Robert B. Parker's the Hangman's Sonnet

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Where were you this morning, Jesse?” Nita asked. “I tried you at your house several times.”

  “I had to go into Boston.”

  Nita seemed to want him to give her a more complete answer, but Jesse had said all he intended to say. Molly and Suit knew about Dix. Healy had known, too, but Jesse didn’t want to broadcast to the world that he went to therapy. He was old-fashioned in that way. In spite of all the good seeing Dix had done for him, he had never gotten over thinking needing help was a sign of weakness.

  “And then I tried your cell later in the day,” she said, immediately regretting it when she saw the confused look on the mayor’s face.

  Jesse let her off the hook. “I spent some time with Henry Wilmott.”

  Nita was confused. “Who?”

  Mayor Walker put down her martini and said, “The curator of the Cain Library and Museum. And what did you and Henry discuss, Jesse? Henry doesn’t strike me as much of a Red Sox enthusiast.”

  Jesse explained about Maude Cain’s missing ring. He took out his cell phone, tapped the screen, and scrolled. He showed them the image of the ring. They both gasped at the sight of it, but it wasn’t beauty the mayor had on her mind.

  “A motive.” The mayor clapped her hands together. “That’s why those men tore poor Maude’s house apart. They were looking for the ring.”

  Jesse was tempted to rain on her parade. He decided against it. He didn’t believe that’s what had happened, but he couldn’t disprove it.

  “So one partner killed the other to take the ring for himself,” Nita said. “It all starts to make sense now.” She took a sip of her bourbon, then pulled out her cell phone. “Let’s get this out there. Let the press know we’re making progress.”

  “No,” Jesse said, not shouting, but making it very clear it wasn’t up for negotiation. “Lundquist and I have already alerted all the PDs, pawn shops, and jewelry dealers in New England, New York, and southeastern Canada. We’ve let our other contacts know that it would be in their best interest to alert the authorities if that ring walks through their door.”

  “But—”

  “Can’t do it, Nita. For now Hump Bolton thinks the ring is his meal ticket. He thinks he can unload the ring to a fence or a dealer and be gone. But the second this becomes public knowledge, we lose him and the ring. He’ll toss the ring in the closest body of water and run. This way we have the advantage. We can get Bolton and get the ring back. You can’t trade that in for a day of good press.”

  “I’m afraid Jesse’s right, Nita,” Walker said, gently pushing Thompson’s phone hand down toward the white linen tablecloth. “Let’s see how it plays out. What are you doing to sew the case up?”

  “We received the ballistics report earlier and the forensics results should be coming in within the next few days. We also discovered some documents in the Cain house that might help us track down some of Maude’s former lodgers and—”

  One of the martini olives seemed almost to turn rancid in the mayor’s mouth, her tone of voice reflecting the foul taste. “But not two minutes ago you told us you know who perpetrated these crimes and why. I’d say it would be irresponsible of you to waste further resources pursuing unnecessary lines of investigation.” She guzzled her drink and signaled furiously to the waitress for another.

  “Actually, Connie, I didn’t. You and Nita came to those conclusions yourselves. I don’t have the luxury of relying on reasonable guesses. The PPD has to be able to prove what we suspect. Until we have enough proof to shut down other lines of investigation, we’ll keep digging.”

  Mayor Walker tried unsuccessfully to smile but stopped trying when Nita Thompson took Jesse’s side.

  “He’s right, Connie. If Jesse or, worse, you came out and made a statement only to have it be wrong, it would be politically disastrous.”

  “Very well,” the mayor said, waving at the waitress to hurry with the second martini. “Very well. Shall we order?”

  Jesse didn’t feel much like eating. That excess energy he’d had earlier in the day had evaporated. All he wanted to do now was sleep, but that was neither on the agenda nor on the menu.

  48

  When Jesse strode into the station the next day at seven, Molly was at the front desk. He was surprised to see her.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Running up my overtime,” she said. “My chief’s a sucker.”

  “You always this funny at this hour?”

  Molly ignored him. “How was dinner with Her Highness?”

  “All right.”

  “Care to expand on that?”

  “No.”

  She shook her head at him. “After those effusive answers, I shouldn’t give you this.”

  “Give me what?”

  Molly handed him two sheets of paper. “Those are the names, addresses, and phone numbers of people who stayed at Maude Cain’s over the years.”

  “You do good work, Officer Crane. Play your cards right and your chief might actually authorize some of that overtime he promised.”

  “I’ll just remind him of how this place ran when Suit was on the desk and Gabe was rehabbing.”

  “All right, Crane. I surrender. Make us some appointments and get someone in to cover the desk here.”

  “Us?”

  “You heard me, Molly. Us.”

  Molly smiled in spite of herself and grabbed the list back out of Jesse’s hand.

  Their third appointment was in Salem with a Mrs. Deanna Banquer. She lived in a beautifully maintained saltbox house, its redbrick chimney sticking up through the center of the roof. A low hedge surrounded her lot. A pea-gravel walkway, bordered on both sides by carefully trimmed boxwoods, led from the curb to the house. Mrs. Banquer threw open the front door when Jesse’s Explorer pulled up. And when Molly and he got out of the SUV, she stepped out of the house and came to greet them. It had been Jesse’s experience that very few people were this enthusiastic about speaking to the police. On those rare occasions when he ran into someone this eager and cooperative, the results, in terms of evidence or information, were often less than sparkling.

  The first two visits hadn’t gone well, either. It wasn’t that the people they’d spoken to weren’t cooperative; they just had nothing helpful to say. Their first stop was in Paradise with a man named Brad Mercer. Mr. Mercer was in his forties and had rented a room from Maude Cain for two months in the late nineties. He had inherited a house in the Swap from his uncle Jack. The house was in tired condition and Mercer had to stay off-premises until the work on the house was completed.

  “She was a lovely woman, good cook, too.”

  But beyond that, Mercer had little to say. He paid her in cash by the week. His room was on the second floor and faced the cove. Nothing unusual had happened during his stay. He didn’t recall much about any of the other lodgers, though he was sure there were others there at the time he rented there.

  Their second stop was equally unproductive. Swan Harbor was a tony village just north of Paradise. Jim Born was fifteen years on the job in town after doing twenty as a Boston cop. While his wife sold their house in Boston, he’d stayed at the Cain house for a few weeks.

  “It was way less expensive than anything available in Swan Harbor.”

  But when Molly asked him about his time in the Cain house, Born gave an unsatisfying yet completely understandable answer.

  “You’ll have to forgive me, Molly, but that was during Nine-Eleven. Mostly I stayed in my room and watched TV. I don’t recall much about those weeks except watching the planes slam into the Trade Center.”

  “Hello, hello,” said Banquer as she met them halfway down the walkway. “You must be Officer Crane, and you’re Chief Stone.”

  They all smiled and shook hands. Deanna Banquer was about five-six, in her late fifties or early sixties, with short hair that was in the final
stages of conversion from mostly red to mostly gray. She had stunning blue eyes and a disarming smile. Jesse thanked her for her time, then she led them into the low-ceilinged house. She showed them into the kitchen, poured them all lemonade, and then joined them at the table.

  “So, Chief Stone, what is it about my time at Maude’s house in Paradise I can help you with?”

  “Jesse. Call us Jesse and Molly, okay?”

  Banquer smiled that smile of hers. “Wonderful. And please call me Deanna.”

  “Molly tells me you two discussed Maude Cain’s death. I know you’ve read about it in the paper and heard it on the news.”

  “Horrible. Horrible. She was such a lovely woman. Very kind and generous to a fault.”

  Molly asked, “Why were you renting a room from her?”

  Deanna’s smile turned suddenly shy. “I’m originally from Ohio and I was trying to establish state residency so I could finish up college at UMass. I had visited this area as a kid with my family during a driving vacation. So I figured I might as well live in Paradise while I established residency, and Maude’s hardly cost anything.”

  Jesse asked, “This was when?”

  “The seventies. July of ’76 thru July of ’77. I had a good job at a restaurant here in Salem. Funny,” she said, her eyes getting a faraway look about them, “I never did finish school. I met my husband-to-be at the restaurant one day and . . . Sorry.”

  Surprisingly, they’d gotten more information from Deanna than they had from their earlier visits. She was very fond of her time in Paradise with Maude, and Maude had been fond of her.

  “Maude’s husband had died a few years earlier and they never had children. I missed my family terribly and so we spent a lot of time together. She would tell me about her family’s history. She was very proud of what they had done for Paradise.”

  Jesse took out his phone and showed Deanna the ring. “Did Maude ever mention—”

  Deanna lit up. “She loved that ring. She even let me try it on once. God, it was beautiful.”

  “So she didn’t keep the ring a secret,” Molly said. “Other lodgers knew about it?”

  “No, I don’t think so. She swore me to secrecy. She said I was the only person she had ever shown it to, certainly the only person she had ever let try it on.”

  Jesse asked, “Do you remember any of the other people staying there while you lived with her?”

  Deanna’s expression did an about-face, souring. “There was one asshole, Evan. He gave Maude a hard time. He was always high, drank a lot, but he seemed to have a lot of money. So whenever Maude asked him to leave, he would pay her off. As nice as her house was and as rich as her family had been, she was pretty broke. I didn’t like that she let him stay, but I understood it. She needed the money. When he tried breaking into my room one night, she threw him out once and for all.”

  After that there wasn’t much more for them to discuss. Deanna said that she and Maude had kept in touch for a while afterward, but once Deanna had a family of her own, their conversations grew less frequent.

  “I hope you find the ring,” she said to them as they were leaving. “She was a woman who didn’t care about wealth, but she did love that ring.”

  49

  Back at the station, Molly was digging into the oldest of the composition notebooks, looking for Evan. It wasn’t much of a lead. It wasn’t at all clear that it was a lead at all. For a woman like Deanna Banquer to refer to someone as an asshole and for him to stick out in her memory made him worth a little investigation. Unfortunately, the world, even in the mid-seventies, was full of people like this Evan character. But Jesse and Molly agreed that from this point forward they wouldn’t be rushing around Massachusetts to do in-person interviews unless they first got more substance on the phone.

  Molly seemed so preoccupied by Maude Cain’s notebooks that Brian Lundquist thought she might not have noticed him come through the station door, but when he tried to scoot by her he was proven wrong.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she said, never looking up. “Just because you’re a big-shot statie now doesn’t mean you just get to walk into Jesse’s office.”

  “Sorry, Molly. You looked busy.”

  “I am. Is it important?”

  He waved a file at her.

  “Come with me.”

  She knocked on Jesse’s pebbled-glass door and stuck her head into his office.

  “What?”

  “Lundquist is here.”

  “Get anywhere with this Evan guy?” Jesse asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay, send him in.”

  Lundquist came in and sat across the desk from Jesse and waved the file at him as he had at Molly.

  “Full array of photos and forensics. Your man Perkins is good. Our guys said he did a first-rate job with the scene. Our guys don’t drop compliments easily.”

  “I’ll let Peter know. How about the index card?”

  Lundquist pulled out several enlargements of areas of the index card, came around to Jesse’s side of the desk, and laid them out on the blotter.

  “See here, Jesse, these dark brown patches? This is old cellophane tape residue. There were still some traces of the actual tape on the card. The lab says the tape is at least forty years old. And here, these indentations in the card that the lab highlighted, what’s that look like to you?”

  “A key.”

  “A safety-deposit box key, to be precise,” Lundquist said.

  “These numbers are the number of the box.”

  “That’s the presumption.”

  “But what bank?”

  Lundquist frowned. “Good question. See this.” He pointed to an enlargement of the top left corner of the index card found in King Curnutt’s rear pocket. “It’s been torn here. Our best guess is that’s where the name of the bank was probably written. In the meantime, we’ve sent all this to the FBI lab in the hope they’ll be able to match the shape of the key and the number to the bank.”

  Now it was Jesse frowning. “Don’t hold your breath. It will take months before they get to this. And when they do, the best they’ll be able to do is to come up with the manufacturer of the key and a list of banks that might have used that type of key and lock. We’re talking forty years ago.”

  “At least forty years. Maybe more.”

  Jesse asked, “Can your guys create a key from this?”

  “I don’t see why not. You mind me asking what for? We don’t even know that this has anything to do with the case.”

  “I think we do. Look, Curnutt’s body didn’t have ID, money, a cell phone, or car or house keys on it. Only this old index card. So he either had it on him or the killer planted it on him.”

  “You’re right, Jesse. But—”

  Jesse stood out of his chair. “Let’s go.”

  “What is it?”

  Jesse didn’t answer directly. “C’mon” was all he said.

  50

  The yellow tape was the only thing that indicated this patch of woods had been the scene of a murder. The Subaru had been towed away and the body long since removed. The old toolshed door creaked in the wind like the surrounding trees.

  “You guys have the car?” Jesse said.

  Lundquist nodded. “Nothing in it that didn’t belong to the owner except Curnutt’s prints. Since the car was boosted from a supermarket parking lot near the New Hampshire border, we’re concentrating our search for Humphrey Bolton up there.”

  “If he’s been watching TV or reading the papers, he’ll be gone.”

  “Bolton’s not the swiftest guy in the world, Jesse.”

  “He’s evaded capture so far.”

  “Good point.”

  Jesse looked at where the car had been yesterday. “I didn’t like it yesterday and I like it even less today.”

  “
What don’t you like, exactly? I know you don’t buy into the ring scenario,” Lundquist said. “You think Curnutt and Bolton were too thick for a jewel heist, but everything about this fits the scenario of them ripping the ring off from the Cain woman’s house and then one partner eliminating the other. The way I see it is that they knew about the ring or, if not specifically the ring, about the Cain jewelry they thought the old woman had in the house. All they find is the ring and that would have been okay. Would have been a nice payday, too, but then things go sideways. The woman dies and they have to rough up the MassEx guy.

  “Now they’ve got a murder rap and assault with a deadly weapon hanging over their heads and the money for the ring won’t get them what they thought it would. Now it’s about survival and getting as far away as possible, maybe even getting out of the country. But the money they get from fencing the ring will get one of them a lot farther away than it will get both of them. I don’t care how dumb Bolton is supposed to be, he can do simple subtraction.”

  Jesse shook his head. “I still don’t like it, Brian. Why come back here when they were in spitting distance of Canada? If Bolton wanted to kill Curnutt, why not do it up by where they were? There are plenty of isolated areas in that part of the state to leave a body, places where no one would find it for weeks or months. Why come back to Paradise? Why call it in? Why take everything off Curnutt’s body and leave or plant the index card? I’m telling you there’s something else going on here that we don’t see or can’t see.”

  “You surprise me, Jesse. Healy always told me you were big on saying the police should follow the evidence, not their hunches.”

  “Yesterday, it was a hunch, but it’s more than that today. I am looking at the evidence. I’m not cherry-picking the evidence that fits a particular scenario. I’m trying to look at the evidence that hangs together and the evidence that doesn’t.”

  “Okay, say I buy that and I got it wrong, that this isn’t about the ring. I don’t know why Curnutt was killed here or who killed him, but killed here he was. Sawtooth Creek is, what, a hundred yards that way? Why not put a bullet or two into Curnutt’s lungs and submerge him in the creek?”