Robert B. Parker's the Bitterest Pill

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “You found pills.”

  Patti nodded and turned away. She was embarrassed. “I’m so ashamed, Jesse. How could I not have known? How did I miss the signs?”

  “Come on, Patti. Teenagers are often strangers to their parents. Even parents close to their kids can’t really know them or what’s going on in their heads. What did Heather say about the pills?”

  She laughed a sad laugh. “What you’d expect. That they weren’t hers and that she was holding them for someone else. When I asked who she was holding them for, she said she wouldn’t rat out her friends. I wanted to believe her. I guess I almost did until I went to pour the pills into the toilet and Heather flipped out. She was like a wild animal, Jesse. She grabbed them out of my hand, scratched my wrist when she did, and swallowed a pill right in front of me. I didn’t know what to do or where to turn. I was afraid to tell Steve and afraid to ask around for help because of Steve’s position. Heather begged me not to tell and said she could kick it with my help, that she could cut back gradually.”

  Jesse said, “It seemed like it was working, didn’t it?”

  She laughed that sad laugh again. “I financed her habit for a few weeks, doling out the pills as we had agreed. By May, I thought we had done it. I even took her into Boston, shopping to celebrate. What an idiot I was, a prize fool. In July, I noticed some of my things started to go missing: a pair of diamond earrings, my iPad, a watch. I pretended with myself for a week but knew in my gut what was going on. It was Heather. I confronted her and told her she had until the end of summer to kick it or she was going to rehab. And voilà,” Patti said. “She did it . . . I thought she did. What an idiot I was. Arrest me, Jesse. I killed my daughter sure as you are sitting here. I killed her with blindness as faith.”

  “Patti, there’s nothing I’m going to say that will make you feel better, but drinking isn’t going to help. That I am sure of. I think you need to talk to someone about this, someone more qualified than me.”

  Twenty-eight

  Patti wasn’t listening to him. Stood up, went into the living room, and came back with an open bottle of Grey Goose. She didn’t bother with a glass, taking a big swallow from the bottle. These days, this kind of punishment drinking was hard for Jesse to witness. He had been where she was.

  He sat patiently and watched as Patti took another swallow. As painful as it was for him to watch, he knew better than most how futile it would be for him to try to stop her. He remembered how he’d taken any attempt to stop him from drinking as a kind of personal challenge. He saw it so clearly now and had been utterly blind to it when he was still actively drinking. He imagined Patti would see it the same way.

  “Chris Grimm,” he said, when he thought Patti could refocus.

  That got her attention. “What about him?”

  “You know him?”

  “Of him,” she said.

  Jesse stayed silent. He wanted to hear where Patti took this and he didn’t want to lead her in one direction or the other. As silence usually did, it got to Patti, and drunk as she was, she needed little prompting to fill in the quiet.

  “I came home from shopping one day at the beginning of the school year and went to change the sheets in Heather’s room. It was pretty obvious she’d been sleeping with someone. I also found a condom wrapper on the floor under the bed. I’m not a prude, Jesse. I never thought a girl as pretty as Heather wouldn’t be sexually active. I mean, I was at her age, but when I asked her about it, she was oddly honest. She told me she had slept with a kid named Chris Grimm and that she had kind of always liked him even though he was sort of a loner. I figured that his name would come up again and they might become girlfriend and boyfriend, but . . .” Patti made a face and shrugged. “Heather never mentioned him again.”

  “Is that it? When I was here the other day and mentioned his name, you denied knowing about him.”

  Patti bowed her head. “I love my husband, Jesse, but he can be hard to deal with. I don’t know, I think he didn’t see Heather for who she was. His upbringing was old-fashioned, and I think he still suffered from the whole Madonna/whore thing. He wouldn’t have been able to accept the idea of Heather having casual sex. And the drugs . . . he would have totally lost it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why did you bring this Chris kid up?” Patti said, her body language hardening, her eyes focused and intense. “Did he have something to do with—”

  “I don’t know. All I can tell you is that he was outside the funeral home and at the cemetery. It’s pretty clear he felt something for Heather, too. More than that, I can’t say.”

  Jesse stood up to go. He figured he had gotten all the information he was going to get from Patti, but he reminded her to call him if she remembered anything or thought of anything else that might help him.

  Patti tried to stand to show Jesse to the door, but he put a hand on her shoulder to hold her down in her seat. He knelt beside her.

  “Patti, I’m an alcoholic. I’m sure that’s not a surprise to you.”

  She smiled at him.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I thought you knew. I’m not going to preach to you. I hated it when people did it to me.”

  She was impatient. “But?”

  “But whatever answers you’re looking for, they’re not in there.” Jesse pointed at the bottle of vodka on the table.

  “That it?” she asked, grabbing the bottle in defiance, just as he would have done a year ago.

  “That’s it.” He stood. “You ever just want to talk, you call me.”

  With that, he left.

  * * *

  —

  OUTSIDE THE HOUSE, he headed straight to the car. He used to be good at separating himself from the victims’ families, from their grief and anger, their guilt and recriminations. It had been one of the great benefits of his self-containment, but it was tough to separate himself from the torture Patti Mackey was inflicting on herself. He had been there, right there in the wake of Diana’s murder. It was all so painfully familiar. Patti Mackey seemed about ready to take the dive off the high board into the deep end of the bottle and, unlike him, she wouldn’t even have Ozzie Smith for company.

  He drove away from the house and headed back to Chris Grimm’s address. Maybe he would catch the kid’s less-than-charming mother at home alone, without his even-less-charming stepfather. And if he really got lucky, he’d catch the kid there unsuspecting, though Jesse never counted on luck. He took it when it came his way. All cops did. Luck had solved more cases than law enforcement types would ever admit, but relying on it was just plain dumb. Jesse was a lot of things. Dumb wasn’t one of them.

  Twenty-nine

  Chris Grimm wasn’t there, but his mother was. As he hoped, Kathy Walters was alone. No hard-assed husband to deal with. Maybe that was why she seemed more welcoming, or maybe it was something else. Just like the other night, she had a dangling cigarette at the corner of her mouth. But this time she asked Jesse in and headed straight to the kitchen.

  “Coffee?”

  He wasn’t really up for it, but he didn’t want to ruin the vibe. “Sure.”

  She put a mugful in front of him, got milk out of the fridge, and slid the sugar bowl over to him. There was already a mug and ashtray in front of where Kathy Walters settled down. Jesse sipped his coffee and, just as he’d done earlier with Patti Mackey, waited for her to fill in the void. Didn’t take long.

  “He ain’t been home for two nights,” she said, taking a long pull on the cigarette. “I’m worried.”

  “Is that unusual? His stepfather didn’t seem to be a big fan of Chris’s.”

  She smiled. “They ain’t exactly fans of each other. Chris usually comes home. There’s been times when he comes in real late, but he does come home. Sleeps in his bed and then leaves before Joe gets up.”

  “He hasn’t called?”

  She shook her head, blow
ing smoke in a steady stream out the side of her mouth as she did.

  “Nothing. Not a word.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Jesse asked. “I left a card with your husband.”

  “Joe . . . he . . .”

  That was answer enough for Jesse. “Can I have a look at Chris’s room?”

  She didn’t like that, hesitating to answer.

  “Listen,” Jesse said, “if you want me to start looking for your son, you’re going to have to cooperate.”

  She didn’t say anything. She stood up and nodded for him to follow her. Kathy Walters walked slowly up the carpeted stairs. The carpet worn thin, the steps creaking as they went. At the landing, she pointed at the third door to her left.

  “He keeps it locked,” she said.

  “Key?”

  She shook her head, doing that smoke-stream thing again. “He wouldn’t trust me not to give the key to Larry, our neighbor, and he wouldn’t trust Joe as far as he could throw him.”

  “You mind if I break the lock?”

  There was that hesitation again. Jesse supposed that she was more afraid of her husband’s reaction than of what he might find in the kid’s room. He understood her fears. Just because she didn’t bear any obvious scars or because those fading yellow bruises from the other night were now almost gone, it didn’t mean she wasn’t in an abusive relationship. He’d answered enough domestic abuse calls in his time to get the picture. He knew how easy it was to judge people like Kathy Walters. Why stay with a man who hurts you and hates your son? Why not leave? Always easier to quarterback on Monday morning than on Sunday afternoon. The problem was, there wasn’t much Jesse could do for her in this instance.

  “Any way this plays out, he’s going to be mad at you.”

  “I know,” she said, voice quivering.

  “I can get you into a shelter, if that’s what you want.”

  She shook her head furiously. “No. No. I want to be here when Chris gets back. I really do love him, but it’s hard for me to show it. And Chris doesn’t make it easy. I’m not a good mother, but I’m the only one the kid’s got.”

  Jesse waited.

  “Go on, do it.”

  Jesse gloved up, stepped a few feet back, built up some momentum, and kicked the door just below the lock. The door swung open violently. He turned to Kathy and asked if she’d like to accompany him to make sure he handled things properly.

  “No, that’s okay. I’m going downstairs. I need a drink.”

  Jesse said he’d come down when he was done and waited for her to leave before heading into the kid’s room. The moment he entered, he knew something wasn’t right. The kid had a huge wall-mounted flat-screen TV, every video game system in the known universe, three classic guitars in his closet, including a classic Les Paul with a sunburst finish, a Fender jazz bass, and a Rickenbacker twelve-string. He had a drawer full of gold chains, diamond rings, watches, and iPads. A lot of the jewelry was women’s jewelry. The watches ranged from cheap Timexes to Rolexes. The Rolexes had different people’s names inscribed on their backs. It didn’t take an experienced detective to figure out that some, if not most, of the items in Chris Grimm’s room were stolen goods. Only issue was, Jesse saw every report of theft and robbery in town and he recognized only two of the items in the kid’s room—the jazz bass and one of the watches—as reported stolen.

  Jesse’s instincts about how the kid had acquired all these goods were confirmed when he found a box of off-the-shelf, disposable cell phones under Chris’s bed. All the phones were still in their clear plastic packages. Chris Grimm hadn’t stolen any of the items in his room, but Jesse was willing to bet most of them were bartered for drugs and that Chris eventually turned these items into cash. It occurred to Jesse that there were now several possibilities as to why Chris Grimm hadn’t returned home for the last two nights.

  He called Molly and told her to send Peter Perkins over to the address and to prepare paperwork for a search warrant on the entire premises. Jesse stepped out of the room and went downstairs to have a different kind of talk with Kathy Walters. The kind of talk no mother, not even a bad one, wants to have.

  Thirty

  While Peter Perkins did a more thorough search of the upstairs rooms, Jesse remained in the kitchen with Kathy Walters. She was really shaken, as much by the fact that the cops were going to have to search the entire house and garage as by the probable truth of her son’s drug dealing. He could see in her face the regret over having opened up the door to Jesse and the fallout that would likely ensue.

  “Kathy,” Jesse said, “I’m not here to make your life or your marriage any harder, but if there are things we are going to find in the house that shouldn’t be here, tell me now and I’ll see what I can do. If we find something when we’re searching for more of the stolen goods, it will be out of my hands and up to the DA.”

  Her deep blue eyes, the blueprints for which she had passed on to her son, were darting from side to side as she thought about what Jesse had said. That meant only one thing to Jesse: She and/or her husband had something to hide.

  “Joe’s really not as bad as he seems,” she said, making a case for her husband. “He just gets worked up sometimes when he drinks. He don’t mean nothing by it. He loves me in his way, and let’s be honest about it, I’m no catch anymore. A forty-three-year-old woman with a seventeen-year-old son who hates the world.”

  Jesse had heard this same sort of thing many times when he was in uniform in L.A. and occasionally in Paradise, battered wives making excuses for their abusers. It was one of the reasons why answering a domestic call was so dangerous for cops. The women who had called for them often feared their husbands’ reprisals. There were hundreds of incidents each year when domestic disturbance calls turned violent, even deadly, for the responding officers. It wouldn’t do any good for Jesse to try to talk her out of it, so he didn’t bother.

  It was then that Joe Walters came through the front door, crazy-eyed and smelling of scotch.

  “Get the fuck outta my house!” he said, charging right at Kathy. “What the fuck did you let them in here for?”

  Jesse stepped between husband and wife. Jesse held the warrant out to Joe Walters. “We have a warrant to search the premises.”

  Walters grabbed the warrant and ripped it in half. “Fuck you and fuck your warrant. Get outta my house.”

  Jesse didn’t budge.

  “Why didn’t you call to tell me about this, you stupid bitch?” Spit flew out of Walters’s mouth as he yelled at his wife. “Instead I gotta get a call at work from Larry next door, telling me there’s cops over at my place.”

  “I wouldn’t let her call you,” Jesse said. It was a lie, but he figured it was worth a shot.

  “Bullshit! You can’t stop her from making a call. This is her house. She ain’t under arrest, and all you’re doing is executing a search warrant.”

  “You know a lot about the law,” Jesse said. “You a real lawyer or a jailhouse lawyer?”

  That didn’t go over well with Joe Walters.

  “Fuck you! Who do you think you are?”

  Jesse had had enough. “Sit down, Mr. Walters.”

  “And what if I don’t?”

  “Unless you took a cab here or walked, I’ll arrest you for DWI.”

  Walters sat down, but Jesse knew it was only a matter of time. He could see Walters was seething, and seething drunks can control themselves for just so long.

  “Jesse, you better get up here,” Peter Perkins called from upstairs.

  “In a minute, Peter.” Jesse turned to Kathy Walters. She was on the verge of panic, because she also knew about seething drunks and what awaited her the minute the cops left. He wagged his index finger at her. “You come with me. You, Mr. Walters, stay right there.”

  “It’s all your fault,” Walters said, his voice getting louder and louder as he wo
rked himself up. “You and that mutant brat. He’s poison, that fucking kid. He caused all of this. You shoulda smothered him in his crib.”

  When he was done with his rant, he charged. Jesse stepped around Kathy Walters and threw a forearm into Joe Walters’s face. His nose broke in a spray of blood and mucus. But Walters was a tough guy and didn’t go down. He came at Jesse again. This time, Jesse planted his foot in Walters’s crotch. Nobody was tough enough to shake that off. Walters crumpled to the floor, bloodied and breathless.

  Jesse knelt down beside him and spoke loud enough so that only Walters could hear him. “Listen to me, you piece of crap. I’m going to make you my personal business from now on. I come by here and see one mark on your wife or your stepson, what I did to you just now will be nothing. Stay down and stay down here. I hear you on the move, I’m charging you with DWI and assaulting an officer. Nod your head if you understand.”

  Joe Walters nodded.

  Upstairs, Peter Perkins pointed toward the door on the far right and held up an evidence bag containing a nine-millimeter pistol. “Loaded. Found it in the master bedroom in the nightstand.”

  Jesse asked, “Your husband have a permit for that?”

  She shook her head.

  “I didn’t think so.” Jesse could see in Perkins’s expression that he had something to say out of Kathy Walters’s earshot. He turned to her and asked her to wait in her bedroom. She walked into the bedroom, zombielike. Her world was coming apart at the seams, with no sign that the seams would hold.

  Perkins walked toward Chris Grimm’s room. Jesse followed him in.

  “Beside the swag,” Perkins said, “there’s a passbook account with thirty-five grand in it. I found a few keys, business cards, and slips of paper with phone numbers on them.”