by Mike Lupica
Annie told Molly that she kept drinking like the world was about to end after Molly left her, had some laughs chatting up some young guy who showed her the motorcycle he had parked out front, declined a ride home on it after watching him come back inside and match her drink for drink. She staggered out of there finally. Alone. Can’t remember what time. Streets were still filled with people. A guy started walking with her on the street. Big beard, she remembers that. Told her it was too early to go home, they needed to get to this party. What party? Annie wanted to know. The guy said the one in the park for just the two of them.
“She still wanted to kick up her heels,” Jesse said.
“Or get them all the way up in the air,” Molly said.
“Hey, we both know that can happen to the best of them,” Jesse said, grinning at her.
They both knew what he meant, the one time in her marriage she had been unfaithful to her husband.
“We’re talking about Annie here,” Molly said. “Focus.”
“Been meaning to ask,” Jesse said. “You ever hear from your old friend Crow?”
She gave him a look as if she might go outside and key his car.
“Are you gonna let me tell this or not?”
“Sorry.”
“So they end up at the park, just the two of them. On the swings first. Turns out he’s got a flask with him. She drinks. He drinks. They start making out. And then bullshit bullshit bullshit, as you like to say, and he’s pulling her into the trees on the lake side and he’s on top of her. As drunk as she was, and whatever she thought she wanted, she didn’t want that. She tried to scream, but he put a hand over her mouth. At that point, she just thought she’d have to let it happen. He was too big and she was too drunk.”
“Bullshit bullshit bullshit,” Jesse said.
“Exactly.”
“But you say it didn’t happen.”
“All of a sudden, they hear a gunshot, she says, and it sounds pretty close,” Molly said.
“Not fireworks?”
Molly shook her head. “I asked her. She said even she could tell the difference.”
“So unless somebody else fired a gun last night, it was the gunshot from the lake.”
“Anyway,” Molly said, “the guy just says, ‘Fuck it, bitch, I didn’t really want you anyway,’ and just leaves her there.”
“Virtue intact.”
“Barely,” Molly said.
“Would she remember the guy if she saw him again?”
“She says no. Said he was wearing some kind of trucker hat pulled down low over his eyes.”
“You should tell her to come in,” Jesse said.
“That’s the thing, she won’t,” Molly said. “I already asked her that, too. She’s embarrassed that she was even in that situation. She doesn’t want Mitch to find out. Said she was telling me as her friend, not a cop.”
“She still ought to come in,” Jesse said. “I don’t want somebody like the trucker-hat asshole running loose in our town.”
“I told her I wouldn’t tell,” Molly said. “But I never count you when I say I won’t tell anybody. You, I tell you everything. Even when I wish I wouldn’t. Starting with my night with Crow.” She shook her head, disgusted. “To my everlasting regret.”
“At least you made your own choices with Crow,” Jesse said.
“I’m not blaming the victim here, I’m really not,” Molly said. “But she ought to want the guy caught same as us.”
“Give her some time,” Jesse said. “Then make another run at her.”
He noticed his coffee cup was empty. He’d forgotten to make more.
“Want coffee?” he said.
“Not if I have to make it.”
“I forget sometimes you’re deputy chief,” he said.
Molly grinned. “Fuckin’ ay,” she said.
He walked across the room and filled a paper filter with Dunkin’ coffee and filled the machine with water. While they both waited for the coffee to brew, Molly took a donut out of the box in front of Jesse. She complained constantly about her weight but never put on an extra pound as far as Jesse could tell. It was a Molly thing. By now he thought that her talking about her hips should be the start of a drinking game.
Just not for him.
“A guy who acts out like that,” Jesse said. “He’ll do it again. Just a matter of time and opportunity. Hate to think we’ve got an ape like that wandering around town.”
“Along with a murderer,” Molly said. “You know who the vic is yet?”
“Sort of,” Jesse said. And told her.
“Where’s Suit?” she asked.
“Back at the lake,” Jesse said. “Probably making calls about car services from there. Peter and Gabe are canvassing the lake houses, all the way around to the other side.”
They talked about Paul not having a phone or wallet on him, and why the killer would have lifted them both.
“You think it was a robbery gone bad?” Molly said.
“I’ll make that one of the first things I ask him when I catch his ass,” Jesse said.
“At least Annie made it home from the park,” Molly said.
“I’m going to find out what happened to this guy,” Jesse said.
“You only talked to him for a couple minutes,” she said. “That doesn’t mean this has to be personal.”
“Feels that way.”
“It always does when it happens in your town,” Molly said.
“Yours, too,” Jesse said.
His cell phone was on the desk in front of him. He heard it buzzing now. Picked it up and saw it was Suit again. The way his day had begun.
“Got lucky,” Suit said. “Got nothing from Uber or Lyft. But the second cab company I called in Marshport told me one of their drivers picked your guy up a block from the church and drove him over here.”
“Good work,” Jesse said.
“Aw, shucks,” Suit said.
“How’d the guy pay?”
“Cash.”
“Where’d he get dropped?” Jesse said.
There was a pause at Suit’s end of the phone and then he said, “That’s the interesting part.”
Jesse waited.
“Lily Cain’s house,” Suit said.
Five
Jesse ordered sandwiches from Daisy’s, which Daisy Dyke herself delivered. When she did, Jesse asked her why she continued to be so good to him.
“Because you continue to give me hope,” she said, “that not all men should have a bounty on them.”
Everybody in town called her Daisy Dyke. She called herself Daisy Dyke. In the world of political correctness, it made Jesse love her even more. But there were other reasons. She had a heart as big as the ocean, and was tough enough to clean up Afghanistan all by herself. Her short hair was a purple color these days. Jesse told her he liked it. Daisy told him she’d gone with it because one of the women on the U.S. World Cup team had the same color. Jesse told Daisy he didn’t know she liked soccer. She said she didn’t, she just had a thing for the soccer woman with the purple hair and tattoos.
“You sure you don’t want to go steady?” Jesse said before she left.
“Don’t be vulgar,” she said.
Jesse couldn’t remember the last time that he and Suit and Molly had been in the conference room on a Sunday morning. They were now. Gabe was looking at security footage from the new camera that had been mounted on a front corner of the Paradise Cinema, wanting to see if Paul might have been in the crowd the previous night, before somehow making his way to the lake. Peter Perkins was still knocking on doors at the lake houses closest to where the body had been found.
“You going to eat your fries?” Suit said to Molly.
“I thought fried food was the enemy now,” Molly said.
“A man still has nee
ds,” Suit said.
“Well, try to keep them under control,” Molly said. “All of them.”
Jesse took a bite of his pastrami sandwich, washed it down with coffee. It was the second fresh pot he’d made. Maybe he did have to quit caffeine next.
“We’ve got the guy at the meeting in Marshport,” Jesse said. “We’ve got Lily’s address. But until we got an ID, we’ve got shit.”
“It’s still kind of early,” Molly said.
“It’s a murder investigation,” Jesse said. “There was an old ballplayer one time who said it gets late early around here. First twenty-four hours are the most important sometimes.”
“If this guy’s prints aren’t in the system, how do we find out who the hell he is and where he comes from?” Suit said.
“There’s different agencies,” Jesse said, “for prints and dental records. One is the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. They started up that Armed Forces DNA Identification thing for soldiers back in the nineties. There’s a few others.”
“You just know this stuff off the top of your head?” Suit said.
“How many times do we have to go over this?” Jesse said. He ate some pickle. “I’m the chief.”
Molly slapped away Suit’s hand as he reached for one of the fries still in her container.
Jesse said, “We need to wait a couple days to put his picture out. Always gotta be careful with next-of-kin issues. If there are people looking for Paul and they see it on the Crier website or wherever, they’ll want to shoot me out of a cannon.”
The Paradise Town Crier was somehow still in business even with bigger papers in bigger cities going under all the time. The owner, Sam Brill, was always complaining about the cost of everything as he got ready to cut his staff again. Jesse thought of him as the real town crier.
Most of the bylines in the paper belonged to a kid named Nellie Shofner, who’d almost always gotten things right when it came to covering the PPD. Jesse liked her.
“I can’t believe our friend Nellie hasn’t called already,” Molly said.
“She will soon. And when she does . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Molly said. “I’ll give her one and tell her you’re unavailable for comment.” She grinned. “Though I always get the feeling that Nellie wishes you were a lot more available to her.”
“How many times do we have to go over this,” Jesse said. “She’s my son’s age.”
“Looks at you like she’s all grown up,” Molly said.
“Not all available women in Paradise want to jump my bones,” Jesse said.
“Those are just the ones who don’t want to wait in line,” Molly said. “They must not know that the line moves.”
Jesse told Molly he was on his way to see Lily Cain.
“You going to call first?” Molly said.
“You’re the one who thinks every woman in town loves me,” Jesse said. “I’ll just give Lily a thrill and surprise her.”
He saw Molly smiling at him.
“What?” he said.
“You’ve got that look,” she said.
“What look?”
“The one that says you might nearly be happy right now.” She was still smiling. “Maybe you don’t need another woman in your life,” she said. “Just a stiff.”
“Works better with both sometimes,” Jesse said.
“Don’t be gross,” she said, and Jesse told her that Daisy Dyke, even playing in a different league than Molly, had basically told him the same thing today.
Six
Lily once joked to Jesse that she’d gotten to the big house on the water the old-fashioned way.
She’d married her way to it.
Jesse thought it had to be more about the money than love, because nothing else made sense. Whit Cain, before his stroke, had looked and acted like every rich asshole the country had produced over the last hundred years, as guys like him kept getting richer, as if somehow assholes like him had become our most predominant natural resource. Jesse had always heard he cheated on Lily, and copiously, at least when he could still get around. Jesse had never spent enough time in their social orbit to know for sure. What he did know was that Whit Cain, before the stroke, had been spending most of his time at his home in Palm Beach, as if he and Lily were leading separate lives. Lily told Jesse once she’d rather spend more time with her gynecologist than more in Palm Beach.
The Cain compound was at the end of Paradise Neck, the harbor to the left and Stiles Island in the distance to the right. The Atlantic Ocean stretched out in front of them, like it was just one more thing in Paradise, Mass., that belonged to the Cains.
A carriage house built in the 1930s, the place had grown and grown. Like the family fortune. Sometimes Jesse thought that whomever said money didn’t grow on trees was full of shit.
The legend around Paradise was that Whit Cain’s father had started out in the bootlegging business with Joseph Kennedy, even though the Kennedys denied to this day that their old man had ever been involved in anything illegal, same as the Cains did.
Old Man Cain had moved north from Boston as the Kennedys had gone south to Hyannis Port, apparently on a mission to buy up every inch of oceanfront property from Gloucester to Salisbury, and more than a little real estate in downtown Boston, and everybody knew better than to get in his way. By the time World War II ended, Cain Enterprises owned the First National Bank of Paradise, the biggest construction business in town, and a real estate company that built houses that cost a vulgar amount of money on property that cost even more. They had even started a boatbuilding company, for which Michael Crane, Molly’s husband, had once worked. And didn’t miss a beat when the old man died. In fact, the rumor about his son Whit was that he was more of a ruthless ballbuster than his father had ever been. What Whit Cain couldn’t buy, he found a way to steal. There were still local legends about rivals whom he eventually rolled. Or who simply left the area and never came back.
Now Whit was the old man, in an upstairs bedroom facing the water, the family fortune of little use to him. Whit and Lily’s only child, son Bryce, was overseeing the family’s business interests, even though the feeling around town was that once Whit Cain had passed Bryce wanted to cash out and move to Palm Beach himself, and for good.
Jesse had gone home and changed before driving over the causeway to Paradise Neck. He wore a blazer and pressed gray pants and loafers that were as close as he had to dress shoes. There was something about Lily Cain that always made him want to look his best.
In another time, you would have been allowed to call Lily Cain a great broad. In private, Jesse knew she could swear like a champion. He’d told her once that she was where sailors went to learn all the ways to use the word fuck. He’d never had the nerve to ask if the pale area on her left forearm had once been a tattoo.
Lily answered the front door herself, even though Jesse knew how much help there was on the premises, at all times.
“Chief Stone,” she said, leaning forward and presenting a cheek for a kiss. “Business or pleasure?”
“Business, Lily,” he said. “But always a pleasure seeing you.”
She was almost as tall as Jesse was. Her hair was some sort of beauty-parlor mix of blond and silver, worn long. Her eyes were as blue as the sky above the water. Jesse just assumed that for her skin to look as flawless as it did Lily’d had work done. But if she had, it was damned fine work. She still had a good figure, too. She must have been something to look at when she was young, Jesse thought, simply because she was still something to look at now. There was always a hint of mischief in her eyes. Or trouble. Jesse guessed she was around seventy. But despite the almost regal way she carried herself, Jesse had always thought she gave off a bad-girl vibe, as if she’d been hell on wheels once and could prove it. Molly Crane liked to say that she herself was a good girl until she turned.
&nb
sp; “Don’t be so formal, Lily,” Jesse said, winking at her. “You can just call me Chief.”
She laughed a full, throaty laugh and showed him in. He had been in the big front foyer a few times before, the room looking as if it wanted to open up all the way through the screened-in porch to the water’s edge, and then perhaps to Portugal.
F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right, Jesse thought. The very rich were different from you and me. It started with the views.
“Bryce and I are just finishing lunch,” Lily said, leading Jesse toward the terrace.
Bryce Cain was at the table, staring at his phone.
“Chief,” he said, looking up finally.
“Bryce.”
They didn’t shake hands. Bryce was still staring at his phone, as if waiting for a text message that might slow down climate change.
Lily took her seat. Jesse sat next to her. Lily asked if he wanted something to eat. He said he was fine. She asked if he wanted coffee. He said if he had any more today, he’d want to run down to the water and swim to Stiles Island and back.
“Wasn’t last night lovely?” Lily said.
She’d still not asked about the reason for Jesse’s visit.
“It was,” Jesse said. “Nothing Paradise likes more than celebrating itself.”
“Jesse Stone,” she said, admonishing him. “You know rebuilding that theater was a good thing for our town.”
“Was and is,” he said. “And doesn’t happen without you.”
“I had plenty of help,” she said.
“Takes a village,” he said.
“And a whole lot of fucking arm-twisting,” she said.
“Think we could have gotten along without fuck in there, Mom,” Bryce said, putting down his phone, almost as a last resort.
“But what would the fucking fun be in that?” she said.
Bryce Cain was almost as pretty as his mother, maybe an inch taller, same skinny pipe-cleaner frame. Same blue eyes. He wore his own blond hair, starting to go gray, way too long for somebody his age, as if he wanted to look like Brad Pitt. His face looked pretty damn smooth, too. Maybe he and Mom shared the same nip-tuck guy.