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
