J. Jance - A more perfect union

I was as bad as Derrick Parker. My mind was restless. No matter what, it kept coming back to the dead man in the water. The fact that he was none of my business didn't make any difference. It's not your case, Beaumont, I tried telling myself. He's not your problem. But the dead man wouldn't go away.

Ironworker. What was it about ironworkers? There was something about ironworkers that had been trying to nose its way into my consciousness ever since Merrilee Jackson had read the word to me off the glinting belt buckle. The thought had been there, poking around the edges of my mind, but with all the hubbub of the afternoon and evening, I hadn't been able to make any connections.

Now though, as I sat in the comfortable silence of my living room with the icy glass of MacNaughton's in my hand, it finally came to me.

Someone in my building. Someone from the ironworkers' local across the alley had rented a unit in Belltown Terrace. I knew it because, as one of the members of the real-estate syndicate which owns the building, I am apprised of comings and goings of tenants. I remembered the lady who handles rentals laughing and telling me that the new renter's vertical commute would be longer than his horizontal one since his office was in the Labor Temple across the alley at First and Broad. I tried to remember what else she had said about him. He was one of the union bigwigs, a business agent or something, not one of the regular working stiffs.

I felt better then, relieved somehow. It was a bit of information I could pass along to Manny and Kramer. Well, to Manny, anyway. Paul Kramer was a prick. I wasn't going to lift a finger to help him.

After two weeks it was good to know that no matter how long my exile in La-La Land might last, I was still a detective at heart. My mind would still work away at solving puzzles, even when it wasn't supposed to. With that knowledge, my body finally began to unwind.

I was going to have one more drink, but I never got around to it. I fell asleep in my chair without bothering to get up and pour that last MacNaughton's.

And without having anyone there to tell me it was time to wake up and go to bed.

Ron Peters woke me at seven o'clock on Sunday morning. It was a good thing, but not quite good enough. I was supposed to be on the set by six-thirty.

Peters and I were partners until a car accident broke his back and put him in Harborview Hospital on a semipermanent basis. By then he had been confined there for five long months and had finally worked his way onto the rehabilitation floor. The doctors said there was no way he'd ever be a detective again, but the department had cleared the way so that whenever he was ready to come back to work, on either a full-or part-time basis, a place would be waiting for him in the Public Information Office. Try as I might, I can't remember to call it Media Relations.

Despite his injury, things were starting to look up for Ron Peters. He had fallen hard for Amy Fitzgerald, his physical therapist. Fortunately, the feeling was mutual. The two of them were busy planning a late September wedding that would include Peters' two daughters, Tracie and Heather, as dual flower girls. They were all four counting the days.

While Ron was hospitalized, I had installed the girls along with their live-in baby-sitter, Mrs. Edwards, in an apartment on the eighteenth floor of my building. It was a lot easier for me to keep and eye on things with them seven floors down than it was to trundle back and forth across ten miles of bottlenecked Lake Washington bridge traffic.

"What are you up to?" Ron asked cheerfully. He is disgustingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed early in the morning.

"Still asleep," I muttered. I'm not a rise-and-shiner, never have been, never will be. "What time is it?"

"Seven," he answered. "Aren't you working this morning? I thought they were scheduled to shoot all weekend long."

"Shit! You're right. I'm late." I struggled to sit up. The foot of the recliner dropped with a resounding thump.

"This won't take long," he said. "I need a favor."

"What's that?"

I paused long enough to let my head clear, more than half resenting the fact that Peters sounded bright as a new penny. That's one thing about hospitals that has always puzzled me. If patients in hospitals are supposed to be there to rest and get well, how come nurses wake everybody up at the crack of dawn, feed them, take their temperatures, and then leave them to spend the rest of the day doing nothing? At least they get an early start on it.

Peters had taken to this regimen like a duck to water. He's been an early riser for as long as I've known him, and once the morning hospital routines were completed, he would invariably give me a call. I was his connection to an outside world of work and family that was otherwise closed to him. His calls were so regular that I had almost quit bothering to set my alarm clock.

"The girls have been bugging me about Bumbershoot," he said. "It's next weekend, you know. They're dying to go, but Amy's going to be out of town at a convention, and Mrs. Edwards just can't hack it by herself. Having the girls in a crowd like that would be too much for her."

Bumbershoot is an end-of-summer celebration, a four-day extravaganza that takes place in Seattle over Labor Day weekend. It's held at Seattle Center, the site of the 1962 World's Fair. Bumbershoot is like a gigantic medieval fair, complete with food booths, fortune-tellers, street musicians, jugglers, name-brand entertainment, and a crowd of approximately 250,000. I could well believe Mrs. Edwards couldn't hack going there with two little kids. I wondered if I could.

Peters continued. "I told the girls the only way they could go was if you'd agree to take them, but that I'd have to check with you first, for them not to get their hopes up."

"Sure, I'll take 'em." I couldn't believe I was saying it. Maybe it was guilt about my own kids that made me say yes. I remembered back when Kelly and Scott were little. I had worked event security at Bumbershoot for two of the three days. When I woke up Monday morning and Karen said that she wanted to take the kids and go Bumbershooting, she and I got in a hell of a fight. We ended up not going at all.

Did I say maybe it was guilt? Of course it was guilt. Who am I trying to kid?

"Thanks, Beau," Peters said. "I figured you would." I didn't tell him why I was such a pushover.

"They'll be thrilled," he continued. "I was afraid Heather would try to get to you before I had a chance."

"Nope," I said, glancing at the still-flashing light on my answering machine. There were at least five messages waiting to be replayed. "This is the first I've heard anything about it."

"Good. I'll tell Mrs. Edwards to get in touch with you to make arrangements.

"How's the movie going?" he asked, changing the subject. "Were you anywhere near where they pulled that body out of Lake Union yesterday?"

I glanced at the clock. I was already late. It didn't much matter if I got there later still. I took the time to tell Peters some of what had gone on the day before. As soon as I got to the part about the buckle, Peters stopped me short.

"Hey, wait a minute. Remember that guy whose boat blew up last week out in the middle of Lake Union? I seem to remember the papers saying the owner of the boat was an ironworker. He was missing afterwards. They had divers down and were dragging the lake, but they didn't find a body."

Peters' more than adequate memory had been honed even sharper by the months of hospital confinement. He would devour newspapers, remembering almost verbatim everything he read. His comment jarred my memory as well. I had heard about the case and the missing body. I had forgotten that the missing victim was an ironworker.