Tommy blew another smoke ring and jerked his head to one side. “Guess he finally gathered up enough brown-nosing points to get kicked upstairs,” he answered.
Eddy Burnside had been my partner for three years. We got along all right, I guess, but there was no love lost between us, and Eddy’s brown-nosing was the least of it. I didn’t trust the guy any further than I could throw him, which, in my mind, made him a perfect candidate to move up the ladder. Get him the hell off the streets. If he’s upstairs making policy, at least he won’t be out in public getting people killed. So even though Eddy was your basic dud for a partner, being stuck with a brand-new detective to wean off his mama’s tits and potty-train isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, either.
“What the hell kind of a name is Jonas?” I asked.
Calling out someone on account of his name puts me on pretty thin ice. Milton is the name my mother gave me. It’s a good biblical name, after all, so I don’t have a quarrel with it. Milton may be the name on my badge, but that’s not what people call me. I don’t know what my father’s people were called in the old country, but when they came through Ellis Island, the last name got changed to Gurkey. That word bears only the smallest resemblance to the word “gherkin”, one of those little sour pickles my mother and grandmother used to make. But Gurkey and gherkin sounded enough alike that the kids at school and later the guys at the police academy dubbed me Pickles. My family never called me that, but at school and work, that’s who I’ve always been—Pickles Gurkey.
In other words, between me and this Jonas guy, I didn’t have a lot of room to talk.
I took a few seconds and scanned through some of the papers in the folder. This Beaumont guy’s job application said he was a U-Dub graduate who had done a stint in the military. That probably meant a tour of duty in Vietnam.
“You’re sticking me with a college Joe?” I demanded. “Criminal justice? Are you kidding? What does a pack of college professors know about criminals or justice, either one?”
Captain Tompkins listened to my rant and said nothing.
“That’s just what I need,” I continued. “Some smart-assed kid who probably thinks that, since he’s got a degree behind his name, he can run circles around someone like me. All I’ve got to brag about is my diploma from Garfield High School. Thanks a whole helluva lot. How’d I get so lucky?”
Tommy blew another cloud of smoke before he answered. “He’s not brand-new,” he assured me. “Beaumont spent a couple of years on Patrol before they shipped him up here last week. Since you were out of town, he’s been working with Larry Powell and Watty Watkins on that dead girl they found over on Magnolia.”
“The Girl in the Barrel?” I asked.
The kid who delivers our home newspaper lives next door. Rather than turning our subscription off while we were out of town on vacation, Anna and I had him hold our papers. When we got home from Wisconsin on Friday night, the kid had brought them over, and we’d both gone through the stack. Anna cut out all the coupons she wanted, and I read all the news, just to bring myself back up to speed.
Doing a balancing act to keep from dribbling ashes all over his desk, Tommy managed to park his stogie on the edge of a large marble ashtray that was already overfilled with cigar butts and ashes. I’m sure the cleaning people love dealing with his mess every night.
“That’s the one,” he said. “As for how you got him? You’re the only guy on the fifth floor without a living/breathing partner at the moment. That means your number’s up, like it or lump it.”
If Tommy had wanted to, I knew he could have moved people around so I wouldn’t have been stuck with the new guy, but there was no point in arguing. If I couldn’t get Tompkins to change his mind about assigning the new guy to me, maybe I could figure out a way to change the new guy’s mind about wanting to be a detective. That was the simplest way to fix the problem—convince the new detective that what he wanted more than anything was to be an ex-detective.
“So where is he?” I asked.
“Probably in your cubicle, writing up his first report. Everybody else was tied up with that serial killer workshop this past weekend, so Beaumont ended up going to the girl’s funeral up in Leavenworth.”
“He went to the funeral by himself?” I asked. “Who was the genius who decided that was a good idea? Shouldn’t an experienced detective have handled it?”
Tommy shrugged. “Didn’t have a choice. Everybody else had paid to go to the FBI workshop. I figured, how bad could it be? But you might want to look over his paper before he hands it in.”
“Great,” I sputtered. “Now I’m supposed to haul out a red pencil and correct his spelling and grammar?”