Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Can you give me what you got today on Vic’s hallway from . . . let’s say from nine this morning?”

  Cavanaugh stepped in front of Jesse. He tapped on the keyboard. Told Jesse to sit.

  “Here you go, Chief.” Cavanaugh pointed at the computer screen. “That’s Mr. Prado’s room there. You can use the joystick, rollerball mouse, or the keyboard arrows to move forward or back. You see an image you want to capture as a still, hit this button. It will pause the video. Then I can print the image for you.”

  Jesse scrolled through the video, Rosa the housekeeper playing a starring role. A hotel guest or two made cameo appearances. Because of the speed at which he moved through the video, the movements of the people on screen reminded Jesse of old silent Westerns. The flickering light above him added to the strobing effect. Then, when Jesse spotted Vic’s door opening, he slowed the action to normal speed, then slower than normal. Out stepped an attractive woman about his own age. The woman didn’t seem to want to leave. Instead, she stood by the open door, turned back, facing into the room. Vic appeared, partially in shadow. Clutched the woman tightly to him. Kissed her long and hard on the mouth. They stared at each other. Neither seeming to speak. The door closed. The woman hesitated again, turned to go, took a few tentative steps toward the elevator, stopped, looked behind her, wiped her eyes, and left.

  Jesse said to Cavanaugh, “Can you get me a still of the woman’s face?”

  “Sure. I’ll clean it up and enlarge it for you.”

  A minute later, the printer kicked on and out came a clear shot of Lorraine Frazetta.

  “Do you know if she valet-parked her car?”

  “We can check,” Cavanaugh said, leaning over Jesse’s shoulder, tapping at the keyboard again. “There you go, she’s handing her ticket to the valet. Here he comes driving it up to the front entrance. Nice car.”

  Before Jesse asked, Cavanaugh printed out a still of the Corvette, clearly showing its tag number. He called the number in to Molly.

  “Also, try to track down Al Gleason from Paradise Taxi. I need to speak to him.”

  Jesse asked Cavanaugh to get him back to the video on Vic’s hall. When the video showed Vic leaving his room and stopping by the elevator, Jesse asked Cavanaugh if he could follow Vic’s progress. The security man leaned over Jesse’s shoulder once again.

  “Okay, here he is in the elevator,” Cavanaugh said. “He pressed the button for three.”

  More keyboard tapping.

  “Here he is getting off the elevator at three. He’s turning. Hold on.”

  More tapping.

  “Here he is again. He’s stopping by room 323. You can take it from here, Chief.”

  Jesse let the video run forward. When he did, he got a knot in his gut. He hadn’t felt this way since the day he found out Jenn had been cheating on him with some smarmy Hollywood producer. Jesse stood up from the chair and, in a monotone voice that barely seemed to belong to him, thanked Cavanaugh for his help.

  Cavanaugh stared at the frozen image on the screen of Vic Prado kissing the woman in room 323.

  “Hey, Chief Stone, don’t you want me to print a still of this for you?”

  Jesse didn’t answer. He kept walking down the hall. When the elevator doors closed, he pressed the button for the third floor.

  69

  Jesse held himself stiffly as he walked right past Molly and the heavyset man sitting next to her desk. All Jesse could see was Vic Prado kissing Dee. It played over and over and over again in his head. He walked into his office, slamming the door behind him. He looked at his glove, shook his head, and pulled open the drawer with the bottle inside. Not many things got to him like this, but he did have his blind spots, and when things came at him from those dark places, they tended to crush him. He was feeling pretty damn crushed at the moment. The trick, he told himself, was not to let anyone else see the damage. He told himself that’s what the drinking was for, to camouflage the wounds. He took his time with the drink, trying to focus on it, the liquor’s flavor, the amber color, the spreading warmth, instead of what had driven him to it. But it was no good. It did nothing to erase the image of Dee locked in Vic Prado’s embrace, his lips pressing against hers. Jesse didn’t pride himself on his imagination, but it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what happened next. He poured another drink.

  By the time Jesse had made it up to Dee’s room from the hotel basement, she was gone. When he asked after her at the front desk, the young woman stationed there told him that Dee had checked out.

  —

  Dave Stockton had gotten her a cab, and no, he didn’t know where it had taken her. Jesse thought he had a pretty good idea of where she’d gone. Not where she had gone, exactly, but who she had gone to meet up with. How convenient for them, he thought, Kayla disappearing. It had taken all he had to hold himself together. He was no longer in the frame of mind to hold himself together.

  Molly knocked. She didn’t bother waiting for him to answer.

  He slammed his hand on his desk. “Damn it, Molly! Did I tell you to come in here?”

  “Watch it, Jesse. You don’t want to knock over your drink.”

  He grabbed the scotch and poured it into the soil of a philodendron that was already on its last legs.

  “What is it?”

  “I got Al Gleason outside.”

  “Who?”

  “Al Gleason! The cabdriver.”

  It took a few seconds for it to register. Molly noticed.

  “Jesse, are you all right? You’re acting—”

  “Send him in,” Jesse said.

  “In a minute. I spoke to Kayla’s dad. She never made it to Taos.”

  “Is he worried?”

  “Not worried, concerned, but he says she’s pulled stuff like this before. She’s called and said she wants time to think and then doesn’t show. She calls a few days later and apologizes for not showing up. Mostly the father grumbled about how Vic ruined Kayla’s life.”

  “You didn’t mention the abduction.”

  “For crissakes, Jesse, give me a little credit.”

  “Sorry. Anything on the white car?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Send Gleason in,” Jesse said, sitting back down behind his desk.

  Gleason smelled like old cigar smoke and coffee. He wore a dirty tweed cap and a windbreaker that fit him ten years and thirty pounds ago.

  Jesse introduced himself.

  “We’ve met. We play you four times a year in softball. You’re a pretty good ballplayer,” Gleason said.

  “Thanks. I’ll have that etched on my headstone.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. You had a fare today, a guy about my age. You took him from the hotel—”

  “Vic Prado. Yeah, I drove him from the hotel to a gas station north of Lowell on the New Hampshire border.”

  “You guys talk much?”

  “Nah. After he gave me the address, he kept his head down and his mouth shut, but I could tell he knew I knew who he was even with that black eye of his.”

  Jesse said, “How’s that?”

  “Chief, you drive a cab as long as me, you can tell. I saw it in his eyes when I looked in the rearview. You know when fares want to talk and you know when they don’t. He didn’t.”

  “You sound sure of yourself.”

  Gleason laughed and his belly jiggled. “Yeah, well, he tipped me a hundred bucks on top of the fare. I didn’t figure it was for my good looks. That’s keep-your-mouth-shut money, pure and simple.”

  “So why aren’t you keeping your mouth shut?”

  “I got to earn a living, you know. The cops can screw up my license.” Gleason slapped his belly. “Believe it or not, Chief, I got other mouths to feed and not many marketable skills beyond my charm and driving a cab.”

  “If you
two didn’t talk on the ride up, what did Prado do to entertain himself?”

  “Texted a lot.”

  “And when you got to this gas station, what happened?” Jesse said.

  Gleason made a face. “Nothing. He settled up. Gave me the hush money and got out of the cab. I asked him if he wanted to wait for his ride in my cab. He didn’t look happy about that and told me to go. So I went.”

  “You’re sure he was waiting for a ride?”

  “No, but what the hell else was he going to do out in the middle of nowheres?”

  “Good question.”

  “Did he have any luggage?”

  “Nope. Just the shirt on his back and the pants on his backside.”

  “Did you give Officer Crane the address where you dropped off Prado?” Jesse said.

  “I did.”

  Jesse extended his right arm. They shook hands.

  “Thanks for coming in.”

  “Always happy to help the police.”

  “Do me a favor, Al, ask Officer Crane to come in here, please.”

  “Sure thing. I’ll enjoy watching her walk,” Gleason said, a lecherous smile on his face. “She’s got the best ass I ever seen on a cop.”

  Jesse gave the cabbie a look that would have given Medusa a run for her money.

  “Sorry. Yeah, sure.”

  Jesse was feeling more like himself until the door closed behind the cabbie. The second it did, that image of Vic and Dee rushed back into his head. And there it got jumbled up with images of Jenn and Elliot Krueger, of Kayla at twenty-one and the young Vic Prado. He had lots of luck with women whom he didn’t love, but none with those he did.

  This time Molly’s presence felt like a lifeline.

  “If you ever decide to take another lover,” Jesse said, “I think Al the cabbie just volunteered.”

  “Ick! I need to take a shower now.”

  “Not yet. I want you to call the gas station where—”

  “Done. Gas station owner, a Turkish guy, says a van came and picked Vic up about fifteen minutes after he was dropped off by Gleason. And before you ask, no, he didn’t get a plate number. He didn’t know what state issued the plates. There were no markings on the van. He didn’t look at the driver and didn’t recognize Vic. I guess baseball’s not so popular in Ankara.”

  “Dead end.”

  “Looks that way, but I got a hit on the plate number you called in. That Vette is registered to a Lorraine Frazetta of—”

  “Frazetta as in Mike Frazetta as in Boston Mob Frazetta?”

  “Give the chief a Kewpie doll,” Molly said. “She’s Mike Frazetta’s wife.”

  “And Vic Prado’s lover.”

  “So he was sleeping with a Mob boss’s wife. Do you think that’s why he ran?”

  “I don’t know. With what’s going on lately, I feel like I know less and less as more and more happens. I know everything fits together somehow, but how?”

  Molly tilted her head. “Everything? You think the guy with the green shoes is connected to Vic Prado’s skipping town and Kayla’s disappearance?”

  “Everything, as in everything that’s happened in Paradise since the day I left for the reunion. I feel like there’s one thing that I’m not seeing and the harder I concentrate on it, the further away it gets.”

  “Have you talked to Kayla’s friend, the one who—”

  “She’s gone. Let’s drop that subject.”

  “Okay, Jesse, you’re chief, but you’re also my friend and for some odd reason I love you. What’s going on with you?”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “You always say that.”

  “Isn’t it always true?” he said.

  Molly shook her head. “No. And I don’t want to have to come to your house tomorrow morning with Suit and scrape you off the floor.”

  “I had a bad moment before. Forget it.”

  “Forgotten. When’s Connor Cavanaugh coming in?”

  Jesse looked at his watch. “His shift’s over soon. I told him to come straight over and that we’d get him dinner.”

  “How about breakfast?”

  “Lunch, too, if it takes him that long. And if he can’t find the guy, we’ll get the other hotel employees in to have a look. We’re going to play our one card. Now get out of here.”

  She hesitated.

  “What?” Jesse said, noticing Molly hadn’t moved.

  She didn’t answer.

  He reached into his bottom drawer and took out the bottle of Black Label. He held it out to her. “Here, go water the rest of the plants.”

  70

  He was hungry and cold, pacing the dock and rubbing his arms for warmth. The dusk air in that part of eastern New Hampshire was crisper than he would have expected this late in spring. As he gazed at the boarded-up summer home behind him, he regretted not having stopped to buy a hooded sweatshirt or something to eat. It occurred to him only after the van had dropped him off an hour ago that he hadn’t eaten all day. He supposed he could have asked the van driver—a man who could be trusted, his lawyer assured him—to pull over and buy him some supplies, but he hadn’t been thinking straight. He was so close to getting out of the mess Joe Breen had created, and he was consumed by the enormity of the step he was about to take. Making contingencies to walk away from one’s life, Vic realized, was much easier than the act of walking away itself.

  For the last sixty minutes, the only sounds he’d heard were the noises in his head and the slapping of lake water against the dock pilings. Before he could see it, he noticed a distant buzzing that grew louder and louder in the dying light. Then he saw it, the mustard-yellow seaplane, its pontoons slung beneath it like clumsy silver clown shoes. It flew in a descending arc over the surrounding pines before touching down on the rippled surface of the water. It took an eternity for the little plane to make its way to the dock, but as it floated nearer to him, Vic’s old life seemed to retreat. Not even the acrid stench of spent gas on hot metal from the plane’s motor could ruin his mood. The pilot flung the door open and called for him to throw him a tie line. He hesitated, then reached down and tossed the pilot a thick nylon rope.

  That was ten minutes ago. Now Vic sat in the Piper Super Cub, eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich, a blanket over his shoulders. Both supplied by the pilot. The pilot, who’d gone to stretch his legs a little and let out some water before taking off again.

  Never had a sandwich tasted so good. It took Vic back to his days in the minors when he got only a few bucks a day for meal money. He and Jesse used to exist on bologna and white bread so they could save up their meal money. For some reason he felt that turning his back on those days with Jesse and Kayla in Albuquerque would be a greater loss than his memories of the World Series. He wondered if the reunion wasn’t more about that than anything else. That he knew his notion of a plea deal worked out by Jesse and his connections was always a pipe dream. He had just wanted to give those days a proper sendoff. Because of Joe Breen, Vic would never know the truth. There was only one thing to do now, to run, and he was doing it. The plane bobbed in the water, gently rocking him into a state of serenity. He guessed he was okay with making a new life for himself.

  Then the electronic strains of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” smashed the serenity of the moment into fragments large and small. That ridiculous song echoed through the trees, mocking him. He was tempted to throw the phone into the lake, which he intended to do, in any case, before the plane took off. But something, maybe that sense of timing he possessed that had allowed him to be such a fine ballplayer, made him look at the screen.

  “Kayla!”

  “Vic, Vic, help me.”

  She spoke slowly, slurring one word into the next.

  “Are you drunk? Are you—”

  “He’s going to kill me, Vic.”

  “Who’s going to
kill you? Kay, what’s wrong? What’s going—”

  A man’s voice interrupted Vic’s flurry of questions.

  “Mr. Prado, if you want to save your wife from a very slow and painful death, please shut up and listen carefully.”

  The man’s voice was nasal and high-pitched, a difficult voice to take seriously. And Vic, like many people before him, made the mistake of doing just that.

  “Listen to me, you little motherfu—”

  Now Kayla’s screams echoed through the phone and into the trees. She sounded as if she were being burned alive.

  “All right. All right! I’m listening. Just stop doing what you’re doing to her.”

  Kayla’s screams faded quickly into sobbing.

  “That’s more like it,” the voice said. “What I did to her was very painful, but she will recover. The human body is quite resilient. That can be good or bad, and that is dependent on what you do next.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “After I’ve given you instructions, do exactly as I’ve said. Do not deviate. Do not hesitate. Do not alert anyone else, most especially the police. Do not try to trick me. I assure you I will know. Even if I think you’ve lied to me, I will cause your wife more pain than you can possibly imagine. Is that understood?”

  “Yes.”

  When the voice was almost done giving instructions, Vic interrupted.

  “I’m sorry for speaking, but I’m very far away from there.”

  “Are you stalling?”

  “No, I swear. I swear I’m telling you the truth. I’m almost out of the country.”

  “That is not my concern. The clock is ticking, and when I’m satisfied you’ve had enough time, it will be very unpleasant for Kayla. Nothing would please me more.”

  Vic’s phone went dead.

  He pulled it away from his ear and stared at it. His mind was a jumble of panicked thoughts. Had Mike Frazetta found out that he meant to run? Had he found out about him and Lorraine? Had Mike meant to kill him all along, and was Kayla his insurance policy? Or was this something else altogether? That last possibility frightened him most of all. Vic supposed the who and the why didn’t much matter in the end. He held the phone out over the lake through the open door of the plane. To be safe, all he needed to do was to let the phone slip out of his hand. In a few days he would have that new life. Kayla’s pain, regardless of how intense, would be over by then. What did he owe her, anyway? She hadn’t exactly been a model wife. She’d left him, hadn’t she? Was he supposed to just walk into a trap and have this guy murder him, too? Vic was no fool. He knew that Kayla wasn’t getting out of this alive, whether he showed up or not.