“Right,” he muttered. Then he stalked off to get coffee.
While he was gone, I took it upon myself to read and edit his report. By the time he got back, I had used a red pen to good effect, marking it up like crazy. It turned out Tommy Tompkins was right. Correcting Detective Beaumont’s work made me feel better. When Jonas came back with the coffees, I handed him the form.
“Not good enough,” I told him. “Not nearly good enough, especially considering you’re a hotshot college graduate. Take another crack at this while I find out what we’re supposed to be doing today.”
I left him there working on that and went looking for the murder book on the Girl in the Barrel. Tommy had told me that until Jonas and I caught a new case of our own, we’d be doubling up with Larry and Watty Watkins on their ongoing case. I spent some time reviewing the murder book entries. The body of the victim, a girl named Monica Wellington, had been found on Sunday afternoon a week and a day earlier. Beaumont and his Patrol partner, Rory MacPherson, had responded to the 911 call. In the intervening days, Larry and Watty, with Beaumont along for the ride, had done a whole series of initial interviews. The autopsy had revealed that the victim was pregnant at the time of her death, but so far no boyfriend had surfaced.
By the time I’d scanned through the murder book, Jonas had finished the second go-down on his report. He ripped it out of the typewriter, handed it over, and then stood behind me, watching over my shoulder, as I read through it. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a damned thing wrong with it.
“I suppose this‘ll do,” I told him dismissively. “Now go down to Motor Pool and get us a car. It’s time to hit the road.”
And we did, driving all over hell and gone with him at the wheel, doing follow-up interviews with all the people who had been spoken to earlier. Follow-ups aren’t fun, by the way. Initial interviews are the real meat and potatoes of the job. The only thing fun about follow-ups is catching people in the lies that they made up on the run the first time around.
Turns out we found nothing—not a damned thing. I was hoping to pull off some little piece of investigative magic to garner some respect and put the new guy in his place, but that didn’t happen. Nobody did a Perry Mason–style confession in our presence. We didn’t discover some amazing bit of missing evidence. In fact, we never did solve that particular case. We worked it off and on for a couple of years and finally got shunted away from it entirely.
All this is to say, it wasn’t a great start for a partnership. In fact, I’d call it downright grim. I kept the pressure on him, expecting him to go crying to whoever it was who had pulled the strings to move him to Homicide, but that didn’t happen, either. He was a smart enough guy who tended to go off half-cocked on occasion.
If he was the hare, I was the tortoise. Jonas had good instincts but he was impatient and wanted to sidestep rules and procedures. I pounded down that tendency every chance I could—made him go through channels, across desks, and up the chain of command. The truth is that with enough practice, he started to get pretty good at it.
I could tell early on that he hit the sauce too much. He and his wife had a couple of little kids at home, and I think they squabbled a lot. I don’t mean that the kids squabbled—Jonas and his wife did. I know her name but it’s slipped my mind at the moment. It’s that old familiar story—the young cop works too hard and can’t put the job away when he gets home. Meanwhile the wife is stuck handling everything on the home front. In other words, I understood it, because those were issues Anna and I had put to bed a long time ago, but like I told him that first day, I didn’t want any advice on nutrition from him, and I figured he didn’t need any marital counseling from me. Fair is fair.
We worked together for several months before the night in early July when everything changed and when our working together morphed from an enforced assignment into a real partnership.