Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “When did he leave?” Jesse asked.

  “Not soon enough.” She saw Jesse wasn’t amused and gave him a serious answer. “When Ginny was a baby.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “First to the Dominican to get a quickie divorce, then . . . who the hell knows. Who cares?”

  Jesse asked, “Did he ever show any interest in Ginny at all after he left?”

  “He wrote to her for a few years, no return address. Then that stopped when Ginny was ten. The letters just stopped coming. Never another one after that.”

  “Did you ever read the letters?”

  “Never. Steve was dead to me.”

  “Did Ginny ever discuss what was in the letters with you?”

  Maxie shook her head. “Me and Ginny . . . we didn’t have that kind of relationship. She wouldn’t talk to me about stuff like that. Jeez, it near killed her when she started bleeding to come to me and let me explain the facts of life.”

  Jesse came back around the desk. “Why did you leave town so soon after Ginny went missing?”

  “For the same reason Johnny O’Hara split,” she said. “I needed to breathe. Without Ginny here, I had nothing to hold me in Paradise any longer. Nothing except pain, and I don’t like pain, Jesse. I’d always wanted to get out of this place anyway. Paradise! Yeah, right. If Ginny turned up, I was a phone call away. You think I wanted to bury myself alive like Tess? She never had much use for me, Tess, but I heard she’s like a ghost these days. She’s still in that little crumby house over on Crestview. Still goes to Mass every day. That was never for me.”

  Molly couldn’t hold her tongue. “But you sent her to Sacred Heart all those years.”

  “My folks paid for it. Said they didn’t want Ginny to turn out like me. Imagine my own folks saying that. Really knew how to hurt a girl. You got another drink there, Jesse? Suddenly I’m not feeling so chipper.”

  Jesse poured her another short one just to get her through the remainder of the interview.

  When she was done, Jesse went back to the interviews Maxie Connolly had done with the police in the immediate wake of the girls’ disappearance. Although the years had eroded her memory somewhat, her statement was consistent with what she had told the police back then. She was watching TV when Ginny went to meet Mary Kate and her other friends at the park for the fireworks and concert. She met friends for dinner. Had a few drinks. Got home around eleven-thirty on the Fourth. She went to bed and was woken up by a panicked call from Tess O’Hara early in the morning.

  Jesse explained that he could release the remains to her as soon as she could arrange for a place to take Ginny. That did it. Maxie fell off her chair onto her hands and knees and wailed. She was shaking uncontrollably. Jesse turned to Molly for help, but she was frozen. Molly’s eyes were as distant as Jesse had ever seen them.

  “Molly!” he said as he knelt down beside Maxie Connolly. He threw his arm over her shoulders. “Molly! Get her a glass of water or something. Then take Mrs. Connolly into the ladies’ room.”

  Molly finally snapped out of it, though her eyes were still very far away.

  Twenty minutes later, Suit was driving Maxie Connolly to her hotel. Molly was sitting across from Jesse. He said nothing. Molly knew all about Jesse and his silence. She was determined not to talk, but somehow words came out of her mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Jesse. I hate that woman. I guess I always have. I thought maybe it would have gone away after all these years. That’s why I didn’t say anything when you had me go pick her up. But it’s worse now.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Maxie never gave a rat’s ass about Ginny. Ginny did everything for herself. Made her own meals, washed her own clothes. She cleaned the house. Shopped. Got herself up in the morning. The only real parenting she ever got was from my folks. She raised herself. So of course it killed her to go to her mother about her first period. You won’t understand this, Jesse, but when a girl gets her period it can be special or terrible. It’s a little bit of both, I guess. Especially for a Catholic girl. We’re raised in such a schizophrenic way about that stuff. Sex is made so taboo, but having children is so meaningful. I don’t know.”

  “What aren’t you saying, Molly?”

  “About what?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Maxie Connolly was a whore and a drunk. Still is, as far as I can tell.”

  Jesse opened his mouth to speak, but Molly cut him off.

  “And don’t even bring up Crow to me. That was different. It was only once and it was only about sex and curiosity.”

  Jesse shook his head. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  Molly flushed.

  “All I was going to say was that everybody is entitled to their grief, Molly. Even Maxie Connolly. You don’t have to like her to give her that. Now, get home. We’ve got an early start tomorrow.”

  As he watched Molly walk away, Jesse realized just how little he knew about her.

  19

  Stu Cromwell kept a bottle in his drawer as well. Officially, cops and reporters were wary of the other, but they often shared common vices.

  “Hope you like rye,” Cromwell said, sliding the glass across his desk to Jesse. “It was my dad’s drink. For years I wouldn’t go near the stuff for just that reason. Now I can’t stay away from it.”

  “When it’s the only thing on the drink menu, it’s my favorite.”

  They clinked glasses.

  After a sip or two, Cromwell said, “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

  “And I didn’t expect to be here.”

  “You here to talk or to drink?”

  “A little bit of both, Stu.”

  “Well, we drank some. Now you want to talk some?”

  Jesse said, “What did you make of all those reporters at the press conference today?”

  Cromwell screwed up his face. “Reporters! Those weren’t reporters. They were leeches. Most of them will disappear in two or three days. Once the next starlet has an affair or shows up at a club holding hands with another woman, they’ll clear out and move on.”

  “You sound bitter, Stu. That the rye talking or you?”

  “Guess I’m a little jealous. Guarantee you any one of those jackals makes more money than I ever did or will. None of them have any real journalism training. Most are failed actors, but it’s tough to knock them taking the money. And there’s no real future for newspapers. Let’s face it, Jesse, this paper might not be long for this world. I spend more time on the phone with my creditors than with Martha’s oncologists.”

  “You seem to know a lot about the enemy,” Jesse said.

  “Journalism is a small fraternity that’s shrinking by the day. When I was in college, I didn’t like all my fraternity brothers, either, but I knew a lot about them.”

  Cromwell poured them both a little more rye.

  “Anything else, Jesse?”

  “Maxie Connolly.”

  Cromwell gave a tight-lipped smile. “What about her?”

  “Was she always such a—such a brassy—”

  “I believe the word you’re struggling for is broad.”

  Jesse laughed. “I was thinking character, but broad works.”

  “She got around.”

  “Stu, you just called her a broad. This is no time to go polite on me.”

  “She screwed around and she wasn’t choosy about her bedmate’s marital status, but the cops looked into that back then. You must have it in your files. They interviewed all of her beaus. Most of them didn’t even know Maxie had a daughter. At least she had the good taste to keep the men out of her own house.”

  “Any men the cops didn’t know about?” Jesse asked.

  Cromwell hesitated for a beat, then turned his palms up. “None that we could find, and we looked hard,” he said, his voice strained
.

  “Did you know her?”

  “Maxie Connolly?” He cleared his throat. “By reputation only until the girls disappeared. You’d see her around town. She was hard to miss, if you know what I mean. Back in the day, she was quite a looker, in a cheap and loud sort of way. How’s she looking these days?”

  “Still loud, but she’s forsaken cheap. She was wearing a mink coat and jewelry worth more than a few years’ worth of my salary. But after I told her she could pick up Ginny’s remains, she wasn’t looking so well.”

  The newspaperman nodded. “I think everyone assumed Maxie didn’t really give a tinker’s damn about her daughter, but you can never know how someone feels just by looking from the outside in.”

  Jesse stood. Shook Cromwell’s hand. “Thanks for the drink. Next time, the drinks are on me.”

  “Now I’ve got a question for you, Jesse. If you don’t mind?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why did you withhold Ginny Connolly’s cause of death? It was easy enough for me to find out the likely COD was a severely fractured skull. Besides, you know that stuff will become public knowledge soon enough. Were you going to use it to sort out the crazies?”

  “Bingo! The crazies come in waves. We’ve already had a few come in and call in. Just makes it easier to eliminate the first set. Do me a favor, Stu, don’t publish that for at least another day.”

  “As long as you keep me in the loop, okay?”

  When Jesse stepped outside, the weather had turned from crisp to damp and raw. The cold wind that had earlier felt bracing now cut through his exposed skin to the bone. He turned up his collar and walked back to his Explorer. He didn’t get far before he was surrounded by some of those reporters Cromwell had just warned him about. They shouted questions out to him as they stuck digital recording devices in his face. The questions were run-of-the-mill and so, too, was Jesse’s answer.

  “No comment.”

  When Jesse made it to his Explorer and drove away, he shook his head as he looked at the reporters in the rearview mirror. He hoped Cromwell was right, that they would disappear with the next whiff of celebrity scandal or mayhem. He was a patient man, but he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He didn’t suffer them at all.

  20

  Down below, the crests of the waves were chopped white by the wind. When they came ashore, they came barreling in with nasty intent. But that hadn’t stopped Maxie Connolly from putting her husband to bed and coming to that old familiar spot on the Bluffs. It had always been their special place. She was hungry for distraction, hungry to get relief from the gnawing guilt, hungry to escape the grief that, until tonight, she had so long kept at bay. All she had been able to picture in her head since leaving the police station was Ginny and Mary Kate clawing at the dirt being shoveled onto them, choking them. It didn’t matter that Chief Stone had assured her that the girls were both already dead before the blanket was placed over them and covered in a shallow layer of dirt. She wanted to get that image out of her head at whatever cost. And she wanted to see him again maybe more than anything she had ever wanted, second to having her girl back.

  Of all the men she had used and who had used her, he had been the one. It wasn’t only about the sex. That’s how she knew it then. That’s how she knew it now, twenty-five years on. She wanted to feel his arms around her again. Wanted to hear the sound of his voice. To smell his peppery cologne. Just recalling the way his cologne meshed with their sweat and the smell of their sex excited her. It had been a long, long time since a man, any man, had made her feel this way. Certainly not that limp old fool asleep in their hotel room.

  In spite of the cold. In spite of the guilt and pain, she didn’t know how much longer she could contain herself. She thought she might orgasm at the sound of his tires spitting out gravel as his car approached, but she told herself she had to hold it together. She had to. She couldn’t scare him away again. No, she had done that once, and now that she was back she knew she couldn’t risk doing it again. Losing him that first time, then losing Ginny, almost killed her.

  She turned back toward the ocean, the wind whipping her hair against her cheeks. She listened to the sound of his footsteps as he came near. She couldn’t bear to watch him for fear of falling completely to pieces. Then she heard his voice. A voice she thought she would never hear again.

  “Hello, Baby,” he said. It was what he had always called her.

  She finally turned around to look at him. “Hello yourself, Loverboy,” she said, as she always had.

  As soon as she turned around, she knew things were different. He had changed. Of course he had. How could he not? But there was something in his eyes that frightened her a little. Her fear melted away when he took her in his arms and the smell of his cologne mixed with the sea air.

  “I’ve missed you, Loverboy,” she said, her cheek pressed against his coat. “I was hoping you’d call.”

  “You knew I would.”

  “You’ve changed, Loverboy,” she said.

  “Lots of things have changed since you went away, Baby.”

  “I had to go.”

  “I know,” he said, brushing her cheek with his thumb. “I know.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened between us before. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Shhh, Baby.” He put his index finger across her lips. “It’s okay. That’s all over now.”

  “I can’t lose you again.”

  “Did you bring them with you?” he asked, cradling her head to his chest.

  He felt her nod. “In my bag.”

  “I want you, Baby.”

  “Right here? Out in the cold? Can’t we go back to your car like we used to? You used to love it when we’d come up here and be together in your car.”

  “Now, Baby. Right here. The way I like it. Turn around.”

  “But I—”

  “That wasn’t a request, Baby. You made me walk away from you once—”

  “Please don’t be mean to me tonight. Just kiss me one time and then you can do anything you want to me.”

  He leaned down and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  “Thank you, Loverboy.” Black tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Don’t thank me yet, Baby. I’m going to make it all right and take away all your pain.”

  She turned toward the ocean, lifting up her coat and skirt, sliding her panties down to her ankles, and stepping out of them. It was all she could do to choke back her tears. She had wanted this for so long. With all the men she had been with since, she had pictured him. Imagined it was his touch, not theirs. She hadn’t wanted it like this. But he was right, she had made him walk away from her once. Not again. Never again. He yanked her by the hair and shoulder, though instead of lifting up her coat and skirt, he grabbed her throat and pulled her close to him. He placed one hand firmly against the side of her jaw and the other hand firmly against the opposite side of the back of her head. And suddenly she knew she had been right to be afraid. Then, with a sharp snap, he kept his promise, taking all of her pain away forever.

  21

  Jesse was stirring a good-night drink with his index finger, looking out the window and wondering why he’d moved out here, away from town, in the first place. He wasn’t a second-guesser by nature, but since last spring he’d occasionally found himself rethinking past decisions. Not regretting them. Not beating himself up over them, not exactly. But dissecting them, trying to follow how he’d reasoned them out. To see if he had actually reasoned them out at all or whether he had simply reacted.

  He’d discussed it with Dix. Sometimes he hated bringing up new subjects with Dix because the man turned everything into a struggle. “What do you think it means?” There were moments when he swore he would strangle Dix if he asked him that again. But such was the nature of their relationship. Whenever a new topic came up, it was nearly impossible to get Dix to talk. Then it was impo
ssible to shut him up. At least, that’s the way it felt. But it had been different when Jesse mentioned his recent bout of introspection. They seemed to have switched roles.

  “How does it make you feel, questioning your decisions?” Dix asked.

  “Uneasy.”

  “Uneasy. Is that all you’ve got?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “First you say you don’t know when I ask you what you think it means. Then this? Uneasy. That’s one word, Jesse. That’s terse, even for you.”

  Jesse shrugged.

  “One word and a shrug.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “C’mon, Jesse, have I ever answered that question?”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “Indeed there is, like you walking in here and admitting to mulling over past decisions about something other than alcohol and Jenn.”

  Jesse shrugged again.

  “You feel uneasy,” Dix said. “Is it the introspection that leads to the unease or is it feeling uneasy that’s making you introspective?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do. You know. There’s only one expert on Jesse Stone in this office and it isn’t me.”

  Jesse said, “I think I’m feeling uneasy.”

  “Good.”

  “Good?”

  “Discomfort means something is going on.”

  “What?”

  “Same answer as before. I can’t know what’s up, but my sense is that you’re changing.”

  “Changing?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re really talking about, Jesse, changing? Isn’t that why you come here?”

  “Maybe.”

  “When did you start this new pattern of behavior, this looking at your decisions?”

  “Late last spring.”

  “And what happened late last—”

  But Dix never got to finish his question.

  “Suit,” Jesse said.