Until Proven Guilty - J. A. Jance [55]
“Which do you want first, J. P. or Maxwell Cole?”
“Let’s try for J. P.”
“I’ll have to tell you about my mother first. She was a beauty growing up, but headstrong as they come. She would sneak out of the house at night to date my father. He was a sailor, the first man who asked her out. She was only sixteen. They planned to run away and get married, but he was killed in a motorcycle accident on the navy base over in Bremerton. She didn’t know she was pregnant until after he was dead.
“Her parents threw her out, told her they no longer had a daughter. My mother went to the Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers in Portland and signed in under the name of Beaumont, my father’s hometown in Texas. My first names are Jonas Piedmont, after her two grandfathers. None of her family ever lifted a finger to help us. When she told me where my first and middle names came from, I hated them. I still do. I’ve gone by Beau most of my life. The initials came up during college. Some of my fraternity brothers figured out it bugged me to be called that. Max never got over it.”
“Where’s your mother now?”
“She died of breast cancer when I was twenty. She never made up with her parents. They lived here in Seattle the whole time, but I never met them. Didn’t want to.”
“You loved her very much, didn’t you?” Anne commented gently.
It was becoming a very personal conversation. Anne seemed to bring out the lonely side of me, the part that needed to chew over my life with another human being.
“Yes,” I said at last, meeting Anne’s steady, level gaze. “I loved her. She could have taken an easy way out, given me up for adoption or had an abortion. She didn’t though. She never married, either. She said that being in love once was enough for her.”
“What about you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Is once enough for you?”
“Maybe not,” I said. It was more a declaration of susceptibility than one of intent.
Anne looked away. “Tell me about Maxwell Cole.”
I wasn’t quite ready to talk about Karen, but Maxwell Cole led inevitably in that direction. “As I said, we were fraternity brothers together. He started out being Karen’s boyfriend. We met at a dance he brought her to, a Christmas formal, and the sparks flew. She broke up with him right after New Year’s and started dating me.”
“He’s a pretty sore loser. Is that the only grudge he’s got against you?”
“It’s gone beyond the grudge stage,” I said grimly. “He’s deliberately torpedoed me. When I was a rookie, he almost got me thrown off the force.”
“How?”
“There was a kid, a young crazy up on Capitol Hill. He was up there taking potshots at people with a gun. I was the first on the scene. I called to him and told him I was coming in. I thought we could talk it out. As soon as I came around the corner into the alley, he fired at me, hit me in the arm, my left one. The bullet knocked me to the ground. He evidently thought I was dead, because he got up and started walking toward me. I shot him, killed him on the spot.
“Max was just starting on the P.I. then. He was a cub reporter, so he wasn’t assigned to front-page stuff, but he did a feature on the kid and his family, how the kid had been an emotionally troubled boy who had been shot down in cold blood by a trigger-happy cop with a bullet in his arm. I’m still a killer cop as far as Max is concerned. He brings it up again whenever he has a chance.”
“And are you a killer cop?”
“I don’t think so. It took months to come to terms with it. I’ve never had to do it again.”
“Would you?”
“Would I what?” I had gotten carried away with the story. Her question brought me back to earth in a hurry. Her eyes were fixed on mine, searching, questioning.
“Would you do it again, given the same circumstance?”
Her gray eyes were serious, her face still and waiting. Here it comes, I thought. The answer to this question is going to blow it. There was no sense in lying. If we were going to be together, I would have to be able to be the real J. P. Beaumont.
“Yes,” I said. “Given the same circumstance,