Payment in Kind (11 page)

I’ve been told that there’s nothing worse than a reformed drunk. That may well be true, but three months into the program, I’m a hell of a long way from reformed. The whole idea of having to quit drinking pisses me off. When the world is full of spry old codgers, seemingly healthy people like Lars Jenssen and some of his aging cronies, who’ve been drinking steadily way longer than I’ve been alive, it irks the hell out of me that here in my midforties I’m stuck with some kind of lame-duck liver.

I don’t like going to meetings, and I sure as hell don’t look forward to them, but they beat the alternative as outlined in grim physical detail by the inscrutable Dr. Wang. And so I go.

The meeting itself was over by eighty-thirty, and Lars and I made our way downstairs to the smoky restaurant for our ritual postmeeting rump session and greasy spoon dinner.

Lars Jenssen was already in the Navy prior to World War II. He missed being on the USS
Arizona
because a ruptured appendix had him confined to a room in a naval hospital in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Once he got out of the hospital, his luck continued to hold.

During the war in the Pacific, Lars survived having two other ships shot out from under him. A confirmed nonswimmer, he still carried in his wallet the frayed and brittle one-dollar bill that had floated by him in debris-littered water off the Philippines while he clung to a life preserver waiting to be picked up after the sinking of the second one, the destroyer
Abner Read
.

Lars stayed on in the Navy after the war, retiring with twenty years of service, and had gone on to a second career as an Alaska halibut fisherman. A lifetime drinker, he had managed to make it through the death of his only child, a son, who was shot down during the Vietnam War, only to fall apart completely during the five years it had taken for his wife, Aggie, to succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.

Sober now for six years, he lived just up the street from me, subsisting on a small naval pension and Social Security in a subsidized apartment building called Stillwater Arms. He prided himself in both his unwavering independence and his good health.

His most prized possession was a videotape copy of a television news broadcast that featured an interview with him done by the local CBS affiliate during Seattle’s famed five-day Labor Day Blackout of 1988. A misguided construction project had shut off the electricity to much of the downtown core, paralyzing businesses and stranding high-rise dwellers, many of whom were far too old and frail to negotiate the long, darkened stairways in their buildings.

The camera had caught Lars Jenssen at the bottom of a nine-story stairwell. He had affixed a flashlight to his cane and was loaded with a backpack full of sack lunches, which he was about to deliver to unfortunate and less able high-rise strandees.

“Somebody’s got to take care of all those old people,” he had grunted pointedly into the camera, and then set out determinedly to clump up the nine stories to deliver his goodies.

I hadn’t seen the interview at the time—hadn’t even known Lars Jenssen then—but he had shown it to me once after we met, venturing shyly into my condo to play it for me on the VCR.

“Offered to let that young guy come with me, but he said he didn’t want to climb all them stairs. Ha!” Lars had snorted derisively when he showed me the tape. “That’s what’s the matter with kids these days. No gumption.”

We ordered our usual postmeeting dinners—a chili-burger for me and a plate of sliced tomatoes and cottage cheese for Lars. It was to this unvarying evening repast, cholesterol doomsayers to the contrary, that Lars Jenssen attributed both his good health and his longevity.

Spooning half a pitcher of cream and several heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee, he eyed me thoughtfully.

“How come you never talk about your family none, Beau?” he asked. “You had a chance tonight, and you blew it. Oh sure, you talked about your kids and all, but when it comes to the rest of your family, it’s like you fell off a turnip truck somewhere all growed up.”

“That’s not too far from the truth,” I told him with an uneasy laugh.

My family history, or lack thereof, isn’t something I’m particularly eager to talk about. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, I suppose, but it’s not something to brag about, either.

“My mother’s dead,” I said flatly after taking a forkful of my chili-burger. “I never knew my father. He died during the war. They weren’t married.”

With an oath, Lars flung his fork back onto his nearly empty plate, where it bounced on a wilted lettuce leaf.

“See there?” he demanded loudly. Encroaching deafness had disabled Lars Jenssen’s volume control years before. “No wonder you’re all screwed up, Beau. You never had no men around, did you? You know, what they call one of them role models.”

Rather than being provoked by Lars Jenssen’s probing interference, I was instead slightly amused. For a whole lot of money, the department gladly would have paid to send me to a genuine shrink. So here I sat in a dingy restaurant being psychoanalyzed by a meddlesome near-octogenarian who had probably never even heard of Sigmund Freud.

Lars leaned back in his chair and squinted nearsightedly across the table at me. “What about your grandparents?” he persisted stubbornly. “You musta spent at least some time with them.”

My amusement disappeared as I felt my hackles rising. I could talk about my father. The motorcycle accident that had killed him was just that—an accident. And so was I, for that matter. It was a cruel twist of fate that those two young lovers, my parents, had never had the chance to marry. The fact that my mother never married anyone else during the lonely years afterward testified to the enduring love she must have felt for her dead sailor/lover.

And I could talk about my mother, too. She had done it all and done it by herself, with no help from anyone. She had kept me and raised me at a time when that simply wasn’t done in polite society. She had brought me up with unstinting devotion and a selfless, gritty determination. I’ve seen a lot of action in my years on the force, but those two qualities still form the basis for my definition of heroism.

Talking about my mother and father was fine, but I could not, would not, talk about my grandfather—a man whose name I bore—about Jonas Piedmont, that stiff-necked, stubborn Presbyterian son of a bitch who had turned his pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter out of the house and who had never once, in all the difficult years that followed, lifted a single solitary finger to help her.

The sudden unexpected flood of resentment that washed through me made it difficult to remember exactly what Lars Jenssen’s question had been, to say nothing of answering it.

“No,” I said finally. “I never did.”

“How come?” Lars wasn’t one to let sleeping dogs lie.

“We just didn’t, that’s all.”

“They dead?”

“Goddamn it, Lars. What’s the point of all this third degree? No, they’re not dead, not as far as I know, but they could just as well be. For all I know, they probably still live somewhere right here in Seattle, but you couldn’t prove it by me. I’ve never met them, never laid eyes on them, never wanted to. Once they found out my mother was pregnant with me, they crossed us off their list. Permanently.”

“I see,” Lars Jenssen said, nodding sagely. “Maybe you ought to pay them a visit.”

“Like hell I will!” I snorted.

AA has strict live-and-let-live rules that decree members should not interfere in other people’s lives, rules that create psychic nonaggression pacts which allow each member, supported by the invisible group behind him, to work his way through his own nightmare of self-imposed darkness.

If anyone had ever told Lars Jenssen about those rules, he had long since forgotten them, or maybe he did remember but was simply ignoring them.

“The thing is, Beau, you gotta give ‘em credit for doing the best they could.”

“I don’t have to give them anything,” I insisted.

Lars shook his head. “Just a minute here,” he said. “Take my boy Daniel now. He didn’t get drafted, you know. He up and volunteered, for Chrissakes. He went over to Vietnam and got hisself blasted to pieces all for nothing. I cussed him for that, cussed him good, too. Not just after he was dead neither, but right then, at the time, when he was leaving.

“I cussed Danny and told him he was too goddamned stupid to be any son of mine. Course, it wasn’t true, and it like to broke poor Aggie’s heart, me carrying on that way all the while her only son was packing up his stuff to leave home and go off to war. And I cussed him later on, too, when I’d be out in the boat, just me and God and the ocean…”

Lars broke off suddenly, stopped cold, and didn’t continue.

Any mention of the Vietnam War always gets to me, because when the war came, I didn’t go. It wasn’t that I was a draft-dodger or a protester. I simply didn’t get drafted, although God knows I was prime cannon fodder material, and you can be damn sure I didn’t volunteer, either. By the time I was in college and eligible for the draft, my mother was already sick and dying. I’ve wondered sometimes if maybe one of her friends wasn’t on the local draft board. Maybe that would help explain why I’m still walking around in one piece when lots of other people aren’t, including Lars Jenssen’s son, Daniel. Lately I’ve wondered if going into law enforcement wasn’t a way to make up for what I have somehow come to regard as dereliction of duty.

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.