Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “What happened here, Pete?”

  “Seems like Mr. Bernstein had a few vodkas too many and picked a fight with a guy twenty years too young for him,” Pete said. “Neighborhood kid named O’Connell.”

  “Who threw the first punch?”

  Perkins pointed across the table. “All the witnesses agree on that.”

  “O’Connell pressing charges?”

  “Probably not. I had a talk with him. I sort of suggested that Mr. Bernstein might show him some love and cash when he sobered up. I got his address and phone number.”

  “Good thinking, Pete. Next time there’s a vacancy for UN ambassador, I’m putting your name forward.”

  Pete grunted.

  “Okay, Pete,” Jesse said. “I can take it from here. Go get Molly and then get back out on patrol.”

  Jesse waited for Pete to leave before speaking to the lawyer.

  “Come on, Monty. Looks like you need some fresh air.”

  Monty Bernstein stood up and wobbled a bit getting his legs beneath him. As he walked out of the Scupper he kept his eyes down and his head straight. Jesse nodded to the bartender and the bouncer as they left. The night air was cool and damp, smelling vaguely of the ocean. Although the Scupper was located about as far away from the sea as you could get in Paradise, it still wasn’t very far. Paradise was all about proximity to the ocean and all one ever need do was to sniff the air to be reminded of that.

  “Walk or drive?” Jesse said to the still silent lawyer.

  “Drive. With the windows down, please.”

  They got into Jesse’s Explorer and pulled away from the curb, Monty leaning toward the open window. Jesse headed northeast and asked Bernstein to explain himself, but Monty answered the question with one of his own.

  “You ever do anything you were so ashamed of you couldn’t live with it?”

  “I’ve come close,” Jesse said. “I used to think it was my fault that my marriage fell apart. Then there’s my drinking. I did ruin my career with the L.A.P.D. with that. No debating that one.”

  “You said you’ve come close, but you never crossed the line?”

  “Never. If I couldn’t live with it, I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “That’s right. You’re a cop,” Monty said. “If things got too bad for you, you’d eat your gun.”

  When Jesse nodded, his expression somehow both serious and fragile, Monty understood even through his drunken haze that Jesse had come close to doing that, too.

  “But don’t you feel guilty about things sometimes?”

  “Guilt,” Jesse said. “I know about guilt. But we’re not talking about me, are we, Monty?”

  “No, I guess we’re not.”

  Jesse didn’t say anything to that, opting for the trick of silence to work on the lawyer.

  “Pull over. Pull over, Jesse. I’m gonna be sick.”

  Jesse swung the wheel hard right. His Explorer screeched to a stop. He hopped out of the driver’s seat, came around the SUV, yanked Monty out of his seat. Monty didn’t need any help with the rest. He emptied himself of everything except what was weighing on his conscience. In the meantime, Jesse’d got a bottle of water and a few aspirins out of the Explorer.

  “I’m okay, now,” Monty said, getting to his feet.

  Jesse handed him the water and the aspirins.

  “You better now?” Jesse said as he pulled back into the light traffic.

  “I guess.”

  “I’m going to ask you some questions that you’re probably not going to answer, but I’m going to ask them anyway.”

  It was Monty’s turn to be silent.

  “I’ve got a witness that will testify that you and Harlan Salter met with Vic Prado at Burt’s All-Star Grill in Helton. I’ve got photographic evidence that will back up that testimony. You want to tell me what was being discussed?”

  “You know I can’t answer that, Jesse.”

  But Jesse noticed that Monty’s expression was twisted in pain as he spoke. When Jesse had pulled away from the Scupper, he didn’t have a destination in mind, but he had one now.

  75

  Jesse drove as quickly as he dared. He didn’t want to use the portable cherry top he carried in his car just in case. He didn’t approve of using lights and sirens unless they were absolutely necessary. Besides, he didn’t want to risk freaking Monty out any more than he already was.

  “Officer Crane,” Jesse said, “Molly, she was onto you and Salter. She told me the night Vic Prado came in to my office that she thought you and Salter knew Prado. She said that Salter looked pretty angry at the sight of Vic.”

  “Officer Crane’s a pretty good-looking woman.”

  “Obviously a pretty good cop, too. Her instincts about the three of you knowing each other were right on. So, let me ask you this a different way, Counselor. Did the business dealings between Salter and Vic have anything to do with Martina Penworth’s murder and the kid’s abduction?”

  Bernstein didn’t answer, but the lines of his tortured expression etched themselves more deeply into his handsome face.

  Jesse navigated the twisty road up to the big old brick Victorian, the Explorer’s tires spitting out pieces of gravel as it moved across the driveway. He stopped the SUV right in front of the porch.

  “What is this place?”

  Jesse said, “Get out.” It wasn’t a suggestion.

  When they were out of the car, Jesse told Monty to wait where he was. Jesse disappeared around the side of the house. Feeling weak and hungover, Bernstein sat down on the porch steps. The wind was much stronger here and the air smelled more intensely of the sea. He could hear the waves rolling ashore down the bluff. He thought he heard something else, too, something like the sound of breaking glass. But the wind noise and his fuzzy-headedness made it hard to know. When the front door opened, Jesse was standing on the other side of the threshold.

  “Come on in, Monty,” Jesse said.

  He stood and went into the house. Jesse had turned on the lights and had started up the stairs without waiting for the lawyer.

  “Where are we?” Monty said.

  There was no answer. The lawyer finally caught up to Jesse at the open door to a second-floor bedroom. Jesse pointed to a crusted red splotch on the floor on the right side of the bed as they faced it.

  “This is your employer’s house, Monty, and right there’s where Martina Penworth’s body landed. You know she was only eighteen and she was murdered for no other reason than she was an inconvenience. I know you’re a criminal defense attorney and I know you were once a prosecutor, but can you even conceive of someone being killed because they were an inconvenience?”

  “He’s no longer my employer.” Bernstein spoke in a whisper.

  “What?”

  “Salter fired me tonight. He’s gone.”

  “Then tell me what’s going on. Get it off your chest.”

  “You know I’m bound by attorney-client privilege even now.”

  “Keep staring at her blood, then tell me that again. You want to come to the station and look at the forensics and the autopsy photos?”

  Bernstein burst out of the room, running down the stairs, tripping face-forward down the last three steps. He crawled through the front door. Jesse found him on his knees on the porch, dry-heaving, gasping for breath. Jesse sat down on the porch steps, waiting. A minute later, Bernstein sat down beside him.

  “You deal in hypotheticals, Chief Stone,” Monty said, addressing Jesse formally.

  “When I have to.”

  “What if I were to tell you that a hypothetical former client of a hypothetical lawyer was blind with vengeance for an incident involving a hypothetical son and his hypothetical girlfriend?”

  “I’m listening, Counselor.”

  “What if I were to tell you that part of this hypothetical lawy
er’s job was to help arrange for that vengeance and that said revenge was about to be carried out and that it involved an innocent woman?”

  “Innocent woman as in Vic Prado’s wife?”

  “Hypothetically speaking.”

  “I’d say that hypothetical lawyer better find a way to speak up unless he wants the kind of blood on his hands that he’ll never get off. Maybe it would motivate the lawyer to know that Kayla Prado had once been the Paradise police chief’s girlfriend.”

  Monty Bernstein went deadly still for a moment, then said, “They call him Mr. Peepers.”

  76

  Jesse had dropped Monty back at the Osprey Inn to sleep off his hangover and shame. Now he sat at his desk, staring at the image of Wally Cox on his monitor. Seeing the late actor’s face made Jesse smile. Cox, with his weak mouth, bookish, unremarkable looks, and wire-rimmed glasses, had a face that screamed nerd. It was a face made for blending into the background, a face made to be forgotten. Jesse remembered seeing the late actor on reruns of The Twilight Zone, Wagon Train, Hollywood Squares, and twenty other shows, the names of which were lost to him. He’d never seen Cox in Mister Peepers, not even in reruns, but the name fit. Only according to Monty Bernstein, the man he referred to as Mr. Peepers was anything but a harmless nerd.

  “Watch out for this guy, Jesse,” Monty said before he left the Explorer. “He’s known to take a particular delight in slow death. He likes punishment. That’s what my hypothetical client wanted. Be careful.”

  Molly came into his office without knocking, but he kept his eyes on the screen.

  “Did you get those photos from Gabe’s camera uploaded?”

  “I did. I’ll enlarge them and run the plates on all the cars in the photographs as soon as—”

  “You were right, Molly, about Salter and Prado knowing each other. Maybe I’ll start listening to you.”

  “That would be a nice change of pace.”

  “Do you remember the actor Wally Cox?”

  “The name sounds familiar,” she said.

  “He was the voice of the cartoon character Underdog. ‘Never fear, Underdog is here.’”

  “Sure, I saw reruns of those when I was little, but it doesn’t help me with his looks.”

  “Monty Bernstein says he’s been told that the guy who snatched Kayla looks like Wally Cox. They call him Mr. Peepers.”

  “I can’t remember what Wally Cox looked like,” she said.

  He laughed. “Underdog on a Wanted poster. Look him up on Google.”

  “I can’t exactly call in a description of Wally Cox to the Boston PD. Do we have anything else?”

  “A disconnected phone number,” he said. “You saw the white Sentra in Gabe’s photos?”

  “You think it’s Mr. Peepers’s?”

  “It better be. Did you send Cavanaugh home?”

  “He’s taking a nap in one of the cells.”

  “Good.”

  It wasn’t five minutes before Molly was back in the office.

  “Dead end on the Sentra,” she said, holding up a photo of the car. “The plate’s a match with the partial we had, but it’s registered to a Sheila Brodsky, seventy-three, of Twelve Cottage Street in Sharon. I checked the list. The car hasn’t been reported missing or stolen.”

  “Call the Sharon PD and have them send a cruiser over there.”

  “You think she’s—”

  “It’s too early to think anything. Just call the Sharon PD. What else?”

  “We had better luck with this,” Molly said, laying a photo in front of Jesse. “That pearl Caddy CTS Coupe is registered to MAF Imports Inc.”

  Jesse shrugged.

  Molly wagged her finger at him. “Remind me again why they pay you the big bucks? You want to take a stab at what MAF stands for?”

  “It’s been a long day, Crane.”

  “MAF. Michael Anthony Frazetta.”

  “If I didn’t think you’d shoot me, I’d kiss you, Moll.”

  “If you drag me down here again off shift, I might shoot you anyway.”

  “So we know Salter and Prado are mixed up together somehow and that Vic is sleeping with Mike Frazetta’s wife. Now we’ve got a car outside Burt’s owned by Mike Frazetta. And if my gut is right, we also have Mr. Peepers watching everyone else.” Jesse stopped talking and his eyes got a faraway look in them.

  “What is it, Jesse?”

  “It was Mr. Peepers who shot out Gabe’s rear tire.”

  “Why?”

  He grabbed the photo of the Sentra out of Molly’s hand. “This! Monty says this guy is a ghost. No one even knows who he is. There are no pictures of him. He must have seen Gabe taking pictures in his rearview as he drove past. Guys like this are allergic to being photographed.”

  “But how can you know it was him?” Molly said.

  “Because I saw him. I looked right at him when I was going to my car at Gabe’s accident scene.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t really remember. There wasn’t anything about him that stuck in my head, but it was him. The staties who pulled Gabe from the car told me they had to chase some creepy little guy away from the wreck, that he was sniffing around, looking for a souvenir. He wanted Gabe’s camera.”

  “But he’s just a shadow in the picture. You can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman driving the Sentra. He might as well be Sheila Brodsky.”

  They both laughed. Maybe too loudly.

  “Mr. Peepers wouldn’t know that,” Jesse said. “He would do anything to make sure he wasn’t on camera. One photo of him and he would be finished. With all the face-recognition software out there these days, there’d be no shadow dark enough to hide him. Think of where he snatched Kayla from in Boston. Two blocks in either direction and he’s on CCTV. Molly, give me a minute. I have a call to make.”

  Jesse was already punching in the number of the Helton PD before Molly Crane was out the door.

  77

  Chief Ralph Carney of the Helton PD wasn’t any more pleased by Jesse Stone’s call than Molly had been about being called in to work. It went downhill from there, especially after Jesse asked if there had been a recent incident at Helton police headquarters. One near their evidence or property rooms.

  “How the fuck did you know that?” Carney said. “Did someone in my department tell you about it? Was it that psycho Bynam?”

  “No one told me anything, Chief. It was an educated guess.”

  “Bullshit! I know your type, Stone. If someone in this department told you, you wouldn’t rat them out.”

  Jesse had little patience for this kind of paranoia, but he couldn’t risk alienating Carney.

  “I give you my word, Chief. It was a guess.”

  “I don’t know how you’d guess that. We even snowed the local paper into writing it up as a friendly prank gone wrong.”

  “You tell me what happened,” Jesse said, “and I’ll tell you how I knew.”

  “A few days ago, the officer stationed at the evidence desk smelled smoke, looked out into the hallway, and saw a cloud of it. He pulled the fire alarm and the building was evacuated. After the fire department cleared us to reenter, we found the door to the evidence room pried open and the CCTV cameras had been spray-painted black. Wasn’t even a real fire. It was an old Army-surplus smoke canister.”

  “Anything missing?”

  “That’s the weird thing. Nothing was missing that we could tell.”

  “Happened the night of my guy’s accident, right?”

  After Jesse upheld his end of the bargain, he got off the phone and went out to check with Molly on the Sentra.

  “Just got off the phone with the Sharon PD,” she said.

  “And.”

  “Good news, bad news. Sheila Brodsky’s alive. She’s on a world cruise, but her garage was
broken into. Her car’s gone.”

  “Well,” Jesse said, “there’s no doubt about Mr. Peepers anymore. He tried breaking in—scratch that—he broke into the Helton PD evidence locker, looking for the camera.”

  “Why didn’t he try that here?”

  “Maybe he did and we didn’t know it or maybe he didn’t know it was here. Or if he did, he might have been gambling we wouldn’t know what we had. If I hadn’t been climbing the walls before, he would have been right. I would have just given the camera back to Gabe’s wife with the rest of his things.”

  “What now, Jesse?”

  “First thing, we report the car stolen. Probably won’t get us anywhere, but it’s worth a shot.”

  Molly said, “Did that. The Sharon PD is putting it in the system as we speak. I guess we can have the Sharon PD talk to Sheila Brodsky’s neighbors and relatives and see if there’s any connection that would lead us back to Mr. Peepers. How did he know she would be gone?”

  Jesse shook his head. “We don’t have that kind of time, and I’m betting Kayla doesn’t, either. She’s bait, and Vic’s been gone since this afternoon. If Vic ran, Kayla’s dead. If Vic does the right thing and shows, Kayla’s dead anyway. For her, it’s a lose-lose proposition.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know, Molly. I don’t know. I’m going to stretch my legs a little and think. Wake Cavanaugh up. Pump him full of coffee and get him back looking at the mug shots. No matter what happens with Kayla and Vic, we still owe justice to Martina Penworth and her parents.”

  78

  Walking wasn’t helping. Sometimes there are no good solutions, no rabbits to pull out of the magician’s hat. Sometimes there are no hats. And Jesse Stone was no magician. Kayla was going to die, and from what Monty had told him, it wasn’t going to be quick or easy. Kayla. He remembered the first time he’d seen her. Even the memory made his heart beat a little faster.