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Authors: J. A. Jance

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BOOK: Ring In the Dead
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“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 supposed 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.

If he was the hare, I was the tortoise. Jonas had good instincts but he was impatient and wanted to sidestep rules and procedures. I pounded down that tendency every chance I could—­made him go through channels, across desks, and up the chain of command. The truth is that with enough practice, he started to get pretty good at it.

I could tell early on that he hit the sauce too much. He and his wife had a ­couple of little kids at home, and I think they squabbled a lot. I don't mean that the kids squabbled—­Jonas and his wife did. I know her name but it's slipped my mind at the moment. It's that old familiar story—­the young cop works too hard and can't put the job away when he gets home. Meanwhile the wife is stuck handling everything on the home front. In other words, I understood it, because those were issues Anna and I had put to bed a long time ago, but like I told him that first day, I didn't want any advice on nutrition from him, and I figured he didn't need any marital counseling from me. Fair is fair.

We worked together for several months before the night in early July when everything changed and when our working together morphed from an enforced assignment into a real partnership.

It was an odd week, with the Fourth of July celebration falling on a Wednesday. Jonas and I were at the range doing target practice when we got a call out on the sad case of what, pending autopsies, was being considered murder-­suicide. The previous Wednesday, an old guy over in Ballard, a ninety-­three-­year-­old named Farley Woodfield, who had just been given a dire cancer diagnosis, went home from his doctor's office, grabbed his gun, loaded it, and then took out his bedridden wife, the woman for whom he was the primary caregiver. After shooting her dead, he had turned the weapon on himself. Several days after the shootings, the Woodfields' mailman had stepped onto their front porch to deliver a package and had noticed what he termed a “foul odor.”

The word “foul” doesn't cover it. Like I said, it was July. The house had been closed up tight. I had been feeling punk over the weekend with something that felt like maybe a summer cold or a case of the flu. I wasn't sick enough to stay home from work, but I can tell you that being called to that ugly crime scene didn't help whatever was ailing me. We found Farley's note on the kitchen table: “With me gone, there goes the pension. Jenny will have nothing to live on and no one to look after her. I can't do that to her. I won't. Sorry for the mess.”

He was right about the mess part. It was god-­awful. Seeing the crime scene and the note made it clear what had happened, but when you're a homicide detective, that doesn't mean you just fill in the boxes on the report form and call it a job. Once the bodies were transported, Jonas and I spent the day canvassing the neighborhood, talking to ­people who had lived next to the old ­couple. From one of the neighbors, we learned that there was a daughter who lived in St. Louis, but there had been some kind of family estrangement, and the daughter had been out of her parents' lives for years.

As for the neighbors? None of them had paid the least bit of attention to the newspapers piling up on the front porch. None of them had noticed that Farley wasn't out puttering in his yard or that the grass he always kept immaculately trimmed with an old-­fashioned push mower was getting too long to cut. By the end of the day, I was mad as hell at the neighbors, because I could see that the old guy had a point. With the ­couple's only child out of the picture, and if Farley wasn't going to be there to look after his wife, who was going to do it? Nobody, that's who!

We had taken the Woodfield call about eleven o'clock in the morning, and it was almost eight o'clock that night when we headed back downtown to file our reports. As usual, Jonas was at the wheel. We were driving east on Denny. When I suggested we take a detour past the Doghouse to grab a bite to eat, he didn't voice any objections. Instead of heading down Second Avenue, he stayed on Denny until we got to Seventh.

The Doghouse is a Seattle institution, started in the thirties by a friend of mine named Bob Murray. It used to be on Denny, but in the early fifties, when the city opened the Battery Street Tunnel to take traffic from the Alaskan Way Viaduct onto Aurora Avenue North, the change in driving patterns adversely affected the restaurant's business. Undaunted, Bob pulled up stakes and moved the joint a few blocks away to a building on Seventh at Battery. The Doghouse has been there ever since. It's one of those places that's open twenty-­four hours a day and where you can get breakfast at any hour of the day or night.

It's no surprise that cops go there. In the preceding months, Jonas and I had been to the Doghouse together on plenty of occasions, grabbing one of the booths that lined the sides of the main dining room. This time, though, when Bob tried to lead us to a booth, I could see we were headed for Lulu McCaffey's station. That's when I called a halt.

Lulu was one of those know-­it-­all waitresses who was older than dirt. One of the original servers who had made the transition from the “old” Doghouse to the “new” one twenty years earlier, she always acted like she owned the place. Unfortunately and more to the point, this opinionated battle-­axe also bore a strong resemblance to my recently departed mother-­in-­law.

Years ago, I had made the mistake of wising off in front of Lulu. She got even with me by spilling a whole glass of ice water down the front of my menu and into my lap. Ever since, I avoided her station whenever possible. This day in particular, I wasn't prepared to deal with any of her guff, so I asked Bob if we could be seated in the back room.

BOOK: Ring In the Dead
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