I looked at my watch. Watty glanced in the rearview mirror and caught me doing it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll be there in time.”
We drove straight back to Seattle. We dropped by Seattle PD long enough to put Fred Beman in an interrogation room, and then we headed for the Hargrove Hotel. In case Benjamin Smith made a run for it, we stationed two uniformed officers at First and Madison. Watty was parked in a car facing northbound at First and Columbia. Larry Powell and I waited inside the scuzzy lobby of the Hargrave, seated on a pair of swaybacked, cracked leather chairs. The clerk seemed distinctly unhappy to see us. As the moments ticked by, I worried that he might have spilled the beans and Benjamin Smith had already skipped town.
Instead, Benjy—I liked thinking of him that way—showed up right on time, at twenty minutes to three, sauntering along, swinging his lunch pail like he didn’t have a care in the world. It was Wednesday. There was no telling if he’d stopped at Bakeman’s on his way home. As soon as he pushed open the brass and glass door and started for the elevator, I stood up to head him off.
“Mr. Smith,” I said, barring his way and holding my badge up to his face. “Detective Beaumont with Seattle PD. If you don’t mind, I’d like to have a word.”
I was deliberately in his face, and the man did exactly what I hoped he’d do. He took a swing at me with the lunch pail. Since that’s what I was expecting, I blocked it easily. When you need an excuse to take someone into custody, there’s nothing like resisting in front of a collection of witnesses to give you a warrantless reason to lock some guy up in a jail cell for the next few hours. On the way to Benjy’s interrogation room, I made sure he got a look at Fred, anxious and despairing, sitting in his.
“What’s he doing here?” Benjy asked, nodding in Fred’s direction.
“What do you think he’s doing?” I said. “Mr. Beman is singing like a bird. How do you think we found you?”
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. It was the case.”