J. Jance: Long Time Gone

There are a number of things I didn’t learn about Dave Livingston until the occasion of Scott’s wedding. For one thing, he speaks French. I have no idea why an accountant from Southern California would be, or would even need to be, fluent in French, but he was and is. In the course of that initial dinner he had sussed out that Pierre, age fifty-seven, had recently been diagnosed with a recurrence of prostate cancer. He and his wife had decided to postpone his next round of treatment until after the wedding. This bit of bad news no doubt accounted for the sudden change in wedding plans, and rightly so. In my opinion, postponing cancer treatment for any reason is never a good idea. Scott and Cherisse were obviously concerned that by summertime his condition might have deteriorated to the point where traveling to their wedding would be impossible.

And so I found myself in the middle of a wedding event that was complicated by a family health crisis and confounded by limited communication skills. Unlike Dave, I am not fluent in French. My daughter had thoughtfully sent along a French/English phrase book that she thought might be useful. Unfortunately the usual tourist-focused contents made zero mention of PSA counts or prostate difficulties, so I couldn’t have talked to Pierre about his situation even if I had wanted.

Dave and Pierre got along famously. In the course of the next several days, the two of them carried on lively breakfast-time conversations in lightning-speed French in which they discussed bits of information both of them had gleaned from that morning’s Wall Street Journal, so obviously Pierre’s grasp of English was far better than he was willing to let on. Meanwhile, Helene and I sipped our respective cups of coffee and smiled sincerely but wordlessly back and forth across the table. Come to think of it, idiotically might be a better way of putting it. As far as I could tell, Helene’s English was as nonexistent as my French.

Thinking the wedding would be a good excuse to use up some of my use-it-or-lose-it SHIT-squad vacation time, I had agreed to come to Hawaii five days before the actual wedding. That turned out to be a big mistake because I’m not much good at taking vacations. Never have been. It’s one of the criticisms Karen used to level at me both before and after we divorced. And my shrink-the one Seattle PD sent me to see after my partner Sue Danielson was gunned down-told me pretty much the same thing.

“It’s one of the main reasons so many retired cops end up blowing their brains out, Detective Beaumont,” Dr. Katherine Majors had said during one of my departmentally decreed counseling sessions designed to fix cops whose partners have been killed in the line of duty. “They never manage to separate themselves from their jobs. Once they stop working, they lose their identity and, as a consequence, their whole reason for living.”

Okay, so I admit Dr. Majors was probably dead-on as far as I’m concerned. No doubt that explains why I went looking for the attorney general’s investigative job before the ink had finished drying on my letter of resignation from Seattle PD. It also explains why the five days leading up to the wedding were unbearable. Dave, the FOTB (father of the bride), and the best man all played golf. I don’t play golf. They also went deep-sea fishing. I don’t like boats-big or small-so fishing was out of the question. The MOTB (mother of the bride), Cherisse, and her maid of honor were up to their eyeballs in last-minute arrangements with flowers, dresses, hairdos, and other essential pre-wedding preparations. Those left me cold as well. So, as co-FOTG, I had spent the days leading up to the wedding enjoying the bikini-clad scenery on the beach but generally feeling like the proverbial fifth wheel.

The wedding itself was a lovely affair. We gathered on a moonlit beach with the sand around us studded with flickering tiki lamps. Cherisse was tall and slender and lovely in her long white dress. Scott was tall and handsome in his tux. They were perfect together. The ceremony was read first in English and then in French. Dave sniffled unabashedly into his hankie all the way through the ceremony. When it came time for the “till death do us part” part, Helene reached over and leaned against Pierre’s shoulder. That small gesture was enough to put a lump in my throat. Nobody was talking about the elephant in the living room, but it was there as big as life.

“I just wish Karen could have been here to see it,” Dave told me later on that night after the multicourse wedding supper. “She would have loved it.”

We were at an outdoor hotel bar where Dave was drinking Scotch and I wasn’t, and I knew he was right. Karen had loved weddings. God knows she dragged me to enough of them over the years.

Some people might think it odd to find the two forlorn men who had shared their lives with Karen Beaumont Livingston sitting together consoling each other. It sounds, in fact, like lyrics from some pathetic country-western song, but the truth is, we were both coming from the same place. When someone dies, other people have to learn to go on with their lives. Weddings happen and babies are born and even the joyful events hurt because the people who are gone aren’t there to witness them.

Once the busy merry-go-round of wedding festivities ended and the kids went off to have fun with their best people, Dave and I had fallen to earth like a pair of balloons with all the helium let out. Dave was grieving for Karen and so was I, but I was thinking about my second wife’s death as well. Losing Anne Corley on our wedding day had left me in an emotional black hole from which I had yet to fully emerge. So while Scott and Cherisse were looking hopefully toward what the future might hold and Helene and Pierre spent the long shank of the evening dreading the future, Dave and I were mired in the regretful past. Bearing that in mind, I think the four of us deserve a lot of collective credit for not having rained on the kids’ parade.

Two days later, as I pulled into my assigned space in the SHIT squad’s parking garage, that balmy evening’s worth of quiet conversation seemed eons away-eons and more than fifty degrees.

Unit B, my unit, is the Special Homicide Investigation Team’s Seattle area office. It consists of four investigators, our commander, Harry Ignatius Ball, who, for perverse reasons of his own, prefers to be called Harry I. Ball, and our office manager, Barbara Galvin. Unit C works out of Spokane. Everybody else works out of the attorney general’s office down in Olympia. Unit B’s newest investigator is Melissa Soames, an easygoing, forty-something, blue-eyed blonde who prefers to be called Mel. She and I ended up checking in at Barbara’s desk at the same time.

“Looks like it’s our lucky day,” she said.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Coming down from North Bend, Harry ended up on the wrong side of a twenty-car pileup east of Issaquah,” she told me. “That means we won’t be doing our morning briefing anytime soon. Hallelujah! So how was the wedding?”

“Fine,” I said.

Barbara Galvin and Mel exchanged looks. Mel rolled her eyes. “Men!” she exclaimed, and stalked off to her office.

“What’s wrong with fine?” I demanded.

“Never mind,” Barbara said with a sigh. She handed me a stack of papers. “Here’s some reading material to hold you until Harry shows up.”

I took the pile of memos and updates and retreated into my office. In most buildings it would have been a cubicle. It wasn’t much larger than a cubicle, but whoever used the building before we took it over had gone to the trouble of creating tiny separate offices with walls that went all the way from floor to ceiling, thus allowing all of us a bit more privacy than we would have had otherwise, and that’s a good thing. It means that when I’m at my desk, I don’t have to hear Barbara Galvin’s phone calls to her son or her new country music. It also means I don’t have to listen in on Mel’s steady diet of twenty-four-hour talk radio.