“No deal,” Jo Jo said.
Jesse waited.
“You can’t even get me for Tammy, no way you can prove it.”
Jesse waited.
“If I did know something, I’m not going to fink out without something better than you’re offering.”
“You need a little time,” Jesse said, “run this thing over in your mind, think about how your life is going to go from now on. I’ll come back in a while and see you.”
“I got to know what the deal is,” Jo Jo said.
Jesse turned and left him there standing alone in the dim light at the back of his tiny cell, the tape recorder silently waiting on the floor by the folding chair outside the bars.
Chapter 73
When her husband came into the house Cissy Hathaway had already mixed the first of their two evening Manhattans. Hasty went as he always did to the living room and she brought the drinks in, as she always did, on a small silver tray someone had given them at their wedding. She put the tray down on the coffee table. She felt weak, as if she’d been ill, but steady enough, quiet inside now that the thing had got out. Hasty took his drink and sipped some without waiting for her. Then he took a Polaroid picture from his inside pocket and dropped it faceup on the coffee table.
“Oh God,” she said.
“I got this in the mail this morning.”
She nodded.
“Explain it to me, please.”
Her husband’s voice was thin and very tight. His face was white, and there were vertical grooves in his cheeks. The hand holding the Manhattan was trembling slightly. She felt the weakness open beneath her and it was as if she would slump into it and disappear. She didn’t want her drink. It stood on the tray in front of her with the short thick glass beaded slightly and the amber light showing through it. She shook her head gently. She couldn’t go through it all again.
“Explain.” Her husband finished his drink. “I need you to explain.”
She stared at her hands folded in her lap. They looked foreign to her. Her knees looked remote and unconnected to her. Her living room, in the house where she had lived for most of her adult life, looked like a museum room. Not hers, not anyone’s. Why would someone make a chair like that? Why would someone sit in it?
Her husband’s voice was so tight it seemed half strangled.
“Now, I want to know now.”
“Jo Jo,” she whispered.
It was so soft he couldn’t hear her. He leaned forward.
“What?”
“Jo Jo. He sent the pictures. I told the police.”
“What police?”
“Jesse.”
She was still whispering. He was still leaning forward. His face was bloodless and there was sweat on his upper lip.
“Did he force you?” Hasty said.
“No.”
Her voice was barely audible.
“Goddamn you,” Hasty said.
“Jo Jo killed that girl, too,” she whispered. “I told Jesse.”
Her husband didn’t say anything. He leaned farther forward until he was doubled over and clutched at himself and began to moan. Then he stood and walked to the wall and pounded on it with both fists and began to scream. Then he stopped pounding and stopped screaming and turned back toward her.
“You . . . you don’t know . . .”
He shook his head. He couldn’t find words. She was still, staring at the hands folded in her lap.
“I’m sick,” she whispered. “You have to understand, Hasty. I’m sick.”
“Goddamn you,” he said. “Goddamn you.”
With the back of his hand her husband knocked a floor lamp over and when it was on the floor he kicked it. Then he turned and ran from the room. After a moment she heard the back door open and after another moment she heard the car start. She sat for a long time in the empty house before she got up finally and walked slowly to the kitchen and closed the back door that her husband had left open. Then she sat and rested her arms on the kitchen table and put her head down onto them, and cried.
Chapter 74
He had them assembled in Bob Merchant’s carriage house, where they had their weekly meetings; all the Horsemen, in fatigues, with weapons, sitting on folding chairs among the children’s bicycles, and the family garden tools: the wheelbarrow, power mower, snowblower, the rakes and hoes, the shovel, and the long-handled three-toothed cultivator, and coiled hoses hanging on the wall. That had been easy, there was a system in place to assemble the Horsemen. Now it was all on him. He stood in a near trance at the side of the room waiting for the men to settle. Now everything was in what he would say. He felt simultaneously frenetic and still. He remembered a phrase he read once in college—furious immobility. That’s what he felt like. Furious immobility. Every moment since Cissy told him had been frenzied. If Jesse knew that Jo Jo killed Tammy Portugal, then soon he would know why, and once Jo Jo began to talk—and Hasty had no doubt that under pressure, Jo Jo would talk—he would tell everything. Tammy, Lou Burke, Tom Carson, the arms deal, everything, and all that Hasty had built for, all the plans, the mobilization, the slow expansion, all that Hasty was, the Horsemen, the bank, the prominent man in town. He didn’t know how Jo Jo had gotten those pictures, but he knew why he had gone public with them. He should never have fought with him about the aborted weapons deal. He should not have blamed him. The blame goes to the commander. It had been a moment of weakness and frustration and it had betrayed him as such moments always would betray a man who had the burden of command. Later he could learn from that mistake. Now he must silence it. Stone knew. He didn’t know how much, but Stone knew something about Lou Burke when he suspended him. He knew something about Jo Jo. Stone was another mistake. Hasty had wanted a pliable drunk. He had been deceived. That mistake had to be silenced too. Once he would simply have used Jo Jo. But now he could not. Now he had only one instrument, the Horsemen. However he was to save the situation, the Horsemen were what he had available. He had not told them yet of the aborted arms deal. If he could pull this off, the arms deal would fade. They wouldn’t need the arms. Perhaps he could control the town without them. Enough good men, banded in the right cause . . . The room was quiet. Hasty walked out in front of the men. His insides felt jagged and unstable. My God, he thought, I hope I don’t foul myself. He tried to tighten his stomach. He took in a deep breath through his nose so as not to let it show and tried to focus on what he wanted.
“Men,” he said, and paused, and cleared his throat. “Men, we have been preparing—I think it is fair to say, that many of us have been preparing all our lives—for the moment that has come.”
He could hear the nervous vibrato in his voice. Was he to fail himself in the moment of crisis? Command, he said to himself. Command.
“You all know Jo Jo. He has his ways, but he has been one of us. Now they have him in jail on a manufactured charge and they will force him to incriminate us. He may resist them, but no one can resist long. They use science to pervert us. Injections, hypnosis, sleep deprivation. It will not be long before Jesse Stone knows our every plan.”
They were listening. His voice was stabilized, though his insides were still turbulent.
“I know that many of us have come to like Jesse Stone, but that is part of his way. He is, at the very bottom line, a stooge for the state police.”
From the inside pocket of his field jacket, he took a Polaroid picture of Cissy and held it up.
“He has even circulated this disgusting piece of trash. I don’t know if any of you have received one; it is an obviously doctored picture purporting to be my wife. A man capable of that kind of deceit is capable of anything.”
Several of the men leaned forward trying to make out the picture. Hasty paused, letting his eyes rove slowly over the room, meeting the look of as many of the men as he could.
He let the pause build. After a long moment he put the picture back in his jacket pocket. His insides were settling. He was heartened by his rhetoric. He had felt the satisfaction of revenge as he had held up his wife’s naked picture in front of the men. Bitch. He felt powerful. His voice was strong.
“He has to be stopped,” Hasty said softly.
Hasty paused again, looking slowly around the room. Some of the men were nodding their heads.
“We will implement our plan to take the town hall,” Hasty said. “We will take Jo Jo out of there . . . and we will eliminate Jesse Stone.”
“You mean kill him?” one of the men said from the back.
“In a war of liberation,” Hasty said, “we do what we must. Our forefathers eliminated the British agents of repression at Lexington and Concord. We’ve done this exercise often enough. We know how. Each of you should report to his squad leader now. First squad will disable telephone service from the town hall. Second squad will see to the electricity. Third and fourth squad will deploy to the town hall and establish a perimeter.”
The silence in the room was jagged with excitement. What had been a kind of war game had suddenly become real and the men felt frightened and heroic.
“It is our moment,” Hasty said softly. “Paradise will be ours. Quietly, without fanfare, and without opposition, we can establish a free white Christian community. And bit by bit, community by community, with ever-growing force as our communities proliferate and begin to connect, we will return this nation to its place of freedom and individual rights which our ancestors dreamed of when they threw off the British yoke.”
Lying on her stomach behind a folded canvas pool cover in the loft of the carriage house, Michelle Merchant listened intently. Her father and her brother were both Horsemen. She thought that all the rah-rah crap that Mr. Hathaway was spouting was really bogus, but she kind of liked the movement because it was antiestablishment the way she was. And when her father got on her case she could say that she was just rebelling the way he did. Her father didn’t like her knowing anything about the Horsemen, which was why she liked to hide in the loft during meetings and listen in. It gave her ammunition when he would yell at her. Her mother didn’t care. Michelle suspected that her mother liked it when Michelle got her father back, like her mother wanted to, but was too wussy.
Below her the men had broken up into four groups. They checked their watches. Then two of the groups went out first. The other men waited. The tension was so strong that it even reached the loft and filtered through Michelle’s nearly impenetrable scorn. She could feel her heartbeat quicken. The men kept checking their watches and after what seemed to Michelle a long time, the last two groups went out and the room was empty.
Michelle could feel her breath coming a little faster. Were they actually going to attack the town hall and kill Jesse? Did they actually believe that crap about starting a free town, whatever that meant? That was total crap. Even if they killed Jesse and got Jo Jo Genest out of jail, pretty soon other cops would know and they’d come and put all the dumb Horsemen in jail. Anybody knew that, for crissake. She smiled for a moment at seeing her father and jerkface brother hauled off to jail. She could go visit them, like in the movies, and talk to them through the bars. Cool. She was dying for a cigarette. The barn was empty. She sat up and lit a cigarette and took in a big lungful of smoke. Her old lady would poop her pants, Michelle thought. She smiled in the dark loft and smoked some more. The only thing that bothered her was Jesse Stone. He was the only adult she’d ever met who hadn’t given her a load of bullshit when he talked to her. She kind of didn’t like him getting killed. She didn’t want to spoil this thing. It was kind of exciting. And she wanted to see what her old lady would do when Dad got arrested. What kind of lecture would they give Michelle then, she wondered. She kind of liked Jesse, though. She finished her cigarette and lit another one. With the tiny red glow of the freshly lit Camel Light bobbing from the corner of her mouth, she slid out the hay loft door and climbed down the back ladder and set off across her backyard.
Chapter 75
“I don’t know exactly what it was Tom Carson did,” Jo Jo said. “Maybe found out about Hasty laundering cash for Gino.”
“You were the go-between?” Jesse said.
“Yeah. I set it up.”
It was late, and Jesse was tired. He and Jo Jo were on their respective sides of the barred door to Jo Jo’s cell. Jesse had a tape recorder. There was a single overhead light in the cell corridor with no shade.
“Hasty’d get a couple percent of what he laundered, and I guess he was using that money to finance the Horsemen.”
“How did he launder it?”
“Just didn’t fill out the cash deposit forms, I guess,” Jo Jo said. “It was his freakin’ bank, you know? Then he’d deduct his two percent, put it in the Horsemen’s account, and wire-transfer the rest to checking accounts in other banks. Now it’s in the banking system nice and legitimate. Gino would write checks on the new accounts. No nasty CTRs pile up on some treasury agent’s desk in Washington.”
“And you think Chief Carson got wind of this?”
“My guess, yeah. And he wouldn’t go with it. Everybody knows it’s drug money. And I heard that Tom said he couldn’t let that slide.”
“And?”
“So they got him to resign, and set him up in a town out in Wyoming. Some Posse group out there fixed it. And after he was out there awhile, they sent Lou out to blow him up. They wanted the local Posse guys to do it, but that didn’t work out.”
“Why didn’t they just kill him right away?”
“We talked about it. Decided it would draw too much attention to kill a police chief. Figured an ex-police chief out in the freakin’ boondocks someplace would go down easier. I think they thought the bomb would pulverize him and they’d never be able to get an I.D.”
“Wyoming cops I.D.’d him,” Jesse said. “How about Tammy?”
“Hasty was tapping her,” Jo Jo said. “She wanted him to leave his wife and marry her. You know Hasty. He thinks he’s a leading freakin’ citizen. Can’t have that. So he told me to dump her.”
“Did he tell you to make it part of the pattern of the painted police car and the dead cat?”
“No, my idea. I had it in for you ever since you suckered me, in front of my ex.”
“I know. I knew you were pulling the ‘slut’ stuff and I knew why.”
“But you couldn’t prove it. I thought it would be cool to do her in a way made you look bad.”
“How about Lou Burke?” Jesse said.
Jo Jo smiled.
“Hasty wrote the damn suicide note. Didn’t trust me to.”
“Why’d you kill him?”
“Hasty said to. Said you were getting too close. Said Lou would talk eventually. So I got him to meet me up on Indian Hill. Told him it was Horsemen business. And I threw him over.”
Jesse was silent for a moment. Jo Jo was finally getting a chance to brag. He was telling the stories almost eagerly, as if they were interesting things that he’d done on vacation.
“I knew about Hasty and Tammy,” Jesse said. “It was in her diary.”
Jo Jo shrugged.
“And Lou’s suicide note was typewritten.”
“Couldn’t handwrite it,” Jo Jo said. “Be too easy to see it wasn’t Burke’s writing.”
“Except Lou didn’t have a typewriter,” Jesse said.
“Coulda typed it here.”
“Nope. We’re all computerized.”
Jo Jo made a disgusted sound.
“Freakin’ Hasty is so stupid, you know. He thinks he’s Napoleon or something with his freakin’ Horsemen.”
“So how come you sent the picture of Cissy to her minister?” Jesse said.
Jo Jo smiled broadly. “Sent it to a lot of people,
” he said. “Sent one to Hasty too.”
“I’ll bet he was pleased,” Jesse said. “You take it?”
“Yeah. Her idea. She liked being tied up. Spanked. Weird broad—big time. Had a lot of poon tang with that broad, and you know how most broads are—all the time moaning about love—she wasn’t like that, she liked the sex, but she was always like mad while we was doing it. She liked to pretend I was forcing her, you know? Grim.”
Jesse nodded.
“She was banging one of your cops too, you know.”
“Probably pretended he was rescuing her,” Jesse said. “How come you decided to go public.”
“With the pictures? I was, ah, brokering an arms deal for Hasty. Gino was supposed to get him some heavy weapons—you know Gino?”
Jesse shook his head.
“Major dude in Boston,” Jo Jo said. “Queer as a square donut, but really wired.”
“And you know him through the money laundering,” Jesse said. He was stroking Jo Jo’s ego.
“Yeah, I know Gino. Hasty’s a big deal in town here maybe, but on the street, he’s nowhere. He had problems, he always had to come to me.”
“So he asked you to get him heavy weapons?”
“Yeah. Machine guns, mortars, some kind of anti-aircraft missiles. I’m telling you, he thinks he’s going to take over the town and, you know, defy the freaking government.”
Jo Jo laughed. Jesse laughed along with him. Couple of good old boys, Jesse thought, chewing the fat in the back room.
“So I set him up with Gino and Hasty gets high and mighty with him when they have a meeting and when the time comes for the guns, they take his money and stiff him.”
“No guns,” Jesse said.
“None, and he blames me. Freaking twerp. Says it’s my fault. Says I better get the money back or else. He’s actually threatening me. Well, first I thought maybe I’d just break his scrawny neck for him, wring it like he was a chicken, you know? But then I think no, be smart, Jo Jo. Don’t get mad. Get even. So I got some of the pictures of his old lady and I sent them out. I sent one to his minister and one to him and one to the president of the Paradise Garden Club that Cissy belonged to. Ought to freak them out. I was going to send a few out every day. Drive Hasty crazy.”
Robert B Parker: The Jesse Stone Novels 1-5 Page 24