Night Passage - Robert B Parker

by Les Weil

  "Divorced," Jesse said.

  He didn't like saying it. It still seemed to him somehow a shameful thing to admit. It made him feel less.

  Hathaway, if he thought it shameful, made no sign. Burke was silent in the shadow near the window to Hathaway's left.

  "What do you think, Jesse," Hathaway said, about fifteen minutes into the interview, "about the right to keep and bear arms?"

  "Constitution's clear on that, I think." Jesse had trouble with all the t's in constitution.

  "Yes," Hathaway said, "I think so too."

  They talked a bit about Jesse's life in the minor leagues and how it was too bad that he couldn't make the throw anymore. They talked of how many cases he had cleared in L.A.

  "Nobody clears them all," Jesse said with a smile, trying to enlist Burke, who remained silent, his arms folded. Clears came out cleaf-th.

  "We talked with your Captain Cronjager," Hathaway said, referring to his folder.

  Jesse waited. Cronjager was a decent enough guy, but he believed in police work and he might not recommend a cop who drank on duty.

  "He speaks very well of you, though he said you might have been developing a drinking problem when you left."

  Jesse made a minimizing gesture with his right hand.

  "I probably went off the deep end there for a bit during the time my marriage was breaking up," Jesse said. "But I'm fine now."

  He had started to say I am, and then wasn't sure he could transit between the two vowels, and changed it to I'm. Did they hear the stutter?

  "All of us like a drink," Hathaway said. "And in times of personal anguish, many of us need one. When one sees a man with your record applying for a job like this one, questions occur. I think I can speak for Lou when I say it is a relief really to hear that you maybe drank a little too much at a time when most of us would. I don't have a problem, do you, Lou?"

  Burke's heavy voice came from the shadow where he sat.

  "No problem, Hasty."

  And that had been it. They had hired him on the spot and brought out a bottle and had drinks to seal the bargain. It had worked out fine. But I shouldn't have been drinking, Jesse thought as he went down the circular ramp off the bridge. Especially I shouldn't have needed to be drinking.

  Jesse turned north along the Henry Hudson Parkway. He drove over the Harlem River Bridge and through the Bronx, where the city was already beginning to green. He followed the parkways, as he had planned, into Connecticut and up Route 15 feeling almost disembodied. He picked up Route 84 in Hartford, crossing the Connecticut River, with the cluster of small-city skyscrapers off to his left. It was dark by the time he crossed the line into Massachusetts and stopped for the night in Sturbridge. He could have driven the last seventy-five miles or so, but he didn't want to. He wanted to arrive in Paradise in the morning. He didn't know why, anymore than he knew why he had stood on Ocean Avenue and stared at the Pacific before he left. But after Jennifer left he had decided that if he was going to be alone, he probably ought to pay attention to what he wanted, even if he didn't always know why he wanted it. In his motel room he poured the almost ritualized drink and sat in the one chair in the silent room with his feet up on the bed. He'd read somewhere that two drinks a day were thought to be good for your heart. That was not bad, two drinks a day. It would give him something to look forward to every evening. It wouldn't scramble his mind. He thought that two drinks a day was about right for him. When he'd been with Jennifer he had tried to pay attention to what she wanted. If she's happy, he always said to himself, I'm happy. It wasn't true. But he had thought at the time that it ought to be true, and he insisted on trying to make it true, no matter how unhappy it made them both. He shook his head sadly in the small room. He was a cop, a guy who took pride in seeing evidence, on making judgments on what was really there. And he failed entirely to do that in his own life.

  "What an asshole," he said.

  His voice seemed so loud in the quiet room that he wondered if someone next door could hear him talking to himself. When you start talking to yourself ... He smiled and sipped his scotch. He could see himself in the full-length mirror on the wall beside the bed. He raised the glass at himself. Get a grip, Jesse. Then he leaned back in the chair, holding the whiskey in both hands, and closed his eyes and thought about the next day. Maybe three drinks a day.

  Chapter 10

  Jo Jo Genest was always alert when he went to the South End. There were a lot of fags down there and he was ready to retaliate if one of them was flirtatious. Jo Jo could bench-press five hundred pounds. At six feet, he weighed 283 and, under the pressure of his latissimus dorsi, his arms stuck out as he walked. He crossed with the light at Clarendon Street near the Cyclorama, and went a half block west on Tremont, and went down three stairs to a basementlevel storefront in one of the old brownstones. In black letters on the big glass window of the store was written Development Associates of Boston. He opened the door and went in. A good-looking young man with dark curly hair and a diamond earring sat at the reception desk, sorting mail. He looked up when Jo Jo entered.

  "Is it Tarzan or one of the apes," the young man said.

  The young man was always saying stuff like that to him, and he never liked it. If he didn't have business to do here, he'd slap the little faggot upside the head. Maybe someday.

  "Gino back there?" he said.

  "Sure."

  Jo Jo nodded and went past the young man through the open archway into the back room. Gino Fish was sitting at a round antique table, in a high-backed antique chair. He was tall and thin with gray hair. Along the right-hand wall, a little behind Fish, sat Vinnie Morris with his chair tipped back and balanced on its back legs. Vinnie was listening to earphones from a small portable tape player clipped to his belt.

  "How's it going, Gino," Jo Jo said.

  "Fine," Fish said.

  "Vinnie," Jo Jo said, "how they hanging?"

  Vinnie Morris always made Jo Jo a little uneasy. The uneasiness puzzled Jo Jo. He weighed a hundred pounds more than Vinnie. But there was something about Vinnie's stillness. And when Vinnie moved he moved with such quickness and economy. And he had heard that Vinnie could shoot better than anyone in Boston. And Vinnie always seemed a little scornful of Jo Jo, which didn't make any sense because Jo Jo could have broken him in two like a twig, and Vinnie better not try anything with him, or he would.

  There were two big suitcases on the floor next to Vinnie. Fish nodded at them.

  "Two million," Fish said, "and change."

  "No sweat, Gino."

  "I'm sure," Fish said.

  "Thing is, Gino, I been getting three and a half on it, and I gotta split it with some people. Makes the math a little complicated. I was looking to get four even on this one, if I could."

  Fish sat silently and looked at Jo Jo, his hands resting on the table, his long fingers interlaced. Fish pursed his lips while he thought about this.

  "We could cut it to two," Fish said. "That would simplify the math even further."

  Jo Jo laughed.

  "I know you're kidding, Gino. But I'm coming cheap at four percent. Not many guys can move two million, three for you bang bang like that, you know?"

  Again Fish was quiet, pursing his lips. This time he was quiet for quite a while. It made Jo Jo nervous. He didn't like being nervous, and especially didn't like being made nervous by two guys he could crush like a couple of grapes. They should be nervous of me, he thought.

  "What you say is true, Jo Jo," Fish said. "Not many men have your contacts in this. But that doesn't mean no one does. I'll give you the four, but I don't want you coming in next week and asking for five."

  "Hey, Gino, I don't do business that way. I say four, it's four and that's it."

  "Fine," Fish said, and nodded at the suitcases.

  Jo Jo went and picked them up. Each of them weighed more than 120 pounds, but if they were too heavy Jo Jo didn't show it. The trapezius muscles bunched along the top of his shoulders and the triceps defined t
hemselves more deeply along the backs of his arms.

  "I'll take care of this today, Gino," he said.

  "I'm sure you will," Fish said.

  "Take it easy," Jo Jo said.

  Neither Fish nor Vinnie spoke and Jo Jo left the office and went through the anteroom and out the front door. The good-looking young man came in with the mail and put it on the table in front of Gino.

  "What do you think," he said. "Cute?"

  Fish glanced up at him and snorted and began to open the mail.

  "What do you think, Vinnie," the young man said.

  "He's a jerk," Vinnie said. "He thinks muscles matter."

  "Well, maybe they do to me," the young man said.

  Vinnie shrugged and turned up the volume on his tape player. The young man went back out to the anteroom smiling.

  Outside on Tremont Street, Jo Jo walked a half block back up the street, and, out of sight of Gino's office, put the bags down on the curb and waited for a cab.

  Chapter 11

  Jesse drove into Paradise at ten in the morning with the sun shining straight at him so that he had to put the sun visor down even with sunglasses on. He could smell the Atlantic before he saw it. Before he went to the town hall, he found the beachfront along Atlantic Avenue and parked and got out and walked onto the beach and looked at the eastern ocean. It probably had something to do with closing a circle. What circle it was, Jesse didn't know. But it did no harm to look at the ocean. He stood for a while, then got back in the car and drove slowly along Atlantic Avenue, following the directions they'd sent him, to the town hall. The east in Jesse's imagination had always been New England: village greens, and white steeples and weathered shingles and permanence. He had always liked to imagine it in winter when the clear virtuous cold was antipodal to the hot desperation of Los Angeles. It wasn't winter when he arrived. It was late June and the narrow streets were dappled by the sunlight shining through the full-foliaged arch of old trees. It wasn't clean and cold, but it was clean and warm and he liked it.

  He met the town, or as many members of the town as were interested, including most of the police department, in the auditorium of the brick town hall. The Board of Selectmen sat on stage in folding chairs. Jesse stood, while the chairman of the Board of Selectmen introduced him from a lectern, reading into an insensitive microphone from a sheet of paper with his remarks typed out on it.

  "It gives me great pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, to present Paradise's new police chief, Jesse Stone."

  The chairman of the board was named Hasty Hathaway. He wore a pink shirt and a plaid bow tie and a seersucker jacket that appeared too small for him. Jesse wore his dark suit with a white banded-collar shirt and no tie. He wore the short .38 in a black holster in back of his right hip. Hathaway handed Jesse the new badge that said "Paradise Police Department" around the outside, and "Chief" across the center.

  Jesse slipped it into his shirt pocket.

  "As most of you know, Chief Stone comes to us from Los Angeles, California, where he is a ten-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, serving most recently as a homicide detective. He holds numerous departmental citations, and was once featured in Parade magazine's list of America's Top Cops. Chief Stone was selected for this post after an exhaustive search from a field which included a number of very viable candidates. I'd like to thank all the members of the search committee who gave unsparingly of their time, and my thanks also to Lou Burke, who served us so well as interim chief. I know he and all the men, and women, of the Paradise Police Department will continue to serve with the devotion to duty that has marked this department since its inception. Chief Stone, would you care to say a few words?"

  "I'm glad to be here," Jesse said into the microphone. "Right now, everyone in the room knows more about the town than I do. I'll need your help. Thank you."

  He stepped away from the microphone. Hathaway looked as if he were hoping for more. But he rallied.

  "Okay," he said, "let's give Chief Stone a round of applause."

  Everyone clapped. Jesse went upstairs with Hathaway and the town legal counsel, whose name was Abby Taylor, and signed several papers. While he was signing them he noticed that the town counsel was wearing a nice-looking pale yellow suit, with a short skirt. Then he went next door to the brick wing where police and fire were housed and sat down in the swivel chair in his new office. Lou Burke came in with a Sig-Sauer ninemillimeter pistol.

  "The one Tommy Carson turned in," Burke said, "when he got fired."

  "Thanks," Jesse said. "I've got my own gun."

  Burke shrugged and put the pistol on the desk. "Belongs to the department," he said.

  "Goes with the job."

  Jesse picked up the gun and put it in the right-hand drawer of the desk.

  "Have a seat," Jesse said. "I might as well start learning."

  Burke sat. He was a compact man with dark skin and an advanced case of male pattern baldness. What hair remained along the sides of his head was black and cut very close.

  "Is this a first-name department?" Jesse said.

  "Has been."

  "Good. How you feel about them bringing me in from the outside, Lou?"

  Burke sat quietly for a moment as if thinking about the question.

  "Relieved," he said finally.

  "You didn't like being chief?" Burke shook his head. "Why not?"