J. Jance - Long Time Gone

It was late by then, almost ten. I checked the number on caller ID. When the name Lars Jenssen appeared, I picked up.

“Beau?” Lars said, sounding relieved. “I’m glad you’re there.”

“Why? Is something wrong?”

“Ya, sure,” he said. “I yust got back from the hospital. They took Beverly over to Swedish in Ballard.”

I felt my heart constrict. “What’s wrong? Do you need me to go there?”

“No. Not now. She’s sleeping. Has a touch of pneumonia, is all. They’re keeping her for a day or two.”

I wasn’t reassured. At age ninety-one, “a touch” of pneumonia can be very serious. And I was also more than a little annoyed that no one had bothered to let me know that Beverly’s condition had changed from being a little “under the weather” to something potentially fatal.

“Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?” I asked. “What about taking you back to the hospital in the morning? Will you need a ride?”

“No. I talked to the lady at the front desk. Queen Anne Gardens has a van that takes residents where they need to go. I’ve already lined up a ride. Now I yust want to go to bed.”

“You’ll call if you need anything?”

“You bet,” he said and hung up.

Mel was watching me closely. “Is someone ill?” she asked.

I nodded. “My grandmother. She’s ninety-one, and they’ve slapped her in the hospital with pneumonia.”

“She’s the one who made the afghan?” Mel asked.

I nodded again. “Beverly Jenssen. My mother was pregnant with me and unmarried when my father died in a motorcycle accident. My grandfather-my biological grandfather-disapproved of unwed mothers and threw Mother out of the house. She raised me on her own and remained estranged from her parents for as long as she lived. In fact, I never met them until I stumbled across them by accident a few years ago. By then my grandfather had suffered a stroke and was ready to let bygones be bygones. After my grandfather died, Beverly met and married an old friend of mine, Lars Jenssen. He’s the one who just called. He’s also an independent old cuss who won’t even let me give him a ride to the hospital.”

I didn’t add that, other than my kids, Lars and Beverly were all the family I had left in the world, but I think Mel picked up on that anyway. “You’re sure there’s nothing we should do?”

“Lars as good as told me to mind my own business.”

There was a knock on the door, and it startled me. Belltown Terrace is a secure building. People inside the building usually don’t go knocking on doors at that hour of the night, and if it was someone from outside, either the doorman should have let me know a visitor was coming up or that person should have announced himself over the security phone at the front door or in the elevator lobby.

“Who is it?” I asked without opening the door.

“It’s me,” Paul Kramer growled from the far side of the door. “Now let me in before I break the damned door down!”

I opened the door to find him, bristling with rage, standing in the corridor.

“Who let you up here?” I demanded.

“My badge let me up here,” he returned. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Beaumont?”

“Until you knocked on the door, I was sitting in my own living room and minding my own business. Why?”

“I want to know what you’re up to. If you had told me what the deal was instead of going off and leaving me with that evidence box and nothing to go on, maybe she wouldn’t be dead.”

“Who’s dead?” I asked, sure his answer would be Sister Mary Katherine. It wasn’t.

“Elvira Marchbank was found dead this evening at the bottom of her basement stairs,” he said. “And I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that she would die under suspicious circumstances on the very same day I catch you prowling around the cold case file of her sister-in-law, who was murdered some fifty-plus years ago. So now that you’ve managed to get my name instead of yours on the checkout sheet for that evidence box, you’re going to tell me what the hell is going on.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t blame me because your name is on the sheet. I seem to remember your insisting on taking charge of that cold case box all on your own.”

Kramer looked as though he was going to explode. “I asked you straight out what this was all about and you-”

“Is something the matter?” Mel asked, stepping into view behind me.

Kramer was taken aback. Clearly he hadn’t expected me to have a visitor at this hour of the night. If Elvira was dead and the captain was worried about a public relations problem, the last thing he needed was a witness to this little tirade. I, on the other hand, was worried about Sister Mary Katherine for fear she could be next on someone’s list.

“This is police business,” Kramer snapped. “Tell your girlfriend it’s got nothing to do with her and to stay the hell out of it.”

I was about to explain that Mel Soames was a colleague of mine and not a girlfriend, but Mel handled that on her own.

“Would you like to see my badge?” she asked sweetly. “Or should I do us all a favor and start out by shoving it up your ass?”

I could have kissed her-probably should have, especially considering the fact that her comment left Kramer utterly speechless for the better part of a minute. Finally, with blood throbbing in his temples, he turned his fury on me.

“If Mrs. Marchbank’s death could have been prevented by my knowing what was going on-”

“Wait a minute, Kramer,” I interrupted. “I told you if you wanted that information, you should call my boss. I even gave you his number. Did you call him?”

“Well, no, but-”

“Sorry. No buts allowed,” I returned. “If you had gone by the book, you would have had the info. Aren’t you the guy who’s always such a stickler for going through channels and across desks? As I told you before, I don’t work for you or Seattle PD anymore. If you’ve got questions about my case, talk to Harry I. Ball or, better yet, talk to Ross Connors himself. Once they give the okay, I’ll be glad to talk to you or your investigators about this. Just have them drop by. Obviously you know where I live.”

Kramer turned and stalked back down the hallway. “Why didn’t you tell him about Sister Mary Katherine?” Mel asked, once the elevator door shut behind him.

“He’s a jerk,” I replied.

“That’s true,” she said, “and readily apparent. But I still don’t know why you shut him down like that.”

“Because Paul Kramer and I have a history,” I replied.

I expected her to argue the point or to ask for more details, but she didn’t.

“Okay,” Mel said. “Makes sense to me.”

With that she went back over to the window seat, plugged her feet back into her shoes, and picked up her coat. “It’s late,” she said. “I need to be going.” She paused by the door. “See you tomorrow. At the office?”

“Probably.”

She left then. As I took the last of the Sister Katherine tapes out of the VCR, I asked myself Mel Soames’s question. Why hadn’t I told Kramer? Wasn’t I being as territorial as he had been in the evidence room? And I would be talking to him or at least to the detectives assigned to investigate Elvira Marchbank’s death. All I was doing was putting him off for a few hours-until the AG’s office was open for business the next morning.

But the really troubling part was a question raised by Kramer himself. Had my refusal to give him the information contributed to what had happened to Elvira? She had been found at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Had she fallen or had she been pushed? By being stubborn, I had put myself out of the loop. Paul Kramer didn’t know about Sister Mary Katherine, but I didn’t know about Elvira. In the game of tit for tat I was as much of a jerk as he was. That was not high praise.