Stranger in Paradise js-7

by Robert B. Parker

  “That’s how I remember it,” Dix said.

  “And you were about to not answer the question,” Jesse said.

  Dix smiled.

  “I hoped you might have a thought,” he said.

  “I have things to redeem,” Jesse said. “But I guess so does she.”

  Dix inclined his head.

  “She has yet to succeed at a job,” Jesse said.

  “Or a relationship,” Dix said.

  “Or a relationship,” Jesse said. “We both got an oh-for on relationships.”

  “Except with each other,” Dix said.

  “This is a good relationship?” Jesse said.

  “It’s an enduring one,” Dix said.

  Jesse stared at him.

  “Well,” Jesse said. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  Jesse paused.

  “Love?” he said.

  Dix nodded.

  “And why do you think it doesn’t work better?” Dix said.

  “Because I’m a mess,” Jesse said.

  Dix shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  “I’m not a mess?” Jesse said.

  “Mess is not a very useful term in my line of work,” Dix said. “But it is not unusual for someone in your circumstances to take on all the blame for those circumstances, not out of guilt but because it gives them the power to change it.”

  “So if it’s her fault, there’s nothing I can do about it,” Jesse said. “And if it’s my fault, there is?”

  “Again, fault is not a term I like to use,” Dix said. “But just suppose the near-fatal flaw in your relationship resides with her.”

  “She’s too career-driven,” Jesse said.

  “I would guess,” Dix said, “that her ambition is a symptom, not a condition.”

  “A symptom of what?” Jesse said.

  “She said to you something to the effect that success might be her way back to you.”

  “Yes,” Jesse said.

  He felt tense. They were about to see around a corner. He didn’t know what he’d see yet, but he’d worked with Dix long enough to know that Dix, however obliquely, would bring him to it.

  “But wasn’t she with you before she began her career?” Dix said.

  “Yes.”

  “So…”

  Dix waited. Jesse sat. After a bit he shook his head.

  “Nothing,” Jesse said.

  Dix whistled silently to himself, as if he were mulling something.

  Then he said, “Jesse, you must know you fill a room.”

  Dix rarely used his first name. Jesse was pleased.

  “I’m not that big,” he said.

  “I’m not talking about physical size,” Dix said. “You are a very powerful person.”

  “For a drunk,” Jesse said.

  “The alcohol may be a saving grace,” Dix said.

  “Because?”

  “It dilutes your power a little,” Dix said. “It must be very difficult to be with someone so powerful unless you yourself have power.”

  Jesse felt a small click in the center of himself.

  “So she has to either increase her own power or decrease mine,” Jesse said.

  Dix pointed a forefinger at Jesse and dropped his thumb as if pretending to shoot him.

  “Bingo!” Dix said.

  32.

  It was 3:12 in the morning when Jesse pulled up in front of the Crowne estate on Paradise Neck. There was already a small generator in place and a couple of spotlights hooked to it. Two Paradise cruisers were there, and the Paradise Fire Rescue vehicle. Suit stood with Molly in the driveway. Peter Perkins squatted on his heels, taking pictures of a corpse. Jesse got out of the car.

  “Mrs. Franklin,” Molly said, as Jesse walked toward them. “Amber’s mother.”

  Jesse nodded. He walked to the body and stood looking down. A lot of blood glistened darkly on the smooth, green lawn beneath her head. Perkins looked up when Jesse arrived and rested his camera on his thigh.

  “Shot in the back of the head,” he said from his crouched position. “Can’t tell how many times. Small caliber, I think. No exit wounds.”

  “State ME been notified?”

  “Yeah. On the way.”

  “Any idea how long?” Jesse said.

  “That’s the ME’s line of work. Blood’s dry. Body’s kind of stiff.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Who found the body?” he said.

  “Suit,” Peter Perkins said.

  Jesse turned and stared at Simpson, standing with Molly.

  “Murder weapon?” Jesse said.

  “Haven’t searched yet,” Perkins said. “It’s not under the body.”

  Jesse nodded and walked over to Suit and Molly.

  “How’d you find the body,” Jesse said.

  “I was just cruising by and I saw this form. So I stopped, investigated, and there she was.”

  “Cruising by at, what, two-thirty or so in the morning?” Jesse said. “You weren’t on patrol tonight.”

  “Not tonight, no,” Suit said. “I do that sometimes, though, just get up in the night and ride around, you know, see what I can see.”

  “Just sort of poking into things,” Molly said.

  Suit blushed a little. Jesse glanced at Molly. She seemed serene.

  “Ever vigilant,” Jesse said.

  Neither Suit nor Molly said anything.

  “Who was supposed to be sitting on Mrs. Franklin, Moll?” Jesse said.

  “Buddy.”

  “He arrive yet?”

  Molly pointed at the roadway behind Jesse’s car.

  “Right now,” she said.

  “Okay, whyn’t you see if you can find a clue or something.”

  They both nodded. And as Jesse walked toward Buddy Hall’s cruiser, parked behind Jesse’s car, they both took out flashlights and began to walk the lawn, carefully.

  “What happened,” Jesse said to Buddy Hall.

  “She must have snuck out the back,” Buddy said. “I’m parked right outside her house all night until I hear the radio call about a body on Paradise Neck. So I call in, and Bobby Martin’s working the desk, and he tells me Molly called it in to him, and that it’s the Franklin broad. And I said, ‘Jesus, she hasn’t left the house.’ And I call Moll on her cell phone and she says yes it is Franklin and she’s been shot and I better get over there. So here I am.”

  “You check her house?” Jesse said.

  “No, I come straight here. Should I have?”

  “It’s okay,” Jesse said. “You help Molly and Suit on the crime scene. I’ll go over there.”

  “Yeah, okay. Jesse, I’m sorry if I fucked up. I didn’t think she’d sneak away.”

  “We’ll play it as it lays, Buddy,” Jesse said. “Go look for clues…and don’t step on any.”

  Buddy Hall nodded his head very hard and hustled toward the wide lawn that led up to the now-empty school. Jesse followed, looking at the ground, walking carefully until he got to Molly.

  “Moll,” he said. “You run things here. Make sure everything is gone and cleaned up and no trace before those little kids get here at eight a.m.”

  “Absolutely,” Molly said.

  A state car pulled up behind the other cars and parked, and a smallish man got out with a doctor’s bag.

  “Okay,” Jesse said. “The state ME. I want a report as soon as he can get us one.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Molly said.

  They watched as the ME trudged toward the body.

  “Suit’s got a girlfriend out here,” Jesse said. “Doesn’t he?”

  Molly nodded.

  “And she’s, ah, inappropriate, probably married,” Jesse said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you discovered him, and he’s made you promise not to tell.”

  “Yes. I gave him my word.”

  “But you can’t resist busting his balls a little.”

  Molly smiled.

  “Could you?�
� she said.

  “Probably not,” Jesse said. “One thing, though. If who he’s banging becomes any kind of issue to a case, I need to know.”

  “I understand that, Jesse.”

  “Okay,” Jesse said. “I’ll trust your judgment.”

  “You can,” Molly said.

  “I know,” Jesse said.

  He walked back to his car and got in and headed back across the causeway toward Mrs. Franklin’s house on Sewall Street.

  33.

  Now that he had to investigate her murder, Jesse decided to call her by her actual name, Fiona Francisco. In which case he could also think of the daughter as Amber Francisco, and stop messing around with the Franklin-slash-Francisco construct in his head.

  He parked in front of her house. There were lights on in the front room. He tried the front door. It was locked. He walked around to the side where a tiny alley squeezed between two buildings. Jesse went down the alley. Behind the house was a tiny brick patio that was at a level lower than the front of the house and was accessed by a door in the basement. The door was open. Jesse looked around the patio. Looming behind it was the back end of another old house. To the left was a small set of stone steps that led up to a driveway at street level. The driveway opened onto a side street that ran perpendicular to Sewall. Jesse looked at it and nodded to himself.

  He went in through the open door. He was in a cellar that had been converted, probably in the 1950s from the look of it, into a playroom. Pine-paneled walls, vinyl-tile floors, Celotex tile ceiling. The furnace and electrical panel and hot-water heater were in an alcove. Jesse went up the stairs on the far end and into the living room. It smelled like a tavern. There was a half-full bowl of bright orange cheese puffs on the coffee table in front of the shabby couch. There were four beer cans upright on the coffee table and one on its side. All of them were empty. A pink crocheted coverlet lay half turned back on the couch. Cheese puff detritus speckled the couch and the floor near the couch. The television was on, some sort of infomercial. The kitchen was empty, dirty dishes on the counter. A dirty frying pan on the stove. Jesse opened the refrigerator. Twelve cans of beer, some Velveeta, a loaf of white bread, some peanut butter, and three Diet Cokes. On the counter next to an unwashed coffee cup was a bottle of multivitamins.

  That oughta balance everything out, Jesse thought.

  He walked through the rest of the small house. The beds were unmade. Dirty laundry lay in piles in both bedrooms. There was a still-sodden towel on the bathroom floor. He went back to the living room and leaned against the front door. To his left was a fireplace that had been cold a long time. Over it was a small mantelpiece, and on the mantel was a school photograph of somebody who probably used to be Amber.

  The cellar door had been unlocked. There was no sign of forced entry. It looked as if she had gone down to the cellar and out the back door and up the outside steps to the side street and was gone. Did she walk? Was there a car? How did she end up out on Paradise Neck? More important, how did she end up dead? It seemed an odd coincidence that she was found on the lawn of the Crowne estate. Clearly, she had snuck out. There was no reason to go the way she went except to avoid Buddy Hall in the cruiser out front. Why would she sneak out? If she thought the bad ex-husband was after her, she’d have run to the cop, not away from him…Her daughter…If her daughter called…“Ma, it’s Amber, can’t talk now, sneak out so the cops don’t see you and I’ll meet you on Sea Street, behind the house.”…Maybe love had failed and she was running from her boyfriend.

  Jesse walked to the fireplace and looked at Amber’s picture on the mantel. It was in a cheap cardboard holder. The picture was garishly overcolored, as school pictures often are. The girl in it looked blankly sweet, with soft brown hair and a roundish, unformed face. Jesse looked at it for a while. It told him nothing.

  Maybe she wasn’t looking for help. Maybe she lured her mother out to be killed…Maybe I been a cop too long…but maybe she did. If she did, who did the killing? Esteban? Why? And why take her to the Crowne estate. Did they kill her there? Kill her elsewhere and dump her there?

  Jesse walked once more through the house, hoping it might tell him something. All it said to him was that it was an unpleasant place to live. He went out the front door and closed it behind him and got in his car. ’Course, Horn Street wasn’t a week in Acapulco, either.

  He started the car and put it in gear and drove back toward the crime scene. The sky was starting to lighten. It was 4:58 on the dashboard clock. It would be daylight soon. Jesse knew it was too early to speculate. But he also knew it wasn’t often that somebody got killed for no reason, or got killed by a perfect stranger. Now and then it happened. Like Son of Sam in New York, or the pair that Jesse had put away a few years ago. But they weren’t common.

  If a few more dumpy beer-drinking women with adolescent daughters get killed, Jesse thought, I’ll revise my position. But right now it’s got something to do with Louis Francisco, and Amber, and maybe Esteban Carty. And maybe something about the Crowne estate.

  Or not.

  34.

  Amber was sitting cross-legged on the daybed, smoking a joint, while Esteban talked on his cell phone. They were alone in the garage with the huge television screen. The TV was on but silent. They both liked to smoke a joint and watch TV without sound.

  “It’ll be in the Boston papers, man, you want to go online and see,” Esteban said.

  He stood in the doorway with his back to Amber, looking down his alley.

  “Yeah, I know you’ll pay. I still got the other package to deliver.”

  Amber watched the shapes move on the silent screen. She knew Esteban was talking to someone, and she could hear the words he said, but the words weren’t real. What was real were the endlessly fascinating shapes.

  “When I get the dough, I’ll ship the package,” Esteban said.

  Amber took in some smoke and held it for a time before she eased it out. The colors on the huge television were very bright and had a kind of inviting density to them. She’d never realized quite how inviting they were.

  “Sure it’s a lot, man, but I can’t just stick it on a plane, you know? I mean, it’s gotta be driven down there. And somebody gotta go along with it, you know? I mean, it ain’t gonna want to go at all, man. I gotta see to it that it does.”

  Amber took another toke. The movement and the colors tended to blend into something. She didn’t know what. But it made her feel religious.

  “Yeah, man,” Esteban said. “You call me when you see the news about Momma. We’ll arrange the other delivery.”

  He shut the cell phone off and came to the couch.

  “You believe in God, Esteban?” Amber said.

  She offered him her half-smoked joint.

  “Sure, baby,” Esteban said, “long as he believes in me.”

  “You believe in the devil?”

  “Baby,” Esteban said. “I am the devil.”

  Amber giggled. Esteban took a toke and passed the nearly burned-out roach to Amber. She finished it.

  “I like to drink wine when we smoke a joint.”

  Amber was watching the colors. She didn’t move. Esteban gave her a smart slap on the side of her butt.

  “You gonna get us some wine?” he said.

  Amber stood up.

  “You don’t have to hit so hard,” Amber said.

  “Told you, baby, I’m the devil.”

  She giggled happily and went to the refrigerator, and came back with a jug of white wine. She put out two unmatched water glasses and filled each one with the jug wine. There were four more joints rolled and lying beside a box of kitchen matches on the wooden crate that served as a side table. Esteban drank some wine and lit another joint.

  “You talking to my daddy?” Amber said.

  “Yeah, we was arranging the payoff for putting Momma down.”

  “Bye-bye, Momma,” Amber said, and giggled.

  “Bye-bye,” Esteban murmured, and sucked in a big lungful of s
moke. As it drifted slowly out of his lungs he murmured again, “Bye-bye.”

  35.

  Jenn came into Jesse’s office in the late afternoon.

  “You look tired,” Jenn said to him.

  “Up most of the night,” Jesse said. “I got a couple hours’ sleep in one of the cells in the back.”

  Whenever he saw her, Jesse felt like jumping up and wagging his tail. He always wanted to tell Jenn how beautiful she was and how much he loved her and how nothing she could do or say would shake him on that. And the strain of not doing that, which both he and Dix had agreed was in his best interest, was very burdensome.

  “So what can you tell me about this murder,” she said.

  “On the record?”

  Jenn paused for a minute, then she sighed a little.

  “I hate when you ask me that,” she said.

  “I hate that I have to ask it,” Jesse said.

  Jenn nodded.

  “But you do,” she said. “I’m in my professional reporter costume, so, yes, we’re on the record.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “The body was discovered by Officer Luther Simpson….” Jesse said.

  “That’s Suit’s real name?” Jenn said.

  “Yep,” Jesse said, “on routine patrol at approximately two a.m. this morning, on the front lawn of the Crowne estate on Paradise Neck. The victim has been identified as Fiona Francisco, who was a resident of Eleven Sewall Street in Paradise. While she lived there she was using the name Frances Franklin.”

  “Why the alias?” Jenn said.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “How long she live there?”

  “We’re checking that. I’m guessing two, three years.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “ME says two twenty-two-caliber bullets in the back of the head at close range.”

  “Was she killed at the Crowne estate?”

  “At or close,” Jesse said. “She bled a lot on the grass where they put her.”

  “Do you see any connection to the Crown estate school project, which drew protesters when it began?” Jenn said.

  “None so far,” Jesse said.

  “Next of kin?”

  “She has a daughter, Amber Francisco,” Jesse said, “who called herself Alice Franklin while she lived here.”