Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  The Parmenter House was one of the most beautiful houses in all of Paradise. People came from all over the States to see it. Unlike the muscular brick Victorians up on the Bluffs, the Parmenter House was a full-out painted lady. It had two turrets, a wraparound porch, a widow’s walk, eyebrow windows, all manner of gingerbread turnings, and a gazebo. There were at least four different kinds of siding used to adorn the outside, everything from fish scales to clapboards. And the color scheme involved an equal number of colors. It had once been home to Wexford Parmenter, a railroad man who’d relocated from Boston in the 1890s. He’d left the house to his son Wexford Junior, who had left it in turn to his daughter Corrina, who had left it to her daughter Martha. Martha had willed it to her husband.

  Jesse knocked on Stu Cromwell’s door. He supposed he could have bluffed his way through it and not waited for the lab results to come back. But to his way of thinking, Maxie Connolly’s justice had already been months delayed and he wasn’t willing to risk losing an arrest because of his impatience. So he’d gotten a comparison sample and sent it to the state forensics lab to make sure it matched the DNA from the unknown contributor’s hair and skin evidence they found on Maxie Connolly’s panties. As he waited on the porch, he noticed some hints of green on the confused hedges that lined the property. If the weather stayed this warm for another week, he wondered if confused bees would come out and join the party.

  Stu Cromwell came to the door, and when he saw it was Jesse standing at his threshold, his body sagged, but he smiled.

  “I suppose I’ve been waiting for you to knock since the day the weather turned warm. Come in,” he said. “Go into the parlor.”

  Jesse didn’t step in. Instead he pointed to the cruiser parked at the curb. “There’s another car parked on Hemlock behind the house, so don’t make this difficult.” The nine-millimeter in Jesse’s hand still felt odd to him, though he had owned one for many years and had occasion use it. He showed the semiautomatic to Cromwell. “And Stu, no martial-arts heroics. I’ve got a black belt in bullets.”

  “There won’t be any trouble, Jesse. I give you my word. Please step in. I’ll come out as soon as we’re done talking.”

  Jesse went into the parlor and sat on a fussy brocade sofa with frills and tassels. The house looked a mess. Cromwell noticed Jesse notice.

  “Since Martha passed, I haven’t seen the point,” he said. “Drink?”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Then I’ll drink alone.”

  Cromwell poured some rye into a cut-crystal tumbler. He didn’t make any silly gestures or toasts. He just drank it. Quickly poured himself another and drank it, too. He sagged even more. “How did you know?”

  “They found Wiethop’s body in his car in a lake in Connecticut.”

  “I know that!” He slammed the glass down against the marble fireplace, smashing it to pieces. “I put him there, for heaven’s sakes. I just needed to buy time until Martha died. How did you know it was me?”

  “You left a bottle of rye behind in the car. That was sloppy and it made me curious. Wiethop was a vodka drinker, and frankly, Stu, you’re the only person I know who drinks rye. Once I got curious, it was easy for me to find out that you and Martha owned a cottage on another lake less than two miles from where they found Wiethop. Did you think you were going to get away with it?”

  “The bastard was trying to blackmail me, Jesse. He had the letter.”

  “The letter?”

  “The one I wrote to Maxie all those years ago. There were things in that letter I couldn’t have come to light while Martha was still alive. After all she had done for me and with how she was suffering, I just couldn’t have it. I wouldn’t have it! I suppose if I had any money to pay that scummy little man, I would have paid for his silence, but the cupboard was bare.”

  “Did you kill Maxie Connolly?”

  Cromwell ignored the question. “I loved her once. I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t love at all. But she had me under her spell. I lived and breathed her. When I had her I wanted her again while I was still inside her. She was magical that way. And the silly part is, she really, desperately loved me, too. Can you imagine a less likely pair?”

  “But you were engaged to Martha.”

  “I was, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t keep away from Maxie. I wrote these silly love letters to her. They were increasingly desperate. I was trying to explain to her how I couldn’t give her up, nor could I break my promise to Martha. And in one letter, the one Wiethop found in his cab, I said some awful and foul things about Martha. I was just so lust-drunk and foolish. I had just never had a woman like Maxie. I was such an idiot. Once Maxie had the letter, she threatened me that if I didn’t find a way to leave Martha on my own, she would show the letter to her and do it for me.”

  “You broke it off.”

  Cromwell nodded. “God, Jesse, you do understand. What else could I do? Maxie’s threat was like a cold slap in the face, and I suddenly saw what I had done and with whom I’d gotten involved. I broke it off immediately after Maxie made the threat. I didn’t care then if she showed the letter to Martha. It was better, I thought, than getting in any deeper with Maxie. But Maxie said she couldn’t go through with it and that she was so sorry.” He paused, drank directly from the bottle. “She said she was desperate, too. That she never thought she could have a smart man, a man with manners and class.” He laughed joylessly at himself.

  “But it was too late,” Jesse said.

  “Exactly. I suppose I never stopped lusting after her. I always dreamed about sleeping with her again, but she disgusted me as a human being. She was so coarse. When I wouldn’t have her back, she went wild, trying to hurt me and punish herself by sleeping around with almost anyone. She would call me and tell me about them and the things they would do. It was so low of her, but that sort of thing was all she knew. It was the only weapon she had and she used it. And even then, I . . .” Cromwell drifted off, lost in the memories of the woman he’d murdered.

  “So when Maxie came back for Ginny’s funeral, what? Did she try to blackmail you?”

  Cromwell shook his head. “No, she offered to return the letters if I would only see her and be with her. She claimed that she had never stopped loving me. That she would do anything to make up for the mistake she had made twenty-five years before. So I agreed. We met at a spot up in the Bluffs that used to be our rendezvous. I made her believe we were going to have one last tryst and then I snapped her neck like a twig. I drove her farther down the Bluffs and tossed her over.”

  “But you took her panties. Why?”

  Cromwell stared at Jesse as if he were speaking Arabic. “Haven’t you heard a word I said?”

  Jesse moved on. “Did she have the letters with her?”

  “Yes. I thought so.”

  “Then why did you kill her?” Jesse said. “You didn’t have to kill her.”

  “But I did.”

  “Why?”

  “I couldn’t chance Maxie talking, not after all that Martha had risked to buy the paper. She had risked everything for me. I couldn’t let scandal and cancer eat up her last few months of life.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself, Stu? Does it help you sleep at night?”

  Cromwell’s face reddened, his voice strained. “What are you talking about? Of course that’s why I killed Maxie. I had to.”

  “No you didn’t. You had all the letters. At least you thought you did. Martha was in no state to care one way or the other. No, Stu, sorry,” Jesse said. “I don’t buy it.”

  The newspaperman bowed his head. “She hurt me, Jesse, in the most profound way I have ever been hurt. Maxie took from me the only obsession I ever had. She ruined that and for twenty-five years I bore what she did to me in my guts like a slow-leaking balloon full of acid. There were times that I thought it would eat me alive. I had to end the pain.”

  “H
ow’s that working for you, Stu?”

  “I’m ready now.”

  Jesse cuffed Cromwell and walked him out. When Peter Perkins got to the porch, Jesse recited the Miranda warning and told Perkins to take Cromwell to the station and book him.

  “You coming, Jesse?” Perkins asked.

  “In a little while.”

  Jesse stood on the porch and watched Perkins load Cromwell into the backseat of the cruiser. The air, which earlier implied the scent of flowers, had turned a nasty shade of raw, smelling now only of chill and the sea. The late-day sun had disappeared behind a sickly gray veil of clouds, and the bare trees on the Parmenter property twisted in the gusts that had kicked up hard and mean. February had come back home to roost. Stepping down onto the granite path, Jesse wondered why victories were always short-lived and why the taste of a win was never quite as sweet as the bitterness of losing. Someday, he would have to ask the devil.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Chris Pepe, Ivan Held, David Hale Smith, Helen Brann, and the Estate of Robert B. Parker. Of course none of this would have been possible without Mr. Parker’s creation of the Jesse Stone novels. A big thanks to Michael Barson.

  Thanks to Tom Schreck and Ace Atkins.

  As always, my deepest love and appreciation goes to my wife and children. Without Rosanne, Kaitlin, and Dylan, none of this would have happened nor would it have meant a thing.

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