Death In Paradise js-3

by Robert B. Parker

  “Anyone else in your life?” Jenn said.

  “Woman who’s a school principal in Swampscott.”

  “And of course you’re sleeping with her, too.”

  Jesse nodded.

  He felt the hot feeling he always felt with Jenn when they talked about sex: anger, and desperation, and excitement, and confusion. About her, about himself.

  “I like her,” he said.

  “Because you can fuck her?” Jenn said.

  “No. The other way,” Jesse said. “I can fuck her because I like her.”

  Jenn turned her wineglass by the stem. Jesse drank some more sparkling water. He hated the insufficiency of the water. It was like breathing at a high altitude.

  “And you like her why?”

  “She’s smart,” Jesse said. “She’s good-looking, she seems nice, and she likes baseball.”

  “You know I date,” Jenn said.

  “Yes.”

  “I often sleep with my dates,” Jenn said.

  “I know,” Jesse said.

  Jenn stopped twirling her wineglass and drank from it.

  “And still,” Jenn said. “Here we are.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Between a rock and a hard place,” Jenn said. “I can’t be with you and I can’t give you up.”

  Jesse got up and went to the cupboard in Jenn’s kitchen and found a bottle of Dewar’s scotch. He put a lot of ice in a big glass, and poured a lot of the Dewar’s over it. He brought the glass back to the table.

  “So much for sparkling water,” Jenn said.

  “So much.”

  Jesse took a large swallow. He could feel it spread through him. His breathing seemed deeper. He could handle this.

  “I meet men I like,” Jenn said. “I find them attractive. I think I could, if not marry them, maybe, at least live with them. And I can’t.”

  Jesse took another drink. Usually he had it with soda.

  “Because?”

  “On the surface it’s because they turn out to be badly flawed. Drink too much, or selfish, or womanizers, or dishonest, or emotional cripples, or people for whom sex is entirely about them… something. And I have to break up with them.”

  Jesse waited.

  “My shrink says maybe their flaws are their appeal.”

  Jesse was quiet. Jenn finished the wine in her glass and Jesse poured her some more.

  “He says maybe I find this kind of man because it’s what I deserve for leaving you,” Jenn said. “And maybe it ensures that I won’t marry them and leave you for good.”

  The scotch was working. The hard weight in his center was less.

  “And all this is unconscious?” Jesse said.

  “Mostly,” Jenn said. “But it’s right. I know it is. It resonates the way something does when it’s right.”

  “So you don’t want to leave me for good.”

  “I can’t,” Jenn said. “I can’t even think about a life without you in it.”

  “But you don’t want to be my wife again.”

  “I don’t know. God Jesus, don’t you think if I knew what to do I would do it? Sometimes I get so scared of losing you I can’t breathe.”

  “And when you think about coming back?” Jesse said.

  “I get so scared I can’t breathe,” Jenn said.

  Jesse drank the rest of his scotch. He got up and went to the kitchen and got more ice and more scotch and brought it back to the table. He sat across from her with the candlelight moving softly between them. Jenn put her hand out on the tabletop toward him.

  “I’ll get better,” Jenn said. “I’m doing good in therapy. I’ll get better.”

  Jesse put his hand on top of hers.

  “Well,” he said, “I think my best bet is to hang around and see how it comes out.”

  Jenn started to cry gently. Jesse patted her hand. He knew how she felt.

  Chapter Forty

  Jesse had a lunch scheduled with Norman Shaw on Paradise Neck at the Boat Club. He arrived a few minutes late and found Shaw at the bar, talking with someone.

  “Chief Stone,” Shaw said. “Michael Wasserman.”

  Jesse shook the man’s hand.

  “Wasserman’s organizing an event,” Shaw said. “And I’m agreeing to be honorary chair.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “I’ll get a table,” Jesse said. “You can join me when you’re through.”

  “I always sit at the same table,” Shaw said. “Just tell the girl you’re joining me.”

  The table was at the window, and from it, Jesse could see the town proper, rising up from its working waterfront, to the town hall bell tower at the top of the hill. He watched Shaw shake hands again with Michael Wasserman and come across the room toward him. Shaw had on cream-colored slacks and a raspberry-colored linen jacket over a forest green polo shirt.

  “Great view, isn’t it?” he said as he sat down.

  “Yes.”

  A gray-haired motherly looking waitress appeared immediately.

  “Want a drink?” Shaw said.

  “Iced tea,” Jesse said.

  Shaw made a face as if the thought of iced tea were repellent.

  “Ketel One on the rocks,” he said without looking at the waitress. “Twist.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Shaw,” the waitress said, and plodded away.

  Shaw picked up a menu.

  “Food’s mediocre here,” he said. “But the view’s great and they mix you a hell of a cocktail.”

  Jesse thought about the mixing skill involved in putting together a vodka on the rocks. What Shaw meant is what most drinkers meant. The drinks were large.

  The waitress brought their drinks, took their lunch order, and left them alone. The vodka was in a wide lowball glass. Shaw took a long pull on it, the way people drink beer.

  “So, Stone,” Shaw said, leaning back in his chair. “What can I do for you?”

  As he spoke he didn’t look at Jesse. He looked around the room.

  “I’m interested in your relationship with Gino Fish.”

  Shaw continued to scan the room. “Why?” he said.

  “His name came up in a case,” Jesse said.

  “What case?”

  “Have you spent much time with Gino?” Jesse said.

  “What’s this about? You talked with my wife, didn’t you? Gino’s a casual friend.”

  Shaw spotted someone on the other side of the dining room, and smiled, and nodded and with his forefinger made a little jabbing gesture of recognition.

  “Michael DeSisto,” Shaw said. “Runs some kind of school out in Stockbridge.”

  “When did you see Gino last?” Jesse said.

  Shaw nodded at someone else, near the bar. He shrugged in answer to Jesse’s question.

  “I see a lot of people,” Shaw said. “Hard to keep track.”

  “I always thought writers were alone a lot,” Jesse said.

  He had in fact never thought that, but he needed to keep Shaw talking. Jesse was pretty sure that Shaw would not stop with one vodka.

  “When I write, I write,” Shaw said. “When I party, I party. What is it you’re after, Stone?”

  Jesse smiled his friendliest smile, but it didn’t help anything, because Shaw wasn’t looking at him. He was still looking around the dining room. Jesse wondered if he was desperate to be recognized, or if maybe it was a posture, designed to show Jesse how little importance Shaw attached to him.

  “No idea,” Jesse said. “I’m hoping I’ll know it when I see it.”

  Shaw nodded without paying much attention and gestured at the waitress. Without further instructions she brought him another vodka. Jesse smiled to himself. Boozers were predictable, Jesse thought, and don’t I know it. When the drink came, Shaw picked it up and stood.

  “Excuse me a minute,” he said. “Got to say hello to an old friend.”

  Standing, he took a swallow of the vodka and then carried the glass with him to a table of four well-groomed women having lunch. He
stood with a hand on the back of a chair, bending over the table, holding his drink in the other hand. He said something. The women laughed. Jesse waited. Shaw had as much swagger, Jesse thought, as a guy with a potbelly, skinny legs, and a silly haircut could achieve. The women laughed again. Shaw laughed with them. Then he kissed one of them on her perfect blond head and came back to Jesse’s table. As he walked past the waitress, he murmured to her. Shaw sat back down across from Jesse and looked out at the harbor.

  “I’ve fucked all four of those broads at one time or another,” Shaw said.

  “Isn’t that nice for you,” Jesse said. “When’s the last time you saw Gino Fish?”

  The waitress appeared with a new vodka for Shaw. It was a double. Shaw took a large swallow.

  Shaw leaned back in his chair again and seemed somehow to expand. For the first time since they had been seated, Shaw looked straight at Jesse.

  “Actually, Gino and I are talking about doing a book together.”

  Under the pink-toned sun color on his face, the broken blood vessels made a darker red web on the skin above his cheekbones.

  Jesse said, “Un-huh.”

  “About the gangster life,” Shaw said. “Disaffection, opposition, freedom, violence.”

  “Un-huh.”

  Shaw drank some more.

  “This country started in rebellion against established laws,” Shaw said.

  Jesse nodded.

  “And Gino Fish, in himself, is almost entirely outside any established norms.”

  “Un-huh.”

  Shaw grinned suddenly, almost genuinely, at Jesse.

  “Sort of a queer Godfather,” he said.

  “How do you collaborate?”

  “Gino and I get together, couple times a week,” Shaw said.

  Despite the fact that he was clearly drunk, Shaw was focused as he talked about his writing, in a way he had not been before that.

  “And talk?”

  “Yeah. Gino likes to talk about himself.”

  Lunch arrived.

  “When the book gets written,” Jesse said, “do you share the royalties?”

  “Everybody thinks it’s royalties,” Shaw said. “It ain’t. It’s the advance, stupid. You know?”

  Jesse ate some clam chowder. Shaw paid no attention to his scrod. His speech had thickened noticeably. He’d been at the bar when Jesse arrived. He’d had three, one of them a double, since Jesse had arrived. The conversation wasn’t going to last too much longer.

  “So he gets half the advance?”

  “Naw, it’s all mine,” Shaw said. “Gino jus’ wants a book about him. He…”

  Shaw stopped talking for a moment and looked at Jesse as if he were having trouble remembering who Jesse was. Then he put his head down and rested it on top of his scrod and went to sleep.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Suitcase Simpson came into Jesse’s office trying not to look self-important.

  “Got the info from the phone company,” he said to Jesse. “That phone number used to belong to a guy named Alan Garner. No longer in service.”

  “Got an address?”

  “Yeah. In Brighton, but he moved last year.”

  “I know where he is,” Jesse said.

  Simpson stared at him.

  “How you know that?” he said.

  “I’m chief of police,” Jesse said.

  “Oh,” Simpson said. “Yeah. I forgot. You going to talk with this guy?”

  Jesse shook his head.

  “We’ll watch him,” Jesse said.

  “We?”

  “You ever do any surveillance?”

  “Jesse. I’m a cop in Paradise, Mass.,” Simpson said. “What the hell am I going to surveil?”

  “Go put on some civvies,” Jesse said. “Time you learned.”

  Driving into Boston from the north, there was a choice between the tunnel under the harbor and the bridge over the Mystic River. The tunnel was a little shorter, from Paradise, but on the Boston end you came up out of the tunnel into the boiling confusion of the largest urban renewal project in the country. Jesse took the bridge.

  As they arched down toward the Charlestown end they could look down at the merge of the river and the gray sprawl of the harbor to their left. Below them was the old Charlestown Navy Yard, now mostly condominiums. Straight ahead the individuated buildings coalesced into skyline.

  Tremont Street was so hot that the asphalt was soft. They parked on a hydrant and Simpson got out and bought a cup of coffee and a large Coke at a convenience store while Jesse stayed in the car looking at Development Associates of Boston. When he got in the car, he handed Jesse the Coke.

  “My mother always used to tell me to drink hot stuff in hot weather,” Simpson said. “Because being hot inside would make you feel cooler outside.”

  Jesse was silent.

  “You think that makes any sense?” Simpson said.

  “Sure.”

  “You think it’s true?”

  “No.”

  Simpson nodded and settled back with his coffee. Jesse knew he still half believed it. He was only about ten years older than Suitcase, but he felt like his father.

  “Who we looking at here?” Simpson said.

  “Alan Garner works for Gino Fish. Gino Fish is the guy whose phone number Billie Bishop left when she departed the shelter.”

  Simpson was sweating. His face was red. Jesse could see him thinking.

  “And two other girls left his phone number at the same shelter,” he said.

  Jesse nodded. Suit wasn’t stupid, but his mind had to move slowly over the surface of information before he possessed it. Jesse gave him time.

  After a time Simpson said, “Well, that would be a really big coincidence.”

  “Really big,” Jesse said.

  “So why not go in and confront him with it?”

  “And he says, I don’t know anything about it, and what do we say?”

  Suitcase drank some more coffee.

  “I think it works,” he said.

  “Drinking hot stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your mother tell you to run cold water over the inside of your wrist to cool your blood?”

  Simpson was surprised.

  “Yeah.”

  Jesse smiled.

  “We could try to find those other girls,” Simpson said. “See what they could tell us.”

  “One’s named Mary,” Jesse said. “The other one is Jane. Or so they told Sister.”

  “No last names?”

  “Nope.”

  “You know where they came from, we could check Missing Persons…”

  “I don’t know where they came from. I doubt that the names are real.”

  “But they left a real phone number.”

  “Kids need to hang on to something,” Jesse said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “However fucked up,” Jesse said, “kids don’t want to just disappear.”

  “They need to feel connected?”

  “To something,” Jesse said.

  Simpson took another sip of coffee. The sweat ran down his face in front of each ear.

  “Careful,” Jesse said. “You don’t want to get a chill.”

  “I don’t know what we’re looking for here,” Simpson said.

  “Me, either,” Jesse said.

  “So how we going to know when we see it?”

  Jesse smiled.

  “It’s a chief of police thing,” Jesse said.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Today they were in Simpson’s Dodge pickup, parked farther down Tremont Street, watching Development Associates of Boston in the rearview mirror. Jesse went to use the washroom at the Boston Ballet building, showing his badge in the lobby to forestall discussion.

  “First rule of stakeout,” Jesse said when he came back. “Locate near a place you can take a leak.”

  “We going to follow somebody if they leave? Gino, or the receptionist guy?”

 
; “Nope.”

  “So why are we here?”

  “See what happens.”

  “Why don’t we follow them?”

  “I don’t want to spook them,” Jesse said.

  “You think they’d spot us?”

  “People like Gino need to be pretty alert,” Jesse said. “If somebody’s alert, it’s pretty hard to tail them alone.”

  “So we’re just going to sit here forever?”

  “In another couple days,” Jesse said, “we’ll double-team them.”

  “Use two cars?”

  “Yes.”

  “You and me in two cars?”

  “Yes.”

  “So this is sort of like training.”

  “Sort of,” Jesse said.

  “That’ll be so cool,” Simpson said.

  Jesse nodded.

  Across the street, Vinnie Morris came up the stairs in front of the office and out onto Tremont.

  “That the receptionist?” Simpson said.

  Jesse smiled. “That’s the shooter,” he said. “Vinnie Morris.”

  “Doesn’t look like anything special,” Simpson said.

  “He’s supposed to be very good,” Jesse said. “Look at me and we’ll pretend to be talking.”

  “Look at you?”

  “Yes. Nod your head. I’m saying something really important which is why we’re sitting here in the parked car. You understand?”

  Suitcase was looking at Jesse, nodding his head vigorously.

  “You think he’d get wise seeing us sitting here?”

  “He might,” Jesse said. “Guys like him and Gino are very careful.”

  “That why we’re using my car today?” Simpson said. “So they won’t see the same one twice in a row?”

  “That’s right,” Jesse said.

  Simpson continued to nod overtly. Jesse grinned.

  “And don’t overact,” he said.

  In the outside mirror Jesse watched Vinnie Morris move up the street toward the sandwich shop where Simpson had bought them coffee when they’d arrived. In a few minutes he came back carrying coffee in a tall paper cup.

  “Think he’s been talking to your mother?” Jesse said.

  “Nobody talks to my mom,” Simpson said. “They listen.”

  Vinnie Morris went back down the stairs into the office again. The truck windows were open. There was no breeze. Jesse could smell the hot smell of the sidewalk. In the middle of the afternoon, Brian Kelly came by and tapped on the side window.