20.5 Ring in the Dead by J A Jance

Author:J A Jance [Jance, J A]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MEL CAME IN about then, smiling and waving her freshly manicured, scarlet nails in my face as she kissed me hello. “What were you reading?” she asked, looking down at the scatter of yellowing onionskin paper I had dropped onto the carpet in front of the window seat. I had let the pages fall as I read them. After I had finished reading, I had simply let them be as I sat there recalling that long-ago history.

“It’s something Pickles Gurkey wrote before he died,” I explained.

“Your old partner?”

I nodded. “His widow, Anna, died a few weeks ago. His daughter, Anne Marie, was cleaning out her mother’s house and found this. She dropped it off because she thought I’d want to read it.”

“Did you?” Mel asked. “Read it, I mean.”

I nodded again.

“May I?”

“Sure,” I said. “Help yourself.”

So Mel gathered up the pages, settled comfortably on the window seat next to me, and started to read. The storm had long since ended. The clouds had rolled eastward. Outside the sky was a fragile blue, and so was the water out in the sound, but it was getting on toward evening.

I waited quietly until Mel finished reading. Fortunately she’s a very fast reader.

“So what happened?” she asked, straightening the sheets of paper and handing them back to me in a neat stack.

“We found the bad guys eventually,” I said. “The one who turned state’s evidence got off with two years for involuntary manslaughter. The shooter, Benjamin Smith, got fifteen years at Monroe for second-degree homicide, which ended up turning into a life sentence.”

“How did that happen?”

“Benjy was an arrogant asshole. That’s why he thought it was great fun to dodge out of restaurants without paying his bills. As far as he was concerned, the whole thing was nothing but a lark. Unfortunately for him, prison has a way of cutting arrogance down to size. Another inmate stuck a shiv into him. He died ten months into his fifteen-year sentence.”

“The other guy at the restaurant shooting?” Mel asked.

“Fred Beman served his sentence, straightened out his life, and now he’s back home in Walla Walla helping his father run his horse farm.”

“What about Pickles?”

“I was there in the courtroom the day the prosecutor dropped all charges against him. He turned around, grabbed my hand, shook it like crazy, and said, ‘Thanks, Beau. Thanks a lot.’ ”

“What about the Jonas bit. Did he ever call you that again?” Mel asked.

“Never. Not once. We worked together for the next five years, and he never called me anything but Beau.”

Mel frowned, looking at the papers in her hand.

“Isn’t Pickles the guy who ended up dying of another heart attack?” Mel asked.

“Right,” I said. “That was Pickles. The second one was five years later.”

“So if you saved him from a murder charge, I don’t get why his family blamed you when he died of a second heart attack that long after the first.”

“They thought he was working to make it up to me—that he owed me somehow—for keeping him out of jail, but it turns out, that wasn’t it at all.

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