Justice Denied

for a post-funeral reception for Lars?” she asked.

I had been playing social director all afternoon, but this one responsibility had somehow fallen off the radar. “Damn!” I said.

“I take that to mean no?” Mel asked.

I nodded. She immediately reached for her cell phone. “I’ll call Rita, then,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll do it.”

“Who’s Rita?” I asked.

“Rita Davenport. She runs the same catering company that served dinner tonight. She and I are both board members of SASAC. That’s how I knew to call her. Why don’t you check with the manager on party room availability. I’ll see what I can do about rounding up some food.”

Luckily, the party room was open for early Thursday afternoon. While I reserved it via the landline, Mel made arrangements for Magical Meals to provide food and beverages. In less time than I would have thought possible, Beverly Jenssen’s post-funeral reception was a done deal.

“You do good work,” I told Mel when she put the phone back down.

“Thank you,” she said, turning to give me a long, inviting kiss. “I’m actually a multitalented girl.”

And that was absolutely true.

I awakened the next morning to the smell of brewing coffee and to Mel’s voice on the telephone telling Harry I. Ball in no uncertain terms that Allen Kates or no Allen Kates, Mel was taking the day off.

“The man’s already been dead for more than a month,” she said. “If King County comes up with anything today, I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to bring me up to speed tomorrow.”

Harry Ignatius Ball was fearless, except when it comes to dealing with irate women. He’s liable to say something politically incorrect in the process, but he always capitulates. This was no exception. Harry buckled.

“Now that I’m not going in,” Mel said, handing me my coffee, “do we have a schedule?”

We didn’t, but Mel managed to organize one in short order. Scott and Cherisse were dispatched to Queen Anne Gardens to collect Lars and bring him to the Shanty on lower Queen Anne for a family breakfast. Despite the risk of occasionally running into Maxwell Cole, I’ve come to appreciate the Shanty in the past few months. It’s old enough for me to feel comfortable there, and I know Lars likes it, too. It had the added advantage of being within easy walking distance of the kids’ hotel.

I expected breakfast to be another disaster, but it wasn’t. Mel disarmed Kelly’s emotional Molotov cocktail by charming Kayla with a pocketful of stickers and by holding Kyle and cooing over him in a way that would have dumbfounded her fellow SHIT officers, Harry I. Ball included. And while Mel and I looked after the kids, Lars had everyone else’s undivided attention as he passed around Beverly Piedmont Jenssen’s treasured scrapbooks.

On that particular day, that collection of yellowed newspaper clippings served as my grandmother’s parting gift to me-and an incredible blessing. It amounted to pretty much a hard-copy LexisNexis report on the life and times of J. P. Beaumont, but this one had been done the old-fashioned way, with scissors and Elmer’s glue.

Back in the days when names meant business for local community newspapers, Beverly had culled all kinds of bits and pieces of my life from the pages of the now-defunct Ballard Dispatch. There were items about Cub Scout activities and high school athletic events, all of them carefully clipped and dated. I don’t think either of the kids had ever seen Karen’s engagement photo or our wedding announcement. (Our divorce announcement was there, too, but that was much later. Beverly wasn’t one for editing out bad news.)

Later on, the stories shifted away from the Dispatch and onto the pages of the Seattle Times and the P-I, as my career as first a Seattle PD beat cop and later as a detective took off and occasionally became newsworthy. There were secrets lurking among my grandmother’s treasures that neither of my children had ever known or suspected about their father. It turned out Beverly had managed to glean things about Kelly and Scott as well-their published birth announcements, for example. Beverly had continued keeping her loving long-distance vigil even after I had reconciled with her and my grandfather.

And at the very last, tucked into the first empty page in the most recent notebook, was the cardboard-framed hospital photo of Kyle. I’m sure Lars put it there for the simple reason that he needed to put it away. I don’t know if his choice of the notebook was deliberate or accidental, but I gave him credit for a stroke of pure genius when I saw the tearfully grateful look Kelly shot in my direction when she found it. The look was utterly priceless-and due entirely to Mel’s efforts rather than my own.

By the time we left the restaurant it was almost time to go to the funeral home.

I don’t like funerals, probably because I’ve been to far too many of them in my time. And I expected this one to be bad news. I realized it was going to be different, however, as soon as we walked into the chapel, where an invisible organ was playing “Love Is Lovelier the Second Time Around.” The back two rows were packed with people-mostly women and one lone man-from Queen Anne Gardens. Also near the back was the contingent from SHIT-Harry and the two other guys from Squad B, Brad Norton and Aaron Oliver. Close to the front were my friends Ron and Amy Peters, along with their three kids. Ralph and Mary Ames were also in attendance.

The whole front of the chapel was arrayed with floral arrangements. Maybe I had overdone it a little, but not that much. As Beverly had specified, there were two separate boxes of cremains on the altar. Between them stood a color photo of a beaming Beverly Piedmont Jenssen, dressed, for once in her life, in sparkling formal attire.

The photo had been one of those shipboard rites of passage taken prior to the formal-night dinner on the Starfire Breeze during their honeymoon cruise to Alaska. Seeing Beverly’s very sophisticated upswept hairdo, I remembered the firefight that had resulted when Lars had made the tactical blunder of comparing Beverly’s hairdo to the fender on a ’57 Cadillac. If you studied the photo closely, you could see the edge of Lars’s glasses where someone, using one of those computerized photo-editing programs, had excised him from the formal pose.

Lars leaned over me. “Ja, sure,” he said. “Yust look at all the flowers. Who do you t’ink sent them?”

“No idea,” I said.

Robert Staunton, the chaplain from Queen Anne Gardens, officiated at the ceremony and did a credible job of it. It was clear from his remarks that he knew Lars and Beverly well, and that he had liked and respected them. What he had to say was in fact a celebration of the love and caring they had brought to each other late in life.

Toward the end of the service Staunton opened the proceedings for comments from friends and family. I was surprised when Kelly handed Kyle over to Jeremy and stepped up to the microphone.

“I didn’t meet my great-grandmother at all until just a few years ago,” Kelly said. “But I know she loved us even when we weren’t together, and I’m grateful to have known her at all. And I’m grateful to Lars for making her so happy.”

That pretty well said it for me. There wasn’t a single thing I could have added to that statement, so I didn’t try.

When it came time to leave the chapel, Lars handed the two boxes of cremains over to Scott for safekeeping. Then he picked up the photo and carried it with him for the remainder of the day, clutching it to his chest as though it were a talisman that would drive away the several elderly women who did tend to cluster around him. As far as they were concerned, however, Lars Jenssen’s opinion to the contrary, I never saw anything at all in the women’s behavior that was the least bit inappropriate. They seemed like nice, ordinary women who were clucking in order to express sincere concern for someone who had lost his mate. Period. If one of them was dead set on maneuvering Lars into the sack, I didn’t see any evidence of it.

Scott and Jeremy loaded all the flowers into the back of Scott’s rented Taurus to take back to Belltown Terrace for the reception. As they were doing the loading, Lars was busy obsessing about how he’d manage to write all the thank-you notes.

“Not to worry,” Mel assured him. “I’ll handle it.”

Thus saving my bacon one more time.

We made it through the reception in fairly good shape. I had been prepared to take the whole group out to dinner, but Scott let me know that wasn’t necessary. “Jeremy and Cherisse haven’t spent much time in Seattle,” he said. “And, according to them, Kayla spent her whole day’s worth of good behavior at the funeral. We’re going to go out for pizza and then tomorrow we’re going to go sightseeing. If you want to come along…”

Somehow the idea of my kids’ spending some adult time together because they wanted to, without squabbling and without parental enforcement, was an idea that warmed me. “I think I’ll take a pass on pizza and