Robert B. Parker's Stone's Throw

by Mike Lupica

  “You try to give him a little shove in Billy’s direction?” Jesse said.

  Crow let that one go.

  “I came here on my own today,” Crow said. “And we both know I wouldn’t be here if I’d killed the guy. And wouldn’t have been there last night if I killed the guy. Or gone to see his wife if I was planning to kill the guy.”

  Jesse believed him, even if he was a killer and thief. And an enforcer. Jesse had known bad men since he’d come to Paradise from L.A., starting with Hasty Hathaway, the president of the Board of Selectmen who’d hired him, and who turned out to be a murderer himself. But none had been worse than Jimmy Macklin. Crow had worked for Macklin. Jesse would always be as wary of him as he was of Jesse. But he had done what he said he was going to do with Amber Francisco, been on the right side of that.

  “You can trust me on this,” Crow said.

  “Bullshit,” they both heard.

  Molly walked in then.

  EIGHT

  She got the same jolt she had gotten in the past when in the presence of Wilson Cromartie. She refused to call it a thrill, even though she knew that’s exactly what it was, at least if she was being totally honest with herself.

  She still thought about him a lot. Probably too much. Cheating on Michael with him, the one and only time she had ever done that, defenseless against the urge to do it, was the worst thing she had ever done. Grandaddy of them all. The sin she knew she would take with her to her grave, one no penance, no amount of Hail Marys and Our Fathers, could get her out from under.

  Devout Catholic Molly Crane.

  Except for one night.

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  The only three people who knew about it were in Jesse’s office now. Molly made sure she shut the door behind her.

  “Wilson,” she said.

  “Deputy Chief Crane,” Crow said. “Is ‘bullshit’ your standard greeting now?”

  “For you it is,” she said.

  She saw that all of his focus was on her. It felt like high school to her in that moment. Talking to the bad boy on whom she’d had a secret crush. But she was going to be goddamned if she was going to show him that.

  Unless he could still see all the way inside of her, all the way to her secrets.

  “Nice to hear you’ve been making friends in town,” Molly said.

  “Eavesdropping?” Crow said.

  “Always,” Jesse said.

  Crow’s face was impassive. He changes his expression about as often as Jesse does, Molly thought. She’d been in Crow’s presence only a handful of times in her life. It just felt like more.

  “So you know why I’m here,” Crow said.

  “I know why you say you’re here,” Molly said.

  His eyes were still on her. “Saying I’m lying?”

  “Only to stay in practice.” She smiled. “Were you practicing on Kate O’Hara?”

  “You’re still a bad, bad girl,” Crow said.

  “Woman,” Jesse said. “A badass woman. And second-in-command to the chief of police.” If Crow didn’t notice Jesse’s change in tone, the snap in his words, Molly did.

  “Just reminding you to watch your mouth,” Jesse said to Crow now. “You got history with us, Crow. But that doesn’t mean you have any standing.”

  Crow turned to look at him.

  “Is this an official interrogation?” Crow said.

  “Ask Molly,” Jesse said.

  “We’ll need to check your story with Kate,” she said.

  “Do what you have to do,” Crow said.

  “You really thought she might be able to help you with Neil?” Molly said. “They haven’t been living together for a while.”

  “Like people say,” Crow said. “Woman behind the man.”

  “What people still say that?” Jesse said.

  “Did you see Neil as some kind of threat to Billy’s interests?” Molly said. “Even Neil had to know he couldn’t stop this thing.”

  “Billy described him as being increasingly difficult,” Crow said. “I asked his wife if she knew why. She said she didn’t. I left. Now here we all are.”

  “Anything else you can think of that might be helpful?” Jesse said.

  “To me or you?” Crow said.

  “You decide,” Jesse said.

  Crow smiled again. And stood.

  “We’re done here,” he said.

  “For now,” Jesse said.

  “See you around,” Molly said.

  “Look forward to it,” Crow said.

  And left.

  “I thought that went well,” Jesse said.

  “I told you once already today,” Molly said. “Don’t start with me.”

  “Furthest thing from my mind.”

  “I mean it,” Molly said.

  NINE

  They were back at The Throw. Jesse had wanted to walk the scene in daylight, in case they’d missed something. He hated missing things.

  “So we’re not assuming it was a suicide at this point,” Suit said.

  “You’re aware of one of my basic rules of ace detecting, Detective,” Jesse said.

  “Assume nothing.”

  “There you go.”

  “One of your many rules,” Suit said. “Sometimes I think you’ve got more than baseball’s got.”

  “Not even close,” Jesse said.

  Molly had a late-afternoon meeting with some church committee she was on. Her church, St. Peter’s, was within walking distance of the station. Before he and Suit had left, Jesse had asked if Molly could manage not to shoot Crow if she happened to run into him on the street. She said she wasn’t promising anything.

  “Dev says there’s nothing to indicate that if somebody else did shoot him, that they dumped the body here, right?” Suit said.

  “Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen that way,” Jesse said.

  Jesse mentioned to Suit again about the only residue being on O’Hara’s right hand.

  “Been thinking about that,” Suit said. “But there are guys who play ball left-handed and write with their right hands.”

  “Or the guy who shot him didn’t know Neil was left-handed, and just put the gun in his right hand,” Jesse said. “And by the way? Neil wrote with his left hand.”

  “You already checked it out,” Suit said. “Of course you did.”

  “You think they let just anybody be chief?” Jesse said.

  Jesse loved Suitcase Simpson, had from the first time he’d met him as an overeager kid. He was smart, tough, loyal. And now that he’d married Elena, he’d stopped trying to screw his way through Paradise, Mass.

  Jesse treated him like a son even though he had a real son in Cole Slayton, one he didn’t know about until a couple years ago. Cole had tried the cops. He was now in his first year of law school, Loyola Marymount, back in Los Angeles, where he’d been raised by his mother. For now he was planning to specialize in financial crimes, saying he was tired of rich assholes finding ways to keep all the money.

  Jesse and Suit had started out by walking the perimeter again, slowly making their way back to the grave in which Jesse had found Neil O’Hara.

  “Who do you think is going to end up with the land?” Suit said.

  “No clue.”

  “You got a preference?”

  “Yeah, that the land stays protected,” Jesse said. “I need a casino in our town like I need a hole in the head.”

  Suit said, “You think that if Neil did kill himself, he was trying to tell us something by doing it here?”

  “I don’t believe he killed himself,” Jesse said.

  “Whose side was Neil on?” Suit said.

  “My opinion? He was a tree hugger at heart and hated both of them.”

  “But if he was leaning toward one of them, Singer or B
arrone, knowing he’d have to choose,” Suit said, “would the other one have him killed?”

  “Guys like them, rich as they are, are like the rest of us,” Jesse said. “Get up in the morning, go to bed at night. Except in between, nobody gets to say no to them. But the good news for them is that now they’ve got a new mayor practically in heat to say yes.”

  Jesse felt his phone buzzing, took it out of the side pocket of his windbreaker.

  “Speak of the devil,” Jesse said.

  “Woof,” Suit said.

  TEN

  Molly had told Jesse once that Gary Armistead reminded her of Justin Timberlake. Jesse had asked her who Justin Timberlake was. It was one of those conversations involving any kind of modern culture that always ended with Molly telling him she didn’t know why she even tried.

  Early thirties, lots of brown hair piled up on top and what looked to be a lot of product in it, deep-fried tan. There may have been more eligible bachelors in Paradise, but Jesse couldn’t think of one off the top of his head.

  Word around town was that Armistead, with a lot of family money behind him, had his eyes on the congressional district in which Paradise was situated, that seat opening up in a year and a half when the current holder of the office finally retired after about a dozen terms. Jesse was of the opinion that only some kind of vaccine could make Armistead’s ambition less toxic than it already was.

  He made Jesse come to him the next day. The Board of Selectmen offices now took up the top floor of the converted firehouse on Broad Street. There was just enough of a view for them to see the tops of boats in the harbor.

  Armistead, Jesse discovered when he got there, had already moved into Neil O’Hara’s old office.

  “I know what you’re probably thinking,” Armistead said when Jesse sat down across from him.

  “Somehow I doubt that,” Jesse said.

  “But I asked Kate if she had any objections to me moving in here,” he said. “She didn’t. So you shouldn’t. Neil was my friend.”

  Jesse thought, In a pig’s eye he was.

  Armistead had yanked down his tie. Now he leaned back in what had been Neil O’Hara’s chair and put his feet up on what had been Neil’s desk. Clasped his hands behind his head.

  “I’m hoping we can have the same kind of solid working relationship that you and Neil had,” Armistead said.

  “I’m easy,” Jesse said.

  Armistead smiled. “Well, we both know that’s a crock.”

  “Gary,” Jesse said, “why don’t you tell me why I’m here, so our working relationship can involve me actually working.”

  Armistead took his feet off the desk, pulled the chair closer to it, leaned forward, smile gone.

  “I’d like you to cut the shit on ‘maybe it’s a suicide and maybe it’s not,’ ” he said. “You know Ellis Munroe feels the same way, for chrissakes.”

  “My investigation into Neil’s death isn’t even twenty-four hours old,” Jesse said. “Jumping to conclusions, or drawing any, is for amateurs at this point.”

  “We need to move past this,” Armistead said.

  “As soon as I determine what happened to him,” Jesse said.

  Another guy who didn’t like being told no, Jesse thought. You could see it in his eyes, so pale Jesse couldn’t tell whether they were blue or green.

  “I’m not Neil,” he said. “Meaning I’m not the kind of boss looking to hug things out.”

  Jesse grinned. “There’s a relief.”

  “You don’t like me very much, do you, Chief?”

  “Doesn’t matter whether I do or don’t,” Jesse said. “You are my boss now.”

  “Who’s telling you to wrap this thing up as quickly as possible,” Armistead said. “Even though he’s gone, this land deal is going to be Neil’s legacy, whether he was behind it or not. And this town needs it.”

  “When I determine if this was a suicide or not, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Armistead said, “So we’re back there.”

  “Never left,” Jesse said.

  “You really think somebody killed Neil?” Armistead said. “Or had him killed?”

  “We’ve got two powerful men who hate each other’s guts fighting for something they both want,” Jesse said.

  “Jesus,” Armistead said, “you’re going to treat them like suspects?”

  “No.”

  “Thank the Lord.”

  “Persons of interest would be more like it,” Jesse said.

  “For something that we both know is going to turn out to be a suicide in the end.”

  “You sound as if wishing might make it so.”

  “You’re smart enough to know how this plays out if you go out of your way to muck up this deal,” Armistead said.

  “You’ll have my badge?” Jesse said.

  “Is that your idea of irony?” Armistead said.

  “Trying to quit,” he said.

  “Like drinking?” Armistead said.

  “Drinking might have been easier, now that I think about it.”

  “I will fire you,” Gary Armistead said.

  And there it is.

  “Understood,” Jesse said.

  Armistead came around the desk now, letting Jesse know that the meeting was over, and that he was being dismissed.

  Jesse stood.

  “Until Neil came along, I can’t tell you how many people who’ve had your job have told me they were going to fire me,” he said.

  He remembered something Crow had said earlier.

  “And yet,” Jesse said, “here I am.”

  ELEVEN

  Jesse was still in his office at seven o’clock. Some days he was headed home by now. But not many. The nights alone were getting longer and longer with Sunny away. Cole was experiencing, in real time, what the first year of law school was really like, which meant boot camp.

  “You ever feel outgunned?” he’d said to his father the last time they’d talked.

  “Never,” Jesse had told him.

  “When Mom was alive she wanted me to be a lawyer and not a cop,” he said. “You think she knows I’m finally doing it? The lawyer thing, I mean?”

  “She always knew everything,” Jesse said. “No reason for her to change course now.”

  “Damn, this shit is hard,” Cole said.

  “Head down,” Jesse said, “eyes up.”

  He finally walked outside and got into the Explorer, drove home, turned on the television, the Sox game against the Rays just starting. He wondered if this would be one of the nights when he’d still be awake by the time the game ended. As much as he loved baseball, as much as he knew it would always be in his DNA, even he could watch only so much of it, especially the way the Sox had played the first couple months of the season.

  He went into the kitchen, thinking he would pan-fry a steak, throw some mushrooms on it, bake himself a potato.

  Then he was opening the cupboard where he’d always kept the scotch, thinking of all the nights when baseball and scotch were all the company he needed, until he wasn’t awake for the end of the game because he was passed out drunk.

  Maybe what he really needed tonight was a meeting. He hadn’t been to one in a couple weeks.

  “It’s when you drop your guard,” Dix said, “that you get tagged so hard you end up on Queer Street.”

  “Not sure they still call it that,” Jesse said. “Obvious reasons.”

  “Queer Street by any other name,” Dix said.

  Jesse didn’t want a drink tonight. He didn’t get the urge every night. Not even most. Just some. Sometimes the urge was stronger than at other times. He stood and stared into the empty cupboard.

  In his mind, the bottle was always there.

  He imagined himself uncapping it now, Dewar’s or Johnnie Walker or whatever it was,
checking to see how much was in there, telling himself that tonight was finally going to be the one when he learned how to pace himself, even drinking alone. Deciding whether to mix it with soda or just splash some over ice.

  My amber waves, he used to think.

  He shook his head now, shaking himself out of his reverie, making a plan for himself, a checklist, knowing he wanted to talk to Lawton and Singer and Barrone, and the other members of the Board, ask them if they’d noticed anything unusual about Neil O’Hara’s behavior lately. Had they seen the signs of depression that Kate had talked about? Had any of them ever heard him mention a gun? When was the last time any of them had spoken to him? Do it by the numbers.

  He would decide on the order in which he wanted to talk to all the players in the game tomorrow. For now he watched the Red Sox, not falling asleep one time. He was wide awake when it ended around eleven, another modern ballgame that had gone on far too long.

  He picked up his phone and called Sunny.

  She answered right away.

  “If you start heavy breathing,” she said, “I’m calling the police.”

  “I am the police,” he said.

  “You must need help fighting crime,” she said.

  “Maybe I just miss you,” he said.

  “I thought we weren’t going to do this.”

  “Miss each other?”

  “Call when we did.”

  There was a silence so long that Jesse checked the screen of his phone to make sure they were still connected.

  He could hear voices in the background.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “Out to dinner,” she said, and left it at that. He let her leave it at that.

  “Aren’t you up late, Chief?” she said.

  It was as if she were changing the subject, though Jesse frankly wasn’t sure what the subject was.

  He told her about Neil O’Hara, about him being left-handed, about the angle of the bullet, about him having gotten himself sideways with Singer and Barrone.

  “You don’t think the guy killed himself.”

  “Do not.”