(5/10) Sea Change

by Robert B. Parker

  “Son of a gun!” Jesse said.

  “And the twins,” Kelly Cruz said, “Corliss and Claudia, were also pals with Thomas Ralston.”

  “You got that from the mother too?”

  “No. I did some follow-up,” Kelly Cruz said. “I’m trying to make sergeant.”

  “Follow-up and a perky little butt,” Jesse said. “You’re a lock.”

  “Yeah. Ralston led a pretty lively sex life. You want to hear?”

  “I do,” Jesse said.

  Kelly Cruz told him everything she’d learned. Jesse listened silently. When she was through he told her what he knew about Harrison Darnell.

  “And Darnell’s parked right beside Ralston?” Kelly Cruz said.

  “In the same harbor,” Jesse said. “And, I don’t think they call it parked. I think it’s anchored, or moored, maybe.”

  “I’ll make a note,” Kelly Cruz said. “So they both knew Florence Horvath. They both have the same, ah, atypical sexual interests. And they were both…anchored…in Paradise Harbor when Florence washed ashore.”

  “Yes,” Jesse said. “Does that seem significant to you?”

  “I might check it out, I was you,” Kelly Cruz said.

  “Thanks,” Jesse said.

  “You’re welcome, but there’s one other thing, maybe,” Kelly Cruz said. “One of the people I talked with down here, a girl, maybe twenty-one, twenty-two, mentioned that Florence Horvath seemed a little old for Thomas Ralston.”

  “She was thirty-four,” Jesse said.

  “No accounting for taste,” Kelly Cruz said. “Maybe he passed her on to Darnell.”

  “Darnell seems somewhat able to tolerate age diversity,” Jesse said.

  “I’ll keep snooping around when I’m not busy with my real job,” Kelly Cruz said.

  When she hung up Jesse sat silently, looking at nothing. The scientists had established that all the tapes were recent. He wondered who the redhead was. He hadn’t seen her on Darnell’s yacht. There were several he hadn’t seen. He had to talk with Katie DeWolfe. And her mother. He couldn’t let it slide. She was fifteen. Her mother had to know, too. Molly hadn’t mentioned a father. Sometimes he thought the fathers were harder. Maybe just because I’m male. He’d have Molly sit in. She knew the mother. When he sat at his desk, Jesse was more comfortable when he took the gun off his hip and laid it on the desktop. He looked at it now, lying there. Be simpler if they would let him just shoot people who deserved it. Who would decide? I would. What if you’re wrong? Ah, there’s the rub.

  He stood and went out to the desk.

  “Can you arrange for Katie DeWolfe and her parents to come see me?” he said.

  “Father’s not around,” Molly said. “They’re divorced.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “I should be the one,” Molly said. “I know Katie, and I know her mother.”

  Jesse nodded again.

  “You’re going to ask me to sit in, too,” Molly said. “Aren’t you.”

  Jesse continued to nod. Molly stared past him for a moment. Then she breathed in audibly.

  “Any special time?” she said.

  “Soon as they can,” Jesse said. “But, you know, try to accommodate to them. I’ll be available.”

  Molly continued to stare at nothing. Jesse could hear her breathing.

  “I wish you could do it,” Molly said.

  “I can. But I thought it might be more comfortable for them if you did.”

  “It will be,” Molly said.

  Jesse nodded.

  “This is not going to be fun,” Molly said.

  “I never promised you fun.”

  34

  Katie DeWolfe was scared. Her small face was pinched with it. She walked stiffly and swallowed frequently. Her mother had the same look. They looked alike. They were both slender, and blond, and had about them a look of furtive sexuality. Jesse could never quite pin down what the look was. But he always knew it when he saw it, and in those instances when he’d had occasion to test it, he had always been right.

  Molly brought them both in, introduced everyone, got the DeWolfes seated, facing the desk, and sat herself in a straight chair crowded in to Jesse’s left.

  “Do you know what this is about, Katie?” Jesse said.

  Katie shook her head.

  “You’re sure?” Jesse said.

  “I got no idea,” Katie said.

  Jesse nodded and took a breath.

  “Okay,” he said. “There’s no easy way to say it. I have a videotape of you having sex with a man named Harrison Darnell.”

  “You’re lying,” Katie said. “It’s not me.”

  “No, honey,” Jesse said. “It’s you.”

  Mrs. DeWolfe said in a strangled voice, “Katie?”

  “No way,” Katie said.

  “I can play the tape,” Jesse said.

  “It’s not me.”

  Jesse nodded. He picked up the remote from his desk and aimed it and clicked and the tape began to roll with a closeup of Katie’s face, looking straight up at the camera over a man’s shoulder. Katie dropped her head and closed her eyes. Her mother stared at the tape. The camera pulled back to show the two of them naked and copulating.

  “Stop it,” Mrs. DeWolfe said. “For Christ’s sake, stop it.”

  Jesse clicked the tape off.

  “She’s fifteen,” Mrs. DeWolfe said.

  “I know,” Jesse said.

  Mrs. DeWolfe looked at Molly.

  “Molly, for crissake,” she said, “what am I supposed to do?”

  “If Katie cooperates,” Molly said, “we can probably work something out?”

  “Cooperates?” Katie said. “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

  “No,” Jesse said. “But he did.”

  “I’m not ratting Harrison out,” she said. “No way. No way.”

  Mrs. DeWolfe said, “Katie, my God.”

  “Oh, like you’re so lily pure. You been oinkin’ a different guy every week since Daddy left.”

  “Katie, that’s not true. And if it were, it doesn’t mean you should. I’m a grown woman, for God’s sake.”

  “So am I,” Katie said.

  She stuck her chest out, so that her small breasts pushed against her cotton tank top.

  “You seen the movies.”

  Her mother slapped her across the face. Katie slapped back at her and her mother gripped her wrists and they grappled there, still seated. Jesse put his head back against the back of his swivel chair and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Molly,” he said.

  But Molly was already up and separating the two women. Jesse opened his eyes.

  “Who’s on the desk?” he said.

  “Arthur,” Molly said.

  Jesse picked up the phone and called the desk.

  “Arthur,” he said. “Step into my office for a moment.”

  He hung up and the door opened and Arthur Angstrom stood there.

  “Take Mrs. DeWolfe out to the front,” Jesse said. “Get her seated and be sure she stays there until I holler.”

  “Okay, Jesse.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Mrs. DeWolfe said.

  “You are, ma’am,” Jesse said. “Easy? Or hard?”

  She lingered for a minute but Jesse could tell her heart wasn’t in it and she stood.

  “I’ll be right outside,” she said to her daughter.

  Arthur took her arm and they went out. Molly closed the office door. Jesse leaned back in his chair and looked at Katie. She looked back at him, trying for defiance.

  “So?” she said.

  Jesse smiled.

  “So,” he said.

  “Like you never had sex?”

  “I’m proud to say I did have sex, and hope to again,” Jesse said.

  “So, you think I’m too young?”

  “Probably,” Jesse said.

  “You never had sex when you was my age?”

  “No,” Jesse grinned again. “But it wasn’t for lack of tryin
g.”

  “Everybody my age has had sex,” she said.

  “Probably not all of them with a stranger forty years older, in front of a video camera,” Jesse said.

  “Turn you on?” she said.

  She looked at him with her eyes wide open. Jesse looked back. Big, blue, innocent and stupid, he thought.

  “You were maybe the twenty-fifth person I looked at,” Jesse said. “I was a long way past turning on.”

  “So, you gonna arrest me, or what?”

  “I don’t quite know what to do with you, Katie. Let’s try talking about things, just sort of pleasantly. I won’t be a tough guy, and you won’t be a sexpot, and we’ll see where the conversation takes us.”

  She frowned, trying to puzzle out what he had said.

  “You married?”

  “Divorced,” Jesse said.

  “Got a girlfriend?”

  Jesse smiled. “Actually, I’m living with my ex-wife,” he said.

  “That’s weird.”

  Jesse continued to smile.

  “Yes,” he said. “It certainly is.”

  “If you’re divorced, how come you live together.”

  “It has to do with love,” Jesse said.

  “You love her?”

  “I think we love each other,” Jesse said.

  “So how come you got divorced?”

  “Long answer,” Jesse said. “The short version is, we had problems we couldn’t solve.”

  “And now you can?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You gonna get married again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They got divorced five years ago,” Katie said.

  “Your parents,” Jesse said.

  “Yes,” Katie said. “I don’t care.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “And I don’t want you giving me a lot of crap about broken homes and that shit,” Katie said.

  “Okay,” Jesse said.

  “I always been kind of wild,” she said.

  “Must worry the hell out of your mother,” Jesse said.

  “She’s scared out of her gourd I’ll get pregnant, like she did.”

  “Which was why she married your father?”

  “Yeah, and had me.”

  “Your father worry about you?” Jesse said.

  “He’s in Louisville, Kentucky,” she said.

  “So you don’t see him so often.”

  “For sure,” she made it one word. “He got married again. Got a kid.”

  “And,” Jesse said, “I gather your mother dates.”

  “She’s boy crazy,” Katie said. “Like me.”

  “Or occasionally,” Jesse said, “man crazy.”

  “You mean Harrison? Yeah. I really showed him something. He said he couldn’t believe how great I was. He’s got this huge yacht and tons of money. My mother’s probably jealous. She’s always pigging these losers.”

  “So how’d you meet Harrison?” Jesse said.

  “Actually I met Tommy first and he introduced me to Harrison.”

  “Tommy?” Jesse said.

  “Tommy Ralston. He’s got a yacht, too. The Sea Cloud.”

  “How’d you meet Tommy?” Jesse said.

  “Cathleen Holton,” Katie said. “Cathleen brought a bunch of us out to Tommy’s boat. She said it was a chance to meet some really cool guys.”

  “She have a boat?” Jesse said.

  “Naw, Tommy sent a launch for us.”

  “How many were you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How many of you went out.”

  “Me,” she said. “And Cathleen, Beth, Nancy and Brittany, five all together.”

  “All around your age?”

  “I’m the youngest,” she said. “I always hang around with older kids.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Tell me about what happened on the boat.”

  “It was wild,” Katie said. “There were four guys and a couple of older women. We had drinks, and we smoked some weed, and the guys said it was like an initiation. We all had to have sex with all the guys.”

  “Everybody cool with that?” Jesse said.

  “Everybody but Nancy. She started to cry and said she didn’t feel good and wanted to go home.”

  “And did she?”

  “They said they’d have somebody take her home in the launch, but she had to do a striptease first.”

  “She mind?”

  “She didn’t want to, but they said she had to if she wanted to go home…so she did. It was pretty pathetic.”

  “And then she went home?”

  “Yeah, one of the sailors took her in the launch.”

  “And the rest of you partied.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the older women?”

  “First they watched, then they joined in.”

  “Hell of a good time,” Jesse said.

  “Sure, and then Tommy said I was so good that he wanted me to meet his dear friend, and said could I come back tomorrow, and I said sure, and so the next day the launch took me to Harrison’s boat. Just me.”

  Jesse was silent. Katie looked at him oddly, like she wanted something. Jesus Christ, she wants approval. He took a breath.

  “Most people,” he said, “are probably doing mostly what they need to do. And maybe you need to do this. But it’s not a good way for you to live.”

  “Why not,” she said.

  “Again,” Jesse said, “long answer. Short version is you don’t become more important because a lot of people are willing to fuck you.”

  “I’m not trying to be important,” she said. “I’m just having some fun.”

  “I need the names of the other girls,” Jesse said.

  “Are you going to tell them I told?”

  Jesse looked at Molly, who had said not a word during the entire conversation. She shrugged and shook her head.

  “To tell you the truth, Katie,” Jesse said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I’ll start by taking names.”

  35

  Jenn always brushed her teeth before bed. Jesse lay in bed on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, watching her through the open door of the bathroom. She was wearing one of his shirts, just the way she used to, and when she bent over to rinse her mouth, her butt showed. Jenn turned off the bathroom light and got into bed beside Jesse.

  “Were you leering at me?” Jenn said.

  “I was admiring your butt,” Jesse said.

  “It is cute, isn’t it.”

  “So you don’t mind admiring,” Jesse said.

  “Admiring is good; leering is good.”

  “I was admiring,” Jesse said.

  Jenn tuned her head and kissed him lightly.

  “Tell me about your day,” she said.

  He knew she was mocking their domesticity.

  “Any day that ends up with us in bed,” Jesse said, “is a good day.”

  “Oh,” she said, “you charming devil.”

  “I would like to get through with this floater case,” Jesse said. “It’s turned into a goddamned cesspool.”

  “The one where you were watching the dirty movies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s gotten worse.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “I do,” Jesse said. “It’s one of the things I really missed when you were gone.”

  “Talking to me?”

  “I could always talk to you,” Jesse said.

  “So talk,” Jenn said.

  They had left the balcony doors open, and they could hear the sound of the harbor as Jesse talked, lying on his back in the nearly dark room, looking up the blank, uninteresting ceiling. Jenn turned on her side toward him as she listened. Through the open French doors, they could hear a boat motor. Softer, more persistent, so familiar in its endless rhythm as to be nearly soundless was the movement of the waves against the causeway at the south end of the harbor. Jenn already knew some of the story, about the videotape
s from Darnell. He told her the rest. He told her what Kelly Cruz had learned. He told her about Katie DeWolfe.

  “So the bastards recruit?” Jenn said when he was finished.

  “And apparently swap.”

  “Tapes, too,” Jenn said, “wouldn’t you guess?”

  “They probably leer at them,” Jesse said.

  “Almost certainly,” Jenn said. “And, my God, what about the women on board? You know the older women? What are they?”

  “Put the young ones at ease. Maybe. On the other hand, Katie says, they ‘jump right in.’”

  “Jesus,” Jenn said. “You can get them both, can’t you? For statutory rape?”

  “I can always do that,” Jesse said. “I want them for murder.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Whoever killed her,” Jesse said. “And whoever helped. And whoever knew.”

  “What if neither of them did it?” Jenn said.

  “One of them did it. Maybe both.”

  “You’re so sure?”

  “I’m so sure.”

  She continued to lie on her side, looking at him. He continued to look at the ceiling.

  “If I was looking at your butt and just thinking it was a good-looking butt?” Jesse said after a while.

  “That would be admiring,” Jenn said.

  “And if I also imagined holding on to your butt while we were making wild and exotic love?”

  “That would be leering.”

  “And is one better than the other?” Jesse said.

  “Jesse, this sex case is making you crazy,” Jenn said.

  “You think?”

  Jenn took in a deep breath.

  “I am your main fucking squeeze,” she said. “You are supposed to admire me and leer at me and feel desire and act on it.”

  “Act on it?”

  “Yeah, act. That too much for you, Hamlet?”

  Jesse grinned at her.

  “Then out swords,” he said, “and to work withal.”

  “That’s not Hamlet,” Jenn said.

  “Jose Ferrer said it in some movie I saw.”

  “That was Cyrano de Bergerac.”

  “Close enough,” Jesse said, and pressed his mouth on hers.

  36

  Thanks for coming in, Mr. Ralston,” Jesse said.

  Thomas Ralston’s head was shaved. He had a deep tan. He was a little taller than Jesse. Six feet, maybe. And he was the kind of fat guy who pretends that it’s brawn. His white shirt had epaulets. It was unbuttoned halfway down his fat tan chest. He had on tan linen slacks and brown leather sandals. A gold cross on a thick chain nestled among the gray chest hairs. He kept his wraparound sunglasses on indoors.