Robert B. Parker's the Hangman's Sonnet

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Miles hesitated but eventually handed his iPhone to Jesse.

  “Who is this?” Healy, not recognizing the number, asked, his voice crackling over the speaker.

  “It’s me, Jesse. An Officer Miles let me use his phone. Thanks for having my back.”

  “What are friends for? Besides, I almost feel like a cop again. Who’s the vic?”

  “Bascom.”

  “Get out! Bascom, the head of security on Stiles Island?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He never struck me as some criminal genius.”

  “He wasn’t,” Jesse said. “He was a pawn. Do you have the shooter in sight?”

  “A few hundred yards ahead of me, yeah. He’s tooling down the highway like he hasn’t got a care in the world.”

  “He’s got six million reasons to feel relaxed.”

  “Not for long, but listen, Jesse . . .”

  “What?”

  “When I tell you who it is, you’re not going to like it.”

  “I know who it is,” Jesse said.

  “But how could you—”

  “It clicked a few minutes ago. It has to do with surveillance cameras. I’ll explain it to you later. For now, keep him in sight. You better call Lundquist and clue him in, but keep everyone else in the dark. Call Molly and tell her to have Peter Perkins search Bascom’s apartment. Tell her to assign two units to the Wickham estate. Anyone coming or going from the estate except the mayor or Nita Thompson gets a tail.”

  “Got it. Anything else?”

  “Nothing else for now.”

  Healy asked, “Did you get the tape?”

  “It’s destroyed.”

  “Damn!”

  “Don’t sweat it. I’ll explain it to you later.”

  “Okay, Jesse.”

  “You know how I said Bascom was a pawn?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He had company.”

  “Like who?”

  “Me.”

  85

  Jesse spent several hours recounting his story to the local and Vermont State Police. Only after Jesse assured them that he would arrest the killer within twenty-four hours did they arrange for him to get a ride back to Paradise. Once he was back at the station, he made calls to Nita Thompson and Stan White, who made a verbal show of feeling betrayed and distraught about the destruction of the tape. After that, Jesse made some other calls, all the pieces falling into place. He wished he could be happy about being right, but there were times, he thought, that wrong was better.

  It was too late to worry about that now. At the moment, he stood outside the town house between Lundquist and Healy, waiting to be buzzed in. Healy was exhausted, having spent the entire night sitting on the suspect’s house.

  “The money?” Jesse asked.

  Healy pointed at the garage door. “In there. The rifle, too. He came home, pulled into the garage, came out, locked the garage door behind him, and he’s been inside ever since.”

  Jesse was beat, too. He’d caught a few minutes of shut-eye during the ride to Boston from Paradise with Lundquist. It was the only sleep he’d gotten since the night before. Lundquist was still upset at Jesse for not reporting the shooting incident in the nature preserve and for keeping him out of the loop when he brought Healy into a police matter.

  “I had no choice, Brian. I had to use someone who had no official standing, someone I could trust who wasn’t on anybody’s radar screen. Nobody would be looking for Healy in their rearview mirrors.”

  Lundquist was unmoved.

  “He’ll get over it,” Healy had said to Jesse when Lundquist was taking a call. “He’s new in the job, so he’s touchy. But he’s good.”

  At a distance, the town house seemed a lovely brick affair with granite steps, black wrought-iron rails, boot scrapers, and converted gaslights. But up close it was more a reflection of its owner: weary and abused, something that looked better viewed through the lens of the past. The windows needed replacing. The bricks were in desperate need of repointing. Pieces of the fence were rusted and missing like rotted-out teeth in a once-glorious smile.

  When the buzzer sounded, Jesse turned to the others and said, “I’m going in alone. It’ll just be easier and I’ll be able to trip him up. If I need you, you’re certainly close enough.”

  Healy was uneasy. “This guy tried to kill you twice.”

  “If he wanted to kill me, I’d be dead. You saw the shot he made last night.”

  Lundquist shrugged. “You want him, he’s yours . . . for now. He’ll wind up in Vermont eventually.”

  Jesse stepped into the vestibule, the front door slamming shut behind him. The inside of Roscoe Niles’s town house was even shabbier than the exterior. The wooden floors were warped and split in several spots, and whatever varnish or wax had once protected them was worn away to a dull memory. The furniture, which ten years earlier might have been called comfortable, was now frayed and scratched, the cushions flat and lifeless. The endless shelves of record albums, CDs, and tapes that had once lined the walls of his den were now as empty as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboards, and his stereo equipment—tube amp, pre-amp, turntable, reel-to-reel, CD player, speakers—was gone.

  There were rectangular ghosts on the walls of the hallways where framed posters and photos had hung, all signed to Roscoe Niles by megastars in the music industry. Jesse had always liked the photo of Roscoe holding David Bowie in his arms, big smiles on both their faces. The empty walls and shelves were eerily reminiscent of Niles’s office at the radio station

  As Jesse walked into the kitchen, he questioned himself as he had since last night when it all became clear to him. Should I have seen it sooner? He had never been a man given to second-guessing his decisions. That had changed a few years back after Suit had been shot. But if he was being honest with himself, he had to confess that since Diana’s death, he’d spent a great many drunken hours doing nothing but questioning himself. It’s what had made him vulnerable to manipulation. The only thing he had been sure of since Diana’s murder was that he had been played for a fool by a man he considered a friend.

  Niles was sitting at the kitchen table, head down, eyes distant, a freshly lit cigarette between his lips. There was a full ashtray on the table, a coffee cup, and a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label before him. Niles was dressed in a ragged white terry-cloth bathrobe. His long steel-gray hair, which he usually kept rubber-banded in a ponytail, fell loosely around his bloated face. The steeliness of his hair and the cigarette’s burning tip seemed to highlight the blooming gin blossoms on his nose. At the thump of Jesse’s footsteps, the old DJ turned his head toward the kitchen entrance, the distance vanishing from his eyes.

  “It’s good to see you, man, but Christ, Jesse, you look like shit,” Niles said, a smile slowly working its way across his lips.

  “I’ve got an excuse. No sleep. What’s yours?”

  “I’ve got the same excuse.” The DJ’s rich voice was uncharacteristically brittle. “I don’t sleep much at all these days. So why are you here? Did that asshole White get his tape back?”

  “Never going to happen.”

  Niles acted confused. “The exchange hasn’t happened? I mean, once I authenticated the tape I thought it would go fast after that.”

  “The exchange happened, all right,” Jesse said.

  Niles did his best to keep looking confused. “I’m slow on the uptake this morning, man. Am I missing something?”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute.”

  “Whatever you say. How much did the tape go for?”

  Jesse didn’t answer him directly. “Remember when you asked me why I was here?”

  Roscoe Niles nodded.

  “I’m here to arrest you.”

  “Arrest me?” Niles tried to act surprised but sounded defeated. “For what, man?”

>   “Murder, for starters,” Jesse said, his voice calm.

  Niles, hand shaking, poured scotch into his coffee cup and drank it down. Poured another. Drank it, too. “And who is it that I am supposed to have murdered?”

  “Roger Bascom.”

  86

  Roscoe Niles spent the next five minutes denying he knew Roger Bascom. Jesse let him, sitting silently across the table as the DJ swore up and down he’d never met the man. He figured Roscoe had to get it out of his system and he hoped Roscoe would say something to make this easier.

  “Phone records don’t lie,” Jesse said. He was bluffing because it would take a little time before they got the LUDs, but Roscoe didn’t know that. “And then there’s this.” Jesse tapped his cell phone screen, then handed it to the man across the table. “Scroll right to left. There’s also dashboard-camera footage of you. Tells an interesting story.”

  Roscoe Niles’s whole body sagged as he handed the phone back to Jesse.

  “Pretty damning evidence, Roscoe: you getting out of your car with the gun case, you holding the rifle, you walking up into the woods . . . The man who took those photos is the retired head of the state Homicide Bureau,” Jesse said. “So don’t bullshit me. Understand?”

  Niles nodded.

  “Explain it to me.”

  “Nothing I say is going to change anything, is it?”

  “Probably not legally, but it may help with the way I feel about you.”

  “That means a lot to me, man.”

  “Apparently not enough.”

  “I’m sorry, Jesse. You have to believe me. I really am, but I was desperate. You see what my place looks like. I’m tapped out and deep into the guys on the street. I haven’t made any real money in years. There are so many mortgages on this dump that I’d have to live two hundred more years to pay them off. I sold everything I had in the world just to make my vig payments until this thing was over with.”

  “I figured you had to be desperate, but there are a lot of desperate people in the world who don’t murder other people.”

  “Bascom needed killing.” Niles lifted up the bottle, waved it at Jesse. “You want one?”

  Jesse shook his head and watched his old friend fill his coffee mug with Red Label.

  “To Diana.” Niles lifted his coffee mug to drink.

  Jesse slapped the mug out of Niles’s hand. “Don’t you speak her name in front of me again.”

  “Sorry, man.”

  “Why didn’t you run, Roscoe? You had the money and you didn’t know I had someone on you. With six mill, you could have been anywhere by now.”

  Niles laughed a coarse laugh like ripping fabric. “I wasn’t going anywhere without Bella.”

  Jesse shook his head. “What was your cut going to be?”

  “A mill.”

  Jesse said, “You undersold yourself.”

  “Story of my life. You have any idea of how much money, how many women I could have had when I was on the air in New York? But not me, no, sir, not Mr. Integrity.”

  “You’re a saint.”

  There was that laugh again. “Ain’t I, though?”

  “Without you to authenticate the tape none of it would have worked. Why didn’t you ask for a bigger cut?”

  “At the time, a mill seemed like a fortune to me.”

  “But I bet Bella explained to you how it could all be for the two of you. Kill Bascom and cut White out. White couldn’t go to the cops.”

  The slump went out of Niles’s body. “No, it was all my idea. Bella had nothing to do with it.”

  “Yeah,” Jesse said, “I bet. Pure as the driven snow. Don’t be an idiot, Roscoe. You know she was probably sleeping with Bascom, too.”

  Niles’s face turned bright red and he seemed ready to pounce.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Jesse said, placing his hand around the grip of his nine-millimeter. “You don’t have a rifle in your hand now. It was you who shot at me in the woods the other day, but that wasn’t part of the plan, was it? You followed Bella to my house that morning. You thought she was sleeping with me, too.”

  “Stop pushing me about Bella. You say another word about her and I’ll ask for a lawyer.”

  “You’re in no position to make threats, but okay, we’ll leave her out of it for now.”

  Niles relaxed, the angry red bleaching out of his cheeks.

  “It’s all bullshit, isn’t it, Roscoe? The poem, the tape, it’s all smoke and mirrors. There never was a Hangman’s Sonnet album. There was nothing on the tape. It was just a prop.”

  “The poem’s real, man, but no, there was nothing on the tape. It wasn’t a scam to begin with all those years ago. They meant to make the album, but Jester went over the edge before the project got started. Terry hasn’t been functional since. The cost of his hospitalization has bankrupted them.”

  “What about royalties?” Jesse asked. “They play Jester’s stuff on the radio all the time. He still sells.”

  “Stan has Jester’s power of attorney. He sold the publishing rights about seven years ago when Jester’s condition worsened and White needed the cash infusion to keep up Terry’s level of care.”

  “Did you know there was no album before White approached you?”

  Niles looked insulted, hurt. “Are you kidding me, man? No, I believed like the rest of the world. Everyone believed because we all want to believe in the Holy Grail or El Dorado or that the Walrus was Paul. Where would we be without myths, man? That’s why it worked.”

  “Almost worked, Roscoe. Almost. So White came to you and . . .”

  “And what choice did I have? I needed bread any way I could get it. But I wasn’t in on this early. White came to me a few months ago because, as Mr. Integrity, I had credibility in the industry. He knew people who might be putting up big bucks would want more than his word alone that the tape was real.”

  “But it was you who suggested using me to vouch for you.”

  Niles couldn’t look Jesse in the eye. “It was me. After Diana was killed I knew you’d . . . Anyway, I’m sorry.”

  “What if I didn’t come to you to ask about Jester and The Hangman’s Sonnet?”

  “Who else would you go to?” Niles smirked. “If you didn’t come on your own, White or Bella would’ve nudged you in my direction or I might’ve called to say hi and taken the conversation that way.”

  “So it was White, Bascom, you, and Bella. Is Evan Updike part of it?”

  Niles was still determined to protect Bella. “It was White and Bascom. Bella wasn’t part of it.”

  “If you only had as much respect for Diana’s memory as for Bella, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “I was desperate, man.”

  “So you say. What about Updike?”

  “He was the straw man, the guy White wanted you to chase while we got out of Dodge.”

  “So he had no part in this?”

  Niles shrugged. “At first, yeah, I guess, when it went down in the seventies. I mean, he was the only other person who knew there was no real Hangman’s Sonnet album, but I’ve never seen him and he was never mentioned as anything except as the fall guy. I can tell you this, though, Stan hates Updike’s guts.”

  “You’re going away for the rest of your life.”

  Niles dispensed with the coffee cup and took a slug straight from the bottle. “What life?”

  87

  Lundquist looked into the rearview and through the protective Plexiglass at Roscoe Niles slumped against the backseat. He was passed out and snoring. Jesse had let him get dressed in something other than the ratty white bathrobe he’d been wearing, though the too-tight T-shirt, ripped jeans, and sneakers weren’t much of an upgrade. He had also let Niles put his hair back into its usual ponytail.

  “I don’t get it,” Lundquist said.

  “What?” />
  “The thing old bikers and old rockers have with ponytails. Do they think it will distract people from noticing their receding hairlines and fat guts hanging over their beltlines?”

  “It’s about not letting go.”

  “Of what?”

  “Their pasts.”

  “How did you get him to waive his right to counsel and cooperate?”

  “I explained that depending on the way we presented things to the DA, he could do hard time or very hard time.”

  “Yeah,” Lundquist said, turning his gaze back to the road. “When you look at it that way, I guess it was an easy choice. But, Jesse, how did you know it was all bullshit?”

  “I didn’t know, not for sure, not until Roscoe admitted it to me. I knew something wasn’t right, and then when I noticed the security cameras at the gas station they had me stop at, I realized how I was being played. Last night, after the Vermont cops dropped me back in Paradise, I got hold of the CCTV footage from where the WBMB studios are. The day the poem was allegedly delivered to Roscoe by messenger—”

  “There was no messenger.”

  “Roscoe knew I would just take his word for it like I took his word for everything else.”

  “Good plan.”

  “Everybody involved was vouching for everyone else and all of it hinged on my vouching for Roscoe. Stan White’s a sharp guy,” Jesse said. “Except for greed and jealousy, it might’ve worked.”

  “But how? When the tape was played, there wouldn’t be anything on it. Then they would all be exposed.”

  “That’s the beauty of it, Brian. Even if they didn’t manage to destroy the tape, all of their asses were covered because they set up a fall guy in Evan Updike. If there was nothing on the tape, it would be because Updike had fooled them and had kept the ‘real’ tape and the money. They could all point to the mysterious Evan Updike and say he was the Hangman. He was the recording engineer at the studio. The police believed he had stolen the tape in the first place. The safety-deposit box key was hidden in his aunt’s rooming house. The exchange was made in Vermont, where he was born. We wouldn’t be able to prove he didn’t do it. Can’t prove a negative.