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

by J. A. Jance

  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.

  It turns out that as far as the Doghouse was concerned, Jonas was a back room virgin. There are plenty of restaurant back rooms in Seattle—at the Doghouse, Rosellini’s, Vito’s, and the Dragon’s Head. It’s no surprise that many of the people who congregate in those back rooms and play the occasional game of poker are local cops and elected officials who want to keep up appearances as far as the voting public is concerned.

  The back room is where Bob delivered us, safely out of Lulu’s territory and firing range.

  We both ordered burgers.

  While we were busy, I had more or less forgotten that I wasn’t feeling up to snuff, but sitting still, drinking iced tea, and waiting for our food, it started coming back. The worse I felt, the more I kept remembering everything about that ugly crime scene in Ballard. Farley Woodfield was evidently a World War I vet. There was a framed photo montage hanging over the fireplace. It included several photos of him—a sweet-faced young kid—posing manfully in his brand-new doughboy uniform. The faded cloth matting around the photos was decorated with a collection of miscellaneous pieces that included faded battle ribbons, tarnished medals, and a distinctive sergeant’s chevron.

  Just thinking about it hit me hard. Here was a poor guy who had given up his youth to go to war and serve his country. Now, seventy years later, he had been left to his own devices with no one to help him or to watch his back.

  Our food came. Jonas dove into his; I pushed mine away.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, because I didn’t want to talk about what I was thinking. “I need to take a piss is all.”

  I left the table and the back room, but despite what I’d said, I didn’t head for the rest room. I wanted to clear my head, so I went outside and walked around the parking lot for a few minutes. I was thinking about the old guy and wondering what I’d do if I was in his position. If I were gone, would my pension be enough for Anna to be able to get by? If something went wrong with her health, would our daughter come through and take care of her if I wasn’t able to do it?

  Somewhere along the way, I realized that my arm was hurting—aching like crazy. I kept wondering how I had managed to hurt it that badly without noticing anything had happened. It was hot as hell outside. Even though it was close to nine at night, it wasn’t dark outside yet, and it sure as hell wasn’t cool. Pretty soon I started feeling light-headed. I went over and stood by the building so I could lean against the wall. That’s when all hell broke loose. Two guys came charging out of the restaurant and through the parking lot with Lulu chasing afte
r them, screaming like a banshee.

  “You come back here!” she screeched, waving a small piece of paper in the air. “You think you can just walk out on your check, you worthless turds? You think your food’s coming out of my paycheck?”

  The problem was, as soon as Lulu screamed at them, the two men stopped running and turned on her. At that point, I don’t think any of them had seen me, but I saw them. The one guy grabbed Lulu by the arm and swung her around, sending her crashing head first into the trunk of a parked car. That’s when things went into slow motion for me. It looked like the other guy was closing in on her. Pushing off from the wall, I drew my Smith & Wesson.

  “Okay, you guys,” I ordered. “I’m a police officer. Let her go. Get your hands in the air.”

  Surprised, they all three turned to gawk at me. That’s when my body just stopped working, starting with my arm and fingers. The gun fell to the ground and went spinning uselessly away from me across the pavement. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t breathe because of the crushing pain in my chest. Even while it was happening, I realized I had to be having a heart attack. I had my wits about me enough that I took a step or two back toward the building so that if I fell, I could slide down the wall instead of falling flat on my face or whacking the back of my head on the pavement.

  I remember seeing the three other people in the parking lot, standing there frozen in time, staring at me. The one guy was still hanging on to Lulu’s arm. Lulu’s mouth was open, like she was still screaming although I no longer heard any sound. Her face was red with fury. I more than half expected her to turn around and plant her fist in her attacker’s face, but then he dropped out of sight and disappeared from my line of vision for a moment. A second or so later the look on Lulu’s face changed. Her eyes widened. In that moment the expression on her face went from utter fury to abject fear. A gun must have gone off then although I don’t remember hearing that, either. I saw the blood spray out behind her, saw Lulu stagger backward a step or two, then I blacked out.

  When I came to, Jonas was squatting beside me and yelling in my ear. “Pickles! Can you hear me? The ambulance is on its way. What the hell happened?”

  He didn’t need to tell me about the ambulance. With my hearing back, I could hear the approaching sirens. They were already, in the background, muffled in a load of cotton, but coming closer fast.

  “Two guys,” I managed. “Lulu. Is she . . . ?”

  Jonas shook his head. “She didn’t make it,” he said. “She’s dead. What the hell happened here?”

  He reached down then. Putting a pen through the trigger guard of my .38, he carefully pulled the weapon out of my lap and laid it aside, just beyond my reach. I remember wondering: How the hell did my gun get there? But then I figured it out. The guy who shot Lulu must have put it there. A dead woman, my weapon, and my fingerprints. I was screwed.

  “There were two guys,” I said, gasping around the awful pain in my chest. “They must have taken off. You’ve got to find them.”

  “Were they on foot or in a car?”

  “On foot, I think. Didn’t see a car.”

  That’s the thing. The gun was there in my lap. The assailants were long gone. Jonas knew I hated Lulu’s guts, and yet he never doubted me, not for an instant.

  “Okay,” he said. “Will do, but first I’ve got to talk to Bob Murray.”

  A Medic 1 guy appeared over Jonas’s shoulder and bodily booted him out of the way. The last thing I remember, as the attendants loaded me onto a gurney, was Jonas striding purposefully back into the restaurant, notebook in hand.

  I had other things to think about that night—like living or dying.

  I STOPPED READING for a moment, thrown back into that terrible parking lot scene at the Doghouse.

  As suddenly as if it were yesterday, it all came crashing back. As soon as Bob Murray told me shots had been fired, I charged out the restaurant’s back door, with him at my heels. Out in the parking lot the smell of burned cordite still lingered in the hot, still air. I found Lulu McCaffey’s bloody body lying sprawled on the pavement between cars. A green bit of paper that I recognized as the check from someone’s table was still clutched in her hand. I checked her pulse first. Finding none and thinking my partner had been shot, too, I turned to Pickles. By then, Bob Murray had raced back inside to call 911.

  Pickles was a few feet away from Lulu, slouched against the building. Kneeling next to him, I looked for a wound of some kind, but there wasn’t any. Whatever had happened to Pickles, he hadn’t been shot. But I did find his gun and I could tell it had been recently fired. He kept trying to talk to me, but all I could make out from his mumble was that there had been two guys and they had taken off on foot.

  I knew that if Pickles had taken a potshot at the two fleeing bad guys, there was going to be hell to pay, and I didn’t want my fingerprints anywhere on the gun. I used a pen to ease his Smith & Wesson out of his lap and set it down on the pavement. He kept trying to talk to me, but most of what he said was too garbled to understand. Eventually the Medic 1 guys showed up. At the time, Seattle had bragging rights because Medic 1’s still relatively new presence in the city had made Seattle the best place in the world to have a heart attack. By the time the ambulance showed up, I was pretty sure that’s what we were up against—a heart attack.

  As soon as the EMTs took over, I heard the sounds of arriving patrol cars converging on the area. I grabbed an evidence bag from the back of our unmarked car, deposited the gun in that, pocketed both, and hurried back into the restaurant. From the way Pickles looked, I was convinced he was a goner. If his death occurred while he was interrupting someone in the process of committing a crime, that meant that whoever had gunned down Lulu McCaffey would be guilty of two counts of homicide—both his and hers—rather than just one.

  Bob Murray was a smart guy. He had come to the same conclusions I had—that the two guys who had skipped out on paying their tab had committed cold-blooded murder in his parking lot. Using chairs from the dining room, he had cordoned off both Lulu’s station and the booth where the dine-and-dash bad guys had been sitting. Although the rest of the restaurant had somehow managed to return to some semblance of business as usual, Bob had made sure that none of the tables in Lulu’s section had been cleared. He was personally standing guard to see to it that no one ventured anywhere near them.

  “Did you see the two guys?” I asked him. “Can you give me any kind of description to pass along to the guys on patrol?”

  Bob shook his head. “I was in the kitchen when they came in. Lulu seated them and served them, so she’s really the only employee who saw them.” He handed me a piece of paper. On it were scribbled several names and phone numbers, written in several distinctly separate styles of handwriting.

  “Who are these?” I asked.

  “They’re the people who were seated at nearby tables,” he told me. “I had them write down their names and phone numbers in case you need to get back to them.”

  “Any of them still here?”

  Bob nodded, but his customary grin was missing in action. “All of them,” he answered. “I sent them to the bar and told them to have one on me while they wait.”

  See there? I told you Bob Murray was a smart guy.

  I glanced over at the booth. “Nobody’s touched it?”

  “Nope,” he said. “And I aim to keep it that way.”

  “Great,” I said. “When the detectives get here, be sure they get prints off everything. It’s hard to find a suspect from an unknown print like that, but once we get the bad guys, having their prints in the system will help put them at the scene of the crime.”

  “You got it,” Bob told me. “I’ll see to it.”

  In the bar, the organ that usually filled the place with sing-along music far into the night was notably silent. The organist was there, but he was sitting alone at the bar quietly having a beer. With Lulu’s body still in the parking lot, it wasn’t at all surprising that nobody felt like singing. In the dark
ened room, seated against the far wall at four separate tables, were the other eight people who had been seated in Lulu’s station at the time all hell broke loose. Still shocked by what had happened, they huddled together in a subdued group, nursing their drinks and their fear.

  Milton Gurkey was my partner. Whether Pickles lived or died, I understood this wouldn’t be my case to investigate. Someone else would be doing in-depth interviews of all the potential witnesses, including talking to the poor people currently sheltering in the bar of the Doghouse. All I wanted from them right that moment was a general description of the two suspects—something I could give to the guys out on the streets in patrol cars so officers in the area could be on the lookout for them.

  What I ended up with was certainly vague enough. Two guys: one about six feet tall, the other a little shorter. The taller of the two was light-complected with dirty blond hair and maybe/maybe not a mustache. He was wearing yellow and brown plaid Bermuda shorts, a white T-shirt, and tennis shoes with no socks. The other guy, five-ten or so, was both shorter and heavier. He had olive skin—maybe Hispanic. He wore jeans, tennis shoes, and a blue plaid shirt. In other words, neither of these guys were fashion plates, but with the seasonably hot weather, their costumes wouldn’t give them away, either, not the way sweatshirts or parkas would have.

  By the time I went back outside, the response to the incident made for mayhem on the street. Although the ambulance had already taken off, there were still fire trucks and plenty of patrol cars, marked and unmarked, in attendance. I tracked down the patrol sergeant and gave him what I had gleaned as far as descriptions were concerned. Having done what I could, I drove to Harborview Hospital, where I planted myself in the waiting room of the ER and waited for word on whether or not Pickles Gurkey was going to make it.

  I was there when a sergeant from Patrol brought Anna Gurkey to the hospital and dropped her off. Previously, I had never met the woman, but I knew who she was when she walked up to the admitting desk and asked the clerk about her husband, Milton Gurkey. Whatever was going on with the patient right then, he wasn’t being allowed visitors. Having been given that information, Anna retreated to one of the straight-backed chairs lining the room. As soon as she was seated, I went up and introduced myself.