowl tightly closed, stepping inside his office is like walking into the kind of smoke-filled room where political wheeling and dealing supposedly gets done. Come to think of it, as far as his office is concerned, that’s not as far off the beam as you might think.

  As soon as I took a seat in front of Tommy’s desk, he slid a file folder across the surface in my direction. There was enough force behind his shove that the file spun off the edge of the desk, spilling the contents and sending loose papers flying six ways to Sunday.

  “What’s this?” I asked, leaning down to retrieve the scattered bits and pieces. I didn’t look at the file folder itself again until I straightened up and had stuffed everything back inside. That’s when I saw the name on the outside: Beaumont, Jonas Piedmont.

  “Your new partner,” Tommy said, leaning back in his chair and blowing a series of smoke rings into the air.

  He’s a hefty kind of guy, with a wide, flushed face and a bulging, vein-marked nose that hints of too much booze. Sitting there with his jacket off and his tie open at the base of a thick neck, he gazed at me appraisingly through a pair of beady eyes. Looking at him, you might think he’d be clumsy and slow on his feet. You’d be wrong. After years of working for the man, I’m smart enough not to make that mistake. Guys who do don’t last long.

  “What’s this about a new partner?” I asked. “What happened to Eddy?”

  Tommy blew another smoke ring and jerked his head to one side. “Guess he finally gathered up enough brown-nosing points to get kicked upstairs,” he answered.

  Eddy Burnside had been my partner for three years. We got along all right, I guess, but there was no love lost between us, and Eddy’s brown-nosing was the least of it. I didn’t trust the guy any further than I could throw him, which, in my mind, made him a perfect candidate to move up the ladder. Get him the hell off the streets. If he’s upstairs making policy, at least he won’t be out in public getting people killed. So even though Eddy was your basic dud for a partner, being stuck with a brand-new detective to wean off his mama’s tits and potty-train isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, either.

  “What the hell kind of a name is Jonas?” I asked.

  Calling out someone on account of his name puts me on pretty thin ice. Milton is the name my mother gave me. It’s a good biblical name, after all, so I don’t have a quarrel with it. Milton may be the name on my badge, but that’s not what people call me. I don’t know what my father’s people were called in the old country, but when they came through Ellis Island, the last name got changed to Gurkey. That word bears only the smallest resemblance to the word “gherkin”, one of those little sour pickles my mother and grandmother used to make. But Gurkey and gherkin sounded enough alike that the kids at school and later the guys at the police academy dubbed me Pickles. My family never called me that, but at school and work, that’s who I’ve always been—Pickles Gurkey.

  In other words, between me and this Jonas guy, I didn’t have a lot of room to talk.

  I took a few seconds and scanned through some of the papers in the folder. This Beaumont guy’s job application said he was a U-Dub graduate who had done a stint in the military. That probably meant a tour of duty in Vietnam.

  “You’re sticking me with a college Joe?” I demanded. “Criminal justice? Are you kidding? What does a pack of college professors know about criminals or justice, either one?”

  Captain Tompkins listened to my rant and said nothing.

  “That’s just what I need,” I continued. “Some smart-assed kid who probably thinks that, since he’s got a degree behind his name, he can run circles around someone like me. All I’ve got to brag about is my diploma from Garfield High School. Thanks a whole helluva lot. How’d I g
et so lucky?”

  Tommy blew another cloud of smoke before he answered. “He’s not brand-new,” he assured me. “Beaumont spent a couple of years on Patrol before they shipped him up here last week. Since you were out of town, he’s been working with Larry Powell and Watty Watkins on that dead girl they found over on Magnolia.”

  “The Girl in the Barrel?” I asked.

  The kid who delivers our home newspaper lives next door. Rather than turning our subscription off while we were out of town on vacation, Anna and I had him hold our papers. When we got home from Wisconsin on Friday night, the kid had brought them over, and we’d both gone through the stack. Anna cut out all the coupons she wanted, and I read all the news, just to bring myself back up to speed.

  Doing a balancing act to keep from dribbling ashes all over his desk, Tommy managed to park his stogie on the edge of a large marble ashtray that was already overfilled with cigar butts and ashes. I’m sure the cleaning people love dealing with his mess every night.

  “That’s the one,” he said. “As for how you got him? You’re the only guy on the fifth floor without a living/breathing partner at the moment. That means your number’s up, like it or lump it.”

  If Tommy had wanted to, I knew he could have moved people around so I wouldn’t have been stuck with the new guy, but there was no point in arguing. If I couldn’t get Tompkins to change his mind about assigning the new guy to me, maybe I could figure out a way to change the new guy’s mind about wanting to be a detective. That was the simplest way to fix the problem—convince the new detective that what he wanted more than anything was to be an ex-detective.

  “So where is he?” I asked.

  “Probably in your cubicle, writing up his first report. Everybody else was tied up with that serial killer workshop this past weekend, so Beaumont ended up going to the girl’s funeral up in Leavenworth.”

  “He went to the funeral by himself?” I asked. “Who was the genius who decided that was a good idea? Shouldn’t an experienced detective have handled it?”

  Tommy shrugged. “Didn’t have a choice. Everybody else had paid to go to the FBI workshop. I figured, how bad could it be? But you might want to look over his paper before he hands it in.”

  “Great,” I sputtered. “Now I’m supposed to haul out a red pencil and correct his spelling and grammar?”

  “That’s right,” Tommy said with wink and a knowing smirk. “If I were you, I’d make sure his report is one hundred percent perfect. Doing it over a time or two or three will be great practice for him, and marking him down will be good for whatever’s ailing you at the moment. Go give him hell.”

  Dismissed, I left the smoky haze of the Fishbowl, doing a slow burn. Next to Larry Powell and Watty, I was one of the most senior guys on the squad. It made no sense to stick me with a newbie who would do nothing but hold me back. Rather than go straight to my cubicle, I beat a path to Larry and Watty’s.

  “Gee, thanks,” I said, standing in the entrance to their five-foot-by-five-foot cell. Which brings me to something else that provokes me to no end. How come prisoners get more room in their cells than we do in our offices? What’s fair about that?

  “For what?” Larry asked.

  “For giving me the new guy.”

  “He’s not brand-new,” Larry advised. “We’ve had to hold his hand for the better part of a week before you came back, so quit your gritching. Besides, you were new once, too.”

  “Sure you were,” Watty said with a grin. “Back when Noah was building that ark, or maybe was it even earlier, back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth?”

  “Funny,” I grumbled. “So how did he go about getting moved up from Patrol? The last I heard, the word was out that there weren’t any openings in Homicide.”

  “There weren’t until Eddy got promoted,” Watty said, “but I’ve heard some talk from other people about this, too. Beaumont’s former partner from Patrol, Rory MacPherson, was angling to get into Motorcycles. Beaumont wanted Homicide. A week ago Sunday, the two of them took a dead body call. The next thing you know, voilà! Like magic, they both get the promotions they wanted.”

  “In other words, something stinks to the high heavens. Are you telling me my new partner is also some bigwig’s fair-haired boy?”

  “Can’t say for sure, but it could be,” Larry Powell allowed.

  “Sure as hell doesn’t make me like him any better.”

  Unable to delay the inevitable any longer, I stomped off and headed for my lair. As I approached my little corner of Homicide, I heard the sound of someone pounding the hell out of our old Underwood. My mother did me a whale of a favor by insisting I take touch typing in high school. When it comes to writing reports, being able to use all my fingers is a huge help. Obviously this guy’s mother hadn’t been that smart. Jonas Beaumont was your basic two-fingered typist, plugging away one slow letter key at a time. When I paused in the entrance, he was frowning at the form in the machine with such purpose and concentration that he didn’t see me standing there. I noticed right off that he was sitting in the wrong chair.

  “I’m Detective Gurkey,, your new partner,” I announced by way of introduction. “The desk you’re using happens to be mine.”

  He glanced up at me in surprise. “They told me to use this cubicle,” he said. “This is the desk that was empty.”

  “Maybe so,” I told him, “but that was Eddy’s desk. He was senior, and he had the window. Eddy’s gone now. I’m senior. You’re junior. I get the window.”

  Admittedly, the view from the window is crap. Still, a window is a window. It’s a status symbol kind of thing.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Just let me finish this.”

  “No,” I replied. “I don’t think you understand. Like I said, I’m senior. You’re junior. That means I don’t stand around in the hallway waiting while you get your act together, clear your lazy butt out of my chair, and clean your collection of crap off my desk. Once your stuff is gone, I move into this one. Just because Watty held your hand and treated you with kid gloves all last week doesn’t mean I’m going to. Got it?”

  “Got it,” he answered promptly, pushing his chair away from the desk. “Right away.”

  I knew I was being a first-class jerk, but that was the whole idea. I wanted the guy gone, and making him miserable was the fastest way to get that job accomplished. I stood there tapping my foot with impatience while he gathered up his coat from the chair and emptied everything he had carefully loaded into Eddy’s empty desk drawers back out onto the top of the desk. After that I took my own sweet time about moving my stuff from one desk to the other. I could tell he was steaming about it while he had to wait, but I didn’t let on that I noticed. After all, this was one pissing match I was determined to win.

  I left him cooling his heels until I was almost done sorting, then I sent him for coffee. “Two creams, three sugars, and no lectures,” I told him. “I get nutritional advice from my wife. I don’t need any from you. And if you want coffee for yourself, you’d better get it now. Once we start hitting the bricks, we won’t be stopping for coffee and doughnuts. This is Homicide, Jonah; it’s not Patrol.”

  The Jonah bit was a deliberate tweak, and he lunged for the bait.

  “Jonas,” he corrected. “The name’s Jonas, but my friends call me either J. P. or Beau.”

  “I’m your partner not your friend,” I told him. “That means Jonas it is for the foreseeable future.”

  “Right,” he muttered. Then he stalked off to get coffee.

  While he was gone, I took it upon myself to read and edit his report. By the time he got back, I had used a red pen to good effect, marking it up like crazy. It turned out Tommy Tompkins was right. Correcting Detective Beaumont’s work made me feel better. When Jonas came back with the coffees, I handed him the form.

  “Not good enough,” I told him. “Not nearly good enough, especially considering you’re a hotshot college graduate. Take another crack at this while I find out what we’re supp
osed to be doing today.”

  I left him there working on that and went looking for the murder book on the Girl in the Barrel. Tommy had told me that until Jonas and I caught a new case of our own, we’d be doubling up with Larry and Watty Watkins on their ongoing case. I spent some time reviewing the murder book entries. The body of the victim, a girl named Monica Wellington, had been found on Sunday afternoon a week and a day earlier. Beaumont and his Patrol partner, Rory MacPherson, had responded to the 911 call. In the intervening days, Larry and Watty, with Beaumont along for the ride, had done a whole series of initial interviews. The autopsy had revealed that the victim was pregnant at the time of her death, but so far no boyfriend had surfaced.

  By the time I’d scanned through the murder book, Jonas had finished the second go-down on his report. He ripped it out of the typewriter, handed it over, and then stood behind me, watching over my shoulder, as I read through it. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a damned thing wrong with it.

  “I suppose this‘ll do,” I told him dismissively. “Now go down to Motor Pool and get us a car. It’s time to hit the road.”

  And we did, driving all over hell and gone with him at the wheel, doing follow-up interviews with all the people who had been spoken to earlier. Follow-ups aren’t fun, by the way. Initial interviews are the real meat and potatoes of the job. The only thing fun about follow-ups is catching people in the lies that they made up on the run the first time around.

  Turns out we found nothing—not a damned thing. I was hoping to pull off some little piece of investigative magic to garner some respect and put the new guy in his place, but that didn’t happen. Nobody did a Perry Mason–style confession in our presence. We didn’t discover some amazing bit of missing evidence. In fact, we never did solve that particular case. We worked it off and on for a couple of years and finally got shunted away from it entirely.

  All this is to say, it wasn’t a great start for a partnership. In fact, I’d call it downright grim. I kept the pressure on him, expecting him to go crying to whoever it was who had pulled the strings to move him to Homicide, but that didn’t happen, either. He was a smart enough guy who tended to go off half-cocked on occasion.