Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “How the hell did he know about the meeting?” Salter said.

  “I told you Stone was no idiot.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I’m not sure he actually knows about the meeting,” Bernstein said. “If he knew, he wouldn’t have used it as a parting shot. He has one piece of information that he threw out there. He’s shrewd. Tomorrow, when we go see him, we’ll see just how much he does know. It’s not as if you were engaged in any illegal activity. You simply exchanged documents with another party with whom you are doing business. You are under no obligation to discuss any of it, so don’t. You were in Helton at the request of a business associate. You need say nothing more. You don’t even need to say that much.”

  Suit wished he could see the expressions on their faces. It was one thing to overhear a conversation. Faces told you a lot. Jesse had taught him that.

  “You make sense,” Salter said, his voice calmer now.

  “That’s what you pay me for.”

  “No, Bernstein, it is not. I pay all my other attorneys for that. I pay you for a very specific purpose.”

  “Whatever you say, Harlan.”

  “And speaking of that . . .”

  “You want me to give the go-ahead, don’t you?”

  “Immediately and with extreme prejudice.”

  “It would be better to wait, but—”

  “But nothing.”

  “Okay, Harlan, you just got done telling me you have me on retainer for a specific purpose. Well, then you need to listen to me. It’s better to let things calm down first, to let everyone get back to their business before—”

  That was the last thing of the exchange between Salter and his lawyer Suit overheard, because an announcement concerning an incoming ambulance blared over the loudspeaker that was situated right above his head. By the time the announcement was over, Salter and Bernstein seemed to have finished their talk. When Suit reappeared in the waiting area, Salter barely acknowledged him.

  “One of those for me?” Bernstein said, pointing at the coffees.

  Suit handed him a coffee. “Sure. Donut?”

  Bernstein patted his abs. “No, thanks.”

  Suit was happy about that. He didn’t care about the coffees. He’d had enough coffee, but there was no such thing as enough donuts.

  40

  Jesse Stone drove by Burt’s All-Star Grill on his way to visit Gabriel Weathers at the medical center outside of Helton. He wanted to check to make sure Sharon, the waitress, was okay and that Spider hadn’t doubled back to displace some of his anger and embarrassment. Jesse had run across a lot of Spiders in his lifetime. Bullies came in all shapes and sizes, but inside they were all about the same: weak, brittle, frightened, self-loathing, predatory. Sometimes one kick in the crotch was all it took to warn them off. Jesse hoped that would be the case with Spider. He couldn’t be sure, because sometimes that first kick just made them want to strike out, not strike back. They usually didn’t have the sand to come back at Jesse directly. No, they had to find a weaker, more vulnerable target. In this case, he thought, that would be Sharon or maybe her kids. Jesse also had his own selfish reasons for wanting to see Sharon. Spider’s interruption and the call about Ben Salter had prevented Jesse from getting the full story about what Harlan Salter IV and his lawyer were doing in a place like Helton.

  Before heading to Helton, Jesse had gone over to Kennedy Memorial Park to meet up with Healy and to see what the forensics unit had to say about where Ben Salter was discovered. Not that Jesse was a clotheshorse, but he swore Healy had only two suits and they were already old when they’d first met. That was more than a decade ago. He didn’t say anything about it to Healy, though Jesse couldn’t help smiling about it.

  Healy noticed. “What are you smiling about?”

  Jesse didn’t answer the question. “Anything worthwhile here?”

  “Nothing to write home about. We’re pretty sure the kid was driven up here via the maintenance access road and dumped. The gate’s open and the lock’s been cut.”

  “Tread prints?”

  “Access road is gravel, so we’re shit out of luck there.” Healy pointed to a patch of ground between two pine trees about fifteen feet to his left. “That’s where your man found the kid. There’s a fair amount of blood, but it’s probably all the kid’s from the broken beak. You ever break your nose?”

  Jesse tapped his nose. “This perfect specimen? Never.”

  “It is a beaut. I broke mine once. And that’s not just an expression. I mean I broke it!”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “High school ball. We were down a run late in the game and the eighth-place batter got a seeing-eye single through the hole on the left side. Coach was gonna pinch-hit for me, but because there were no outs, he decided to let me sacrifice and not waste a position player. First pitch is a high fastball, tough to get on top of with the bat. I tried to bunt it anyway. Ball caromed off the bat and hit me square in the honker. The sound of my nose breaking made the catcher puke his guts up. Either that or all the blood that came gushing out of me.”

  “Maybe both,” Jesse said.

  “I was in no position to judge. Hurt like a bastard, but it added a lot of character to my face. Don’t you think?”

  “Character . . . is that what they call it?”

  “Fuck you, Jesse.”

  “If you find anything out here, let me know.”

  Jesse fought the urge to stop for a drink during the entire ride to Helton. With the turmoil over the murder and Gabe’s accident, he had pretty much put the reunion and the baggage that came with it out of his mind. Even Kayla and Dee hadn’t brought it back to him, though he guessed their showing up in town and then on his doorstep unexpectedly probably should have. But Healy telling him that story of breaking his nose in high school had brought it all back in a rush. Suddenly, no matter how loud he turned up the radio, he couldn’t block Julio Blanco’s voice out of his head. Over and over again he heard Blanco describing how Vic Prado had caused the injury that ruined Jesse’s baseball career forever.

  Jesse pictured Dix smiling at this turn of events. It was Dix who had helped him come to see that his drinking was part of a series of unsuccessful mechanisms Jesse had set up to help him control the world around him. Of course, any such system was doomed to fail. Jesse saw that now, but knowing it and changing lifelong patterns were two very different animals. He got the sense that Dix took a kind of perverse pleasure in it when the universe would throw Jesse unexpected curveballs. Dix would claim otherwise. He would say that these unexpected turns of events were great opportunities for insight. Maybe Dix was right, because never in a million years could Jesse have predicted that Healy’s story would set him off the way it had. Now it was Dix’s voice, not Julio Blanco’s, he heard in his head. Unresolved feelings don’t resolve themselves. Just because you shove unwanted things into the attic doesn’t mean they aren’t still there. Man, he especially hated those rare occasions when Dix would get folksy or metaphorical.

  He never supposed he would be pleased to see Burt’s All-Star Grill again, but he was. Jesse realized that if he was half as good at life as he was at police work, he’d be in great shape. Jesse got out of the car, leaving Blanco and Dix behind.

  Burt’s was empty but for some flies, and they weren’t ordering off the menu. Jesse didn’t have time to wait for someone to appear, so he walked up to the pass-through window where the cook put up the finished orders. On the other side of the window sat a young brown-skinned man in his twenties, dressed in grease-smeared kitchen whites. He wore a silly paper cap on his head. He was reading a Spanish-language newspaper.

  “Hector, right?” Jesse said.

  Hector startled a bit, then collected himself. He stood and came to the window. His expression was practiced and blank. Jesse knew the look, the look of invisibility. Illegal
s learned to wear that expression from the second they crossed the border. It was pretty common in L.A. and now it was pretty common in these parts, too. Concerns over immigration policy were way above Jesse’s pay grade, and the way he figured it, people who came here and worked hard to improve their lives should be welcomed, not punished. As Hector approached the window, his face broke into a broad smile.

  “You the cop protect Sharon from Spider, ese chingazo de pendejo,” said the cook, who feigned spitting on the floor.

  “You’re right, Spider is a fucking idiot.”

  Hector was impressed. “You speak Spanish?”

  “Some. Curses, mostly. I worked L.A.P.D. for ten years.”

  Hector smiled. It was a nice, kindly smile.

  “Let me make you something,” he said to Jesse. “Huevos rancheros?”

  “That’s okay. I’m not hungry. Is Sharon around?”

  He waved his hand. “She go.”

  “Did Spider come back?”

  “No, but she is thinking he will, so she get her kids and go someplace safer.”

  There was a look in Hector’s eyes Jesse couldn’t quite read.

  “Safer? Safer where?”

  “Is okay,” Hector said.

  Now Jesse understood. “She’s with you?”

  Hector didn’t answer.

  “She has my card,” Jesse said. “Tell her to give me a call when she gets a chance.”

  He winked. “If I see her.”

  When Jesse got back into his car, it seemed Julio Blanco and Dix had taken their voices and gone elsewhere.

  41

  Kayla Prado slid her Louis Vuitton suitcase into the trunk of the rental car. She thought she’d feel different when she actually left Vic. She had anticipated tears, terror, anger, but there was none of that. She had cried a million tears in the last several years over the state of her marriage. She had cried even more of them when she got back to the hotel. She thought she might die of embarrassment after walking in on Dee and Jess. Desperation was never pretty, no matter how much mascara and lipstick you covered it in. And there was no denying her pursuit of Jess after all these years smacked of lonely desperation.

  Was she scared of leaving behind the comfortable, if unhappy, life she had with Vic? Of course she was. She had defined herself by Vic for two decades, had basked in the warmth of his fame and charm and money. She supposed she still might even love him, but without some distance, it would be impossible to tell. She had lost so much of herself in the process that she had almost forgotten who she was. She had once been the wild child: fiercely independent, clever, beautiful. Now she felt like nothing so much as a line drawing: a hollow outline of someone who might or might not be there. The time had finally come for her to redefine herself and to be more than an adjunct on Vic Prado’s Wikipedia page. And if there was any anger, it was aimed more at herself than at Vic. She had been complicit, looking the other way all these years as her husband bed-surfed his way first through the major leagues and then through Scottsdale. She had played a fair amount of musical beds herself.

  “Come on, Kay, darlin’, don’t do this,” Dee said even as she brought out Kayla’s matching Gladstone bag to the car. “The thing with Jesse . . . I’m sorry about—”

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said, taking the brown leather satchel from Dee’s hand and placing it in the trunk next to the suitcase. “I’m happy for you. Jess is a great guy. He deserves someone like you. I guess I half hoped you two might wind up together. Turning up at his house with you there was good for me. Maybe it was the best thing. It showed me how low I’d gotten, how I was looking to be rescued. I’m the only one who can do that. I see that now, and I can’t do it around Vic.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To my folks’ house in Taos for a little while. Then . . .” She shrugged. “I’ve got a flight to Albuquerque out of Logan later today. I’m going to sightsee a little in Boston first.”

  “Call me when you get to Taos, please,” Dee said. “I want to know you’re all right.”

  “Sure.” She wrapped her arms around Dee and kissed her softly on the lips. “You’ve been a good friend to me. You’ve been the only real friend I’ve had for a long time.”

  “What should I tell Vic?”

  “I left him a long letter, but please don’t tell him where I went. I’ll deal with him directly, but I need some time. You understand.”

  “I do, darlin’. I do.”

  “Thanks.”

  When they let go of each other, Dee called after Kayla, “Don’t forget to phone.”

  Kayla blew a kiss, got into the car, and was gone.

  Dee wasn’t exactly racked with guilt, but she wasn’t feeling very good about herself at that moment. The most obvious reasons being she wasn’t real and she wasn’t really a friend, in spite of how much she had grown to care for Kayla. And with Kayla gone, Vic would be particularly vulnerable to her. Dee was sure if she gave in to Vic’s advances now, she could cull the intel she’d been looking for all these months. The intel that would finally bring Vic’s sham empire down. The thing was, she hadn’t counted on falling so hard for Jesse Stone. She knew enough of their history from Kayla and had seen enough of the dynamic between Jesse and Vic to know that if Jesse ever found out she had slept with Vic, there would be no second chances. Suddenly everything in her life was at risk and in play. She had staked her savings and her career on a wild gamble. Now she had to figure the odds of that gamble against losing a man she might actually want to fall in love with. Dee was so absorbed with her own troubles that she didn’t notice the white Sentra take off after Kayla’s rental car.

  42

  When Jesse Stone came out of the elevator on the third floor, Monty Bernstein was there to greet him. They shook hands. He didn’t trust the lawyer as far as he could throw him, but Bernstein was more pleasant than most. As a cop, Jesse understood that pleasant didn’t mean incompetent, nor did it mean impotent. Criminal lawyers usually knew the wrong kinds of people. They were sort of like cops in that way. Jesse sure knew his share of bad guys and wasn’t above rubbing elbows with them if it meant getting to the bottom of a nasty case. There had been that whole thing with Crow a few years back, and more recently, he’d had occasion to make an ally of Fat Boy Nelly, a Boston-area pimp who was taking the business of prostitution digital. That was another way cops and lawyers were alike: The bad guys with whom they crossed paths often owed them favors. And Jesse knew if he was willing to call in those favors, so, too, would a guy like Monty Bernstein. That made him potentially dangerous, even if he was more pleasant than most.

  “Ben’s in room 312,” said the lawyer as they moved down the hall.

  “Where’s Harlan Salter?”

  “You seem to have a knack for getting under Harlan’s skin. Let’s just say that after our first few meetings with you, it was easy for me to convince my client not to be here.”

  “Your client doesn’t seem easy to convince under any circumstances,” Jesse said.

  “Tell me about it, but he pays well.”

  “I figured.”

  Jesse left it at that. This was his second hospital-room visit of the day. He hoped it would be more productive than the one he’d had with Gabe Weathers. Gabe was communicative up to a point, but between the pain from his concussion and his broken pelvis and the medication, he wasn’t making much sense. It was clear that the concussion had pretty much wiped out Gabe’s memory of the entire morning of the accident. He couldn’t recall the accident at all. He remembered that he’d been assigned to keep an eye on someone. He just couldn’t remember who or why. Then he got frustrated at trying to remember. Jesse assured him that it was okay and that everyone was looking forward to his return to duty. The doctors told Jesse that return wouldn’t be for quite a few months, but that he could probably be transferred to Paradise General in a few days.

&nbs
p; “Here we are,” Monty said. “Listen, Jesse, I think we understand each other and we’re all anxious for the man or men who did this to Ben and Miss Penworth to be brought to justice—”

  “But . . .”

  “But if I sense your questions are either straying into areas I feel are unrelated to the case or get Ben agitated, I am going to call an immediate end to the interview.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I was wondering if I might have a moment alone with Ben before you begin the interview.”

  Jesse nodded. The lawyer knocked and entered Ben Salter’s room. Good to his word, Bernstein called for Jesse Stone not two minutes after that.

  Jesse introduced himself and explained what he was doing there. The kid’s entire face was black-and-blue. His nose and jaw were swollen. His eyes were slits. One of his ankles was in a cast. Jesse asked how he was feeling. The kid said he was glad that his jaw was only bruised and that he guessed he would be okay. Jesse smiled at that.

  “Martina’s dead, isn’t she? No one will tell me anything.”

  Jesse added to the kid’s frustration. “Why do you think she’s dead?”

  Ben Salter described how he and Martina had just finished having sex for the first time when the guy in black burst into the room.

  “He didn’t say anything. He shot into the wall above the headboard to show us he was serious. He just kept pointing with his gun and silencer. He motioned for me to get out of the bed and get on my knees. He zapped me with something and . . . after that I can’t remember much. I thought I remembered a shot, but I wasn’t sure if I was confusing things. Then, when he got me out of the trunk of his car . . . I don’t know. The way he smiled at me and shook his head when I asked about Martina . . . I felt like he killed her.”