He sat on the edge of the lounge chair beside hers. “No, sorry. I came to talk to Stan. I’m surprised to see you out here. Don’t you ever work? I thought you’d be burning up the phones.”
She laughed. It was the laugh of a teenage girl caught by her mom doing something in her room they both knew she shouldn’t be doing, not in her room, maybe not anywhere. Bella sat up, the smile vanishing.
“Can I tell you something, Jesse?”
“Uh-huh.”
“My PR firm, the one I gave you that fancy card for . . . It’s kind of an exaggeration. I mean, I’ve done some promo work, but not this kind of thing. This Jester thing is way above my paygrade. I was a club promoter in Boston. Do you know what that is, a club promoter?”
He nodded. “Bar and club owners hire you to get people through their front doors.”
“Right. I was good at it, too. People usually have trouble saying no to me. Well, most people.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
“That’s how Stan found me. He came to me and offered to set me up in my own business, to make it legitimate. He got me incorporated, got me an accountant and everything. Bought me cards, showed me the ropes. He’s really smart about promo stuff and he knows a million people.”
“But why you? Why did he choose you? No offense, Bella, but there are hundreds of firms he could have gone to who have the same contacts, better contacts than he does.”
Without a hint of embarrassment, she said, “Because I came cheap and I’m beautiful. Stan’s an old man, but he’s not dead. He likes having me on his arm. He likes the respect in other men’s eyes when they see me with him. He gets off thinking about what those other men think when they see me with him.”
Remembering Diana’s struggles at the FBI and his conversation with Molly, he asked, “You’re okay with that?”
“People use each other all the time, Jesse. I’m young, but I learned that lesson a long time ago. When I hear someone say they were used, I always want to call bullshit on that. Nothing is ever one-sided. And so, sure, Stan is using me, but I’m learning things. I’m meeting people. I’m collecting contact information, making connections, networking. When this Terry Jester gig is done, I’ll collect my fees and be on my way. Stan can look at the photos of me standing beside him, put them up in his office, and dream his dreams. What’s wrong with that?”
“I’m a cop, not a judge, Bella.”
“I like you, Jesse, even though you hurt my feelings this morning. You’re less full of shit than most men. But I can tell you disapprove.”
“I know a little something about trading on beauty.”
“I just bet you do. What about it?”
“It’s got a limited shelf life and it gets you just so far.”
She sat up, faced Jesse, her expression going steely before his eyes. “Thanks for the advice, but let me worry about that. I’ve got all sorts of charms, some less obvious than others. The offer stands. Just say the word.”
He ignored that. “But why aren’t you working the phones to get people to come to the party? It’s a pretty solid assumption that whoever has the tape is going to approach Stan once word gets out, and I feel pretty confident word is about to come out.”
She laughed again, only this time it was a laugh as cold as her expression. “Stan’s already been working the phones.”
“Has he?”
“I think it’s safe to say that when it goes wide, he’ll already have offers in place for new bidders to compete against. I told you, Jesse,” she said, leaning back down on her chaise, “I’m learning a lot from Stan. Why aren’t I working the phones? Because when word about The Hangman’s Sonnet gets out, all the A-listers who couldn’t even be bothered to return my calls and emails will be begging to get a second chance to attend the birthday party. I won’t have to call them. They’ll be calling me.”
“You have learned a lot,” he said. “Let me ask you one more question before I go.”
“Anything.”
“How much has Stan paid you so far?”
Unlike with her previous snappy answers, Bella hesitated. Her lip twitched almost imperceptibly.
“He’s paid for my wardrobe, put me up here, given me spending money. The payoff’s a percentage on the back end,” she said, her voice louder, too loud.
“Thanks, Bella.”
He turned and went back into the house.
71
Molly had called him before he’d even made it out the front gate of the Wickham estate with the name of the retired cop who had led the investigation into the missing Hangman’s Sonnet master tape.
“His name’s James Flint and he lives on Mayflower Way in Swan Harbor.”
Tamara Elkin lived in Swan Harbor, but in a different part of town. Three-eleven Mayflower Way was a brick colonial only a few blocks from the Atlantic in an older part of town than Tamara’s condo. All the houses on the street were fronted by hand-built stone walls and surrounded by big old oaks and maples. Jesse parked in front and walked up the entrance. The front door swung open even before he was halfway to the small granite stoop. A tall but bent man, his hair a wiry steel gray, stepped out and called to Jesse.
“Chief Stone, walk around back. I’ll meet you out there.”
Flint retreated back inside as Jesse veered to his right and made his way around back. There was a small cedar deck butted up against the house. There was a picnic-style table on the deck, on the table a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses. As Jesse was sitting down, Flint came out the back door, carrying a thick, dark brown accordion file in his left arm.
“Chief,” Flint said, shaking Jesse’s hand. “I’m Jimmy Flint.”
“Please call me Jesse.”
“Yeah, I s’pose it’s better than us calling each other Flint and Stone.” Flint poured out the iced tea.
“Means we can skip the Fred-and-Barney jokes.”
The left corner of Flint’s lips turned up in what passed as a smile. “Officer Crane tells me there’s a break in the case,” he said, thumping the accordion file down on the table.
“See for yourself.” Jesse unfolded a copy of the sonnet and slid it over to the old cop.
Flint shook his head. “I’ll tell you what, Jesse. There were many times I didn’t believe the damned poem existed.”
“But there it is.”
“That it is.”
“I’ve held the original in my hand, but what made you say that, about not believing the poem existed?”
“Look, Jesse, the Yarmouth PD isn’t exactly the FBI or the Boston PD, and I suppose it was even less of a force back in the mid-seventies when I worked the case, but Jester wouldn’t even talk to us. It was all Stan White, the manager. White said there were no copies of the poem because Jester wouldn’t let copies be made, so we had nothing to go on there. And no one other than White and Jester had seen it.”
Jesse asked about the tape.
“Yeah, we had the box the tape was stored in. Here!” Flint reached into the file and produced several faded color photos of an empty plastic box. “The prints on the box were Jester’s, White’s, and Evan Updike’s.”
“The engineer. That’s who I’m interested in,” Jesse said.
“What an asshole. I liked him for it. We all did.”
“But?”
“But there was no hard evidence against him. All of their prints were all over the damned studio. No one saw him take it. We executed warrants on his room and on his car. We even kept him under surveillance until he left Cape Cod. We knew exactly what we were looking for, too.”
Flint pulled out another faded photo. This one was black-and-white. It was a shot of Terry Jester, a much younger Stan White, and a man Jesse assumed was Evan Updike, holding a reel of tape toward the camera. The top side of the reel faced the camera. On one of the wide metal spokes of the reel was a p
iece of masking tape and on the masking tape was written THE HANGMAN’S SONNET MASTER in black marker. White and Updike were smiling, but Jester’s expression was flat and distant.
“That Updike there?”
“Yup,” Flint said. “A nasty piece of work, that one. Must’ve been a hell of an engineer for people to put up with the bastard.”
“Seems he had that effect on everyone. I never met the man and I don’t like him.”
“So, Jesse, do you really think this is it? Is the tape going to resurface after all these years?”
Jesse explained the details, about where Curnutt’s body had been found, about Updike being Maude Cain’s nephew, about how he’d rented a room from her in the period of time after the tape went missing, and about Roscoe Niles receiving the original poem at the station.
“I’d appreciate a call if and when the tape’s recovered. This damned case has kept me up nights on and off for forty years. Be nice to know for sure before I kick.”
“It’s a promise,” Jesse said, shaking Flint’s hand.
Flint pushed the accordion file toward Jesse. “Here, take this. Been nothing but a damned albatross to me all these years. Hope it ain’t one for you, son.”
Jesse hoped so, too.
72
Hump knew it was late when he cracked his lids open, but he was still tired and fell back into that nether space between waking and sleep. Trapped inside since he’d come to Boston, moving only at night from place to place, he’d had very little option but to eat and watch TV in the shithole apartments of the men who’d been willing to put him up for the night. Overeating made him lazy and fat and he found that all he wanted to do was to escape into sleep. That morning it was especially bad because he was stressed and up against it.
He was running out of time and options. He was already taking stupid chances by staying with the last two guys he’d asked to put him up for a night. He had iffy relationships with both of them. Two days ago it was someone he knew as a kid but not exactly a friend and not a person he had a whole lot of faith in. Still, it had worked out. He’d thrown the guy two hundred bucks and asked him to forget he’d ever been there. Yesterday he’d taken a much bigger risk, staying at Milo Byrnes’s dump. Milo was a full-on tweaker, the kind of guy who’d steal anything from anyone and worry about consequences and the swag’s worth afterward. That’s how he’d ended up inside with Hump and King in the first place.
Hump was quickly falling out of the in-between world and back into sleep, his body relaxing as he fell. Somewhere in his head he thought he was at the beginning of an unpleasant dream. It was a dream of noises and odors, of a squeaking door hinge, creaking floorboards, the gentle rustling of fabric against fabric. It stank of old sweat and smoke. It didn’t take long for Hump to decipher that the stench and the noises were coming not from dreamland but from Milo Byrnes rifling through his stuff.
If Hump had been fully awake, there’d be no contest between a skinny, decayed weasel like Milo Byrnes and himself. Hump had been horrified at the sight of Byrnes when he’d come through his apartment door the night before. The guy’s skin was a sickly yellow, his teeth were rotting out of his head, and he looked like a walking skeleton. Hump opened his eyes just enough to get a sense of what was happening, but he was facing a wall, his back to Byrnes. Hump had his nine in bed with him and his cash was in a bag taped to the inside of his left thigh. The ring, though, was in one of his bundled-up socks. He couldn’t let a skel like Byrnes get to it.
Hump rolled around, tossing the moth-eaten sheet off him, raising the nine-millimeter toward Byrnes.
“What the fuck, Milo, you piece of—”
But he couldn’t finish the sentence because Byrnes had come armed, too, and plunged a serrated kitchen knife into Hump’s belly. Hump reached out with his left hand, grabbing onto Byrnes’s sweat-soaked T-shirt that hung off the tweaker like a tent. He pulled Byrnes close to him, put the muzzle of the gun into the flat of the bony man’s abdomen, and fired. He fired again. Again. The third bullet went right through the bag of bones and skin and into the wall of the closet-sized bedroom. Some of the noise was swallowed up by Byrnes’s now-lifeless body. Hump tossed the almost weightless dead man aside like an old foam pillow.
Ears ringing, light-headed, he stood. When he did, he collapsed back onto the bed. He noticed his shirt was slowly turning red, soaking with blood, and that the kitchen knife was still stuck in his belly. He laughed at his situation, wincing in pain as he did. The knife was going to have to come out, and when it did, it was going to hurt like a bastard. That wasn’t the worst of it. He knew that when he pulled it out, the serrated edge would do more damage and the bleeding would get much worse.
Hump forced himself to get up again, tossing the gun down on the bed. He found his way into the filthy bathroom, going through the cabinets for anything that might work as an antiseptic, for gauze or cotton, anything he could use to stanch the wound, and tape to hold the makeshift bandage to the wound. What he found in the bathroom was some cotton wadding and toilet paper. Nothing else. In Byrnes’s room, he found a syringe Milo had readied for himself and a pint bottle of cheap vodka with a few swallows left inside.
Hump took a swig of vodka, tied off his left biceps with the piece of rubber tubing Milo had meant to use for himself, poured a stream of vodka onto the syringe, and then stuck the needle into a bulging vein at the bend of his left arm. The jolt was immediate, intense. Hump’s whole body clenched, his eyes widened, the noise on the street below turned into the buzzing of a million mosquito wings. In a single motion he tore his shirt off as if it were made of tissue paper. Strangely, what had frightened him so only a few seconds before—the thought of yanking the knife out of his gut—now seemed like something he couldn’t wait to try. Without hesitating, he grabbed the knife’s handle, took a few deep breaths, and pulled.
He collapsed to his knees, the weirdest thought going through his head. Is this what getting hit by lightning feels like? Lightning always frightened him. As bad as the pain was, it almost felt like it was happening to someone else. When he managed to get to his feet, Hump realized he was still holding the knife. He laughed at it, dropped it. He noticed the blood now pouring out of him and onto his pants. He poured the remainder of the vodka onto the wound, lightning striking a second time. Then he wadded up the cotton and shoved it into the mouth of the wound. He covered the cotton with sheets of toilet paper and pressed his hand hard against it. He found Milo’s meth stash and pocketed it.
Hump went back into his room, rigged strapping out of some torn shirts, changed the bandage, and used the strapping to hold the new bandage to the wound. He got into different jeans, threw on a shirt and, in spite of the heat, a sweatshirt over that. He wiped off the bloody gun on the bedsheet, tucked it at the small of his back, and grabbed the Baggie of meth out of his old jeans. He thought about taking his duffel bag with him but decided not to try it. He had to travel light and move fast. Instead he collected the pair of socks in which he’d hidden the dragonfly ring. He had no choice now. He had to get to Dennis’s Place and find Mickey Coyle.
73
Jesse didn’t make a habit of driving over to the county morgue unless it was business. When he and Tamara were building their friendship, he avoided seeing her at work. He had spent too many hours at morgues and hospitals, spent too many hours with the dead and the dying. It was different at the murder scene. The bodies there were somehow less human when they were part of the crime scene, but when they were laid out naked on stainless-steel tables or slid out of a refrigerator, you could really get a sense of the violence and of what had been taken from them.
“Spend too much time with the dead, Stone, and you get dead inside,” his first detective partner said to him as they watched the autopsy of a fifteen-year-old girl. “Never become so familiar with it that you don’t see it.”
Those days in L.A. now seemed like they happened a long time ago and to s
omeone else. Jesse hadn’t understood what his partner meant back then. He understood it now.
He’d sat outside in the parking lot for an hour going through Flint’s old accordion file. Jesse couldn’t find anything the Yarmouth PD had done that he wouldn’t have done or something they should have done that they didn’t do. What was pretty clear through all of it was that no one, from Stan White to the guy who owned the recording studio, was very anxious to discuss the recording sessions or who had participated.
Given the status of the musicians Roscoe Niles had listed for him, the ones rumored to have been part of the recording of The Hangman’s Sonnet, it was unlikely any of them would have taken the tape. But they certainly would have been people Jesse would have interviewed. It wasn’t as if the Yarmouth PD hadn’t tried. It was impossible to know what someone might have seen or overheard. One of the musicians might have knowledge about the theft that they weren’t even aware of. Yet White refused to release the names of the musicians involved, saying that they had only participated in the recording of the album under the promise of strict confidentiality and that he would never break his word to them. In Flint’s interview notes, there was a quote from White:
“Look, if it was up to me, I would cooperate with you and give you the names. But if I give you even one of their names, I can have the crap sued out of me and Terry. These musicians, they may all seem like drug-addled hippies to you, but believe me, they are anything but. They are sharks, and sharks with managers, lawyers, and agents. Besides, all the musicians were gone before the tape went missing.”
In the file was a blank copy of the confidentiality agreement. Jesse was no lawyer, but the agreement did seem ironclad. There were also many, many photographs in the file. Photos of the studio, of the box in which the tape had been stored, of Evan Updike and Stan White, of Terry Jester. Jesse had seen Jester’s face before, but the shots of Jester on his album covers were vastly different from the shots in the file. On his album covers, Jester usually wore a knowing smirk as if he was winking at the person looking at the album cover. You and me, we know the truth. The photos in the file depicted a man buried deep within his own head or of someone losing it, if not lost. Now what Stan White had confided to him earlier about Jester’s state of mind made more sense.
Robert B. Parker's the Hangman's Sonnet Page 23