funcuoning building only underscored the silence. Jesse walked to the sliders that opened onto the little deck, and looked out at the harbor.
There was still enough light to see all the way across to the Neck. A single lobster boat came in toward the town dock, otherwise the boats that bobbed on the calm ufface of the harbor were moored and empty.
Jesse liked the silence. It was comforting.
He stood for a while looking at the quiescent harbor and let the silence sink in. Then he went to the kitchen and got the bottle of Black Label from the cabinet and poured some over ice. He let it sit for a moment while he hung his coat on the back of a chair. Then he picked up the glass and walked into the living room and looked out the window and took his first drink. First one at the end of a day was always a home run. He sat down on one of the armchairs that had come with the apartment, and put his feet up on the coffee table, He sipped again. The silence made him feel strong. And the whiskey made him feel strong. He tried to simply feel the strength and let his mind go, let it be part of the silence and the whiskey and not think about Jenn.
He felt strong about Jenn. Right here at least. Right now.
The prospect of life without her seemed for the moment filled with possibility. He drank again and got up and added some ice and poured some more scotch. He took the drink back to the window and looked out again. He could think about who killed Captain Cat, but he tried not to. He pushed the thoughts over to the periphery of his mind, let them drift there with thoughts about Freedom’s Horsemen. They would work on their own if he didn’t force them into the center of his consciousness and hold them too tightly. He swallowed some whiskey. The evening had come down upon the harbor. The Neck was no longer visible. Only the lights from some of the houses shone across the dark water.
The lobster boat was docked now, nearly motionless against the dock in the bright mercury lamps of the town landing.
Abby made things easier. He drank more whiskey. He liked her. But he knew better than to go from one monogamy to another.
Abby would be the first of many. He liked the idea. He drank to it. His glass was empty. He got up and got more ice, holding the glass under the ice dispenser in the refrigerator door. He poured scotch over the ice. He looked at the bottle. There was an encouraging amount still left in the bottle. Happiness is a jug that’s still three-quarters full. It was exciting to go out with a woman and be talking pleasantly and maybe having lunch and knowing that in a few hours, or maybe next week, after another date, that you’d see her with her clothes off. It was nice. He remembered the frantic scuffle of his adolescent dates. As an adult there was a calmness and friendliness to it all.
Adults made love. How soon depended on circumstance.
But all concerned knew it would happen and it took all the desperation out of the procedure. Jesse hated desperation.
Life, if he could make all the rules, would proceed in a stately manner. Dating as an adult was sort of stately.
Stately. He liked the sound of it.
“Stately,” he said.
His voice seemed loud and not his in the thick silence of the almost empty apartment. He took his drink to the kitchen and made himself a ham-and-cheese sandwich and ate standing at the counter, sipping his whiskey between bites. When he was done he made a fresh drink and walked back to the living room and sat back down. He tried to count how many he’d had.
“More than two,” he said.
Again his voice was loud and alien. Stillness was the norm here. He tipped his head back against the chair, Stately, he thought. I like things to be stately.
He fell’asleep and woke up in the hard
darkness of late night, feeling thick and stupid. He went to bed and didn’t sleep well and got up at daylight with a hangover.
like summer except that the kids were back to school.
Jesse was glad he wasn’t a kid as he walked past Paradise Junior High School on his way to Carole Genest’s house. Every once in a while one or two leaves on an otherwise green tree would sho’w yellow as he walked along Main Street.
There were adults, mostly female, moving about in front of the shopping center, and there was a back-to-business quality that seemed to settle in on a town once school was in session. Jesse had hated school, always. It had something to do with hating to be told what to do, he supposed. On the other hand he’d liked playing baseball and being in the Marines and being a cop in L.A., all of which entailed being told what to do. Maybe he didn’t like being told what to do indoors. Or maybe he didn’t like being instructed.
But he didn’t mind being
coached… He couldn’t figure it out, but it was not a problem he needed to solve, so he put it aside. The big oak tree that loomed over Carolc Genest’s driveway was entirely green.
Jesse paused under it and looked at the bright lawn that rolled down to Main Street from the big white house. Ten rooms maybe, and a big yard in the middle of town.
Only the youngest Genest kid was home when Carole let Jesse in. He was in the den with some coloring books and some crayons and some little wooden figures scattered about, watching a home shopping show as if it were a performance of King Lear.
“Want some coffee?” Carole said.
“Sure.”
Jesse followed her through the long formal dining room into the big kitchen, paneled in pine, with shiny copper pots hanging from a rack over the stove. The big window at the back of the room looked out at more land behind the house, planted with flowering shrubs and shielded by white pine trees.
“Nice property,” Jesse said.
“How much land you got?”
“Three-quarters of an acre,”
Carole said. She put coffee into the gold filter basket of a bright blue coffeemaker and added water and turned it 0n, and sat down at the kitchen table opposite Jesse. She was a pretty woman, with an empty face and wide eyes which always looked a little star-tied.
“Been here long?”
“Ten years,” she said.
The kid came from the. dencarrying a ratty-looking stuffed animal by the ear. It was too dilapidated for Jesse to tell what it had been. The child laid the upper half of himself over his mother’s lap and, holding the stuffed animal tightly , started to suck his thumb. Carole patted his head absently.
“You get it as part of the
divorce?”
“Yes. And he’s supposed to pay me
alimony every month but he doesn’t.”
“Must be tough to keep the payments
up,” Jesse said.
“I got to pay taxes quarterly, but at least there’s no mortgage.”
“No mortgage?”
“No. Jo Jo bought it for cash, when we got married.”
“Cash? Really? When was that.”
“Nineteen eighty-six,” she said.
“House cost a hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars.
Probably worth five now.”
“I should think so,” Jesse said.
“Where’d Jo Jo get the cash?”
Carole shook her head. The coffeemaker had stopped gurgling. She raised the kid from her lap and got up and poured them coffee.
“You take anything?” she said.
“Cream and sugar, please. Two
sugars.”
“Skim milk okay?”
“SUre.”
She put the coffee down on the table and sat back down.
The kid plopped back in her lap and sucked his thumb some more.
“What did you ask me?” Carole
said.
“Where Jo Jo got the cash. Hundred and
fifty-five thousand is a lot of money. It was even more in 1986.”
“I don’t know,” she
said.
Jesse nodded.
“Jo Jo come around since he and I had that talk?” Jesse said.
“No.”
“How are the kids doing?”
Carole shrugged.
“You talk to a shrin
k at all?”
“How’m I supposed to afford a
shrink,” Carole said.
“My HMO pays a hundred bucks for
counseling. You know how far that goes?”
Jesse nodded.
“How are you getting by,
financially?”
Again Carole shrugged. It was a particular kind of shrug.
Jesse had seen it often. It was not a gesture of surrender or even of defeat, those were long past. It was a gesture of numbness. It meant no hope.
“You got any family?”
“My mother’s dead,”
Carole said. “My father’s in Florida with my stepmother. My father sends me some . money.”
“If Jo Jo’s not paying what
he’s supposed to you can take him to court.”
“Sure, and pay a lawyer, and have the judge tell Jo Jo to pay and have him not pay, and maybe come around later and beat the shit out of me?”
“I don’t think he’ll do
that again,” Jesse said.
“Maybe not if you’re around, he
hasn’t bothered me since that time. But how long you going to stay around here?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse
said.
“How come he’s scared of you
anyway?” Carole said.
“I mean, look at him. Look at you. How come he doesn’t get you for slapping him around?”
Jesse looked at the little boy, sucking his thumb on his mother’s lap. How much of all this did he hear? Probably all of it. How much did he undetand? Probably too much of it. What could Jesse do about that?
“Well,” Jesse said.
“I’m a cop, which carries a little weight, and I carry a gun, which may have a lot of weight.”
“Jo Jo’s got a gun. He used to
have two or three around here.”
Jesse ,nodded.
“So what is it,” Carole said.
Jesse looked at the boy again. Nothing to do about that.
“Jo Jo’s a fake,” Jesse
said. “Alone at night, when he can’t sleep, sometimes, for a minute he knows it. And he knows that I know it too.”
“A fake?”
“Sure. He’s strong, and
he’s cruel. And that’s a dangerous combination. But he isn’t really tough.”
“And you are?”
Jesse smiled at her.
“Yes, ma’am. I am.”
The boy straightened and whispered in his mother’s ear.
“Okay,” Carole said.
“I’ll take you.”
She stood.
“Excuse us a minute,” she said to
Jesse and went out of the kitchen with her son.
For a drunk, Jesse thought as he sat in the quiet kitchen, I’m pretty tough for a boozer.
The television blatted in the family room. The kitchen faucet had a slow drip. He wondered if it needed a washer or if she just hadn’t shut it off tightly. Jenn had rarely shut the faucet off tightly. He always had to firm it up when he had walked through the kitchen. She never closed the cabinet doors all the way either. When she had stopped coming home everything had been much more buttoned up.
Carole came back into the kitchen. She got a Fudgsicle from the refrigerator freezer and removed the wrapper and gave the Fudgsicle to the boy.
“More coffee?” she said.
Jesse held the cup out and Carole poured from the round glass pot.
“When does he start school?”
Jesse said, nodding at the boy.
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“Kindergarten next year,” Carole
said.
The boy showed no sign that he knew they were talking about him. He sat on his mother’s lap, working on the Fudgsicle.
“Can you get a job then?” Jesse
said.
Shrug.
“What did you do before you got
married?”
“High school,” Carole said.
“Jo Jo knocked me up senior year. I never graduated.”
“Maybe you could get some
training,” Jesse said.
“Sure.”
“What does Jo Jo do for a
living?” Jesse asked.
Carole shrugged. “He does some bodybuilder contests, I know.”
“Can you make a living doing
that?”
Shrug.
“What was he doing for a living when he bought this house for cash?”
“I don’t know,” Carole
said.
Jesse allowed himself to look puzzled.
“I’m not very smart,”
Carole said. “I never learned anything in school. I didn’t ven graduate. Taking care of me was his job.”
Jesse drank some of the coffee. It had gotten stronger sitting in the pot.
“I think it would be good if you
didn’t have to depend on Jo Jo.”
“Sure,” Carole said.
“It’s what my old man is always telling me. From Florida. So who’s going to marry a woman with three small kids and an ex-husband like I got?” .
“Maybe you don’t need a husband
to take care of you.”
Jesse said.
“Yeah,” Carole said.
“Right.”
“So as long as you knew him, Jo Jo never had a regular job?”
“He tended bar once in a while. Worked as a bouncer.‘;
“Where?”
“Club in Peabody. The Eighty-six
Club.”
“He work there much?”
“No.”
Jesse stood and brought his coffee cup to the sink.
“Well, you need me, you know how to get me,” Jesse said.
“Yes.”
“Thanks for the coffee.”
“Sure.”
Jesse looked for a moment at the little boy, his face dirty with melted Fudgsicle. You don’t have a prayer, Jesse thought. Not a goddamned prayer.
toast and bit off a corner, and chewed and swallowed.
“I asked you to have coffee with me, Jesse, because I’m concerned about some of the things that have happened in town recently.”
Hathaway held the now .truncated triangle of toast delicately‘ in his fight hand and moved it slightly in rhythm to his speech. Jesse waited.
“I mean, I know they are not serious
crimes. But the spray-painting of a police cruiser, and the killing of that police station cat… well, it’s all around town.”
Jesse had nothing to say to that, so he waited.
“Obviously someone wishes to embarrass the police department.‘’
Jesse continued to wait.
“Do you agree?” Hathaway said.
“Yes.”
“And,” Hathaway said,
“I’m afraid they’re
succeeding.‘’
“‘Fraid so,” Jesse said.
“Who might that be?” Hathaway
said.
Jesse leaned back in his seat and turned his coffee cup slowly with both hands.
“We roust some of the burnout kids in town every day.”
Jesse said. “We arrest several drunks a weekend. We referee a domestic dispute about once a week. We stop people for speeding. We tow cars for being illegally parked.
We‘ re in the business of telling people no.”
“So it could be anyone,” Hathaway
said.
“Could be,” Jesse said.
“But isn’t it more likely to be
one person than another?”
Hathaway said. “Don’t you have
any suspicions?”
“Sure,” Jesse said.
“Perhaps you’d care to share them
with me,” Hathaway said. “I am after all the town’s chief executive.”
Jesse thought it an odd phrase to describe the selectman’s job, but he didn’t comment.
might be Jo Jo Genest.”
Jesse said.
“Jo Jo?”
“I came down pretty hard on him for
harassing his ex-wife a while ago.”
“But you yourself say you deal regularly with domestic disputes.”
“Yes.”
“So it could be any of those
people’s man or wife.”
“Feels like Jo Jo to me.”
“That’s pretty weak,”
Hathaway said.
“Yes it is,” Jesse said.
“If it were strong I’d arrest him.”
“But you’re still
suspicious.”
“Jo Jo’s the right kind of guy.
He’d need to get even for being embarrassed in front of his ex-wife, and he wouldn’t have the cojones to do it straight on.”
“Cohonees?”
“Balls,” Jesse said.
“You think Jo Jo Genest is
afraid?”
Hathaway seemed genuinely amazed.
“Can’t always judge a
book…” Jesse said.
“No,” Hathaway said.
“No. I can’t buy that at all. Jo Jo grew up in this town. If you did something to Jo Jo he might be angry. But if he were angry, God help you. He wouldn’t sneak around killing cats.”
Jesse turned his coffee cup a little more.
“Sure,” he said.
“Probably right.”
“And you have no other theories?”
“No.”
“Well, you better get some,”
Hathaway said. “There was a story about it in the Standard Times last night.”
Jesse nodded without comment.
“It made the papers, in my view, because you sent the cat remains to the state laboratory, and they talked about it to someone.”
“Could be,” Jesse said.
“Isn’t it a bit preposterous to
send the remains of a dead cat to the state whatever-it-is lab?”
“Forensic,” Jesse said.
“I’d pi’efer that next
time you are tempted to seek outside assistance, you consult me first.
Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Jesse said without
meaning it.
“This town does not wish outsiders sharing our problems,‘’
Hathaway said.
“Of course,‘” Jesse
said.
“We handle our own business here. Part of liberty is self-reliance.”
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