Death In Paradise js-3

by Robert B. Parker

  “And you,” Lilly said.

  She nodded at Jesse.

  “How is he to work for?”

  “Needs a lot of attention,” Molly said.

  “He does,” Lilly said, “doesn’t he.”

  They walked past the desk and into the corridor. To the left was Jesse’s office. Straight ahead was the squad room. To the right was the line of four holding cells.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a jail cell,” Lilly said. “They don’t look very tempting.”

  “They’re not supposed to be,” Jesse said.

  The squad room had a long pine table in the center.

  It was yellow with shellac. There was an empty pizza box on it, some empty cardboard coffee cups, and a carton half full of donuts.

  There were two cubicles on the back wall. There was a computer set up in each.

  “Looks like the faculty lounge,” Lilly said. “This where you gather the men to solve crimes?”

  “When they’re not eating,” Jesse said.

  “Where do you keep guns and things?”

  “There’s an equipment closet off the squad room.”

  He held the door to his office open as Lilly went in.

  “So this is where you rule,” she said.

  “And read the paper,” Jesse said.

  Lilly walked around the small office. She picked up Jenn’s picture from Jesse’s desk.

  “This her?”

  “Yes.”

  “She looks familiar.”

  “She’s the weather girl on Channel Three.”

  “I think you’re supposed to say ‘Weather Woman.’ “

  “I think so,” Jesse said.

  Lilly looked at the picture another long moment before she put it back on Jesse’s desk.

  “I wish she weren’t so damned good-looking,” she said.

  “Me, too,” Jesse said. “Want some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  Jesse poured two cups and gave her one. She sat across from his desk and sipped it.

  “Have you found out about Billie Bishop?” Lilly said.

  “The dead girl is Billie Bishop,” Jesse said.

  “Oh dear,” Lilly said. “You’re sure.”

  “I am.”

  Lilly had on a dark blue warm-up suit. Her hair was caught back with a blue headband.

  “Have you told the parents?”

  “Yes.”

  Jesse had on jeans and a corduroy jacket.

  “How were they?”

  “Very unusual,” Jesse said.

  “Grief?”

  “I’m not sure. The father, I think so. The mother? Maybe not.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “The mother was maybe relieved,” Jesse said.

  “My God.”

  “Whatever else is going on in that family,” Jesse said, “it’s the mother that controls it.”

  “I don’t think I ever met her,” Lilly said.

  “I’ve had to tell a number of people that someone has died,” Jesse said. “She’s not like anyone else.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We have a name in Boston. I have Suit going through the Internet, see if he can find anything that this name would have in common with Billie, or Paradise, or Swampscott.”

  “Suit?”

  “Officer Simpson. We call him Suitcase.”

  “After the ballplayer,” Lilly said.

  “Very good.”

  Lilly nodded. She stood and walked to the file cabinet and picked up a baseball glove.

  “Is this your glove?”

  “Yes.”

  She read the label on the wrist strap.

  “Rawlings,” she said. “Is it a good one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you always had it?”

  “Since the Dodgers signed me.”

  “Do you still use it when you play softball?”

  “Sure. That’s why the pocket is so big.”

  Lilly nodded, looking at the glove.

  “I’d love to see you play some night.”

  Jesse looked at the calendar on his desk next to Jenn’s picture.

  “We play Thursday night,” he said. “Game starts at six.”

  Lilly nodded. She put the glove back on top of the file cabinet.

  “How about Molly?” she said.

  “How about her?”

  “You and she? Anything?”

  “No. Molly’s married, got kids in school.”

  “That doesn’t always prevent things,” Lilly said.

  “It does in this case.”

  “What’s her husband do?”

  “He’s a carpenter. Works in the Rucker Boatyard.”

  “Does she ever do anything but cover the front desk?” Lilly said.

  “Sure.”

  “So she’s not just a secretary with a gun?”

  “No. She likes the day shift and she likes to be in the station so her kids can reach her if they need to.”

  “Couldn’t they reach their father—at the boatyard?”

  “They can.”

  “Fathers are as responsible for their children as mothers.”

  “That would be my guess,” Jesse said.

  She smiled at him.

  “You’re pretty hard to argue with, aren’t you?”

  “I think so,” Jesse said.

  Lilly got up again and walked past Jesse’s desk and stared down at the fire trucks parked outside the station.

  “I’ve never had sex in a police station,” she said.

  Jesse smiled. “Me either.”

  “Does anyone ever have sex in one of the cells?” Lilly said.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Maybe somebody should,” Lilly said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Would you dare?” Lilly said. Her voice was bubbly with humor and something else.

  “No.”

  “Scaredy-cat?” Lilly said.

  “That’s me,” Jesse said.

  “I’ve always had a fantasy of sex in some public place.”

  “You have a hidden side,” Jesse said.

  Lilly turned from the window and looked directly at him. The humor and something else in her voice glistened in her eyes.

  “I do,” she said.

  Jesse didn’t say anything.

  “Does it bother you?” Lilly said.

  “No,” Jesse said. “I like it.”

  “But you wouldn’t make love to me in a jail cell?”

  “Not one of mine,” Jesse said.

  Again Lilly looked straight at him. “How about your office?”

  “Can’t,” Jesse said.

  The sound was still in her voice and the look was still in her eyes, but there might have been the tinge of annoyance in both.

  “Because?”

  “Because I don’t want to be caught.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “It would embarrass me, and the department,” Jesse said.

  “School principals aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing either. It would embarrass me, too. But the risk is part of the fun.”

  “I like you. I like to have sex with you. But this is what I have. I’m divorced from the only woman I seem able to love. I am trying not to drink. I can’t play professional baseball like I was supposed to. All I can be is a cop, and this is my last chance at that.”

  “And you can’t jeopardize it.”

  Jesse smiled. He felt himself relax. She understood.

  “No. I can’t. Not for fun.”

  “Will Jenn always be the only woman you’re able to love?”

  “I don’t know. She is so far.”

  Lilly sighed, and smiled.

  “Well,” she said. “I guess I’ll just hang around and see.”

  “You can’t count on me changing,” Jesse said.

  “Maybe not. But I can count on you to fuck my brains out, can’t I?”

  “Absolutely,” Jesse
said.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Jesse had breakfast with Lilly before she went home, and he was late coming to work. It was a deeply still summer morning that you can only get in a small town. Cloudless. Hot. Silent. As if everything was going to live forever.

  “Suit’s in the squad room,” Molly said when Jesse came into the station. “He says to come see him.”

  Simpson was at one of the computers.

  “I got a hit,” he said when Jesse came into the room.

  “On what?” Jesse said.

  “Gino Fish. I got a connection with Paradise.”

  “Which is?”

  “This’ll knock your socks off,” Simpson said.

  “Sure,” Jesse said.

  “Norman Shaw,” Simpson said. “How about that?”

  “Knocks my socks off,” Jesse said. “What’s the connection?”

  “Article in the Globe five years back,” Simpson said. “Shaw was going to write a book about Gino and they were going to make a movie out of it.”

  “You print it out?”

  “Yeah.”

  Simpson handed Jesse a sheet of paper.

  “Anything else?” Jesse said.

  “Not that helps us. He did ten years at Walpole for killing a guy with a straight razor.”

  “Nice,” Jesse said.

  “Was one of the people they covered when they did that big spotlight thing on organized crime.”

  “Anything about girls?”

  “Says in here he is alleged to be gay.”

  “I know. Anything about prostitution?”

  “Nothing specific. Just says he’s the alleged boss of all criminal activity in Downtown and Back Bay.”

  “Well,” Jesse said and gestured with the printout. “I’ll take this. You print out the rest and put it on my desk.”

  “Print out all of it?”

  “Yep.”

  “There’s 5,145 entries for Gino Fish.”

  “Most of them are for fish markets, or tropical fish collectors, or sportsmen or other guys named Fish, or Papa Gino’s pizza,” Jesse said. “Internet’s not too selective.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Simpson said.

  “So just print out the ones about Gino Fish, and don’t duplicate.”

  “I hate the Internet,” Simpson said.

  “Information highway,” Jesse said.

  “Mostly bullshit highway,” Simpson said.

  “No one ever said crimebusting was pretty,” Jesse said.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  When she opened the front door Joni Shaw said, “Oh, oh, the fuzz.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Are you planning to search the place?” Joni Shaw said.

  “No, I just want to talk.”

  She smiled widely at him and stepped away from the door.

  The entry hall of Norman Shaw’s big house was twenty feet wide with a curved staircase to the second floor. At the turn a full-length window was full of sunlight. To the right of the front door there was an umbrella stand made from the lower part of an elephant’s leg, and a dark wine-colored Persian rug lay across the width of the hall at the foot of the stairs.

  “Let’s sit in the atrium,” Joni Shaw said.

  She led Jesse through a room lined with bookshelves and scattered with heavy nineteenth-century furniture, into a glass atrium where the ocean was visible a hundred yards below, tossing spray toward the house as it broke on the rocks. Jesse sat on the end of a green leather chaise.

  “Coffee?” Joni Shaw said. “A drink?”

  “Coffee would be nice,” Jesse said.

  “That will make it a social call,” Joni Shaw said.

  “Sure,” Jesse said.

  Joni Shaw was dressed in black shorts and a white silk tee shirt that stopped short of her waist so that her stomach showed. An Asian woman brought coffee. Jesse added cream and sugar and drank some.

  “Is your husband at home?” Jesse said.

  “Oh, damn,” she said. “I thought you’d come calling on me.”

  Jesse smiled and didn’t say anything.

  “Norman is working,” Joni Shaw said. “He works every morning in his study with the door locked.”

  “Here in the house,” Jesse said.

  “Yes. But it might as well be on Mars,” Joni Shaw said. “He is simply not here when he’s working.”

  “Well, maybe you can help me,” Jesse said.

  “I hope so,” Joni Shaw said.

  Jesse noticed that everything she said seemed to imply something more.

  “Do you know a man named Gino Fish?”

  “The gangster?”

  “Un-huh.”

  “Sure.”

  “Talk about him a little,” Jesse said.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “His name has come up in a case I’m working on,” Jesse said.

  “Oh my, are we suspects?”

  “No. I’m just looking for help.”

  Joni Shaw was sitting on the couch across from Jesse, with one leg on the couch so that he could see the inside of her thigh. She sipped her coffee, looking at Jesse over the rim of her cup.

  “Aren’t we all,” she said.

  Jesse waited. Joni Shaw let him wait.

  “Gino Fish?” Jesse said after he had waited long enough.

  “You may remember that about five years ago one of Norman’s books was being made into a movie, here, in Boston.”

  Jesse nodded as if he remembered. Five years ago he’d been in L.A., on the cops, still with Jenn.

  “Norman was an executive producer on the movie. He didn’t really have to do anything, it was just a title, extra money. Gino used to visit the set. He knew some of the crew. Then when we had some trouble with the union, Gino was very helpful.”

  “How nice,” Jesse said.

  Without leaving the couch, Joni Shaw leaned forward and poured him some more coffee. Very flexible.

  “Oh,” Joni said, “I don’t doubt that Gino has done some terrible things. But he’s a very interesting person.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “I try to make my own judgments of people,” Joni said, “and so does Norman. Gino has been very nice to us, and good fun at a party.”

  “So he’s become a friend?”

  “I guess you could say that,” Joni Shaw said. “Not perhaps the first circle of intimacy, but certainly more than just an acquaintance.”

  She made “first circle of intimacy” sound seductive.

  “Do you know anyone named Bishop?” Jesse said.

  “I don’t think so. Is he involved in your case?”

  “When’s the last time you saw Gino?” Jesse said.

  “Oh… two, no, three, weeks ago. In fact he was at the party where you were going to arrest us.”

  “Anyone with him?”

  Joni smiled.

  “A very good-looking young man,” she said.

  “And, I wasn’t going to arrest you,” Jesse said.

  Joni Shaw drank a small sip of her coffee, holding the cup in both hands, like in a television commercial, and looking at Jesse.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “Can’t blame a girl for hoping.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Jesse sat beside Brian Kelly with the windows open in an unmarked gray Ford that belonged to the Boston Police Department. They were a half block up Tremont Street from Development Associates of Boston. It was a hot, clear, day.

  “OCU got no surveillance on Gino Fish?” Jesse said.

  “Nope. He’s down the list,” Kelly said.

  “How come?” Jesse said.

  “Everything in his part of the city is quiet,” Kelly said. “Commissioner likes it.”

  “How come it’s so quiet?”

  “Gino’s a good administrator,” Kelly said. “There’s not much street crime on Gino’s turf. Commissioner hates street crime.”

  Jesse looked at the brick-and-brownstone rehab that was spread over the South End like brocade.
>
  “Doesn’t look like a street-crime neighborhood.”

  “It isn’t anymore.”

  “And Gino cleaned it up?”

  “Not really. Economics did that. But Gino keeps it that way,” Kelly said. “Him and Vinnie.”

  “So I guess you people aren’t going to be a big help.”

  “Can’t give you manpower. Happy to offer advice.”

  “Why should you be different,” Jesse said.

  “You spare anybody?”

  “I got twelve people,” Jesse said.

  “How are they at covert surveillance?”

  “Not much call for that in Paradise,” Jesse said.

  A black Lexus sedan with tinted windows pulled up in front of Development Associates and sat at the curb, its motor idling.

  “This is exciting,” Kelly said.

  The car sat for five minutes and then Vinnie Morris came out of the office and up the steps and stood outside the car. In a moment Gino Fish came out with the good-looking young man. The young man locked the office door, and they came up the steps together and got into the backseat of the Lexus. The door closed. The Lexus pulled away from the curb.

  “You want to follow them?” Kelly said.

  “Alone?”

  “We got nobody else,” Kelly said.

  “I don’t want to let him know,” Jesse said. “We can’t tail him in one car.”

  The Lexus turned up Dartmouth Street and disappeared. On the sidewalk in front of the office, Vinnie Morris fiddled with a Walkman on his belt for a moment, then put on the earphones and turned and walked up Tremont Street with his hands in his pockets.

  “You want to commit an illegal burglary?” Kelly said.

  “Not yet,” Jesse said. “Place is probably alarmed.”

  “Probably,” Kelly said. “You got a plan?”

  “I don’t want to tip him,” Jesse said. “I want him conducting business as usual.”

  “And?”

  “And I guess all I can do is come in every day and watch him. See what develops.”

  Kelly’s hands were resting on the steering wheel. He drummed his fingers for a moment.

  Kelly said, “I’ll help you when I can.”

  “We do and it’s your collar,” Jesse said.

  “Whose ever collar it is, it would be a pleasure to haul him off.”

  “And, it’ll be our secret,” Jesse said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning your captain doesn’t find out you’re cheating on him. And nobody else on the job knows I’m chasing Gino.”

  “You think he’s got a cop on his tab?” Kelly said.