Robert B Parker - Stone 2 - Trouble in Paradise

by Trouble in Paradise(lit)

  The cards seemed to move about in his thin hands as if they were alive. Macklin got a pair of threes. Chuck opened. Macklin drew three cards. It didn't improve his threes. He dropped out. Chuck won with three queens. Tiffany made sure everyone had what they needed in food and drink. And she made sure that she rubbed her chest against all the players but Tony. Tony neither ate nor drank.

  Sergeant Voss leaned on the wall in the foyer. Occasionally Tommy King sat in for Tony. Macklin was a competent card player, but it didn't interest him. Gambling was for losers. There were better ways to get money. And there were better ways to lose it... like women. Macklin played hard enough to make it seem he was trying and kept close track of the amount of money that was moving Iv across the table.

  After an hour and a half, Macklin was down $200.

  i "Excuse me a minute," he said.

  "Damn beer, you don't drink it, : you just rent it."

  He stood and walked through a bedroom into the bath and closed the door and locked it. Then he unbuttoned his pants, pulled the tape off the gun butt and took the pistol out of his protector. He put the pistol down on the top of the toilet tank and took the occasion to urinate. Make it authentic. Then he zipped up.

  Washed his hands, dried them on a towel, picked up the pistol, cocked it, and went back through the bedroom. He took a pillow |s off the bed and shook the pillowcase loose. Carrying it in his left hand, with the 9-mm in his right, he went into the poker room. The first thing he did as he stepped through the bedroom door was to shoot Sergeant Voss in the middle of the chest. Voss grunted and fell on his left side and twitched a couple of times and was still. It took the starch out of everyone else in the room. Macklin waved the gun gently toward the poker players. Tiffany began to cry softly.

  Macklin ignored her.

  "Any one of you can be next," Macklin said.

  "Unless I get all the money."

  Nobody spoke.

  "Everybody clasp their hands behind their head."

  They did as they were told.

  "No problem," Tommy King said.

  "You'll get your money."

  "This is true," Macklin said.

  "Now, one by one, starting with you, Tommy, get up, empty your pockets into the pillowcase. And then lie facedown on the floor," he gestured with the gun barrel, "right there."

  They did as they were told. After all the men had done as they were told, Macklin picked up the money on the table and handed it to Tiffany.

  "Hold that," he said.

  Then he surveyed the room.

  "In a minute I'm going to search you, one at a time. If I find you held out on me, I'm going to shoot you in the back of the head."

  He paused a moment.

  "Anybody got anything to declare?"

  Nobody moved. Macklin grinned.

  "Okay, I believe you. Come on, Tiffany."

  He took hold of her wrist and led her past the dead man in the foyer and out the front door. Turn left. Two doors down. Into the emergency stairwell. Tiffany was still crying. He let go of her.

  "I left you behind, they'd have taken the money away from you," he said.

  "Now you're on your own."

  And he left her clutching the table stakes and sniveling, and he ran down the four flights. At the bottom he took the gun off cock, dropped it in the pillowcase, and went out the emergency door onto the street.

  NINE.

  "So now you're a weather weenie," Jesse said.

  He sat at the counter in Jenn's kitchen in a newly remodeled third-floor condominium on Beacon Street. Jenn had shown him around. From her bedroom window, you could see the Charles River. He had felt uneasy in her bedroom, but he was more comfortable now, sipping a scotch and soda, while Jenn transferred supper from the take-out boxes to the plates.

  "Only the guys have to be weenies," Jenn said.

  "The weather girls have to look," she stuck out her chest and wiggled her hips, "goooood."

  Jesse smiled.

  "What about 'having a film career'?"

  Jenn shook her head.

  "Have to ball too many toads," she said.

  "Like Elliot?" Jesse said.

  "Yeah, and the worst part is after you ball them, they're still toads."

  She had bought chicken salad at the take-out, and cold sesame noodles, and a loaf of sourdough bread. She went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Chardonnay and handed it to Jesse.

  "Opener's right there beside the wine bucket," she said.

  Jesse finished his scotch, opened the wine, and poured two glasses. He handed one to Jenn as she came around the counter to sit beside him. She touched his glass with hers.

  "I don't know what to drink to," Jesse said.

  "We could drink to each other."

  "Okay," Jesse said. They drank.

  "So," Jesse said.

  "Here we are."

  "Yes."

  "But I don't quite know where here is."

  "Other than three thousand miles from Los Angeles?" She served a spoonful of chicken salad onto his plate.

  "It's got grapes in it," Jesse said.

  "That makes it chicken salad Veronique."

  Jenn served him some sesame noodles and took some for herself. She liked to eat, and she was careful about what she ate. But she put together some very odd combinations, Jesse thought.

  Sesame noodles and chicken salad? Veronique? She was sitting beside him eating neatly. She seemed calm. He could smell her perfume, and he could brush her arm if he leaned slightly left. He remembered exactly what she looked like with her clothes off.

  He felt as if he might come apart and scatter on her kitchen floor.

  He sipped some Chardonnay. He didn't like wine that much. He particularly didn't like Chardonnay. But he knew she always had ordered it when they were married, and this had been the most expensive bottle of Chardonnay in the Cove Liquor Store, which was the nearest liquor store to the police station.

  "You doing good with your drinking, Jesse?"

  "I'm all right, Jenn. I slip occasionally, but never in public."

  "Drinking alone?"

  "Yep. But not often."

  "I worry about you drinking alone."

  "Hell, I've always liked drinking alone, Jenn. I hate being drunk where people can see me."

  "I know. You're a very inward person."

  Jenn was eating her noodles with chopsticks. He admired how clever she was with the chopsticks. He always used a fork. She ate some noodles, put down the chopsticks, drank some wine.

  "Well," she said.

  "The question is where are we."

  Jesse nodded. He wasn't hungry. He drank some wine.

  "I've had quite a lot of therapy since we broke up," she said.

  "We didn't break up," Jesse said.

  "You left me for Elliot the producer."

  Jenn nodded carefully.

  "I've had quite a bit of therapy since I took up with Elliot Krueger and you divorced me," she said.

  "I'm sorry," Jesse said.

  "I guess I'm quibbling over language."

  "You're mad," Jenn said.

  "And why wouldn't you be?"

  "You did what you had to do."

  "I guess so," Jenn said.

  "But all the therapy I've had hasn't solved my problem."

  "Which is?"

  "I want to be with you and I don't."

  "And what's the shrink say about that?"

  "She says I'm ambivalent."

  "For this she gets a hundred dollars an hour?"

  "Two hundred. And she's worth it. She helped me see that I really feel both ways at the same time, that it's really quite human to feel conflicting things."

  "So what do you do about it?"

  "I don't know yet. But I know I want to stay near you. You were too far away before."

  "And what do we do with your ambivalence? You fuck me on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Elliot Tuesdays and Thursdays?"

  "It's not about fucking, Jesse."
r />   "The hell it isn't."

  "Well. It's not only about fucking."

  Jesse took in some air. He finished his wine. Better not have any more.

  "Okay," he said, "it's not only about fucking. It's about you don't want me and you don't want to lose me. What the Christ am I supposed to do with that?"

  "Talk."

  "That's what I'm doing."

  "No," Jenn said.

  "Mostly you're yelling."

  Jesse got off the stool and walked into Jenn's frilly living room id looked down at Beacon Street.

  "Goddamn, this is hard," he said.

  She stood in the doorway behind him.

  "It's awful, isn't it?" she Isaid.

  "Yes."

  "Dr. St. Claire says the bond between us is quite impressive."

  Jesse nodded, staring down at the cars outbound toward Kenmore Square.

  "I think we need to try," Jenn said.

  "Try what?" Jesse said.

  "Jesse," Jenn said.

  "We're divorced. We're single. We can act like [any other single people. We could date."

  "Date who?"

  "Anybody we wanted," Jenn said.

  "Including each other. Like | we'd just met."

  "And?" Jesse said.

  "And see what happens."

  "Sex?" Jesse said.

  Jenn shrugged.

  "Let's see what happens."

  "Not tonight," Jesse said.

  "No," Jenn said.

  Jesse turned from the window and looked at Jenn and smiled.

  "You are a piece of work, Jenn," he said.

  "You want to give it a try?"

  "Sure," Jesse said.

  "Want to take me to dinner next Wednesday night?"

  Yes.

  They stood on opposite sides of the living room for a time and looked silently at each other. Then Jenn walked across and put her arms around Jesse and rested her head against his chest.

  With her voice somewhat muffled, she said, "A day at a time, huh?"

  "Sure," Jesse said.

  TEN.

  "And you just walked out and shot the cop without a word" Faye said.

  They were sitting in the Mercedes parked on Indian Hill, looking at Stiles Island where it jutted into the harbor.

  "He was the dangerous one. Knock him over and they take you seriously."

  "So you did it for effect."

  "I wanted to neutralize him. And I wanted to get their attention."

  "Weren't you afraid someone would hear the shot?" Faye said.

  "Hotel rooms have pretty good sound insulation," Macklin said.

  "And most people don't know what a gun shot sounds like anyway. They're afraid to call up and make an asshole of themselves, you know?"

  "Why didn't they call down to the desk the minute you left the room?"

  "And say what-we were having an illegal poker game up here, guarded by a corrupt Boston cop? As soon as I left the room, they were busy getting the hell out of there and covering their tracks."

  "So they won't even report it."

  "Nope. Why I like to knock them over."

  "Paper says that a policeman was found shot to death in a room," Faye said.

  "And the room was occupied by someone named Thomas King, who turns out to be a phony."

  "It didn't say in the paper."

  "It will," Macklin said.

  "The real Thomas King will be a guy from Des Moines, who's never been to Boston, and somebody lifted his credit card number and used it to make phony plastic."

  "You take some awful chances, Jimmy."

  "Not really," Macklin said.

  "What if the cop had found your gun?"

  "Guy's patting you down he stays away from your crotch."

  "But suppose he had found it?"

  "So he takes it," Macklin said.

  "And they either boot me out or let me play. If they boot me out, I take my thousand and leave. If they let me play, I donate my thousand and leave."

  "But shooting the cop?"

  "Part of doing business," Macklin said.

  "Either it bothers you or it doesn't. If it bothers you, find another line of work."

  "It doesn't bother you."

  "No."

  "What if you'd missed?"

  Macklin grinned at her.

  "I don't miss."

  They were quiet. Below them, a sloop, heeling sharply in the offshore wind, was moving out of the harbor under sail. They were too far to make out the people onboard.

  "So how much did you get?" Faye said.

  "Fifteen thousand and change," Macklin said.

  "Should keep us afloat until we clean out Stiles Island."

  "You really think we can?"

  "It's perfect," Macklin said.

  "The isolation. The money. The police."

  "Small-town cops?"

  "You bet," Macklin said.

  "Biggest robbery they've ever had is probably some kid copping two Snickers bars from a Ma and Pa."

  "I think something happened here last year, while you were in jail."

  "Probably caught a Peeping Tom," Macklin said.

  "No, I don't remember. It was on the news one night."

  "Whatever," Macklin said and grinned at her again.

  "They haven't seen anything like me before."

  Faye smiled back at him.

  "Not many people have," she said.

  ELEVEN.

  Suitcase Simpson and Anthony De Angelo brought the Hopkins boys and Snapper Jencks in to see Jesse at 9:15 in the morning. None of them seemed scared. They all seemed to enjoy the celebrity of being arrested.

  "Nobody was home but the kids," De Angelo said.

  "Either house. I left a note."

  "My father's going to be down here with a lawyer soon as he finds out," Earl said.

  Jesse nodded. Simpson closed the door and leaned against it.

  "I don't think you're supposed to arrest a kid without his parInts' permission anyway," Robbie said.

  "You better call my mother It work."

  Jesse leaned back in his chair and looked at them with the deadyed cop look he'd polished to a gleaming edge in South Central L.A. He let his eyes move slowly from one to the other, letting his saze rest heavily on each of them. Jencks was the hard case. He met esse's look. The other two didn't. Jesse looked at Earl.

  "You want a lawyer?" Jesse said.

  "I don't know no lawyer," Earl said.

  "Want me to get you one?"

  "I don't want your lawyer," Earl said.

  "You better wait until my aid man gets here."

  "How old are you?" Jesse said.

  "Fifteen."

  Jesse looked at Robbie.

  "You?" he said.

  "Fourteen."

  "You?" he said to Jencks.

  "Old enough," Jencks said.

  Jesse nodded. Jencks looked older than the other two. He was t, but he already had the shadow of a beard, and he had muscle definition. Didn't have to be older. Might merely have grown up quicker.

  "Here's how it's going to go," Jesse said.

  "You better let me call my mother or father," Earl said.

  Jesse gestured at the phone. Earl stared at it and didn't call. Jesse hadn't thought he would. They weren't scared enough yet, and they didn't want their parents to know they were in trouble. Yet.

  "Shut up," Jesse said.

  "We're going to ask you to wait in separate cells while we question you one at a time until one of you tells us that the three of you set the fire on Geary Street. Then we will throw the book at the ones who held out on us and go easy on the one who cooperated."