“The guy Weathers was tailing . . . he a suspect?” Carney said.
“No, but—”
“But you don’t want him to know he was being tailed.”
Jesse smiled. “No wonder they made you chief and gave you that natty uniform.”
Carney understood Jesse’s predicament. “I’ll talk to Lino and explain the situation. I don’t think it will be a problem. Probably road rage. Your guy cut somebody off because he wanted to keep up with the subject car and some nut took offense.”
“Probably,” Jesse said, but didn’t quite believe it. Too convenient. Jesse believed in convenience about as much as he believed in coincidence.
He thanked the Helton chief for all the help. Before they parted ways, Carney reminded Jesse to stop off at the evidence desk and collect Gabe Weathers’s personal items. When Jesse walked back through the police garage and motor pool, he was no longer at ease and he was no longer smiling.
56
The aspirins had helped a little to begin with, but they had become decreasingly effective as the day wore on. So in addition to the pounding headache, nausea, and full-body weakness, his stomach was killing him. His early rest-stop meeting with Salter and his lawyer hadn’t done much to improve his condition. There was no way he was going to see Dee today. He didn’t have the energy or the desire. Although he had lusted after her for so long and here she was demanding to see him, it was a no-go. Even picturing her tanned nude body, muscles twitching in anticipation, and fantasizing about her begging him to take her in that sexy, vaguely Southern accent of hers couldn’t do the trick. So he texted her and told her the rendezvous would have to wait another day. She’d tried calling a few times, but he refused to answer and let her calls go to voice mail. He texted her again, explaining that he was honestly quite sick, and asked her to give him a day. The calls stopped after that.
Dressed in the same rumpled, sweaty clothes he’d slept in, he’d fallen into bed. He’d spent most of the day in that half-conscious, half-asleep state that only hangovers and certain drugs can induce. At about three in the afternoon, after Dee’s calls had stopped and he felt a bit more human, he got up, took a long shower, and shaved. His hair still wet, he fell back into bed and finally into a deep sleep. It didn’t last, and that was a shame. He was dreaming of Kayla, not Dee. They were young again, impulsive, and stupid in love. They were on a beach somewhere, naked, just holding each other. Kayla was laughing. Even in the dream he realized Kayla’s laugh was something he hadn’t heard for years. It was one of those paradoxical things about dreaming, how you could be a part of it and be apart from it and that the contradiction didn’t matter. Then a weird image attached itself to the dream. He looked away from Kayla to an impossible tree rising out of the sand. On a thick branch above their heads, a stunning, black-feathered bird was singing, but without sound. It wasn’t that Vic couldn’t hear. He heard the roar of the waves. He heard Kayla’s laugh. It was that he knew the bird’s voice had been taken from it. He heard the phone, too. And that was not part of the dream.
He grabbed the phone and checked the number to make sure it wasn’t Dee again.
“Lorraine, hi,” he said, still groggy.
“Umm. Your voice is all sleepy and sexy.”
“Sleepy, yes. Sexy, no.”
“What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I got into a fight with an old friend and then we got drunk together. Now I’m just trying to get some sleep and recover.”
“Poor baby,” she said without a hint of sarcasm. “I can come over and make it better.”
“A long sleep is the only thing that will make this better. Why are you calling?”
“I have a surprise for you.”
“Really? What kind of surprise?”
“I told Mike that I was going back to Lowell to visit my aunt Maria.”
“I’m not getting you,” Vic said.
“I’m here, Vic.”
“Here? Here where?”
“In Paradise.”
Vic sat up in bed as if he were spring-loaded. That undid all the good the sleep had done him.
“Vic! Vic,” she said when he didn’t respond.
“Yeah, Lorraine. Sorry, I’m still waking up. That’s great.”
“You know what’s even better?” Her voice crackled with excitement. “I’m in the hotel lobby.”
Vic fell silent again. A spectrum of emotions went through him that began in anger but ended in a kind of serenity. Serenity because Lorraine had helped push him to make up his mind. He was going to run and though he hadn’t yet figured out just how, he thought that maybe Lorraine could help him.
“Well, then,” he said, “if you’re in the lobby, you better come on up.”
57
Jesse and Dee were to meet at the Lobster Claw for dinner. Jesse sat out on the back deck, waiting for Dee to arrive. He had chosen the Lobster Claw because it was only a few months old and was a Jenn-free zone. For many years, the Gray Gull had been his go-to restaurant, but so much of the drama with Jenn had played out there. It never got public or ugly. There were no screaming fights or nasty scenes. That’s not what Jesse and Jenn were about. Yet so much of their relationship was spent in a constant push/pull: one step forward, half a step back, living together, living apart, dating each other, and dating others. Jesse shook his head just thinking about how much time and energy they had both invested in a long-drawn-out dance that, in the end, came to so much smoke. Although it had been years since they had been together in any real sense of the word, he guessed he was still attached to Jenn. He didn’t need Dix to tell him it was time to move on. He wanted to move on. Dee made him want to move on.
He was already at the table, sipping a beer. Beer was sometimes part of a game he played with himself about his drinking. There was a hierarchy on the Jesse Stone alcohol scale that ran from water to beer to wine to scotch and soda to scotch to martinis. Beer was one step up from soda or sparkling water and several steps removed from martinis. He had a number value system as well that he used in conjunction with his alcohol scale. Two beers were equal to one scotch and soda. Two scotches were equal to one and a half martinis, and so on. Of course it was all nonsense: Alcohol was alcohol. Any cop or bartender knows that there’s roughly the same amount of alcohol in one beer as in one glass of wine as in one shot of eighty-proof liquor. But drinkers feed their habits with these games, and Jesse was an experienced player.
Dee came out on the deck in tight white slacks, red deck shoes, and a beige sweater under a perfectly faded denim jacket. Dee was smart about how she dressed. She didn’t always play up her beauty, but she always let it shine through. She had on some makeup, but an appropriate amount for a spring dinner with the chief of police at a place called the Lobster Claw in a town called Paradise. She always smelled great. Jesse lit up at the sight of her. She smiled that neon smile back at him, but he detected a note of seriousness in her he hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew it was something. Dee noticed him notice. She also noticed the slight swelling and bruising on the outside of Jesse’s right eye. She leaned over and kissed him not so softly on the lips. When she pulled back, Dee stroked her fingers along his bruises. She ordered a martini, dry, three olives, from the waitress standing at her shoulder. She sat down and turned her attention back to Jesse.
“What happened to you, darlin’?”
“You first,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I saw it on your face.”
She thought about saying something witty to deflect him but couldn’t think of anything witty. Then she remembered about the call that never came.
“It’s Kayla,” she said.
“I know.”
Dee’s eyes got wide. “What do you know?”
“She left Vic.”
“But how—”
Jesse pointed at his eye. “Vic told me while he was trying to break my cheekbone.”
“You two got into it?”
“We did.”
“Bad?”
“Not for me,” Jesse said, the corners of his mouth turning up.
Dee understood. “Men! What did you do to him that he came after you?”
“He thought Kayla had left him for me.”
She shook her head and smiled.
“I’m wounded,” Jesse said.
“No, darlin’, it’s not that I don’t think Kayla or any other woman wouldn’t run in your direction at the drop of a hat. I sure would. It’s just that I know where Kay went.”
“Where?”
She winked at him. “I’m sworn to secrecy.”
“But I’m the chief of police,” he said, a broad smile on his face.
“You going to take me back to the station and beat it out of me?”
“Beating isn’t what I had in mind.”
It was her turn to smile. The waitress delivered Dee’s martini. She stirred the drink with the speared olives, raised the glass, and said, “To thorough interrogations.”
He raised his nearly empty beer glass. “Uh-huh.”
Dee ordered a field-greens salad with goat cheese and walnuts and a lobster roll. Jesse ordered a shrimp cocktail, extra cocktail sauce, a burger, and another beer. They ate mostly in silence, both taking time to look out at the Atlantic. They were thinking about very different subjects as they stared out at the water. Jesse was trying to find the words to ask about the big thing he was certain Dee was hiding from him. He was also worried that asking might ruin it. He could hear Dix in his head, chiding him about his desire to control everything, even things completely beyond his control. Dee was breathing a sigh of relief that Vic had told her the truth about not being in any shape to meet with her and that he wasn’t just avoiding her. She was also thinking that she didn’t want this night to end.
The waitress broke the spell. “Coffee? Dessert?”
They ordered coffee.
Jesse waited for the waitress to leave. “Are you going to tell me where Kayla went?”
Dee made an exaggerated frown. “I was kind of looking forward to that thorough interrogation you’d mentioned.”
“I’ll come up with a new question you can refuse to answer.”
She looked around as if to make sure no one was listening. “You can’t tell Vic.”
“Word of honor.”
“She went back home.”
“Scottsdale?”
“New Mexico. She’s going to spend some time in Taos with her folks and try to figure out what to do with her life.”
“Good for her.”
“But didn’t she really hurt you?”
“Long time ago.”
“That’s a very enlightened lie,” she said. “You forget, I saw the look on your face in New York when Kayla was around.”
He shrugged.
“That’s it, a shrug? You can do better than that, darlin’.”
“Probably.”
“Jesse Stone, are you always this effusive?”
He didn’t answer.
The waitress delivering their coffees saved Jesse from further questioning. The waitress also put two snifters of amber liquor down on the table next to their coffees. The intense smell of alcohol and the tang of concentrated orange rose up from the fancy glassware, blending with the salt smell of the sea and the earthy fragrance of coffee. She placed the check on the table as well.
“The Grand Marniers are compliments of the owner,” the waitress said. “Dan wants you to stop by on the way out. I’ll take the check when you’re ready.”
Jesse thought back to the night he’d stood alone on this very deck, drinking his Black Label and thinking about his transition from one ocean to another. Dan Castro had wanted to speak to him that night, too. Less than a week had passed, but it felt like a distant memory. Lots had changed in the last several turns of the earth. Mostly he thought about the murdered girl. The last time he’d stood on the Lobster Claw’s deck, Martina Penworth’s life stretched out before her like a long, dimly lit road full of potholes and promise. Now that road was forever closed, promise forever unfulfilled.
“What’s wrong, Jesse?”
“I was thinking about the dead girl.”
“Any progress?”
“None.”
They sipped their orange-infused brandies. Dee liked it. Jesse didn’t. He wasn’t a Grand Marnier type of guy.
“I don’t want to add to your worries,” Dee said.
“But . . .”
“But Kayla was supposed to let me know she arrived safely in New Mexico.”
Jesse said, “She hasn’t called?”
“Not a peep.”
“Have you tried calling her?”
“About twenty times. The first calls went straight to voice mail. Then the voice-mail box filled up.”
“Do you know her parents’ number?”
“We’re friends, but we’re not that close, darlin’.”
Jesse said, “She probably just wants some solitude. But I’ll get hold of her folks tomorrow morning.”
“That makes me feel better.”
“While we’re on the subject of making you feel better, how about we head back to my place and get that interrogation started?”
“What about speaking to the boss? He did buy us drinks.”
“You want to bribe the chief, you’ve got to do better than a round of drinks.”
Jesse put three twenties on the table and took Dee by the hand.
“This way,” he said, “through the parking lot.”
58
When Jesse walked through the front door of the Paradise police headquarters, he once again came bearing donuts. This time because he was a little late for work. As chief, he didn’t need to answer to anyone if he took an hour here or there, but that wasn’t his way. Though he had no experience at being a chief when he got the position and had walked into the middle of a shit storm from his first day on the job as chief, there were lessons he had learned in the Marines and as a ballplayer that applied. One was to never expect more from the people who work for you than you expect from yourself. Good leaders lead by example. So Jesse had tried, for the most part successfully, to be in early and get the lay of the land. On those rare occasions when he fell down, he had Molly Crane to protect him. He loved Molly for her loyalty and for a hundred other reasons. Problem was, Molly liked to gloat about having to save her boss’s behind. And when he walked in late that morning, he knew Molly would be all over him. But Molly was too busy to bust on her boss for being late. She was taking a report from a neatly dressed young man who sat across from her. Jesse walked directly into his office without even saying hello.
He sat at his desk, pulled a jelly out of the box of a dozen, and sipped at the extra-large milk-and-sugar coffee he’d bought at the donut shop. Some days, the stationhouse coffee sufficed. Some days not. He was in the midst of a sex hangover—weak-kneed, lightheaded, and dreamy—and that required copious amounts of good coffee and as many bad carbs as he could stuff into his body in a brief period of time. He took a bite of the donut and remembered the lesson his training officer had given him his first day on the job in uniform in L.A. During a break, they drove to Randy’s Donuts, that place near LAX with the giant stucco donut on the roof. His TO, Rodriguez, was a tough guy built like a pit bull, only not as pleasant. He was the type of guy who told rookies not to speak unless he gave them permission to speak and then only if they had an intelligent question to ask. Rodriguez bought three different kinds of jelly donuts, moved away from the cashier, and placed them in a row on the counter.
“First and most important test, rookie,” Rodriguez said. “I’ll know all I need to know about you when we’re done. Y
ou gonna be a good cop. You gonna be a bag of leaves. I’ll know after this.”
Jesse had no idea what was going on but went along with it. As a Marine and as a ballplayer, he was used to all the weird, often inexplicable hazing rituals the new guys had to endure.
“Okay, rookie. Here we got a jelly donut covered in powdered sugar. Here we got a jelly donut covered in colored sprinkles. Here we got a jelly donut covered in granulated sugar.” Rodriguez pointed as he spoke. “Which one you going to eat?”
“Granulated sugar,” Jesse said.
“Why’s that, rookie?”
“Our uniforms are black, sir,” Jesse said. “You get any powdered sugar on your uniform and wiping it will only spread it around. Sprinkles are better, but in hot or wet weather, you can have the same trouble as with the powdered sugar. Worse, because the stains will be colored. Granulated sugar you can brush off.”
Rodriguez smiled at Jesse. “Outstanding, rookie. You’re going to make detective someday.”
Jesse was smiling about that memory when Molly came through his office door.
“Donut?” He hoped she’d be distracted.
It was a waste of time.
“You forget to change your clocks in March?” she said.
“Go away, Crane. That’s an order.”
Not only didn’t she leave, she stepped closer to Jesse’s desk and leaned in to take a close look at him.
“The swelling’s gone down on the side of your face, but you’re looking like you spent the night with other body parts—”
“Molly Crane! You’re a good Irish Catholic girl. You are not supposed to know about such things.”
“That’s the great paradox of my faith. We learn about such things so we know what not to do.”
“You’ve got me there.”
“But I’m not here about your persistent debauchery,” she said. “I’ve got Ron Pearl from Mayflower Rental out front.”
“They rent pilgrims?”
“Stick to police work, Jesse. Your stand-up is weak. They rent cars.”
Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot Page 19
