Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Jesse nodded. “That’s about it.”

  “Then who, Colonel Mustard?”

  “When I catch the killer, I’ll let you know.”

  “Okay, wait . . . you know Dragoa didn’t kill Maxie Connolly. But is he the suspect in the girls’ murders or am I missing something here?”

  “What I can tell you is that something’s up with Dragoa.”

  “But I thought you just said—”

  Jesse held up is palm. “First he hit on a woman who winds up dead a few hours later. Then he shows up at Mary Kate O’Hara’s funeral. Unexpectedly, too.”

  “He does seem to be showing up in interesting places,” Healy said, scratching his chin.

  “Can you spare a man? With Gabe still in rehab and Suit on light duty, I can’t afford to dedicate anyone to Dragoa. When I start putting all this stuff on the street over the next day or two, I’m thinking maybe he’ll get spooked and show his hand.”

  “If he has a hand to show.”

  Jesse made a face. “I know it’s flimsy, but when flimsy’s what you’ve got, you go with it.”

  “Your instincts are good enough for me. For a few days, sure, I can give you somebody to tail the fisherman.”

  “Not just somebody.”

  “Don’t sweat the details, Jesse. Dragoa eats half his pickle at lunch, you’ll know it and you’ll know whether it was a kosher dill or a sweet gherkin. But once he takes his boat out . . .” Healy shrugged. “Well, I can’t help you there. Black helicopters and drones aren’t in this year’s budget.”

  “Understood.”

  “When should I have my man start?” Healy asked.

  “Tomorrow, early, before sunup. Alexio’s been known to head straight from the bar or the drunk tank to his boat. Here’s Dragoa’s address and where he docks his boat,” Jesse said, pulling a slip of paper out of his back pocket. “Let’s give my lies a couple of hours to percolate.”

  Healy took the paper, waved it in the air. “Pretty confident I was going to agree to lend you a man.”

  “Let’s just say I was hopeful and leave it at that.”

  “You owe me a drink.”

  “Several.”

  Healy extended his right hand. “You got it.”

  There was an insistent knocking on the conference room door and an impatient person on the other side.

  49

  Jesse had never seen Bill Marchand look beat-up and disheveled. That was no longer the case. Men like Marchand had an image to maintain and usually went to great lengths to protect it. It wasn’t so much out of vanity or ego, as people often assumed. Defending their images was something Jesse understood about politicos that most people got wrong. The person beneath the image, rotten or pure, beau or bully, was almost beside the point. The electorate voted for the image, not the person behind it. Jesse thanked his lucky stars that his job was by appointment because he didn’t think he could win an election, nor would he ever want to.

  Although Marchand had been impatient to get into the room, he seemed to be fumbling for his words. This, too, was a phenomenon Jesse had never before witnessed. Marchand, even when bearing bad news, usually delivered it calmly and without hesitation. Just when Jesse was about to come to the selectman’s rescue, Marchand found his footing and his words.

  “Can a friend get a drink around here?”

  This is going to be bad, Jesse thought. Maybe worse than he’d anticipated.

  Jesse threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Sure, Bill. Let’s go into my office.”

  Jesse got a funny feeling in his stomach, a feeling he had had only twice in his life. The first time had been when he was in A ball and got called into his manager’s office after going hitless in three consecutive games. He knew then as he knew now that it was trouble. The other time was when he found out Jenn was cheating on him. Both times it signaled the end of things. One ending was temporary. He earned his starting job back the next week. One ending wasn’t, though it took a decade for him and Jenn to realize it.

  It was strange how things worked. Jesse’s job had been threatened before, more than once, and he’d taken it in stride. Jesse always took life in its stride, sometimes with an assist from Johnnie Walker. It was his way. He was tough, a man unto himself. Molly had summed him up best when she compared him to Crow. She said they were both self-contained men, immune from the petty vanities and forces that swayed weaker men. He wasn’t feeling immune presently. Just at the moment he had finally accepted that Paradise would be his life’s work, he was going down.

  When they were settled in at his desk, Jesse poured some of the same Irish he had poured for Maxie Connolly only a few days earlier.

  “You sure you won’t drink with me?” Marchand asked, his hand a bit unsteady.

  “Too early even for me.” Jesse managed a laugh.

  “You sure?”

  “Bill, say what you’ve got to say. We keep on like this, you’re going to offer me a cigarette, a blindfold, and ask if I have any last words.”

  Marchand didn’t guzzle his drink, but he didn’t sip it, either. He stretched his neck. Spoke.

  “Jesse, you’ve got a week.”

  Although he felt a warm sense of relief, Jesse sat stony-faced. A week could be an eternity or it could be over in the blink of an eye, but at least he still had his job and a chance to do right by the dead girls.

  “Did you hear me, Jesse?”

  “I’ve got a bad shoulder, not bad ears.”

  “The mayor wanted your ass on a silver platter and she wanted it right now. My other colleagues were pretty tepid in their support of you. I bought you a week.”

  “A week to solve three homicides, two of which happened twenty-five years ago. Should I find the killers of Judge Crater in my spare time?”

  “Jesse, you can be an ungrateful SOB and a hard man to like sometimes.”

  “Sorry, Bill. I know that most of the time you are my sole backer in town.”

  Marchand grabbed at his chest to feign a heart attack. “I think I need another drink and some CPR. Was that an apology I just heard coming out of your mouth?”

  “Giving me a time limit isn’t going to solve these cases for you or for anyone you bring in to sit in this chair.”

  “I know that, Jesse. I told them all that. I told them that till I was blue in the face.” Marchand stood, looking worse than he had when Jesse had laid eyes on him earlier. He walked to the office door and turned back to Jesse and in a voice as cool as a crocodile’s said, “You’ve got a week.”

  50

  Stu Cromwell was happy to see Jesse walk into his office. It was easy for Jesse to read Stu’s smile. Murder sells papers, and just recently Paradise had plenty to sell. And Jesse knew that the few crumbs he’d thrown Cromwell’s way had let the newspaperman sell some stories to larger news services and earn a little money beyond the sales of his own paper, the circulation of which was forever dwindling. Until their last visit together, Jesse hadn’t realized just how dire the paper’s situation was. If the current events kept the paper going a little longer, so be it.

  Cromwell nodded, gestured to the empty seat across from him, but didn’t get up.

  “Jesse.”

  “Stu.”

  Cromwell reached into his drawer, pulled out a fresh bottle of Canadian Club and two glasses. “Drink?”

  “Everybody’s starting early today.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Forget it, Stu. None for me, but go right ahead.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, twisting the cap and breaking the seal. “You sure?”

  Jesse nodded. Cromwell poured and sipped.

  “You’ve been hitting it mighty hard lately, Stu. Last time I was in here, the bottle was still pretty full.”

  Cromwell looked confused, then recovered. “Yeah. Between Martha and the long hours since
the bodies have been discovered. You know how it is.”

  “I do.”

  “So what can I do you for, Jesse? You have something for me?”

  “I might, but first I’d like to talk about Paradise.”

  “What about it?”

  “When the girls went missing, what was the town like? I haven’t been able to get a grip on that, no matter how many old files I read or pictures I look at. Everyone tells me it was smaller then. I get that much.”

  Cromwell poured himself some more rye, then put away the bottle and the extra glass he’d taken out for Jesse. He sat back in his seat.

  “It was a different place back then,” he said, a wistful look on his face. “Obviously we were just as close to Boston, but it might as well have been a different world. It was a smaller town with a small-town feel. But for the ocean and the whaling nonsense, it was more like northern New England, more Maine or New Hampshire than a secondary suburb of Boston. Does that make any sense?”

  “Some.”

  “It was less affluent. The old families that had established the town were either dying off, moving out, or running out of funds. Stiles Island wasn’t very developed yet. The people who lived here then were, for the most part, people born and raised here. We’d had a few ‘white flight’ refugees from Boston, but not many to speak of. There wasn’t a whole lot of crime.”

  “Sounds a little too good to be true.”

  Cromwell sipped some more of his drink. “Don’t misunderstand. It wasn’t nirvana. We had our issues. The Swap was getting pretty bad and there weren’t a whole lot of jobs being created in the area. We had our share of abusive parents, wife beaters, drunks, and thieves, but until the girls went missing, most people left their cars and houses unlocked.”

  Jesse asked, “Are you saying that the town changed when Mary Kate and Ginny went missing?”

  “No. It had already started to change, but that July fourth is a convenient line of demarcation. By the time the girls disappeared, the whole world had changed. It had begun to contract, and as the world seemed to get smaller, Paradise seemed to lose its small town–ness. Maybe it was AIDS or MTV or the first computers, I don’t know. It just became harder to be apart from the rest of the world. Stiles Island was slated for development. The yacht club was expanding and people with money had begun to move in from Boston and New York City. But when the girls went missing, it became an easy dividing line with which to view Paradise’s history. And here’s the hardest part to believe. Paradise supported two daily newspapers. Amazing.”

  Jesse took it all in, thinking if he had any other questions. Cromwell got impatient.

  “Anything else, Jesse? You mentioned you had something for me.”

  “I said I might have something for you.”

  “Do you?” He finished his drink.

  “Remember I told you about Maxie Connolly’s missing items?”

  “Was on this morning’s front page.” He held up a copy of the paper for Jesse to see, his index finger pointing at the headline:

  NO PEACE EVEN IN DEATH

  MAXIE CONNOLLY’S GOODS GONE

  “I take it you haven’t seen this until now,” Cromwell said.

  “I’ve been a little busy today, Stu.”

  “Sorry, but what about Maxie’s missing items?”

  “They’re not missing anymore. We found them in the apartment of a cabdriver, a man with a record named Rod Wiethop. W-i-e-t-h-o-p.” Jesse spelled it out and slid a file across Cromwell’s desk. “Here’s his driver’s license photo, his license plate number, and a description of his car. As far as we know, he was the last person to see Maxie alive.”

  “I take it Mr. Wiethop isn’t in police custody?”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Do you think he robbed her?”

  “Possibly.”

  Cromwell smiled. “Possibly?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Are you now questioning whether or not Maxie committed suicide?”

  “Draw your own conclusions. That’s what newspaper people do, isn’t it?”

  Cromwell’s smile got bigger. “Can we go off the record?”

  “Okay,” Jesse agreed. “Off the record.”

  “Do you think Wiethop killed her?”

  “No.”

  “But you think somebody did?”

  “Maybe.”

  Cromwell was silent.

  “You have my permission to attribute all the on-the-record stuff to me. You print any of that off-the-record stuff and attribute it to me, Stu, we’ll have a major problem. It’ll be personal, not official.” Jesse walked to the door. “By the way, I’m about to call a press conference for . . .” He looked at his watch. “For one p.m. You’ll want to be there.”

  “About Maxie?” Cromwell asked.

  “Everything but. Maxie’s your exclusive.”

  “Anything else, Jesse?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What?”

  “Bring a big notepad. You’ll need it.”

  51

  That was the odd thing, that it should have been the three of them to have killed the girls. It wasn’t like they were that close, not then and certainly not now. Of all the many things haunting him about that long-ago Fourth of July, it was that it should have been the three of them. There were a thousand what-ifs that might have changed all their destinies, but it was his curse that he should be bound to these two morons for eternity. They had been teammates. Friendly enough, but not really friends. John and Alexio were buds. He and Zevon were close, but it wasn’t like they all hung out together. Before that night, he couldn’t recall a single time when he’d hung out with Millner and Dragoa without the other guys around.

  That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. For the weeks leading up to that Fourth, the plan was for him and Zevon to meet Ginny Connolly and Mary Kate O’Hara at the park and for the four of them to head out to Humpback Point. Just the four of them and no one pretended they were headed out there to watch the fireworks from Stiles. They’d kept it pretty quiet. The girls were sixteen, and though no one in Paradise made a big deal about statutory rape back then, they all agreed it was best not to advertise. He’d scored half an ounce of good weed and taken bottles of Southern Comfort and Jack Daniel’s from his dad’s liquor cabinet. He’d even paid Dragoa twenty bucks to use his rowboat. It was all perfect until Zevon backed out that morning. Fucking Zevon had ruined everything and paid for it with his life. But not even that sacrifice could undo the old blood. Now, as he walked to the maintenance shed, he knew there would be more blood. There would have to be.

  And here they were again, the three of them. They had tried very hard not to ever be seen in public together for fear of anyone in town piecing together the events of that night. In spite of the fact that it was pretty clear early on, after the police interviews, that both girls had kept the secret, they could never be one hundred percent certain. They had worried most about Molly Burke. Although they were seniors and didn’t know any of the girls very well, they’d heard that Molly Burke and Mary Kate were best friends. Dragoa, the stupid hothead, had suggested killing Molly, but had been voted down. They had another way of keeping tabs on Molly. He convinced John and Alexio that if Molly knew anything, she would tell Zevon and that Zevon would tell him. Of course, in the end, the joke was on him. He was the one to confess their sins to Zevon.

  “Did you hear what Stone said on the TV today?” Dragoa said almost before he’d stepped fully into the maintenance shed. “They got our DNA, maybe.”

  “I heard.”

  “They found hair and fiber samples from that goddamned picnic blanket you made us wrap them in,” Millner said. “I told you to just chuck ’em in the freakin’ hole. I mean, jeez, they was already dead. What the hell did it matter?”

  “It’s twenty-five years too late for second-guessing, guy
s. Besides, we would have had to get rid of the blanket anyway. If we burned it, we would have attracted attention. If we tossed it in Sawtooth Creek, we risked having it traced back to the building we buried them in. And don’t forget, that blanket is the thing that helped us carry their bodies without getting covered in their blood. Sometimes there aren’t good choices, just less bad ones.”

  “They know there was more than one of us,” Millner said.

  “They don’t know. They think it’s a possibility. Very different things.”

  “Cut it out, man,” Dragoa said. “You heard that reporter from Boston. She said that because one of the girls was stabbed and that the other had a fractured skull that it meant there had to be more than one killer.”

  “She said it suggested there might be, not that there was. Jesse didn’t confirm it. He said he will follow the evidence.”

  Millner laughed. “Stone always says that crap. Do you think they really found all that evidence like Stone is saying?”

  “Well, maybe if Alexio had been able to control his appetites better. Maybe if he didn’t stab Mary Kate so many times, there wouldn’t have been so much blood and a need for—”

  “I was drunk.”

  “You’re always drunk.”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” Dragoa said, charging at him. “I’ll kill you, you mother—”

  Millner grabbed him, clamping his arms around the fisherman. “Relax, buddy. Relax. It don’t matter now.”

  “Johnny’s right. I’m sorry. None of that matters now. The only thing we can do is wait it out.”

  “We been waiting it out for twenty-five years,” Millner said.

  “Then a few more days won’t matter.”

  Dragoa didn’t like it. “Easy enough for you to say.”

  “You’re wrong, Alexio. It’s not any easier for me. I’ll see what I can find out and I’ll keep in touch same way as always.”

  There was no handshaking when he left. There never was. As he walked quickly back to his vehicle under cover of darkness, his mind was churning as it had on that beautiful summer night all those years ago.