Jonathan Kellerman - Gone

“Is Mr. Beamish a professor?”

“No,” she said, “he never liked teaching. His thing was litigation.”

I reached Beamish’s Tudor at eleven a.m. The same Indonesian maid answered.

“Yes!” She beamed. “Mister home!”

Moments later the old man came shuffling out, wearing a saggy white cardigan over a brown knit shirt, pink-striped seersucker pants, and the same house slippers with wolves’ heads on the toes.

His sneer was virtuoso. “The prodigal policeman arrives. What does it take to motivate you people?”

“There’ve been some problems with the phones,” I said.

He cackled with the joy of omniscience, cleared his throat four times, hacked up something wet and swallowed it. “My tax dollars put to good use.”

“What did you call about, sir?”

“You don’t know?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“You still haven’t seen the message? Then how did you- ”

“I figured it out, Mr. Beamish, from the look of contempt on your face when I drove by.”

“The look of…” A puckered, lipless mouth curled ambiguously. “A veritable Sherlock.”

“What’s the message?” I said.

“When you talk you flinch, young man.”

“I’m a little sore, Mr. Beamish.”

“Carousing on my dollar?”

I unbuttoned my jacket, undid a couple of shirt buttons, and revealed the bandages around my middle.

“Broken ribs?”

“A few.”

“Same thing happened to me when I was in the army,” he said. “Not combat heroics, I was stationed in Bayonne, New Jersey, and some Irish lout from Brooklyn backed a Jeep right into me. But for the grace of a few inches, I’d have ended up childless, singing soprano, and voting Democrat.”

I smiled.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Got to hurt like hell.”

“Then don’t be funny,” I said.

He smiled. A real smile, devoid of scorn. “Army doctors couldn’t do a damn thing to patch me, just wrapped the ribs and told me to wait. When I mended, they shipped me off to the ETO.”

“No medical progress since then.”

“When did this happen to you? Not that I really care.”

“Two days ago. Not that it’s any of your business.”

He gave a start. Glared. Plucked brown fabric from his sunken chest. Broke into arid laughter, coughed up more mucus. When the wheezing stopped, he said, “How about a drink? It’s almost noon.”

As I followed him through dim, dusty, high-ceilinged rooms full of Georgian antiques and Chinese porcelain, he said, “How’d the other guy fare?”

“Worse than me.”

“Good.”

We sat at a round table in his octagonal breakfast room, just off a kitchen whose stainless steel counters and chipped white cabinets said it hadn’t been altered for half a century.

Mullion windows looked out to a shade garden. The table was seasoned mahogany, cigarette burned and water-marked, circled by four Queen Anne chairs. The wall covering was a pale green silk Asian print, crowded with peonies and bluebirds and fictitious vines, faded white in spots. A solitary framed photo hung on the wall. Black and white, also diminished by decades of ultraviolet.

When Beamish left to fetch the drinks, I took a look at the picture. A lanky, light-haired young man in an army captain’s uniform stood arm and arm with a pretty young woman. Her cloche hat rested on dark curls. She wore a fitted summer suit and held a bouquet.

Big ship in the background. U.S.S. something. A fountain-penned caption in the lower right border read: 4/7/45, Long Beach: Betty and Al. Back from the war at last!

Beamish returned with a cut-crystal decanter and a pair of matching old-fashioned glasses, lowered himself to a chair slowly, struggling to hide his own wince. Then changing his mind.

“Eventually,” he said, “you don’t need to be beat on to ache. Nature does it all by her cruel self.” He poured us each two fingers, slid my tumbler across the table.

“Thanks for the encouragement.” I held mine up.

He grunted and drank. I imagined Milo in forty years, hacking and swigging and pronouncing about the sorry state the world had gotten itself into. Old and white-haired.

The fantasy ended when I got to heterosexual and rich.

Beamish and I drank. The whiskey was a single malt, peaty, sweetish going down, with a nice after-burn that reminded you it was alcohol.

He licked the spot where his lips used to be, put his glass down. “This is the good stuff, Lord knows why I brought it out.”

“Uncharacteristic burst of generosity,” I said.

“You’re an insolent one- none of the obsequiousness of a public servant.”

“I’m not one. I’m a psychologist.”

“A what- no, don’t answer, I heard you fine. One of those, eh? The fat detective sent you over here to deal with an unbalanced old fossil?”

“All my idea.” I gave him a short explanation of my relationship to the police. Expected the worst.

Beamish drank some more and tweaked the tip of his nose. “When Rebecca died I saw no point in living. My children insisted I see a psychiatrist and sent me to a Jewish chap in Beverly Hills. He prescribed pills I never took and referred me to a Jewish woman psychologist in his office. I rejected her out-of-hand as a high-priced babysitter but my children coerced me. Turned out, they were right. She helped me.”

“I’m glad.”

“Sometimes it’s still difficult,” he said. “Too much damned space on the bed- ah, enough mawkishness, if we sit here too much longer you’ll send me a bill. Here’s the message I left the fat detective: A woman came by three days ago, poking around that one’s pile of logs.”

Pointing in the general direction of Nora’s house. “I went over and asked her what she was doing and she said she was looking for her cousin, Nora. I told her Nora hadn’t been seen in a while and that the police may very well suspect Nora of nefarious activity. She didn’t seem at all surprised by that possibility- is it ‘Doctor’?”

“Alex is fine.”

“Did you cheat on your exams?” he snapped.

“No- ”

“Then you earned your damned degree, so use it, for God’s sake. One thing I detest is the ersatz familiarity the beatniks ushered in. You and I may be drinking my best single malt, sir, but if you addressed me by my Christian name, I’d toss you out on your ear.”

“That would be painful, under the circumstances,” I said.

He worked his lips. Conceded a smile. “What’s your family name?”

“ Delaware.”

“Now, then, Dr. Delaware…where was I…”

“The cousin didn’t seem surprised.”

“On the contrary,” said Beamish. “The possibility that Nora was under suspicion seemed downright syntonic. ” He grinned. “A psychological term, I learned it from Dr. Ruth Goldberg.”

“A-plus,” I said. “Any reason the cousin wasn’t surprised?”

“I pressed her on that but she was not forthcoming. Quite the contrary, she was eager to leave and I had to prevail upon her to leave her name and phone number.”

Another slow rise from the table and a five-minute absence allowed me to finish my scotch. Beamish reappeared holding a piece of white paper folded to a two-inch square. Gnarled fingers labored at unfolding and smoothing.

Half a sheet of heavy-stock letterhead stationery.

Martin, Crutch, and Melvyn

A Legal Corporation

Olive Street address, long list of small-print names, Beamish’s near the top.

At the bottom of the page, shaky handwriting in black fountain pen, smeared around the edges.