Ring In the Dead (2 page)

Since Anne Marie was clearly so ill at ease, I made no attempt to join her on the window seat. Instead, I sat in one of the armchairs facing her. Hoping to make things better for her, I bumbled along, doing my best to carry on some semblance of polite conversation. In that regard, I was missing Mel in the worst way. She can always smooth out the kinds of difficult situations that turn me into a conversational train wreck.

“I'm so sorry to hear about your mother,” I said regretfully. “I'm afraid I lost track of her after your father died.”

“I'm not surprised,” Anne Marie replied. “Once Daddy was gone, Mother didn't want to have anything to do with Seattle PD.”

“Had she been ill long?”

Anne Marie took a tentative sip of coffee and shook her head. “She had a bout with breast cancer several years ago, but she responded well to the treatment. Her doctors said she was in remission. When she got sick again, we thought at first that the breast cancer had returned. It turns out it was a different kind of cancer altogether—­pancreatic—­and there was nothing anybody could do.”

“Losing your mother is always tough,” I said.

Anne Marie gave me a challenging look, as though she suspected I had no real understanding of her situation. I could have told her that I had lost my own mother to cancer when I was in my early twenties and much younger than she was now, but I didn't. Still hoping to be a good host, I tried changing the subject, only to land squarely on yet another painful topic.

“I guess the last time I saw you was at your father's funeral.”

Anne Marie nodded. “I was only a sophomore in college when Daddy died. I've always hated funerals,” she added. “Mother did, too. She told me she wanted to be cremated, and she stated in writing that she didn't want any kind of ser­vice. She probably did that for my sake because she knew how much funerals bother me.”

My bouncing unerringly from one loaded topic to another didn't do much for putting Anne Marie at ease. Still, it must have worked up to a point, because after a brief pause she pressed forward with the real purpose of her visit.

She straightened her shoulders and took a deep breath before saying, “Mother always blamed you for Daddy's death. So did I.”

I was hard-­pressed to summon a suitable response for that. I remembered the day Pickles Gurkey died like it was yesterday—­in the middle of the afternoon on a rainy Monday. Pickles and I had just placed a homicide suspect under arrest. The guy had turned violent on us, and it had taken both Pickles and me to subdue him. The suspect was in cuffs and safely in the back of the car, when Pickles had suddenly staggered and fallen. At first I thought he'd been punched in the gut or something during the fight, but I soon realized the situation was far worse than that. He'd already had one heart attack by then, and here we were five years later with the same thing happening When I realized this was a second attack—­and a massive one at that—­I immediately called for help. Seattle's Medic 1 was Johnny-­on-­the spot just as they had been the first time around. On this occasion, however, there was nothing they could do; nothing anybody could do.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I did everything I could . . .”

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.

I
T 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 get 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.”