Robert B Parker: The Jesse Stone Novels 1-5

by Robert B. Parker

  “That’s fair enough,” Brown said. “We can’t assume he’s a homophobe, Alex.”

  “Maybe,” Canton said. “But he’s one of the few I’ve met that aren’t.”

  He stared hard at Jesse, a red flush of anger still brightening his face.

  “I’m not so sure,” Jesse said. “There might be a lot of cops who don’t really much care what you do with a consenting adult.”

  “You’ve never been gay,” Canton said.

  “You have me there,” Jesse said. “And you didn’t come here to argue police tolerance with me. What I can do is tell you that everyone in this town is entitled to the protection of the police. And everyone will get it as long as I’m chief. Including you.”

  “Alex, he has the right to prove his homophobia before we condemn him.”

  “And he probably will,” Canton said. “I’m going to apply for that gun permit. Don’t think I won’t.”

  Jesse smiled pleasantly.

  “I don’t think you won’t,” he said.

  Chapter 6

  Macklin sat with Faye on the deck outside the Gray Gull Restaurant overlooking the harbor. They were drinking cosmopolitans. Faye had hers straight up in a big martini glass. Macklin was drinking his on the rocks. The late afternoon sun had gotten low enough behind the buildings to throw elongated shadows of the wharf office and the sail loft out onto the water.

  “Faye,” Macklin said, “you look more like the wife of a WASP millionaire than any of the real ones I’ve ever known.”

  “So maybe that means I don’t,” Faye said. “And exactly how many WASP millionaires’ wives have you known?”

  “If I knew one, she’d look like you,” Macklin said.

  He had loosened his tie and taken off his coat. He sat now with his legs out in front of him, leaning back in his chair. There was a breeze off the water.

  “You told that woman we were from Concord,” Faye said.

  “Sure,” Macklin said. “I lived there for a couple years.”

  “In Concord?”

  Macklin grinned. “MCI Concord,” he said. “The prison.”

  Faye laughed. “Jimmy, you’re crazy.”

  “Can’t get too solemn about this shit,” Macklin said.

  A waitress went by. Macklin gestured at her for a refill.

  “And maybe, whaddya got. Some fried clams? Give us an order of fried clams,” he said. “But bring the drinks first. Don’t wait for the clams.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Macklin watched her as she walked away. Nice butt. Young. Probably some college kid working for the summer.

  “So what did we learn about Stiles Island today?” Faye said.

  “Three quarters of a mile long,” Macklin said, gazing out across the harbor at the near end of it. “About a quarter of a mile wide. Fifty estates so far. Room to build another fifty. Cheapest one is eight hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. Adults only. No children. No dogs.”

  “Most people can afford eight-hundred-seventy-five-thousand-dollar houses are too old to have children anyway,” Faye said.

  Macklin nodded.

  “Only access is across that bridge,” he said. “All the power lines are under the bridge, all the phone lines, even the water pipes are incorporated into the bridge understructure.”

  The waitress brought them two more cosmopolitans. The pink drinks looked just right, Macklin thought, out here on the deck of the weathered shingle restaurant with the harbor below them. Macklin liked things to be right.

  “There’s a branch of Paradise Bank,” he said. “With safe deposit boxes. There’s a private boat club on the harbor end of the island, only place on the island where you can land a boat. There’s a health club with a drug store and beauty salon and a restaurant with a big plate glass picture window looking out on the ocean side. And there’s a private security patrol, a man on the bridge twenty-four hours, and a two-man cruiser patrolling the island twenty-four hours. Everybody got a radio that connects to the security headquarters in the other side of the real estate office and to the Paradise Police.”

  Faye held her glass with the fingertips of both hands. She was watching him over the rim of it as he talked. When he finished she whistled very softly. “And I thought all you were doing was watching Mrs. Campbell’s ass,” she said.

  Macklin grinned. “Attention to detail,” he said.

  A gull coasted down, sat on the fence railing about five feet away, and waited. The waitress brought flatware wrapped in napkins, and an order of fried clams in a small paper napkin–lined wicker basket. She put the clams on the table between them and placed two small paper cups of tartar sauce beside the basket.

  “Catsup?” she said.

  “No, thank you very much,” Macklin said.

  The gull fixed its opaque stare on the clams. Macklin unwrapped his flatware and tucked the napkin in under his chin. He picked up the knife and made a fencer’s pose at the gull.

  “One move at the clams, bird, and you die,” Macklin said.

  Faye picked up a clam with her fingers, dabbed it in the tartar sauce, and popped it in her mouth. She wiped her fingertips carefully with her napkin while she chewed her clam.

  When she swallowed it, she said, “So what is your plan?”

  “Well,” Macklin said, “I thought I might give Mrs. Campbell a ringy dingy . . .”

  “Like hell,” Faye said. “Looking is one thing. You’re a man, and you can’t help it. But you start following up, and I will cut off your balls.”

  “Faye, would I cheat on you?”

  “Like I say, you’re a man.”

  “Cynical,” Macklin said.

  “Experienced,” Faye said. “Besides, you know what I meant. What is your plan for doing business on the island?”

  “Well I’m going to get a good map,” Macklin said. “And I’m going to start putting together a crew.”

  “What are we going to do for money in the meantime?”

  “I’ll get some,” Macklin said.

  “I hope so. You got people in mind for this crew?”

  “Yeah. It’s one of the best things about going to jail a few times,” Macklin said. “You get a chance to network.”

  “You going to hit the bank?”

  “Sweet cakes,” Macklin said, “I’m going to hit the whole island.”

  Chapter 7

  As he had taken to doing when his day ended at five, Jesse stopped by the bar at the Gray Gull. He would have two drinks, talk with the bartender or a few of the regulars, and then go home for supper. It worked better than having a drink at home. It was sociable, and it was easier to stop after two in public. Being chief of police carried with it certain obligations, and Jesse was pretty sure that not getting drunk in public was one of them.

  “Black label and soda, Doc,” Jesse said to the bartender. He made a measuring gesture with his hands. “Tall glass.”

  The bartender made the drink and set it before Jesse and went down to the service corner of the bar to get a waitress order. He mixed up two pink drinks, one of them up, the other on the rocks, and set them out with the slip tucked between the glasses. Then he came back down the bar to talk with Jesse.

  “You been fighting crime all day?” Doc said.

  “Serve and protect,” Jesse said. “What are those pink things?”

  “Cosmopolitans,” Doc said. “Sort of a summer martini.”

  “They look tasty,” Jesse said.

  “They’re pretty good,” Doc said. “You want to try one? On me?”

  The young waitress came and put the two drinks on a tray and went out onto the deck with them. Jesse noticed that her cutoff jeans were snug.

  “No thanks, Doc. Scotch is fine.”

  Jesse nursed his
drink. The bar was only half full. It was midweek, and the after-work crowd hadn’t drifted in yet in force. Jesse liked quiet bars. He liked them best in the middle of the afternoon, air-conditioned and nearly empty, where everything was desultory and you could play old Carl Perkins stuff on the juke box and watch people as they came in out of the outside brightness and paused for their eyes to adjust. He liked the lucent way the bottles looked, arranged along the back of a good bar with the mirror reflecting the light from behind them. It was a little too late to be perfect, but it was still a good place to be. For two drinks.

  In the bar mirror, he saw Abby Taylor come into the bar with a tall man in a seersucker suit. Jesse smiled. Only here, Jesse thought. Until a year ago, he’d never seen a seersucker suit. They got a table behind him and sat. Abby saw him then and said something to the man and got up and walked over. She was wearing an olive suit with a short skirt.

  “Jesse,” she said. “How are you?”

  They shook hands, and she put her cheek out. Jesse kissed it lightly.

  “Fine,” Jesse said. “You look great.”

  Behind her Jesse could see the guy in the seersucker suit order drinks from a waitress. He was nearly bald, with what remained of his hair cut short.

  “Thanks, you too. How are you and Jenn getting on?”

  Jesse shrugged. “She came back because I was in trouble. Now I’m not in trouble. She hasn’t been around much. Suit tells me he saw her doing the weather on Channel Three.”

  “So you’re not together?”

  “God no,” Jesse said.

  “But you’re not fully apart,” Abby said. “Are you?”

  “I guess not,” Jesse said. “That the new boyfriend?”

  “Chip? Maybe. We’ve been dating for a while.”

  “Chip?” Jesse said.

  “I know, but he’s really nice. He knows about us. Want to meet him?”

  “No,” Jesse said.

  The young waitress with the tight cutoffs came out of the kitchen with a basket of clams and walked past them toward the deck. Jesse watched her. Abby smiled.

  “Good to see you’ve not lost all interest,” Abby said.

  “I don’t think that’s possible,” Jesse said.

  “Well . . .” Abby paused a moment, thinking of what to say. “I hope you and Jenn work it out, whatever way is best for you.”

  “When we got divorced I thought we had,” Jesse said.

  “One would have thought that,” Abby said and patted his hand lightly where it rested on the bar. “Take care of yourself.”

  “You too,” Jesse said.

  He watched her as she walked back to sit down with Chip. Chip looked over at him and nodded in a friendly way. Fuck you, Chip.

  “Better hit me again, Doc,” Jesse said.

  The second drink tasted better than the first. Jesse held it up so that the light shown through it. The ice cubes were crystalline. The drink was golden with scotch and quick with carbonation.

  “You know a family in town named Hopkins?”

  “Yeah. He’s some kind of financial consultant, I think.”

  “Kids?”

  “They got a couple,” Doc said. “Kids are real assholes.”

  “Lot of that going around,” Jesse said.

  “Yeah, all fifteen-year-old kids are probably assholes,” Doc said. “But these kids are worse. You know I got a lobster boat.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “I caught them one day stealing lobsters out of my boat while I was in the wharf office for a minute.”

  “Maybe they were having a clam bake,” Jesse said.

  “They weren’t taking them. They weren’t even throwing them back. They were stealing them and throwing them up onto the deck of some guy’s Chris-Craft.”

  “So the lobsters die and the guy’s boat gets messed up and you lose money and all they get out of it is the pleasure of being pricks,” Jesse said.

  “Jesse, you’re wasting your time as a cop. You should be a child psychologist,” Doc said. “I wanted to drown the little fuckers.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  Doc shrugged. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled above his elbows and his sun-darkened forearms were those of a man who’d done a lot of heavy physical labor in his life.

  “They’re too old to scare, too young to kick the shit out of. I chased them off, climbed on the Chris-Craft, and got my lobsters back.”

  “Say anything to the parents?”

  “No.”

  Doc moved down the bar and drew two pints of Harp. He put them on the bar, picked up the tab, rang it up and put it back in front of the drinkers. Then he moved back to Jesse.

  “How come you’re asking?” he said.

  “Just making conversation,” Jesse said.

  Doc squinted at Jesse and shrugged. “Yeah, you’re a big conversation maker,” he said.

  “I try,” Jesse said.

  He got up from the bar and went to a pay phone and called the station.

  “Anthony? Jesse. You know those Hopkins kids, torched the house on Geary Street? Well, I want a cruiser to park outside their house for a half hour every shift, starting tonight. No, don’t say anything, don’t do anything. Just park outside the house a half hour every shift. That’s right. I want to make them nervous.”

  Chapter 8

  At 2:15 in the afternoon, Macklin was sipping a Kettle One martini with a twist, at a sports bar on Huntington Avenue. He was wearing baggy olive linen slacks with three reverse pleats, a loose-fitting black silk tee shirt, and alligator loafers with no socks. In his wallet he had ten one hundred-dollar bills from Faye’s savings account. In his pants pocket, he had a hundred and a twenty left from the liquor store.

  There were four people besides Macklin in the room: a man and woman at a table eating buffalo wings, and a white-haired man down the bar, watching the soccer game that was on every big screen television in the room. The bartender was slicing lemons.

  “Quiet afternoon,” Macklin said.

  “Usually is,” the bartender said, “this time on a weekday.” He was a middle-sized young guy with a thick moustache.

  “Soccer don’t help,” Macklin said.

  “Some people like it,” the bartender said. “Can’t get into it myself.”

  “Whaddya like?” Macklin said.

  “Football,” the bartender said.

  “Now you’re talking,” Macklin said. “You bet?”

  “Sure,” the bartender said. “Last year I was up about a bill and a half.”

  He finished slicing the lemons and put them in a jar and put the jar in the refrigerator under the counter. Then he came down the bar and nodded at Macklin’s glass.

  “Buy you one?” he said.

  “Be a fool not to say yes,” Macklin answered.

  The bartender scooped some ice into a shaker. Without measuring, he poured in vodka and a splash of vermouth.

  “You must know the game,” Macklin said. “Come out ahead.”

  The bartender rattled the martini around in the shaker and then poured it through the strainer into a chilled glass.

  “I played some in high school,” he said. “And I pay attention.”

  He ran a twist of lemon around the rim of the glass and then dropped it into the martini.

  “Makes the game more interesting,” Macklin said, “you got something on it.”

  “You got that right.”

  Macklin sipped his second martini. “Nice job,” he said to the bartender.

  The bartender grinned and went down the bar to the white-haired man. Macklin took the hundred from his pocket and put it on the bar. The bartender poured a double shot of Jack Daniels over some ice and put it on a paper napkin in front of th
e man. Then he strolled back up the bar to Macklin. He gave no indication that he saw the hundred.

  “I’m from out of town,” Macklin said. “And I’m bored. You know where I could find a card game?”

  “Where you from?”

  “Dannemora, New York,” Macklin said.

  “And you want to play poker?”

  “Yeah. Good game. Some money changing hands, you know?”

  “Sure,” the bartender said. “Lemme make a call.”

  The bartender went down the bar and punched out a number on the phone. He talked for a moment and then hung up and walked back down to Macklin.

  “You know the Lincolnshire Hotel?”

  Macklin shook his head.

  “You can walk there. You call Tommy King from the lobby. Tell him Lennie Seltzer sent you. They’ll tell you the room number and up you go.”

  “You Lennie?”

  “No, Lennie’s the guy I called.”

  “Excellent,” Macklin said. “How do I get there?”

  He finished his second martini while the bartender gave him directions. Then he got up, left the hundred on the bar and headed for the door.

  “Wish me luck,” he said.

  The bartender gave him a thumbs-up, and Macklin went out onto Huntington Avenue and walked to the Copley Place Garage where he had parked his car. He took the thousand dollars from his wallet and crumpled the bills and put them in his right-hand pants pocket. Inside the car, he unlocked the glove compartment and took out his 9-mm pistol. He undid his pants. Instead of shorts, he was wearing an oversized jock with a cup. He shoved the pistol down inside the cup. He took a roll of adhesive tape from the glove compartment, tore off some, and taped the handle of the gun against his belly, well below the navel. Then he got out and tucked in his shirt and buttoned his pants. He locked the car and cut through Copley Place on his way to the hotel. He paused outside a leather goods store and looked at himself reflected in the dark glass of the display window. The gun didn’t show, just as it hadn’t shown when he rehearsed this morning.