Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “And you didn’t meet me down here at this hour to question me about something I would never talk to you about.”

  “You used to tell me all about you and Kayla,” Vic said.

  “That was then.”

  “You mean before she—”

  “Yes, I mean before all of it. That was a long time ago, Vic. A lot has changed.”

  “I saw you were sitting next to Blanco last night. What garbage did that miserable prick—”

  Jesse’s temporary reprieve from the headache was over. He took another sip of the coffee and said, “Forget Julio Blanco. Forget Kayla and Dee. What am I doing here, standing on the street with you at—”

  Jesse Stone never finished the question. His cell phone buzzed in his pocket. Vic’s cell phone went off as well. Only his ringtone was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Neither man seemed pleased by their respective calls. It was too early for peanuts and Cracker Jacks.

  Jesse saw that the call was from the Paradise PD. He excused himself and stepped away from Prado. “This is Chief Stone.”

  “Jesse?” It was Molly Crane, and he didn’t like the tone of her voice.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing good. You better get back here. The Salter family handyman just found a murdered girl at the old house on the bluff.”

  “Murdered how? When?”

  “We just got the call. I’m headed out there now.”

  “I’m on my way. And call Healy.”

  Jesse looked back at Vic Prado, who appeared worse than he had only a few minutes earlier. Prado was still on the phone and he didn’t seem happy with the party on the other end of the line. But that wasn’t Jesse’s problem. He walked back into the hotel and through the lobby. As he hurried to catch the elevator, he saw Vic’s pair of muscleheads rushing to the hotel door.

  10

  Vic Prado turned and saw Jesse retreating into the hotel. Fuck! The whole point of this stupid reunion was to get with Jesse. Months of planning, of playing Mike Frazetta, all for nothing. Jesse Stone was going to be his way to get out from under, and now it was all slipping away. But Vic hadn’t put up with all the shit he had had to endure in the minors, the long bus rides, horrible food, and inept coaching, without learning to cope. The only way to survive long enough in the boonies so that you could thrive on the big stage is to be adaptable, and Vic Prado was nothing else if not adaptable.

  “Yeah, I see ’em,” he said to Joe Breen as the two pet gorillas emerged from the hotel. “They’re coming out the door right now.”

  “What the fuck were you doing talking to that cop without my boys around?”

  Vic had come to understand that he could sometimes manipulate Mike Frazetta, but that his charms were lost on Breen. Frazetta was susceptible for the same reasons the marks were: They were in awe of professional athletes. They had all dreamed the dream. Had all played Little League ball and imitated their favorite player’s rituals: the way Nomar used to adjust his gloves, tug his jersey, tap his toes; the way Ichiro held the bat straight at the pitcher, tugged the right shoulder of his jersey, and seemed to rest his chin on that shoulder. It was that dream that Vic used against the men who ran the asset-management firms they had targeted. Even the most intelligent men he’d met got completely stupid around him. It was the same way men reacted to a gorgeous woman in the room. He had seen men of all stripes melt in the presence of Kayla. Hadn’t he? Hadn’t he ached to find a way to have her? And now it was Dee who made men stupid.

  “What did you want me to do, Joe? The guy was my roommate, for crissakes! I married the woman he was dating when he got injured. It would have seemed very odd for us not to have talked in private, to clear the air. I mean, I haven’t talked to the guy in forever.”

  Breen was a cold one. “I don’t care for it.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about it now. Because of you, he’s heading back to Paradise. Did you have to do that, kill a girl? You and Mike promised—”

  “I promised you nothing, Prado. And it wasn’t me that killed the girl. It was you. You picked these guys as targets. You said they would be no problem. If you had been right, the Salter kid would be waking up with the girl right now.”

  “Fuck you, Joe.”

  But Breen didn’t get angry. He just laughed into the phone and said, “Enjoy the rest of the day with your old mates, Vic. I have the sense Mike will want you to contact the father again soon.”

  Back in his flat, Breen pressed the hang-up button on his phone, let himself out of the bathroom, and tiptoed around the kitchen. He hit the brew button on the coffeemaker and then headed back into the bedroom. There he crawled in bed next to Moira, a girl from the old country and a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Moira was still asleep. Joe Breen got a strange feeling in his gut as he watched Moira. Come the morning after, Joe, having satisfied his need for comfort and for comforting, would usually send the girls on their way, sometimes with a few extra twenties stashed in their pockets or their backpacks. He knew student life was a struggle. But this morning, Joe Breen didn’t want to send Moira on her way. He wanted her to stay as long as the girl cared to.

  11

  Dee had taken three ibuprofen and treated herself to all the ridiculously priced bottled water the room had to offer. She kept her head under the shower for a long time after cleaning the scotch-scented sweat off her body. She was much less anxious to scrub away the remnants of Jesse Stone. Before she had met Jesse, she knew it was possible, even likely, that they would wind up together, but she hadn’t expected to want to be with him so badly. Whether she had compromised herself by not keeping him at arm’s length was a question for later, for post-hangover self-assessments. Stepping out of the shower, all she wanted to do was dry off and dive feetfirst into the well of sleep.

  She nestled in bed, the cool top sheet and soft quilt molding over her body like a downy cast. It didn’t take but a second for her eyes to flutter shut and for her to begin to drift away. At the same time, the feel of Jesse’s lips against hers, the power of his arms around her, came rushing back. She was going to enjoy this sleep.

  No, she wasn’t.

  There was a loud, persistent banging at the room door. She had sunk so quickly and so deeply into sleep that it took a few seconds for Dee to make sense of it. Hadn’t she hung the privacy notice on the door? She had. The banging got louder, more persistent.

  “Open the door, Dee!”

  It was Kayla.

  Annoyed, her headache reasserting itself, Dee scrambled out of bed and went to the door. She didn’t bother covering up. She knew that her body sometimes made Kayla jealous, and at the moment, that was just fine with her.

  “What?” she said, pulling back the door.

  Kayla didn’t hesitate, walking into the room past Dee. Dee shut the door.

  “And good morning to you, darlin’,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm.

  The sarcasm was lost on Kayla, but Kayla’s appearance wasn’t lost on Dee. The woman was a mess, and looked as if she hadn’t slept. Her face was free of makeup and her hair was all over the place. In the year since she had insinuated herself into Kayla and Vic’s circle of friends, Dee had only once seen Kayla in such a state. That time, too, she had showed up at Dee’s doorstep early in the morning, in tears.

  “How could you do that?” Kayla was shouting.

  “Do what?” Dee said, though she knew that Kayla was talking about Jesse.

  “Don’t play the dumb blonde with me, Dee. You’re as smart a person as I’ve ever known. You know about me and Jess.”

  “Okay, Kayla,” Dee said, now putting on a robe. “You don’t act dumb with me, either. Don’t you think I realize you and Vic invited me along for two reasons only? One was to hang out with you while Vic rekindled his youth. The other was to entertain Jesse. For some reason, it seemed important to both of you to keep Jes
se happy.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Kay, sorry. You guys made me feel like an expensive escort, a party favor for Jesse Stone, if he were so inclined. Well, as it turned out, I was so inclined.”

  Kayla had no answer for that but tears.

  12

  Jesse had driven past the Salter house before but hadn’t spent a lot of time in that part of Paradise. With the Atlantic, the lighthouse, Paradise Neck, and Stiles Island spreading out below, the view was breathtaking, and it was easy to understand why the wealthy had once made the bluffs their own. It was also easy for people to forget that attitudes toward the sea had changed over the last hundred and fifty years. Once upon a time, men understood their insignificance in relationship to the ocean. They respected its might and its bounty. They weren’t so cocky as to think of the ocean as something the Lord had put there as a means for their leisure. In the past, the wealthy built their houses by the sea not so they might play in it, but that they might revere it.

  His first reaction after getting the call from Molly about the murder was to fly back, but Jesse realized that between the New York traffic, the potential delays at LaGuardia, and traffic on the other end, he might as well drive. And it would save him the trouble of having to get his car back to Paradise from New York. Once he got out of New York City, past New Rochelle and into Connecticut, the drive hadn’t been too bad, and there were the memories of his time with Dee to keep him company. He’d left a note for her at the desk. It wasn’t poetry. Hard to write poetry when you know someone’s just killed a girl in your town. Hard for Jesse to write poetry, period. The note explained the essentials and he hoped Dee could understand why he’d left without saying good-bye. If she couldn’t, he wasn’t sure he’d want to see her again, anyway.

  Jesse was okay until his Dee fantasies had run their course. By then the aspirins were losing ground to his headache. The headache wasn’t the only thing making a comeback. With the pain came Julio Blanco’s voice. Jesse wished he had pressed Molly for some details, any details, or had stopped to call back for an update. At least then he could begin thinking the basics of the case through instead of hearing Blanco’s indictment of Vic Prado over and over again in his head. Blanco’s voice was bad enough, but now Jesse kept rerunning the play in his head, trying to view it from the catcher’s perspective. He scoured his own memory for any hints he might have suppressed, for any sense that Vic had held on to the ball too long before throwing the ball. It was no good. Jesse had and would only ever have the memory of the play he had carried with him since the night of the game. Except now he carried it with doubt.

  One of the things, maybe the only thing, that had let Jesse move on with his life after his shoulder was torn apart was the belief that what had happened was fate. It wasn’t preordained or anything, but things played out as they’d had to: because the ball was hit as slowly as it was, because of where it was hit, because of the speed of the runner, because Vic had better range to his left than to his right, because Vic had to throw from his knees across his body, because Vic was such an instinctive fielder, because the runner was trying to impress the scouts, because the infield was so hard, because, because, because . . . Now there was a different because, one that had nothing to do with bad luck or unfortunate, immutable events. This new because was tainted with all the worst aspects of human weakness.

  Jesse pulled over at the next-to-last rest stop in Connecticut. He let out some of that gallon of water he’d had earlier, bought a liter bottle to put back in, swallowed another fistful of aspirins. Once he felt the aspirins taking effect, he called Molly.

  “Any details?”

  “God, Jesse,” Molly said. “She was eighteen.”

  Jesse Stone let Molly have a minute. She was a good cop, a tough cop. Unlike some of the other cops on the Paradise PD, she would have done okay for herself on the L.A.P.D. or any other big-city PD. Guys like Suit Simpson, as good and loyal as he was, were better off in Paradise. Jesse understood that his demeanor at crime scenes sometimes led his cops to believe he thought that one corpse was like the next, that one murder victim was like any other. He supposed that it was okay for them to believe that. He also supposed it was true, if not completely. Every murder victim deserved justice, needed an advocate. Just as every living citizen was entitled to equal protection under the law, so, too, were the murdered entitled. Yet some victims were more equal than others. Maybe that wasn’t fair or right, but it was human, and cops were owed that much leeway.

  “Name?” Jesse said.

  “California driver’s license says Martina M. Penworth. She’s—was a student at Tufts. Same school as Ben Salter, one of the sons.”

  “How? Where?”

  “Handyman came to check out the house after the storm. Found the Salter boy’s car out front and the front door unlocked. He discovered the body in a small second-floor bedroom. Two bullets in her, probably nine-millimeter. One in the heart. One in the head. Close range, but the entry wounds weren’t contact wounds. There was another round put into the wall above the headboard. There was evidence of sexual activity.”

  “Rape?”

  “Hard to tell, but I don’t think so. Just a used condom. ME will be able to tell you more.”

  “TOD?”

  “Last night, around ten.”

  “The Salter kid?”

  “No sign of him,” Molly said.

  “Any ideas?”

  “I guess the kid could have done it, panicked, and took off. But it doesn’t explain the car and it doesn’t explain the damage to the bedroom door. Door seems like it was kicked in.”

  “The girl’s parents been notified?” There was silence from the other end of the phone, which Jesse understood perfectly. “I’ll do it,” he said. “It’s my job. How about the Salters?”

  “The father, Harlan IV, is on his way from the Vineyard. No doubt he’ll have a Boston lawyer in tow.”

  Jesse agreed. “No doubt.”

  “Healy?”

  “Should be here any minute.”

  “Okay, Molly, I shouldn’t be too much longer. I want to drive by the scene first, then I’ll come into the office. I’ll want to talk to the handyman.”

  “Ethan Farley.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s worked for the family forever and his family has worked for the Salters going back generations. He’s not our man,” Molly said.

  “Anything else comes up, call me.”

  Jesse got back into his car, his headache ebbing away. Before pulling out of the parking spot, he bent his right arm at the elbow and touched his hand to his shoulder. It didn’t hurt, not in a conventional way. It was more of a phantom pain, one that spoke of what could have been. Right now, finding Martina Penworth’s killer was more important than all the coulda-beens and shoulda-beens in Jesse Stone’s life.

  13

  Monty Bernstein hated his name. It was absurd, nearly as absurd as the reasoning behind it. The least his mom could have done was lie to him about why she’d hung Monty on him, told him she’d had a fierce crush on the young Montgomery Clift or that she had greatly admired the WWII British field marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. But no, she felt compelled to tell him the truth: “I loved to watch Let’s Make a Deal, and I thought Monty Hall was handsome.” He supposed it really didn’t matter, that when your last name was Bernstein, Monty fit just as well as anything else. He also knew that the name worked for him. No one forgot his name once they heard it, even if it did elicit sneers and whispers at the country club. Harlan Salter IV had remembered it. And even though the WASPy prick had counted his fingers after shaking Monty’s hand for the first time, Monty didn’t care.

  Bernstein knew that among Salter’s army of attorneys and legal advisers, he was more stray dog than top dog. It didn’t matter. Salter paid him a nice retainer, and when Harlan called he needed the kinds of services only Monty co
uld deliver. One high-end corporate lawyer was much like the next. What did it matter if one was a member of the Harvard Club or the Cornell Club? That wasn’t the case when it came to criminal defense attorneys. The majority of criminal defense lawyers began their careers as prosecutors, so they understood the hunt from both the cheetah’s and gazelle’s perspectives. They knew which judges could be played and how to play them. They knew who among their former colleagues were hardasses or soft touches. They knew which cops had weaknesses and how to exploit those weaknesses. Most important, there was one other resource criminal defense lawyers had at their disposal that the Skull and Bones boys didn’t: bad people, very bad people.

  For the bulk of his ten years under Harlan Salter IV’s retainer, Monty Bernstein hadn’t had to dip into that exclusive well. He’d had to ask a favor from a former lover to get the oldest Salter son, Micah, out of an assault charge stemming from a bar fight near Boston College. He’d acted as a go-between for Harlan with a narcotics detective who’d caught the middle Salter son, Elijah, buying coke in Roxbury. But until now, Monty hadn’t had to do anything for the youngest son, Ben. He was the good kid, the one who followed the rules and kept his nose clean. The problem with life was that even if you didn’t go looking for trouble, trouble sometimes came looking for you. From what Harlan had told Monty on the phone, it seemed that the worst kind of trouble had found Ben.

  Monty stepped out of his offices and into the backseat of the black Lincoln Navigator. Harlan’s driver closed the door behind him. Salter was in the backseat as well, staring out the window, smoking his pipe. The earthy, sweet cherry aroma of the smoke overwhelmed the lawyer. Monty should have been used to the aroma of Harlan’s pipe by now, but it was always a shock to him. He couldn’t think of another person he knew who smoked a pipe. Salter didn’t acknowledge Monty until the large SUV began moving. Even then, he didn’t look at the lawyer.

  “You’ve spoken to your friends about how to proceed?” Harlan said, his voice cool and firm.