by J. A. Jance
The camera had caught Lars Jenssen at the bottom of a nine-story stairwell. He had affixed a flashlight to his cane and was loaded with a backpack full of sack lunches, which he was about to deliver to unfortunate and less able high-rise strandees.
“Somebody’s got to take care of all those old people,” he had grunted pointedly into the camera, and then set out determinedly to clump up the nine stories to deliver his goodies.
I hadn’t seen the interview at the time-hadn’t even known Lars Jenssen then-but he had shown it to me once after we met, venturing shyly into my condo to play it for me on the VCR.
“Offered to let that young guy come with me, but he said he didn’t want to climb all them stairs. Ha!” Lars had snorted derisively when he showed me the tape. “That’s what’s the matter with kids these days. No gumption.”
We ordered our usual postmeeting dinners-a chili-burger for me and a plate of sliced tomatoes and cottage cheese for Lars. It was to this unvarying evening repast, cholesterol doomsayers to the contrary, that Lars Jenssen attributed both his good health and his longevity.
Spooning half a pitcher of cream and several heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee, he eyed me thoughtfully.
“How come you never talk about your family none, Beau?” he asked. “You had a chance tonight, and you blew it. Oh sure, you talked about your kids and all, but when it comes to the rest of your family, it’s like you fell off a turnip truck somewhere all growed up.”
“That’s not too far from the truth,” I told him with an uneasy laugh.
My family history, or lack thereof, isn’t something I’m particularly eager to talk about. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, I suppose, but it’s not something to brag about, either.
“My mother’s dead,” I said flatly after taking a forkful of my chili-burger. “I never knew my father. He died during the war. They weren’t married.”
With an oath, Lars flung his fork back onto his nearly empty plate, where it bounced on a wilted lettuce leaf.
“See there?” he demanded loudly. Encroaching deafness had disabled Lars Jenssen’s volume control years before. “No wonder you’re all screwed up, Beau. You never had no men around, did you? You know, what they call one of them role models.”
Rather than being provoked by Lars Jenssen’s probing interference, I was instead slightly amused. For a whole lot of money, the department gladly would have paid to send me to a genuine shrink. So here I sat in a dingy restaurant being psychoanalyzed by a meddlesome near-octogenarian who had probably never even heard of Sigmund Freud.
Lars leaned back in his chair and squinted nearsightedly across the table at me. “What about your grandparents?” he persisted stubbornly. “You musta spent at least some time with them.”
My amusement disappeared as I felt my hackles rising. I could talk about my father. The motorcycle accident that had killed him was just that-an accident. And so was I, for that matter. It was a cruel twist of fate that those two young lovers, my parents, had never had the chance to marry. The fact that my mother never married anyone else during the lonely years afterward testified to the enduring love she must have felt for her dead sailor/lover.
And I could talk about my mother, too. She had done it all and done it by herself, with no help from anyone. She had kept me and raised me at a time when that simply wasn’t done in polite society. She had brought me up with unstinting devotion and a selfless, gritty determination. I’ve seen a lot of action in my years on the force, but those two qualities still form the basis for my definition of heroism.
Talking about my mother and father was fine, but I could not, would not, talk about my grandfather-a man whose name I bore-about Jonas Piedmont, that stiff-necked, stubborn Presbyterian son of a bitch who had turned his pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter out of the house and who had never once, in all the difficult years that followed, lifted a single solitary finger to help her.
The sudden unexpected flood of resentment that washed through me made it difficult to remember exactly what Lars Jenssen’s question had been, to say nothing of answering it.
“No,” I said finally. “I never did.”
“How come?” Lars wasn’t one to let sleeping dogs lie.
“We just didn’t, that’s all.”
“They dead?”
“Goddamn it, Lars. What’s the point of all this third degree? No, they’re not dead, not as far as I know, but they could just as well be. For all I know, they probably still live somewhere right here in Seattle, but you couldn’t prove it by me. I’ve never met them, never laid eyes on them, never wanted to. Once they found out my mother was pregnant with me, they crossed us off their list. Permanently.”
“I see,” Lars Jenssen said, nodding sagely. “Maybe you ought to pay them a visit.”
“Like hell I will!” I snorted.
AA has strict live-and-let-live rules that decree members should not interfere in other people’s lives, rules that create psychic nonaggression pacts which allow each member, supported by the invisible group behind him, to work his way through his own nightmare of self-imposed darkness.
If anyone had ever told Lars Jenssen about those rules, he had long since forgotten them, or maybe he did remember but was simply ignoring them.
“The thing is, Beau, you gotta give ‘em credit for doing the best they could.”
“I don’t have to give them anything,” I insisted.
Lars shook his head. “Just a minute here,” he said. “Take my boy Daniel now. He didn’t get drafted, you know. He up and volunteered, for Chrissakes. He went over to Vietnam and got hisself blasted to pieces all for nothing. I cussed him for that, cussed him good, too. Not just after he was dead neither, but right then, at the time, when he was leaving.
“I cussed Danny and told him he was too goddamned stupid to be any son of mine. Course, it wasn’t true, and it like to broke poor Aggie’s heart, me carrying on that way all the while her only son was packing up his stuff to leave home and go off to war. And I cussed him later on, too, when I’d be out in the boat, just me and God and the ocean…”
Lars broke off suddenly, stopped cold, and didn’t continue.
Any mention of the Vietnam War always gets to me, because when the war came, I didn’t go. It wasn’t that I was a draft-dodger or a protester. I simply didn’t get drafted, although God knows I was prime cannon fodder material, and you can be damn sure I didn’t volunteer, either. By the time I was in college and eligible for the draft, my mother was already sick and dying. I’ve wondered sometimes if maybe one of her friends wasn’t on the local draft board. Maybe that would help explain why I’m still walking around in one piece when lots of other people aren’t, including Lars Jenssen’s son, Daniel. Lately I’ve wondered if going into law enforcement wasn’t a way to make up for what I have somehow come to regard as dereliction of duty.
We had been sitting there quietly for a very long time when I realized at last that Lars Jenssen was waiting for me to spur him forward. “So what happened then?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I got over it, I guess. Finally figured out that it wasn’t doing me no good. All that resentment was just eating up my insides. Except…”
“Except what?” I prompted again.
“By then Daniel was already long dead and buried. Getting rid of all that poison helped me some, but it didn’t do poor little Danny no good, or Aggie neither. By then she was so far gone that she didn’t understand. I’ll tell you this, Beau, if I got me one regret in life, that’s it. Once they’re dead, you can’t do nothing about it, nothing at all.”
For a moment Lars Jenssen seemed adrift again, lost in a sea of thoughts about the past and what couldn’t be changed in it. Then he sat up and put both hands on the table.
“How’re you doing on your list?” he asked brightly, seeming to change the subject. I realized belatedly that he hadn’t changed the subject at all. That cagey old goat was simply taking a run at me from another direction.
Anyone who
thinks the Alcoholics Anonymous program is a walk in the park hasn’t sat down to do Step 4, which entails making a searching moral inventory of yourself, or Step 8, which involves making a list of all the people you have wronged in your lifetime, people to whom you ought to make amends while you still have a chance.
I was on Step 8, and Lars Jenssen’s message was clear.
“Look, Lars,” I said patiently. “You’ve got it all ass-backwards. I didn’t wrong my grandparents, they wronged me, us-my mother and me both. If that happened to Kelly, if my own daughter got pregnant, you can bet I wouldn’t throw her to the wolves like that.”
“Oh?” Lars Jenssen asked.
And suddenly I had a vision, a flashback of me standing nose to nose with Kelly in Arizona a few months earlier, of my telling her that the young man she had been interested in was nothing but a creep and a bum. In the dim restaurant light my ears reddened at the thought. I wondered if Lars saw them change color, if he had spoken about this because somehow he had direct knowledge about my confrontation with Kelly or if his comments came from the general pool of human experience that goes with being a parent.
To shut down the discussion, I reached for the check, which Lars Jenssen always insisted on splitting right down to the last penny. “Let’s head home, Lars. I’ve got a case I’m working on.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I had stumbled into yet another one of Lars Jenssen’s pet peeves where J.P. Beaumont was concerned.
“What time did you go in to work this morning?” he asked, pushing back his chair and taking up the cudgels.
“A little after seven,” I answered. “Why?”
“And what time did you quit tonight?”
“Five. Right around there.”
“And you’re going to work some more tonight? One of the biggest mistakes a man can make is to work too goddamned much. First you drank so much it got you in trouble, and now you’re gonna work so much it’ll be the same damn thing. Society ain’t as hard on workaholics as it is on the other kind, but it’s still just as bad for you in the long run, just as hard on your system, you mark my words.”
The conversation had done a complete circuit. We had gotten beyond the sticky family part of my life. Once more I was able to regard Lars Jenssen’s well-intentioned concern as nothing more or less than an amusing, harmless foible.
“I’ll bear that in mind, Lars. Come on.”
We got up and left. Once outside, we found the air was brittle and cold. Lars paused on the sidewalk outside the restaurant and sniffed the air.
“It’s gonna rain,” he pronounced. “Take maybe a couple of days, but it’ll rain like hell.”
I glanced up. The air was so still and clear that even with the downtown glow washing against the sky, a few faint stars were visible.
Shaking my head in disbelief, I took him by the arm. “Snow maybe, Lars, but it’s too damn cold to rain.”
He looked at me with a kindly but disparaging glance. “These young kids,” he mumbled. “They don’t know nothing about nothing.”
Me? A young kid? I’d already spent almost twenty years on Seattle’s homicide squad, but in Lars Jenssen’s vernacular, I was nothing but a misguided young upstart. Chuckling inwardly, I didn’t bother to reply.
We walked home through the biting cold. Even with his cane, Lars Jenssen had little trouble keeping up. He had told me that he used the cane more for balance than anything else, and striding along beside him, I could see that was true. I walked on with him as far as his apartment and then backtracked the single block to my own building.
There was one lone light blinking on my answering machine. One call had come in. And when I listened to the recording, the voice on it belonged to Detective Paul Kramer.
“Give me a call,” it said. “It’s nine-thirty, but I’m still at the office.”
At least I wasn’t the only workaholic in the crew. As far as I knew, Kramer was married, but he was nonetheless working bachelor’s hours. Picking up the phone, I dialed his number. He answered before the second ring.
“Beaumont here,” I said. “Why the hell are you still working, or did you switch to graveyard without telling me?”
“I was working on the reports until just a little while ago,” he answered lightly. “But I thought you’d want to know that Baker’s finished the autopsies and I can pick them up early tomorrow morning. They actually said I could get them tonight, but it’s late, so I said what the hell.”
“Right. Anything else?”
“We may have some preliminary stuff from the crime lab by then as well. Other than that, there’s not much to tell. You’ll be happy to know that our reports are completed and on Sergeant Watkins’ desk.”
I resisted the temptation to say, “Pin a rose on you.” “Good,” I said. “That should make his day.”
There was a pause, a pregnant pause, as though Kramer had something else to say and couldn’t make up his mind to spit it out.
“What’s going on, Kramer? Is there something more?”
“No, not really. Did you pick up the bomb-threat info from Doris Walker?” Kramer asked.
“Yes, I got it.”
“Well? Have you looked at it yet?” Kramer demanded impatiently. “What does it say?”
Lars Jenssen’s warning about becoming a workaholic came back to me. The devil made me decide that in a world of workaholics it was time for an ounce of prevention.
“No, I haven’t looked at it yet, and I’m not going to, either, not until morning. The city doesn’t pay enough for me to work twenty-four hours a day, and they don’t pay you that much either. We’ll go over it in the morning.”
“Good enough. I’m heading out of here too. See you then.”
Kramer sounded casual and almost friendly, and phony as hell. “Right,” I said, and put down the phone.
Nothing of what he’d told me had been important or urgent enough to merit an after-hours phone call, and Detective Kramer and I certainly weren’t on the kind of chummy basis that makes for pass-the-time phone calls going back and forth. I couldn’t help wondering what the hidden agenda had been in his calling me, but when no obvious answers immediately presented themselves, I let it go and headed for bed.
What I needed right then more than anything else was a good night’s sleep, but that was something easier said than done. Once in bed, I fell asleep within minutes, but shortly after that, some outside noise disturbed me enough to bring me fully awake. After that, I couldn’t go back to sleep for any amount of money.
I tossed and turned, waiting for sleep to return while my guts roiled inside me. That late night chili-burger was at war with my innards, and the roaring battle kept me wide-awake no matter how tired I was.
I lay there for what seemed like hours, listening to the rumbling of the building’s heat pumps on the roof outside my penthouse. No longer were they an anonymous part of the building’s white noise. I was consciously aware of them now, aware of the implications behind their presence and absence-heat or cold, comfort or not. The ongoing roar was downright soothing, but I still couldn’t sleep.
For a while I kept my restless brain at bay by focusing on the case, by doing a series of mental lists about what would need to be accomplished the next day-locating the missing Volvo, interviewing the Chambers woman and Maxwell Cole, getting a look at the autopsy results, and talking to the lady at the school district.
But thinking about the case was really only a futile effort to jam my mental frequencies and hold other more disturbing thoughts at bay. Because Lars Jenssen had, knowingly or not, let one of my very own personal demons out of the jug.
“Damn you,” I mumbled aloud as I finally drifted off to sleep in the wee hours. Only, it wasn’t Lars Jenssen I was thinking about and cursing. It wasn’t him I was damning.
It was that selfish son of a bitch himself-my grandfather, Jonas Piedmont.
Chapter 10
That night, for the first time in my life, I dreamed about my
grandfather.
I was in a cemetery, a cold, wind- and rainswept cemetery, not a real one, and not one I’d ever seen before. Across a wide expanse of grass, I could see a wooden casket poised over a newly dug grave, waiting to be lowered into it. Around the grave a group of men, some leaning on picks and shovels, stood waiting and talking.
Somehow I knew at once that Jonas Piedmont was lying dead in that coffin. Filled with a terrible and inexplicable urgency, I hurried toward the group of men, rushing because I knew I was late. Long before I could cover the distance between me and the grave, however, the casket began sinking slowly and inevitably into the ground. I shouted for them to wait for me, but instead, they all turned and started throwing dirt onto the vanished coffin.
I shouted again, pleading in vain for them to stop, but they wouldn’t. They kept right on flinging the heavy, wet dirt into the hole in the ground. By the time I reached the group and recognized the men as members of the Regrade Regulars, the grave was completely filled in and slivers of grass were already sprouting up through the muddy ground even as Lars Jenssen himself heaved the last shovelful of dirt onto the grave. When he saw me standing there panting, he leaned on his shovel again, pointing and laughing.
I fought my way out of the dream and found that the sheet had somehow come loose during the course of that restless night. It was bunched up and wrapped around my neck. I fought my way out of that too, throwing it on the floor beside the bed, and made my way into the bathroom. I didn’t need an interpreter to explain that particular dream. What I really needed was a steaming hot shower to wash it away.
As I shaved, the radio in the bathroom reported that another day had dawned clear and cold. There was a slight warming trend, all the way up into the low twenties-a big help for Belltown Terrace’s heat pumps, which still rumbled away outside-but the slightly higher temperatures wouldn’t make things that much better for anything else.