Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  “You look official today, Chief,” Bryce said.

  “I think of the look as firm and resolute,” Jesse said.

  “Or just ruggedly handsome,” Lily said.

  Dev had taken a picture of Paul with his phone, and asked an old friend with the State Police to do an artist’s rendering, which Dev had delivered to Jesse himself. They both agreed it was very good. Jesse took the drawing out of its manila folder and handed it to Lily.

  “This man was found dead at the lake early this morning,” Jesse said. “Lily, he took a cab over to Paradise from Marshport last night. The driver said he dropped him here.”

  Lily looked at the drawing, then back at Jesse.

  “I’m sure he did,” Lily said. “But just getting to the gate doesn’t get you in. When Whit and Karina, his nurse, are alone in the house at night, she deactivates the phone down there when she goes to bed. To get in, you need her phone number or mine. Or you’re out of luck.”

  “Did the nurse mention a visitor before she went to bed?”

  “She did not,” Lily said.

  “But she would mention it?”

  “She thinks of herself as more than Whit’s nurse,” Lily said. “She sees herself as a gatekeeper. If somebody wanted to get inside the gate last night, she would certainly have told me.”

  Lily’s reading glasses were on the table in front of her. She put them back on and took another look at the drawing, before handing it to her son.

  “Is this an accurate rendering?” she said.

  “It is,” he said. “I didn’t want to bring a photograph from the morgue.”

  “Do you know who this poor man is?” she said.

  “Only have a first name,” Jesse said. “Paul. I met him at an AA meeting in Marshport last night.”

  No point in holding back on that. Jesse assumed by now that if there was life on Mars, even they knew about his drinking problem. And he knew that Lily had been one of the people fighting for him to keep his job when he was in rehab.

  “And you think he came here?” Lily said.

  “Don’t think,” Jesse said. “Cabdriver said he dropped him.”

  “Then how did he get to the lake?” Bryce said. “Pretty long walk.”

  “Maybe the killer drove him,” Jesse said.

  “You’re saying the killer picked him up here after the taxi let him off?” Bryce said. “How does that make any sense?”

  “You don’t have a security camera at the front gate?”

  Bryce Cain shook his head, as if the subject frustrated him.

  “Mom says it’s not Buckingham Palace,” Bryce said. “And she’s not the queen.”

  Jesse grinned at Lily. “Beg to differ.”

  “You say you met this guy but have no idea who he is,” Bryce said.

  Jesse said, “No identification on him. I was hoping he’d paid the driver with a credit card, but he paid with cash.”

  “Maybe the guy was drunk and ended up getting robbed and killed,” Bryce said. “Who the hell knows?” Bryce lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “But a drunk getting killed is hardly the crime of the century.”

  “Ex,” Jesse said.

  “Excuse me?” Bryce said.

  “Ex-drunk,” Jesse said. “Or recovering, take your pick, unless the toxicology shows different. I just know he was still sober at around seven o’clock last night when I left him.”

  “Maybe the night was young and he couldn’t stop himself from getting hammered,” Bryce said. “But you’d know better than me.” He smiled. “No offense, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “How did he die, if you don’t mind me asking?” Bryce said.

  “Shot,” Jesse said.

  “In our town?” Lily said.

  “Happens in the best neighborhoods,” Jesse said.

  “I wish I could help you more, Jesse,” she said. “But I have no idea who this man is, or what business he could possibly have had with us.”

  “Had to ask,” Jesse said.

  “Well, just make sure you keep my mother out of the media,” Bryce said. “You know how much the fake-news people would love to have the Cains in a story like this.”

  “Not to make too fine a point of it,” Jesse said, “but what part of the story would be fake?”

  Jesse and Bryce Cain had never spent much time together. But it had been more than enough for them to know they didn’t like each other. It seemed to bother Bryce that his mom liked Jesse as much as she did, and that she had fought for Jesse while he was in rehab. Jesse’s reasons for disliking her son were far simpler. He just thought Bryce was a raging entitled rich-boy assclown.

  “Sometimes, Chief,” Bryce said, stepping hard on the last word, “I think you occasionally forget that you work for us, and not the other way around.”

  “Bryce,” Lily said. Some snap in her voice. “Please cut the shit.”

  Jesse felt himself smiling.

  Lily Cain, ladies and gentlemen.

  “Sorry,” Bryce said. “Not looking to tangle with you, Jesse.”

  Just like that he was Jesse.

  “Dad’s upstairs dying,” Bryce said. “We don’t need any extra noise.”

  Jesse saw Lily Cain smile.

  “At this point, Bryce,” she said, “extra noise is likely the least of his concerns.”

  She turned back to Jesse.

  “You have my number,” she said. “Send the picture to my phone. I’ll ask Karina if she saw or heard anything unusual before bed.”

  “He was dropped here a few minutes after nine,” Jesse said. “So you weren’t back yet?”

  “There was a big reception at Town Hall,” she said. “Which I noticed you managed to avoid.”

  “You bet.”

  “I probably left a little after that, took one last look at my marquee, and then went home to bed.”

  “Thank you,” Jesse said.

  She smiled again. “I know you, Jesse Stone,” she said. “You’re going to be like a dog with a bone with this.”

  “Everybody has to be good at something,” he said.

  “Well, just leave us out of it,” Bryce said, reaching for his own phone, pushing his chair back, walking away from them toward the water.

  Jesse and Lily watched him go. Neither spoke until Lily sighed and said, “The pull of heredity.”

  “Ain’t it grand,” Jesse said.

  Seven

  At a few minutes before six that night Jesse parked the Explorer in front of the First Episcopal Church of Marshport.

  He always wondered if they’d originally planned to have a Second or Third Episcopal, with the thought of franchising them in the area like Taco Bells.

  Jesse had never been one for attending any kind of church regularly. But with old ones like this, he loved the architecture more than the idea of them, the red brick and the spires and the ornate windows. Loved the way they were so obviously built to last. Wondered all over again where the financing had come from at the time they were being built. This one was more than one hundred years old. Maybe there had been a Friends of Marshport to raise the money back in the last century. The Ukrainian Mob had taken over the running of the town well into the start of this century, before a famous shooting war that was compared at the time to Gunfight at the O.K. Corral made Marshport essentially start all over again. At the time, Jesse had heard that a private detective he knew from Boston had been in the middle of all that, after his best friend had nearly been shot to death by one of the Ukrainians. Jesse never found out for sure. But it sounded like the detective. Spenser, his name was. A total badass himself, with whom Jesse had worked a couple times. Even Sunny said he was the best.

  The message board out front gave the schedule of Sunday services. Nothing there about the Higher Power the people in the basement were abou
t to discuss. Maybe it was implied. It was church, after all.

  Jesse left his revolver and badge in the glove compartment. He didn’t like being without a gun, even in a house of worship. He was carrying a Glock .40, semiautomatic, magazine, no clip, fifteen to seventeen rounds. But even though he was here on official business, he was still one of them in the room, part of the club, not the chief of police from the next town over.

  Hi, I’m Jesse.

  He sat in the back. He always sat in the back, except at rehab, when they made you sit in a circle with a much smaller group. But he looked at the room differently than he had last night. Looking at it with cop eyes tonight. Checking for faces he recognized.

  The speaker gave her name as Laura. She was a pretty blond woman in her thirties, maybe forties, who’d been there the night before. Said she’d been an advertising executive in Boston. Happily married to a man she described as a “biggie on the go.” She smiled when joking that she knew it was going to shock them, but that she’d never thought she had a problem with alcohol. Thought she had her drinking under control, even during her girls-gone-wild days in college.

  But then she was into the drinking life, full throttle. It was just part of the skill set of her business life, or so she told herself. Like bullshitting people. Business lunches and dinners got longer and longer. She got caught in her first affair. The biggie-on-the-go left her. Then she didn’t need the excuse of a business dinner, she just started going to bars. Before long she was leaving with strange men.

  Jesse thought of Annie leaving the Scupper, and the strange man she’d met on the way home.

  “That’s the way I thought of them,” she said. “Strange. Never imagining the strange one was me.”

  She was on a downhill run by then. Lost her job. Lost the house. Ended up in a motel in Quincy, having been beaten up. She used her phone to call the cops. One of them, a woman, took her to a meeting that night.

  Laura said she was eleven months sober. She was working again in the advertising business, from home. She’d run the Boston Marathon in April. The people in the room applauded when she finished. It was time for cookies and coffee. By now Jesse knew that cookies and coffee were the thirteenth step of AA, after the one about carrying the message to other alcoholics.

  “First time you spoke?” Jesse said to her.

  “You could tell?”

  “Sometimes I can,” he said. “It didn’t sound like a story you’d told before.”

  “Finally screwed up my courage,” she said.

  “Pretty sure courage was going to the first meeting,” he said.

  He put out his hand.

  “Jesse,” he said.

  “You’re the cop,” she said.

  Jesse grinned. “Well, not the only one.”

  He took out his phone and showed her the picture of Paul. He heard the sharp intake of breath.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “He’s dead. We were all just here.” She looked up at Jesse. “How? When?” She shook her head quickly, almost furiously, as if flies were buzzing around it. “I’m stammering,” she said.

  He told her how Paul had died, and when.

  “I had to get out of here last night,” Jesse said. “A thing over in my town. I talked to him for a minute. Wondered if you might have after I left.”

  She didn’t look to Jesse as if she’d taken a lot of time on hair and makeup. But this close to her, he saw the age around her eyes, or perhaps the mileage. The old Indiana Jones line. Not the years, the mileage. There was a tiny scar, unhidden by the makeup, on her chin. Her eyes were very blue, almost violet. She reminded him a little of Sunny. An older, sadder version of Sunny. Just not as pretty. Few were.

  “We did sit here and talk,” she said. “He said what he’d said when he put his hand up. He just needed a meeting. Said he needed a shot of courage tonight, not bourbon.”

  “All I’ve got is his first name,” Jesse said. “No way to ID him, at least not yet. Did he say anything that might help me figure out how he ended up here?”

  She tilted her head, ran a hand through her long hair, frowning.

  “He really didn’t,” she said. “He asked me if I wanted to grab a burger. I thanked him and told him no, I already had plans. I really did, but I don’t come here looking to meet guys. He said no worries, he sort of had to be somewhere, too. Then he asked me to wish him luck.”

  “He say why?”

  “He did not. And I didn’t ask.”

  “You ask where he was going?”

  “That I did ask,” Laura said. “He said Paradise. Then he said that from what he knew, maybe they should call it Fool’s Paradise.”

  Eight

  Crossing over from Marshport into Paradise, Jesse found himself wanting a drink.

  The urge came over him sometimes just like that, no particular trigger, no real precipitating event. A sudden storm, appearing over the water as if out of nowhere. Then he just wanted a drink right fucking now.

  He felt himself squeezing the steering wheel, as if lessening his grip even slightly would transform the Explorer into one of those self-driving cars, and he would be on his way to the Gull. Or a liquor store still open on a Sunday night.

  He took in as much air as he could, let it out slowly, telling himself the feeling would pass, that since rehab it had always passed, that he didn’t need to pull over and sit on the side of the road until the feeling did pass.

  It still didn’t take much, even after a meeting. Or maybe it was because of the meeting, who the hell really knew? Sunny always said that drinking never really made her feel better about things when she felt as if her own life were turning to shit. But that it sure as hell never made her feel any worse.

  What had Sinatra said that time when Jesse and some buddies had gotten drunk and gone to see him in Las Vegas, when Frank was old and starting to forget the lyrics and acting impatient for his own show to be over, as if it were a ball game that had gone all too long? “We feel sorry for all you people who don’t drink, because when you wake up in the morning that’s as good as you’re going to feel the rest of the day.”

  Do you still miss it? Suit had asked.

  Every day.

  He slowed the car, making his way down Main Street in the gathering darkness. Past the theater. Taking the turn and driving past his old condominium, a couple blocks from the Gull. Then past the Gull and down through the Swap until he was in front of the Scupper, outside which Annie Fallon’s night had changed, and nearly her life. He slowed as he passed the Scupper and looked through the front window and saw people laughing and talking, all of them with drinks in their hands. The people he served and protected.

  He hadn’t done much of a job protecting Paul from getting one to the back of the head, from the .22 that had killed him. Dev had the bullet. One shot, he said, rattling around inside the brain, goodbye.

  When Jesse got home, he was so tired it was as if he’d walked from Marshport. But somehow his thirst had made him hungry. So he decided to fry up a burger, truck-stop style, and watch Sunday Night Baseball.

  Baseball was usually all he watched on television. Baseball or Westerns. That was it, all the company he got from TV. Cole hadn’t been around much lately. He’d completed his state cop training, been assigned to their office in Northampton. He had a steady girlfriend there, even though he constantly told Jesse that talking about “going steady” dated Jesse more than his taste in music did.

  That was Cole’s life right now. Learning to be a cop in western Massachusetts. And girls. Or girl, singular, in this case. Katie was her name. Jesse still hadn’t met her. But the kid seemed happy enough, even talking occasionally about going back to Los Angeles someday and seeing if he had the chops for Robbery Homicide.

  He said one time that he’d thought about taking Jesse’s name instead of his mom’s, but Cole Stone sounded too much like he ought to
be a fucking ice-cream store. He stayed with Cole Slayton.

  When the burger and fried potatoes Jesse had cooked up with onions were ready he set up a TV table in front of the set. Did they even still call them that? Jesus, he was getting old. He pointed the remote and switched on the game, Red Sox against the Yankees, and saw that it was only in the fourth inning. Some people wrung their hands over how long the games were. Not Jesse. They could play all night as far as he was concerned.

  Long games made his nights feel shorter.

  He reached for his iced tea, held up the same tall glass that used to hold Johnny Walker or Dewar’s, saw the same amber color he used to see when it was scotch in the glass, with just the right amount of soda.

  He’d always liked watching baseball when he’d had a few, no way of getting around that.

  “Here’s looking at you,” he said, his voice sounding too loud in the empty room, even over the sound of the announcers.

  When he’d finished eating and cleaned his plates, he called Sunny Randall.

  She answered right away.

  “Damn,” she said. “It’s never good when the police call.”

  Just the sound of her voice made him feel better. Less like the alonest man around. He’d told Sunny once that Molly had said that about him and Sunny had said, “Wait, somebody else besides me picked up on that?”

  “Your father was a cop,” Jesse said. “You say that when he calls?”

  “Are you calling to chat,” Sunny said, “or do you need crime-stopping tips?”

  Jesse said, “What are you wearing?”

  “Does asking a question like that make you feel out of step in the modern world?” Sunny said.

  “And proud of it.”

  “What would you say if I told you I just got out of the shower and was wearing nothing except a towel?”

  “I’d go downstairs and get in the car and drive down there with the siren on,” he said.

  “Actually,” she said, “I’ve got goop on my face, and am wearing baggy gray sweats.”