Robert B. Parker's the Hangman's Sonnet

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Jesse’s cell started buzzing like mad, but he didn’t answer the calls. They were from Nita, from the mayor, from Stan White, from Bella. He looked at his watch. Roscoe Niles had been on the air for an hour. Jesse wondered how many times he had read The Hangman’s Sonnet on the air by now. He turned on the radio, and with a Terry Jester song playing in the background, Roscoe was reading the poem. And by the time tomorrow morning’s Globe hit the streets, the story would explode. Jesse hoped his career wouldn’t explode with it. He shut off the radio and got out of the Explorer.

  Tamara tried to hide her smile when he walked into her office. It was futile. She lit up, but her expression quickly turned to sadness.

  “See that?” she said. “Leaving you is going to be tough. You’re the best goddamned friend I’ve ever had.”

  “The friendship’s not going to stop when you leave.”

  “I’m not so sure. Out of sight, out of mind.”

  “The price you’re paying for fame, fortune, and the dead of Texas.”

  She laughed that loud, goofy laugh of hers.

  “You can always make me feel better, Jesse Stone.”

  “That’s what I had in mind.”

  “What?”

  “Making you feel better. Tonight’s about the last sane time we’re going to have in Paradise for a while. Dinner?”

  “Fine. I’m in.”

  “Deal,” he said. “But let’s make it late. I’ve got to meet with Lundquist and then I’m going to have to do a lot of hand-holding for the next few hours after that.”

  “Why?”

  Without confessing his part in it, Jesse told her that word had leaked out about the poem and that it would be only a matter of time before the tape was offered up for bidding.

  “Do you really think so, after all this time?”

  He said, “I’m not much of a gambler, but if I could find someone to take my action, I’d put every dime I had on it. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

  On his ride back to Paradise, he listened to Roscoe Niles play side one of Terry Jester’s second album, God’s Middle Name.

  74

  He brought the accordion folder into the station with him.

  Molly said, “Lundquist is in there waiting for you.”

  “Good.”

  “I found a few addresses on Evan Updike, but nothing current. Nothing even remotely current. Can’t find any recent photos of him, either. He’s got no social-media presence or phones listed under his name.”

  “Death certificate?”

  “Gee, Jesse, I wish I was smart like you. First thing I thought of when I couldn’t find anything on the guy later than 1985. No luck there, either.”

  “He was a major drug abuser. Who knows, maybe he found God, got straight, and changed his name or joined a cult.”

  “Maybe. What’s that file about?”

  “From your buddy Jim Flint of the Yarmouth PD. It’s his case file.”

  “Thick.”

  “Uh-huh. Thorough, too,” Jesse said. “When Lundquist leaves, give him everything you’ve got on Updike. We’ll let the staties put the word out about him. We have to remember we’re trying to close two homicides. The tape is secondary and maybe our way to the killer.”

  “Weren’t Bolton and Curnutt responsible for Maude Cain’s death?”

  “Probably, but we don’t have Bolton, and that still leaves Curnutt’s homicide to deal with.”

  “You think it’s Evan Updike behind the missing tape?”

  “Flint liked him for it and he seems the most likely suspect. I think Stan White thinks so, too, though he says different. Until we can do better, Updike’s it. Can you do me a favor, Molly? I need you to make a few calls for me. It’s not strictly police business, but it’ll mean a lot to me.”

  “Sure,” she said, making a face. “Tell me what you need.”

  Lundquist was holding Jesse’s old baseball mitt in his hands. He didn’t have it on. He was too respectful a person for that. It was more like he was inspecting it, revering it, wondering whether the object itself could reveal anything about the man who owned it.

  “Did you play ball?” Jesse asked, walking around his desk, laying the file down.

  “A little. All hit. No field. And the curveball was as mysterious to me as the Second Coming.”

  Jesse laughed. “If it wasn’t for the curveball, Brian, the major leagues would be much more crowded.”

  “Could you hit the curve?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How?”

  “Part of it was being blessed with great eyesight. Sometimes I could pick up the rotation on the ball and knew it was a curve. And I was observant. If you watched a pitcher enough, you could see him tipping off his pitches. Sometimes it was how he held his glove when it was a curve. Sometimes his arm angle changed when he threw a curve. But as I moved up in class, pitchers were more polished, many had pitched in the bigs and had corrected their tells. So in Triple-A it was a matter of working the count, getting the pitcher in a spot where you had a pretty good sense of what pitch he would throw in a given situation and where he would throw it. There are a lot of people with the physical gifts to play baseball, but it’s the mental aspects of things that separate the good from the great.”

  “Jeez, Jesse, why didn’t you go into coaching?” Lundquist asked, placing the ball back in the glove and the glove back on Jesse’s desk. “You sound like you would’ve made a great manager.”

  Jesse shook his head. “Last thing on earth I would have done. It would have been like an author who could no longer get published working in a bookstore. Too frustrating and not enough money in it. No, when my shoulder got wrecked, that was the end of baseball for me forever.”

  “Why am I here, Jesse?”

  “Because I’m going to need you to back me up when the tape is finally offered up.”

  “What do you need?”

  “I’m not sure, but I suspect the DA is going to object when the tape is offered to the highest bidder and money is to be exchanged. But I think it’s going to be our only chance to clear the books of the two open homicides.”

  “Risky.”

  “Very, but the only lead I’ve got is on a guy the Yarmouth PD cleared years ago. Molly will give you all the details when you leave. Everything else is a dead end. The forensics have gotten us nowhere. Hump Bolton has gone to ground. If we balk at the exchange, then Curnutt’s killer will be gone with the wind.”

  “Do you really care about who killed a mutt like Curnutt?”

  “I care about any open homicide in my town, no matter who the victim was.”

  “Fair enough. Okay, Jesse, I’ll back you with the DA. I hope you’re right.”

  “Me too.”

  75

  It wasn’t the Gray Gull. It wasn’t the Lobster Claw. It wasn’t Daisy’s, nor was it any one of thirty other restaurants in the area. Instead, Jesse took Tamara to a chain restaurant out near the highway. It was one of those places with laminated menus, table tents, and annoyingly bubbly servers who told you their names in breathless voices and went on about their all-day two-fers. When she saw the place in the distance, Tamara leaned over and hugged Jesse, hard.

  “I love you, Jesse Stone. You are one of a kind.”

  Two years earlier this had been the place in which they’d shared their first meal out together. It hadn’t been a date, but it was where they’d first shared dark truths with each other about their pasts and established the trust that bound them together as friends. They hadn’t been back since.

  “My treat,” he said, pulling into a yellow-lined parking spot. “You can even have the shrimp-and-steak fajita combo if you’d like.”

  “A big spender, my goodness.”

  When the hostess saw Jesse’s PPD hat, she winked at him.

  “Your table is read
y, Chief Stone,” she said, walking them to the booth they’d sat in two years earlier.

  Tamara stopped in her tracks about five feet short of the booth when she noticed the bouquet of yellow roses and the bottle of champagne on the table. She punched Jesse’s left biceps.

  “You son of a—” She stopped herself as silent tears rolled down her cheeks. “Damn you, Jesse.”

  “I didn’t want you to think I wouldn’t miss you or that I wasn’t proud of you.”

  “I’m not leaving yet,” she said, choking slightly on her words.

  “I know that. C’mon, let’s eat.”

  “Yellow roses,” Tamara said, sliding into the booth, clutching her bouquet.

  “Only appropriate, given that you’re moving back down to Texas.”

  “What’s the champagne for?”

  “For us to drink on a mutually agreed-upon date,” he said.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  They both ordered Black Labels.

  “Are you sure it’s okay for us to drink scotch together?” Jesse asked. “You’ve been on the warpath about that lately.”

  “One drink and this one time, it’s okay.”

  The server was dismayed. “I’m sorry, folks, but that’s not part of the two-fers.”

  Jesse assured her that it was fine and to just bring the drinks. When the server left, Jesse and Tamara laughed, if a bit sadly, remembering that they’d gotten the same speech about the scotch the first time they’d been here.

  “So how’d it go with Mayor Walker and Nita Thompson?”

  The server brought their drinks and took their order: an omelet for Jesse and the fajita combo for Tamara.

  Jesse raised his glass. “To your success.”

  “To the best friend I’ve ever had . . . and, dare I say it, the sexiest one, too.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  After they drank, Tamara repeated the question. “How’d they react?”

  “They were resigned to it coming out eventually and they were glad to have had some warning about it. We discussed how we’d handle the press conference, what we would confirm or deny, stuff like that. They were pretty calm about it.”

  “Yeah, I’ll just bet they were. I’ll also bet you offered to give the mayor political cover.”

  “You’re too smart for your own good, Doc.”

  “And why would you do that, let her hide behind you?”

  “Let’s just say it was more of a trade than me being benevolent.”

  “Still, Jesse, why?”

  “If I’m going to find out what’s really going on here, I need her to back me up. If that means keeping her head off the chopping block by putting mine on it, so be it.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. It’s the right thing to do. There’ve been two murders in my town, an old woman’s house was destroyed, and a man was nearly beaten to death. I can’t let that stand. The mayor can afford to worry about covering her ass. I can’t.”

  Tamara was about to say something when the food came. As the server was squeezing lime on Tamara’s fajitas and creating a choking cloud of smoke, Jesse’s phone buzzed. When he saw who the caller was, he stood up from the table and picked up.

  “Stone?”

  “Vinnie. What’s up?”

  “That Bolton guy you’re looking for, he’s at a back booth at Dennis’s, waiting for my guy, Mickey Coyle.”

  “Thanks, Vinnie. I owe you.”

  “I know you do. You better get down here pronto, Stone.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The bartender says Bolton looks like he’s in pretty bad shape.”

  When Jesse got back to the booth, he threw three twenties on the table and said, “Hey, Doc, how would you like to take a drive down to Boston with me? If not, I’ll get someone to drive you home.”

  She slid out of the booth, grabbing her flowers and the champagne. “I wasn’t that hungry anyway.”

  76

  Jesse pulled to the curb down the block from the bar. Before they got out of the car, he grabbed Tamara’s forearm and stared her in the eyes.

  “You hang back outside, okay? This guy’s probably armed, and if he’s hurt . . .”

  “I’ll be all right, Jesse.”

  “Please, Doc, no heroics. I can’t lose anybody else.”

  She stroked his cheek. “I promise, Jesse. I won’t come into the bar until you send for me.”

  Jesse took off his hat and his cop shirt and pulled his white tee over his beltline. He unclipped his hip holster, removed his weapon, and fished his softball warmup jacket out of the rear seat. He wrapped his hand around the nine-millimeter’s grip and threw the jacket over his gun hand.

  “Shouldn’t you call the BPD for backup?” Tamara asked as they walked toward Dennis’s.

  “They’ll come sirens blaring and it might create a hostage situation.”

  Jesse spotted him the second he came through the bar door. As Morris had said, Hump Bolton was sitting alone at a back booth, facing the front door.

  “Where’s the head?” he asked the barman.

  The barman pointed to the right of where Bolton was seated. “Through there.”

  As Jesse walked back, he counted three other people in the place besides Bolton, the bartender, and himself. Two were up front at the bar and one was at the far end of the bar about ten feet from Bolton. The other thing Jesse noticed as he got closer to the rear booth was that Bolton looked bad-off. His skin was grayish and his face was covered in sweat. His eyes were glassy, his pupils black pinpricks, and he was bent over slightly. Both of Bolton’s arms were below table level, and it seemed to Jesse as if the man was clutching his abdomen. But he walked right past Bolton and toward the bathroom and the old phone booth. While back there, he racked the slide on his nine and counted to thirty.

  When he came back through the doors, he stopped next to Bolton’s booth. “Mickey Coyle sent me. You Hump?”

  Bolton straightened up in his seat, wincing in pain at the effort, looking at Jesse. There was a strange blankness in the big man’s expression, but Bolton didn’t say anything.

  Jesse pushed him. “Look, you got something for me to look at or not?”

  Bolton still didn’t say anything. As Jesse waited him out, he saw that below table level, Bolton’s sweatshirt was soaked through with blood. His pants were wet with it, too.

  “Sit,” Bolton said finally.

  Jesse sat across from him, resting his gun hand on his thigh, making sure the barrel was pointed directly at Bolton’s midsection. “So, Bolton, what you got? Let’s see.”

  “Coyle didn’t send you or . . . maybe he did. He always was a scumbag. You a cop?” Bolton asked. “What you got under the jacket, a .38 or a nine-millimeter?”

  Jesse didn’t figure it was worth arguing. “A nine, and it’s pointed right at your gut.”

  Bolton laughed, his body twisting in pain. “Find another target, cop. I already got a nice hole in me there.”

  “Shot?”

  “Stabbed. Son-of-a-bitch tweaker I stayed with last night stuck a kitchen knife in my belly. I think he clipped my liver. I don’t think he got a liver no more, not after what I done to him.”

  “I’ve got a doctor outside. You slide out of the booth, let me pat you down, and I’ll get her in here to look at you.”

  Bolton ignored him. “You Boston PD?”

  “Paradise police chief, Jesse Stone.”

  “Chief, huh?” He laughed, his body clenching in pain again. “I’m moving up in the world. Listen, Stone, we didn’t mean to kill the old woman, I swear on my mother. She just . . . you know.”

  “I know. Who hired you?”

  Hump shrugged. “King made all of them arrangements.”

  “What were you looking for in the house?”


  “A key or a piece of paper with numbers on it, stuff like that.”

  “Curnutt found it. Did you know he found it?”

  “No, he fucked me with that.”

  “You think the guy who hired you guys killed King?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Just because it figures don’t make it so.”

  “Let me get the doctor in here for you.”

  “Nah, I’m done. The only reason I’m even still breathing is because I’ve been tooting on some crank every few minutes.”

  Jesse asked, “You still have the ring?”

  “In the balled-up socks in my sweatshirt,” Bolton said, his words slurred, his eyes fluttering. “It’s a beautiful thing. You seen it?”

  “Uh-huh. Pictures of it.”

  “Maybe you should get that doctor in here. I don’t think—”

  But before Hump Bolton could finish, he slumped over in the booth and fell onto the floor. Jesse quickly stepped around to Bolton, dragged him away from the booth, and laid him on his back. Jesse patted Bolton down, pulled the gun out of his waistband, and pushed it along the floor behind him.

  Jesse held up his shield. “Police. Call nine-one-one and get an ambulance and backup here. You.” He pointed to one of the guys sitting at the bar. “Go outside. There’s a woman doctor out there. Get her in here. Now!”

  The guy jumped off his barstool and ran through the door. But by the time Tamara made it inside, it was too late. Hump Bolton was dead. Jesse didn’t need the medical examiner now standing over his shoulder to tell him so. He knew death when he saw it.

  77

  Tamara had tried her best to get Bolton’s heart started again. When the ambulance got there, the EMTs took over, but it was all wasted effort.

  “I’ve got no clue how he was even talking to you, Jesse,” Tamara said between giving statements to the Boston cops. “He was suffering from profound blood loss and that was a nasty wound.” She shook her head. “I usually get them when they’re already dead and their stories are already written. Sometimes I forget how powerful and stubborn the mind can be. It can make the human body ignore the fact that it should have stopped functioning.”