We had been sitting there quietly for a very long time when I realized at last that Lars Jenssen was waiting for me to spur him forward. “So what happened then?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I got over it, I guess. Finally figured out that it wasn’t doing me no good. All that resentment was just eating up my insides. Except…”
“Except what?” I prompted again.
“By then Daniel was already long dead and buried. Getting rid of all that poison helped me some, but it didn’t do poor little Danny no good, or Aggie neither. By then she was so far gone that she didn’t understand. I’ll tell you this, Beau, if I got me one regret in life, that’s it. Once they’re dead, you can’t do nothing about it, nothing at all.”
For a moment Lars Jenssen seemed adrift again, lost in a sea of thoughts about the past and what couldn’t be changed in it. Then he sat up and put both hands on the table.
“How’re you doing on your list?” he asked brightly, seeming to change the subject. I realized belatedly that he hadn’t changed the subject at all. That cagey old goat was simply taking a run at me from another direction.
Anyone who thinks the Alcoholics Anonymous program is a walk in the park hasn’t sat down to do Step 4, which entails making a searching moral inventory of yourself, or Step 8, which involves making a list of all the people you have wronged in your lifetime, people to whom you ought to make amends while you still have a chance.
I was on Step 8, and Lars Jenssen’s message was clear.
“Look, Lars,” I said patiently. “You’ve got it all ass-backwards. I didn’t wrong my grandparents, they wronged me, us-my mother and me both. If that happened to Kelly, if my own daughter got pregnant, you can bet I wouldn’t throw her to the wolves like that.”
“Oh?” Lars Jenssen asked.
And suddenly I had a vision, a flashback of me standing nose to nose with Kelly in Arizona a few months earlier, of my telling her that the young man she had been interested in was nothing but a creep and a bum. In the dim restaurant light my ears reddened at the thought. I wondered if Lars saw them change color, if he had spoken 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.