Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  38

  He had decided on a spot he thought would make sense, a place where someone walking along the Bluffs might eventually stumble onto Maxie’s handbag. It wasn’t too far from where they used to meet when he thought all he wanted was her. Even now, having murdered her and coldly tossed her body off the Bluffs, he flushed at the memories of their stolen moments in his car, of the times they could sneak off to a Boston hotel for a night. Then there were the times they had pushed their luck beyond all reason, like when they’d run into each other outside the restrooms at the Gray Gull. He remembered getting weak at the sight of her, then his fury at the thought of her being at the bar with another man. How Maxie fanned the flames by rubbing up against him and taunting him.

  “Do you want me, Loverboy?” she’d say, her lips brushing his ear, her warm cigarette breath against his neck. “Get rid of that stuck-up fiancée of yours and meet me here in an hour.”

  He exploded, pushing her into the men’s room, locking the door behind them, taking her in the stall. It was all over in an instant, but was so much more exciting than anything he had done with any other woman before or since. His heart raced at the thought that he had ever been so stupid or so impulsive. Thinking back on it, he wondered if Maxie hadn’t set him up. Was she really there with another man or did she follow me to the restaurant? He’d been so blind back then that he had never considered the possibility she was lying to him. That was all so long ago, but it felt alive in him.

  Before leaving the spot and going back to his office to retrieve Maxie’s bag, he smiled at the cleverness of his plan. How he would fashion a kind of suicide shrine out of Maxie’s bag, a file photo of Ginny, and a couple candles. The cops, even Jesse Stone, would eat it up. He knew the press would. He was sure of that. He envisioned the headlines:

  MOTHER PRAYS AT DEAD GIRL’S SHRINE

  ENDS IT ALL

  He was still feeling the rush of pride as he pulled up in front of his office. All he had to do was get the stuff, head back up to the Bluffs, and it would be over. He’d worry about the missing letter when the time came. If it came. For now, it was one thing at a time. The street was quiet when he stepped out of his car and put the key in the office door lock.

  “Hey!” a man’s gravelly voice cut through the quiet and the dark.

  He startled, fumbling his keys.

  “Relax,” said the voice, and a man stepped out of the shadows of a nearby storefront. He was a rough-looking guy with a face full of dark stubble and a dangling cigarette. “I’m here to do you a favor.”

  “Really?” he said. Removing the keys from the lock, he worked them between the fingers of his right glove. He didn’t want a fight. Hadn’t studied or sparred in years, but he hadn’t forgotten his training and one blow with a fist full of keys was better than just a fist if it came to that. “You’re here to do me a favor. And do I get to know the name of my benefactor?”

  “Cut the crap, mister. We need to talk.”

  The keys were in place. He forced his body to relax, preparing to strike with his right arm if the guy got too close. “About what?”

  “About how I seen you drive up to the Bluffs the other night to snuff the blonde.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Cell phones are great things, you know, especially ’cause they come with cameras. I got a nice shot of your car, plate and all, with you behind the wheel. I thought it was real weird, her having me drop her off up there alone like that in the freezing cold. I figured I might snag me some married guy going up there to meet her for a little backseat bingo.”

  “Look, whatever your name is, I’m sure—”

  “Forget my name and forget the stalling. See, here’s the thing, I was going to leave it alone. I figured, how much could I hit some poor working stiff up for ’cause I caught him meeting some old broad up in the Bluffs? It didn’t seem worth the trouble. Why am I going to screw up some guy’s marriage for a few hundred bucks? But when the police chief shows up at my door and starts busting my chops about the blonde, I got kind of curious, you know? Then when I find out the blonde offed herself, going over Caine’s Bluff, I’m thinking maybe she had a little help with the takeoff. Funny thing is, I got a way of tracking down plate numbers and when I traced yours . . . man, I really got interested.”

  “Damn it!”

  “You got that right. See, like I said, I’m here to do you a favor.”

  He put on a brave act. “Even if you do have a photo of my car going up to the Bluffs, so what? It’s evidence of nothing. I could have gone up there two weeks ago, last year, last evening. In any case, electronics are easily tampered with. There’s nothing tying me to that unfortunate woman or to her suicide. Sorry, you’ll have to go squeeze some other orange to get your juice.”

  Rod Wiethop pulled something out of his pocket and held it in the yellowish beam of the streetlight. “You know, I don’t think so, mister. I think I’m gonna be able to squeeze all the juice I need outta you for as long as I’m thirsty. See, after the chief come talk to me, I went down to the garage and went over my cab. People are dropping all kinds of stuff in the cab all the time: drugs, groceries, gifts, underwear . . . all sorts of things. And the blonde, she dropped this.”

  “An envelope. Why should I care—”

  “You know, I’m losing my patience with you now,” Wiethop said. “I ain’t your wife. Deny, deny, deny might work with her, but not with me. See, I got this letter here from you to the blonde that would pretty much blow your life up. Man, what were you thinking to put that stuff down in writing?”

  “I wasn’t thinking at all. That was the problem. Perhaps you’re right, let’s discuss your terms over a drink. Come in.”

  Wiethop smiled. “That’s more like it. I guess I could use a friend.”

  “Yes,” he said, “friends.”

  39

  Tamara Elkin tried pouring Jesse another drink, but he waved her off. She decided she’d had enough as well and put the bottle back in the kitchen. When she came back into Jesse’s living room, she plopped herself down in his recliner across from the sofa on which Jesse had kicked up his feet. Neither of them spoke and neither seemed the least bit uncomfortable. Then she became aware of Jesse staring at her hair.

  “Many men have tried to figure out the enigma that is my hair, Jesse Stone,” she said, a laugh in her voice. “And many have failed.”

  “Any live to tell the tale?”

  “The lucky ones.”

  He shook his head at her, smiled. But she noticed something off in his smile.

  She asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Jesse, we’ve been friends for, what, two days? And no offense, but you’re not as inscrutable as you’d like to believe you are. So let’s hear it.” She crooked one of her long, tapered fingers at him and wiggled it. “Something’s bothering you. Besides, isn’t sharing part of the whole friendship thing?”

  “The panties,” he said.

  “I don’t know about you. You’re sending me mixed messages there, Chief. I thought discussing my underwear was off-limits if we were going to be pals.”

  “Not yours. Maxie Connolly’s.”

  She laughed that deep laugh of hers. “You, sir, are a unique individual. Given my chosen career, you can imagine I’ve had some strange discussions in my time, but discussing a dead woman’s missing panties is a first.”

  He smiled, but again it was a troubled smile. “It’s more than her panties,” he said. “Her handbag and cell phone are missing, too.”

  “I can’t help you there, but like I said on the phone, some gals do go commando-style. And from what the buzz is around about her, it seems to me the late Maxie Connolly might have been a prime candidate for AARP Commando of the Year Award.”

  “If all that was missing was her panties, it wouldn’t bother me
as much. I saw surveillance video of her leaving her hotel room with her bag and she went straight from the hotel to the Bluffs.”

  Tamara asked, “How did she get there?”

  “Cab.”

  “Well, Sherlock, you might want to have a talk with the cabdriver.”

  “Did that.”

  “And?”

  “And I think I better go have another talk with him,” Jesse said. “And you, Doc, I think it’s time for you to get going.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. We can’t do friendly sleepovers every night.”

  “Tempted?”

  He said, “I didn’t think there was any question of that.”

  Tamara stood. “Just checking. You know, I won’t hold it against you if you give in to it on occasion.”

  “But I will.”

  She wagged a finger at him. “Oh, you’re one of those.”

  “One of those what?” Jesse asked.

  “Moralist.”

  He tilted his head. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “What would you say?”

  “That I can usually sense right from wrong.”

  “I don’t know, Jesse. I look at the world and the bodies that come into my morgue and I wonder if I know what’s right anymore.”

  “Let’s say I know what’s wrong. Easier to know what’s wrong.”

  “You’re an interesting man, Jesse Stone, but you’re out of place here.”

  “In Paradise?”

  “Yes, but that’s not what I mean, exactly,” she said. “I mean you were born in the wrong century. You should have been sheriff in a small frontier town.”

  He didn’t say anything to that because he’d had that same thought a thousand times himself. It was one of the reasons he loved Westerns so much. As a kid, he often pictured himself as the sheriff in High Noon or as Wild Bill Hickok cleaning up Dodge City. When he thought about it seriously, Jesse realized that right and wrong probably weren’t any less complicated back then, but it was easier to pretend they were.

  When Tamara had gone, Jesse sat in front of the TV and clicked through the channels, looking for a Western.

  40

  Jesse tried to reconcile the size of the closed white coffin with the skeleton of the girl inside. He tried to reconcile the images of the girl, of her mugging for the camera with Molly and Ginny, with the dirty bones found in a hole on Trench Alley. He stopped soon after he began. These weren’t the kinds of things Jesse focused on. He didn’t see the point. The dead were just that, dead. If humans possessed souls and if there was something that came after this world, Mary Kate’s had gone there a long time ago. The rest of it, these few hours at the funeral home, were for the less fortunate, the ones left behind to suffer.

  Jesse made his appearance at the funeral home before receding into the backdrop. He paid his respects to Tess O’Hara and Mary Kate’s sisters and their families. One of the grandkids looked a lot like her late aunt. Mary Kate’s father was nowhere in sight. No surprise in that. But Jesse was surprised by the paltry turnout. Then he remembered what Healy had said to him about small towns and shame. They all just wanted to forget, to go to work, come home and have dinner with their families, watch TV, and be left alone. They wanted to forget. It was Jesse’s job to remember.

  He had given Molly the day off to attend the wake and the service, but she came and sat beside him in one of the empty back rows of folding chairs at the funeral home. Molly’s jaw was clenched tightly. Lately, that seemed to be her default expression. The rest of her face was blank, her eyes far, far away.

  “Do you think she’ll be lonely, Jesse?” Molly said, her voice a brittle whisper.

  “How do you mean?”

  “She’s had Ginny there to hold her all these years. Now . . .”

  Jesse turned to stare at Molly. This was a side of her he had never before seen. He understood that she felt guilty about something. Maybe that she had lived happily all these years, had raised a family and built a career, while her friends had been murdered and left to molder in a filthy hole in a forgotten building. But Jesse sensed there were other things at play here. And there was a question he had wanted to ask her from the very start, that in deference to their relationship, he had not asked. He had hoped she would just come to him and explain, but she hadn’t. He thought, for both of their sakes, the time had come to ask the question.

  “Come with me,” he said, standing and walking out back of the funeral home.

  Snow was falling in big, lazy flakes. A white dusting covered the few cars that would follow the hearse to Sacred Heart Catholic Church. They stood close to each other under an overhang.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You know what.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “If Mary Kate was your best friend and Ginny was a friend of yours who grew up only two houses away from you, why weren’t you there that night?”

  Molly looked as uncomfortable as Jesse had ever seen her. He put his hand on her shoulder, friend to friend. Molly’s mouth opened and closed. No words came out. She was torn.

  He repeated the question. “Why, Molly?”

  “Mary Kate and I were fighting over a boy. We hadn’t spoken to each other in weeks.”

  “The boy who you mentioned when we were on Stiles Island, was he who you were fighting over?”

  Molly nodded, looking very stoic.

  “What was his name?”

  “Warren. He went to Sacred Heart Boys.”

  “Older?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this, Jesse.”

  “I know you don’t, but you have to talk about it to someone.”

  “Not now. Not today, of all days.”

  “Did Mary Kate take Warren away from you, Molly?”

  “Please, Jesse, stop. I can’t do this now.”

  Jesse took his hand off her shoulder and watched her head back inside. He had been in therapy long enough to know that Molly would tell him when she was ready and not before. Jesse turned his attention to the weather, looked at his watch, and decided he’d better get over to the church.

  41

  Sacred Heart Catholic Church was a little out of place in Paradise. It was too large for a small town. It was more suited to Boston or New York. A Gothic Revival structure built from great blocks of light gray stone turned nearly black with a century’s worth of coal dust and oil soot, the church was impressive to behold, made even more so by its position atop the highest point in town inland of the Bluffs. When its stone steeple and cross were lit up, they were visible for miles around. The rest of the campus, the school buildings, garages, and other structures, were far more mundane.

  Jesse parked his Explorer perpendicular to the church entrance, but down the hill a bit and behind some ivy-covered fencing. It gave him a very good view of things without making his presence obvious to the attendees. He wanted to sit back and observe from a distance. He was hoping to see an unexpected mourner, a face that didn’t seem to belong. The turnout at the funeral home had been so small and no one there had seemed out of place. Sacred Heart was something else. It was large enough that you could slip in and out unnoticed. You could be a silhouette in a back pew if you wished. Jesse didn’t know that he expected much in the way of results. He had made so little headway so far that he was willing to give it a try.

  He called in to the station while he waited for the hearse to show.

  “Suit, I’m at the church. The guys in place?”

  “They’ll keep the media away from the family as best they can.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “Police chief from Helton called. Alexio Dragoa’s alibi checks out for the night Maxie Connolly killed herself.”

  “I figured.”

  “The roads bad out there?”

  “You making small talk w
ith me, Suit?”

  “I’m going nuts in here, Jesse.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’ll get back on the street when I’m ready to put you there.”

  Jesse tapped the end-call button on the touch screen. The fact was that Jesse didn’t know he would ever feel right about putting Suit back on the street. Suit’s getting shot the way he did had thrown Jesse a curve he hadn’t learned how to hit. He stared at the phone in his palm, thought about finally making that call to Dix.

  Somebody rapped their knuckles against the driver’s-side window. Jesse, trying very hard not to look startled, turned to see Stu Cromwell lurking. He lowered the window.

  “Jesse.”

  “Stu.”

  “You here on official business or are you going to the service, Jesse?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  Cromwell said, “Since we’re talking, let me ask. You got anything for me?”

  “Maybe I do. We can’t locate some of Maxie Connolly’s personal effects. Items we know she must have had with her when she went up to the Bluffs.”

  “Like what?”

  “Her cell phone, for one,” Jesse said.

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “Not yet, but you should get some mileage out of that.”

  “Some. I’m sure the missing stuff will turn up.”

  “That makes one of us,” Jesse said.

  “How was the turnout at the viewing?”

  “Light. The family, Molly and me, but only a few other people.”

  Cromwell nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “Not to me.”