The Jesse Stone Novels 6-9

by Robert B. Parker

  “But,” Sunny said, “what I wasn’t prepared for is…I like her.”

  “She’s pretty likable,” Jesse said.

  “She is,” Sunny said. “She’s interested. She’s smart. She listens. She gets it. She’s funny. She’s been around.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “All of us have been around,” Sunny said.

  “I know.”

  “But for all of that, there’s some quality in her,” Sunny said, “that makes you want to protect her. Some sort of little-girl thing, like she really shouldn’t be facing life alone.”

  “I know that, too,” Jesse said.

  He admired his whiskey.

  “Yes. I can see why she’s hard to let go of,” Sunny said.

  Jesse took another drink.

  “Can I trust her?” Sunny said.

  Jesse set the glass down on the counter.

  “No,” he said.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Sunny said.

  “Some are less perfect than others,” Jesse said. “Who’s with her at night?’

  “Nobody. She lives in a secure building. Twenty-four-hour concierge. I take her home when she’s through for the night. And pick her up when she starts the morning.”

  “Doesn’t leave a lot of time to find the rapist,” Jesse said.

  “If he’s stalking her,” Sunny said, “I’m hoping that maybe he’ll find us.”

  “Is there a Plan B?”

  “Of course there’s a Plan B,” Sunny said. “You remember my friend Spike.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to introduce them,” Sunny said, “and see if she’ll let Spike babysit her sometimes, while I try to find the rapist.”

  “Spike would be effective,” Jesse said. “She won’t like it so much that he’s gay.”

  “Because she can’t vamp him?”

  “Something like that,” Jesse said.

  “You know her,” Sunny said.

  “I know her better than anyone,” Jesse said. He put some more ice into his glass as he talked, and added whiskey. “But I have no judgment about her. I know the facts of her, but I can’t seem to make anything coherent out of what I know.”

  “Yes,” Sunny said.

  Jesse started on his second drink.

  “How is Walton Weeks going?” Sunny said.

  “Gathering information,” Jesse said.

  “Anything promising?”

  “Too early.”

  “And the public attention doesn’t help,” Sunny said. “You’re sitting there looking at this pile of unassociated data, and everyone is clamoring for an arrest.”

  “Clamoring,” Jesse said. “He was a friend of the governor’s.”

  “Oh God!” Sunny said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We both know the first person to look at in a murder case,” Sunny said.

  “Cherchez la significant other?”

  “Oui.”

  “There’s three ex-wives,” Jesse said. “The current significant other got killed with him.”

  “Did she have a significant other,” Sunny said, “besides Walton?”

  “Good thought,” Jesse said. “We don’t know yet.”

  “You know what connection he had to Paradise?”

  “Nope.”

  “You know his connection to the governor?” Sunny said.

  “Nope.”

  “How about the bodyguard?” Sunny said.

  “You’ve been following the case,” Jesse said.

  “I read the papers with interest,” Sunny said. “I am tight with one of the cops involved.”

  “I suspected as much,” Jesse said. “Bodyguard was a cop in Baltimore.”

  “You check that out?”

  “Not yet,” Jesse said. “If he were lying, why would he lie about something so easy to check?”

  “Gun?”

  “Carries a nine-millimeter Glock,” Jesse said. “We test-fired it. It isn’t the murder weapon.”

  “You’ll find him,” Sunny said. “Or her. Or them.”

  “Sometimes you don’t,” Jesse said.

  “I know.”

  They were silent. Jesse thought he heard Sunny swallow.

  “You having a drink?” he said.

  “White wine,” Sunny said. “Are you having scotch?”

  “I am,” Jesse said.

  “Having a virtual drink together,” Sunny said.

  “Better than no drink at all,” Jesse said.

  They were quiet again. It was an easy quiet. There was no strain to it. There was never any strain between them, Jesse thought.

  “Ever see Richie?” Jesse said.

  “I saw him today,” Sunny said. “He came to pick up Rosie for the weekend.”

  “She like that?”

  “Yes. She’s always happy to go with him.”

  “He still married?” Jesse said.

  “Yes.”

  “Wife like Rosie?”

  “Richie says so, and Rosie likes her.”

  “How’s that feel?”

  “Awful.”

  “You comfortable,” Jesse said, “letting her go?”

  “Yes. I miss her, but Richie would never let her be mistreated. He loves her as much as I do.”

  “How is it between you and Richie.”

  “When he’s here?” Sunny thought about it. He heard her swallow. He took a drink. Companionable. “It’s very difficult. For both of us. We are still so…so stuck together…it’s hard to move naturally.”

  “He like that, too?” Jesse said.

  Sunny thought about that.

  “Richie is so interior, it is hard to tell,” Sunny said. “But I think so. I don’t think I’m projecting it onto him.”

  “Well,” Jesse said. “Aren’t we in a fucking mess.”

  Sunny took another sip of wine. She swallowed slowly, and Jesse could hear her pour more wine, the bottle clinking against the rim of her glass.

  “I guess,” Sunny said finally, “if I had to be in a fucking mess, there’s no one I’d rather be in a fucking mess with.”

  “Me too,” Jesse said.

  24

  Jesse sat with Molly in the squad room watching videotapes of Walton Weeks. Molly was taking notes. On the screen, Weeks was interviewing a congressman.

  “I am not, of course, an economist,” the congressman said.

  “Thank God,” Weeks said.

  “But I have yet to hear a valid argument against what used to be called trickle-down economics.”

  “The theory that if rich people have money to spend, they’ll spend it, and everyone will benefit,” Weeks said.

  “Yes, as a means of redistributing money, it is infinitely more efficient than having us give it to the government for redistribution,” the congressman said.

  “In the form of taxes,” Weeks said.

  “Yes. If taxes are lowered for people with money, they’ll do something with it. They won’t pile it in the cellar. They’ll invest it and some broker will get a commission. They’ll buy a car and some salesman will get a commission. They’ll build an addition to their house and carpenters, plumbers, electricians, et cetera, will be hired. The economy will benefit. Workers will benefit.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Weeks said. “What about nonworkers?”

  “Nonworkers?”

  “Small children,” Weeks said. “Mothers of small children, elderly men, people who can’t work?”

  “No one wishes to abandon those people, but higher taxes, and bigger welfare payments, are not the answer.”

  “What is the answer,” Weeks said.

  “We need to create stable families,” the congressman said. “Families with husbands and fathers to care for their children, their wives, their elderly parents.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Walton, I’m not here to talk about social engineering,” the congressman said.

  “Of course you are,” Weeks said. “What do you think taxes are?”

  �
��Too high,” the congressman said, “is what I think taxes are.”

  Weeks smiled and looked into the camera.

  “On that note, we’ll take a break,” he said. “Be right back.”

  Jesse clicked the screen dark. Molly looked at her notes. Jesse stood and walked down the room and looked out the back window at the public works parking lot.

  “Pretty reasonable guy,” Jesse said.

  “He asks hard questions and follows them up,” Molly said, still looking at her notes. “But he isn’t abrasive. He seems, like, actually interested, like there’s no gotcha going on, you know?”

  “I like the one an hour or so ago, when some other guy was talking about creating stable families, and Walton says, ‘So are you in favor of gay marriage?’”

  “Yes. You know what’s good,” Molly said. “He didn’t put words in his mouth. He didn’t say, ‘Aha! So you are in favor of gay marriage.’ He just asked the honest question.”

  “No wonder people liked him.”

  “You never watched him?”

  “I only watch ball games,” Jesse said. “What do we know about him from watching his program all day?”

  “He’s nonpartisan,” Molly said. “He challenged this guy about how to help impoverished people. He challenged some black activist a while back on welfare.”

  She looked at her notes again.

  “‘If it’s so good,’ he said, ‘why are there so many fewer intact black families than there were fifty years ago?’”

  “Is that true?” Jesse said.

  “How the hell do I know,” Molly said. “But you tend to believe him when he says things.”

  “So he’s likable and believable, and essentially nonpartisan,” Jesse said. “He seems in a genuine search for the truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “No wonder somebody wanted to kill him,” Jesse said.

  “We don’t want a lot of that going on in public,” Molly said.

  “Be the end of politics as we know it,” Jesse said.

  “Amazing they let him on television,” Molly said.

  “I got a folder full of his columns that I’ll read tonight,” Jesse said. “But, cynicism aside, he doesn’t seem like somebody who would be murdered and hung from a tree because of his, for lack of a better word, politics.”

  “Is that why we watched all this?” Molly said. “To find that out?”

  “Good to know about your victim.”

  “There were two victims,” Molly said.

  “I know,” Jesse said. “But she didn’t leave us videotape. We get his killer, we’ll get hers.”

  “The thing is,” Molly said, “it’s like we’ve got too much. Videotapes, newspaper columns, two victims, three ex-wives, bodyguard, researcher, lawyer, manager, and God knows who else.”

  “There’s no such thing as too much,” Jesse said.

  “Except that it’s sort of daunting,” Molly said.

  “It’s just work,” Jesse said.

  “A dauntingly lot of work,” Molly said.

  Jesse smiled.

  “We can work.”

  Molly closed her notebook.

  “We certainly can,” Molly said. “My kids are starting to call me Aunt Mommy.”

  “Take tonight off,” Jesse said.

  “Omigod,” Molly said. “Tough on the outside, tender on the inside.”

  “Probably the right arrangement,” Jesse said. “For a cop.”

  Molly smiled.

  “Sometimes you’re the other way,” Molly said.

  “There’s something I’ve been wondering about, Moll,” Jesse said. “Maybe you can help me with it.”

  “Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”

  “What,” Jesse said.

  “‘Maybe you can help me’ is usually code for ‘Molly, there’s something needs to be done that I don’t want to do.’”

  “Molly,” Jesse said, “I’m the chief of police. I don’t do, I delegate.”

  Molly nodded.

  “And wonderfully well,” she said. “What do you need?”

  “As far as we know,” Jesse said, “Weeks wasn’t in the military. He wasn’t licensed to carry a gun. He didn’t have a security clearance.”

  “So?”

  “So why do we have Walton Weeks’s fingerprints in the system,” he said.

  Molly was silent for a moment.

  Then she said, “I’ll look into it, Chief.”

  25

  Sunny and Spike drove Jenn home to her new condo at One Charles Street. Sunny sat with the motor idling while Spike took Jenn to her apartment and went in with her to make sure she was alone. It was early evening, a cold rain was falling, and the wind was strong. Across Charles Street, a man in a trench coat stood in the shelter of a doorway, his hands in his pockets, a wide-brimmed felt hat pulled down. Sunny studied him. There was no way to see his face. He didn’t move. He could be the guy she’d seen outside King’s Chapel. Or he could be Humphrey Bogart. Spike came back from Jenn’s apartment and got in the front seat. On the floor, Rosie raised her head and looked at Spike with some annoyance before she settled back down with her head against the heater.

  “Dog’s very territorial,” Spike said.

  “She needs her space,” Sunny said.

  “Dog weighs thirty pounds,” Spike said. “I weigh about two-fifty. I need a little space myself.”

  “You wish you weighed two-fifty,” Sunny said. “See that guy across the street?”

  “Sort of,” Spike said.

  “I’m going to circle the block, see what he does when we’re gone.”

  “You recognize him?” Spike said.

  “I can’t see him well enough.”

  “Want me to go ask him about himself?” Spike said.

  “God, you’re aggressive,” Sunny said. “‘Excuse me, sir, are you by any chance stalking someone?’”

  “Just a thought,” Spike said.

  Sunny put the car in drive and headed toward Park Square. She turned left behind the Four Seasons hotel and left on Arlington and circled briefly through the South End and back onto Charles. The man was gone. Sunny continued on Charles slowly, but he wasn’t in sight. Sunny went once again around the block. Again, nothing.

  “Want a drink?” Sunny said.

  “What about Rosie?” Spike said.

  “We’ll go to the Four Seasons,” Sunny said. “Guys on the door will look out for her.”

  They sat at the bar downstairs. Sunny ordered a cosmopolitan. Spike had bourbon.

  “So what do you think of Jenn?” Sunny said.

  “I think I’m the perfect bodyguard for her.”

  “A tough fairy,” Sunny said.

  “I can protect her, and she can’t seduce me.”

  “You think she would?”

  “It’s what she knows how to do,” Spike said. “I don’t know if she’d want sex or not, but she’d use it to get what she wanted. If I was straight, I’d follow her around like a beagle.”

  “She has a lot of juice.”

  “And she generates a lot of heat,” Spike said.

  “Spike, I didn’t think you noticed things like that.”

  “I notice,” Spike said. “I just don’t care.”

  “Jesse said she wouldn’t like you because she couldn’t use her sex on you.”

  “Jesse’s right,” Spike said. “I think she’ll accept me. I’m big and strong, and she’s scared. But I know women like Jenn. She’s not homophobic. My sex life is fine with her. But they only know how to relate to men in a sexual context, and when that’s not available, as it’s not with me, it makes them ill at ease.”

  “Some women like that.”

  “Yes, many. They are comfortable with a guy who’s got no interest in seeing them naked. Jenn isn’t one of them. She counts on men wanting to see her naked.”

  “You think she’s promiscuous?”

  Spike sipped some bourbon.

  “Honey,” he said, “I don’t even know
what promiscuous means anymore, except I’m probably in favor of it. I think she likes sex and will sleep with someone because she does.”

  “Nothing much wrong with that,” Sunny said.

  “You should know,” Spike said. “But I don’t think she’s ever, what, driven by sex. She can have sex or not. But she never takes her eye off the prize.”

  “Which you think is more than a good time?” Sunny said.

  “Yes.”

  “You know what the prize would be?” Sunny said.

  Spike sipped more bourbon and held it a moment in his mouth before he swallowed.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not sure she does. But it’s not about achieving orgasm.”

  “You only spent about three hours with her so far,” Sunny said. “You seem to know an awful lot.”

  “Three hours is a long time if you pay attention,” Spike said.

  “And you’re smart,” Sunny said.

  “That too,” Spike said. “Plus, she reminds me of someone.”

  “Me?”

  “No,” Spike said. “I’m not sure you know what the prize is, but you don’t use sex to get it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “So who’s she remind you of?”

  “Me,” Spike said.

  Sunny sat back in her chair with her cosmopolitan half-raised to her lips.

  “Well,” she said finally, “the physical resemblance is striking.”

  Spike shrugged. Sunny finished raising her glass. She drank and put the glass back down.

  “How would you like to be in love with Jenn?” she said.

  Spike shook his head slowly.

  “Oh, Mama!” he said.

  26

  Suit came into Jesse’s office and sat down.

  “Molly said you wanted me to run down Weeks’s fingerprints,” he said.

  Jesse smiled.

  “She’ll be chief someday,” Jesse said.

  “What?” Suit said.

  Jesse shook his head.

  “What have you got?” he said.

  Suit took out his notebook.

  “Walton Weeks was booked for public indecency in White Marsh, Maryland, in 1987.”

  “And fingerprinted at the time,” Jesse said.

  “That’s what it says.”

  “Who booked him?”

  “Baltimore County police.”

  “Got a name?” Jesse said.