Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  “Still coming,” Jesse said. “Just no siren.”

  She laughed.

  “If you’re gooped and saggy, you must be alone.”

  “I said baggy, Chief Stone. Not saggy.”

  Jesse said, “Where’s your ex?”

  “Richie and his son are in Los Angeles, visiting the boy’s sainted mother. They were supposed to stay a week. They’ve stayed two.”

  “How’s it going with the three of you?” Jesse said. “Or four, counting Rosie.”

  Rosie was Sunny’s dog.

  “Love the boy,” she said. “Still love the father. It’s that thing about the three of us that’s the problem.”

  “Ongoing,” Jesse said.

  “Ongoing,” she said. “I’m good at a lot of things. Stepmom isn’t one of them and might not ever be. And he’s talking about marriage again.”

  “Love is lovelier,” Jesse said.

  “Theoretically.”

  “Are you and Richie currently, ah, together?”

  “If you mean together in a carnal sense, no. He needs time to figure out how to be a dad.”

  “So the two of you aren’t doing it in the changing room of boutiques the way we did that time in Beverly Hills?”

  “That was more a one-off,” she said.

  “Two-off, as I recall.”

  There was a silence now, from both of them. Neither, Jesse knew, was uncomfortable with this kind of silence.

  Finally Jesse said, “Change of subject?”

  “And stop talking dirty to each other? Is this really you?”

  “Caught a dead body today at the lake,” Jesse said. “Or Suit did.”

  “Do tell.”

  He did. When he finished, Sunny said, “I’m sorry for the dead fellow. But maybe this is a good thing for you. Maybe even better than sex.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he said. “If I use the blue light and the siren, I could still be there in half an hour.”

  “I thought we were going to hit the pause button on being friends with benefits,” she said, “and just try being good old friends.”

  “Thinking that’s starting to get old,” he said.

  “Maybe we should put our therapists in a room and let them figure out where this relationship should go,” Sunny said.

  “It’s a relationship again?”

  “Always was,” Sunny said.

  “Dr. Silverman and Dr. Dix, fighting for the title,” Jesse said.

  “We could make it pay-per-view.”

  There was another silence and then Jesse said, “You said you still love Richie. What about me? Am I still first runner-up?”

  “Let me get back to you on that.”

  Jesse said, “Do you really have goop on your face?”

  “I might have lied about that,” she said.

  Then she told him what she was really wearing. Or, more accurately, not wearing.

  Then they did talk dirty to each other. It was, Jesse decided, better than baseball.

  Nine

  Molly Crane stood in her living room, having pulled back the draperies a couple inches after turning out the lights, unable to shake the feeling that she was being watched.

  She’d had the feeling all night.

  She was alone in the house. Michael was just a few days into the Great Pacific Race, which used to start in May but had been pushed back to July this year, rowing from Monterey to Honolulu with a rich friend, something for which he’d been training for a year, 2,400 miles, no engines, no sails, four to a boat, two hours on and two hours off for a month. Or more. Like his version of the Boston Marathon, just across the Pacific. He’d been dreaming about a boat like this, this race, his whole life. But any kind of boat made Michael Crane happy. He’d been working on them since high school, the same as his father had.

  Molly knew Jesse’s father had been an L.A. cop.

  Boys and their daddies, she thought.

  But being on a boat, being in the water, did make her husband happy. Happier than he is with me? Now, that was a damned good question, she thought. She knew they loved each other. That had never been in doubt, from the time they started dating in high school when both of them were fourteen. As far as Molly knew—and she was a cop, after all—he had never cheated on her. To this day, she didn’t completely understand her one and only indiscretion with a career criminal named Wilson Cromartie, known as Crow. Why she had wanted him the way she did. Wanted him and needed him. She had told Jesse once that it had been a need for her at the time, the way his drinking had been.

  “But you stopped after one,” Jesse said.

  “It wasn’t easy, let me tell you,” Molly said.

  “Booze is always around,” Jesse said. “Maybe a good thing for you Crow isn’t.”

  But she had given in to it. Or let herself be carried along by it. She had cheated on Michael. The next day, she knew that Jesse knew before she told him. They knew things about each other that way, things that Michael didn’t know about her and that Jenn, Jesse’s ex-wife, didn’t know about Jesse. Maybe Sunny knew Jesse that way. Sunny’s relationship with him, Molly had always thought, was closest to the one Molly had shared with him, almost from the day he’d showed up in Paradise.

  Just without sex. Not with Jesse. They’d never had any interest in making it physical, despite the jokes and comments and fake flirtation. Even with the times in the old days when they’d gotten drunk together, it was understood between them, no discussion necessary. When Jesse had most needed taking care of, when he’d tried to disappear into the bottle, Molly felt more as if she were taking care of a brother.

  If she loved Jesse, and she knew she did, it was like that.

  Molly Crane was a caregiver, through and through. She always had been. A good Catholic girl, except when she’d been bad with boys in college, during the period when she and Michael decided not to be exclusive. But she did the most to take care of their marriage and their four daughters. The youngest was going off to college in the fall. University of New Haven. She was going to study criminology.

  The thought of it made Molly smile.

  Girls and their mommies.

  At the department, Molly didn’t just take care of Jesse. She took care of Suit and everybody else. Managed the things that Jesse had no interest in managing, as if managing one more household.

  Starting with the chief.

  Now she felt as if she were taking care of him as much as she ever had, whether he realized it or not, even though he had stopped drinking, at least for now. Day at a goddamn time, as he kept telling her.

  Molly knew enough about alcoholism. There’d been enough of it in her own family, starting with her own father. She knew things were supposed to get better once they stopped drinking, even though her father never had. But these days Jesse seemed as sad as he ever had. And as distant. Even with a son in his life. She’d come into his office and he’d be sitting behind his desk, pounding that stupid ball into his mitt. He’d have that faraway look on his face, as if things were supposed to have turned out better for him.

  Drunk or sober.

  At least today had been different. This victim was personal for him, dying, as he had, so soon after getting sober. She could see it in Jesse’s eyes, mostly. Something flickering in there. A candle slowly coming to life.

  Like having a problem to solve, a killer to find, was a need with him, replacing his need for drink.

  The things you thought about when you were the one alone in the night.

  She stared harder at the street. Emma was spending a couple weeks with her best friend’s family in Nantucket. Christ, Molly thought, what is it going to be like when she was off to college and Michael was away again at another race and the house was empty and quiet like this all the time? When she was officially—Oh, kill me now for even using the expression; oh, fuck me�
��an empty nester.

  Not much scared Molly Crane. But that scared the holy hell out of her. She knew herself and her husband well enough by now to know how little care Michael required from her.

  So who was she going to take care of when she got home from the office at night?

  Maybe that was why she was the one feeling restless last night, even if she never would have admitted that to Annie. Even if she hadn’t gone to the Scupper looking to pick up a man, the way Annie so clearly had.

  “I’m bored and I’m horny,” Annie had said after her second drink, or maybe it had been her third.

  “Not a good mix,” Molly had said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Annie had said.

  Then she had nearly been raped. It made Molly, the caregiver, feel guilty as sin afterward. Was guilt a sin? She couldn’t remember whether the nuns had ever addressed that. Just the guilt part, for doing dirty things and thinking dirty thoughts.

  I shouldn’t have left her in that bar by herself.

  Maybe somebody had been watching her—them—at the Scupper.

  She knew why Annie had been there. But why was I there, really? Molly prided herself on her honesty, starting with being honest about herself. Was she already starting to worry about what might happen to her marriage when it was the two of them alone in the house, when they were both in the house?

  She wasn’t feeling what she’d been feeling with Crow that time. The ocean itself couldn’t have stopped what happened between them, just that one night, but one she remembered as vividly as if she had it on tape.

  She’d been thinking about Crow lately.

  She was feeling restless these days, as if there were some kind of hole in her life that even a job she loved, one that involved working with people she loved—starting with the chief—couldn’t fill.

  Maybe she was the one who needed to start seeing Dix, Jesse’s shrink.

  She knew that even with a son in his life now, and Sunny always on the periphery, the job was all Jesse really needed. He still didn’t know how to be a dad to Cole. If anything, he acted more like an older brother. Or friend. Maybe they’d be drinking buddies if Jesse still drank.

  But Jesse knew how to be a cop. He knew how to be chief. Molly heard the way he talked about being a ballplayer. There was no way he could have been better at that than being a cop. Even being a cop in a small town like theirs.

  It did everything except make Jesse happy. That was Molly’s fantasy about Jesse. Not being in bed with him. Just that he’d find some happiness. Maybe peace along with it. Jenn had never made him happy, at least not for very long. Diana never had. Molly still thought Sunny had come closest. But maybe that was because Jesse couldn’t have her, at least not completely. At least not yet, and maybe not ever, Sunny’s job being as important to her as Jesse’s was to him.

  He was just so fucking sad sometimes.

  Molly felt sad tonight.

  She kept looking out the window at the quiet cul-de-sac that had been part of her world for her entire marriage, a few blocks from the other quiet street on which she’d grown up. This was the house in which they’d raised their children. Now the three older daughters had left Paradise, for good, Molly was certain of that. Emma was on her way to college.

  Maybe, Molly thought, her unease tonight, the wariness she was feeling, was because of what had happened to Annie last night. And not just to Annie. To Jesse’s acquaintance from the AA meeting.

  Usually when one or more of the girls were in the house, she’d lock away her gun, the Glock .40 like the one Jesse carried, the gun he’d brought with him from Los Angeles.

  Tonight she would keep the gun on her nightstand.

  She did not feel safe tonight.

  She put the living room lights back on as she headed upstairs for bed, having no idea how right she was.

  She was being watched.

  And wasn’t the only one.

  Ten

  They caught one small break. There turned out to be security footage in Marshport of Paul coming out of the First Episcopal Church on Saturday night. Jesse had called the chief there, Captain John Kyle, who told Jesse they had a camera set up at one of their new substations across the street. The picture of Paul’s face was clear enough that Jesse allowed Nellie Shofner to put it up on the Crier website on Wednesday night. Trying to make something happen. Get them in the game.

  Now it was Thursday afternoon, and they still had no hits from any of the agencies Molly and Suit had contacted. No missing-persons report filed on a white male in the whole state since Sunday.

  “We’re reaching the point where we may need some help from the universe,” Molly said.

  “Is there a number we can call for that?” Jesse said.

  “On it,” Molly said.

  They had been eating lunch at his desk, just the two of them. Like an old married couple, he thought. Molly said that Nellie Shofner had called again an hour before, asking if there were any developments in the case. Nellie still didn’t know they had a first name on the victim, and was still calling him John Doe. Molly asked Jesse now if he knew the expression had started with plaintiffs in property cases. He told her he did not.

  “Your head ever feel full, all that useless information stored up there?” he said.

  “Just because you didn’t know doesn’t make it useless,” Molly said. “You’re just jealous.”

  “Often,” Jesse said. “What did you tell Nellie?”

  “That the investigation was ongoing,” Molly said. “She told me that I was getting almost as good at saying nothing as you are.”

  “Less is more,” Jesse said.

  “A lot less, in your case,” Molly said. “A whole lot less.”

  Jesse knew how these things worked. You just kept pulling on strings. Occasionally the universe did intervene and a string got pulled for you. He remembered another case, a floater they’d found off Stiles Island, a woman who’d been in the water awhile. Florence Horvath, her name was. It took some time identifying her, too. Turned out she had rented a boat at Ned’s Cove and never returned it. But the owner had a credit card on file, and a picture of her driver’s license. Then the boat turned up at another yard in the harbor. It turned out to be one of the saddest cases he’d ever worked, the woman killed by the father who’d been abusing her since she was a child. There was your fucking universe for you right there.

  But the finding out, the figuring out, the grunt work and grind, sometimes started with something as random as the guy from the boatyard showing up at the station. And then you were in the game.

  Jesse had met the victim this time but didn’t know who he was. Somebody did. Matter of time, he kept telling himself. Even as he felt they were losing valuable time.

  Things got late early. But he’d done this kind of work plenty of times before. He knew how good he was at it. Wondered sometimes where his skill set could have taken him in L.A. if he hadn’t drunk himself out of town. Or maybe he was supposed to end up here. Maybe this was who he was and all he was and where he belonged.

  It was nearly five in the afternoon. His door was open, as usual. Molly still gave a rap on the frame to announce herself before poking her head in.

  “Got a woman to see you,” Molly said. “She saw the picture of Paul on the website. Says she knows him.”

  * * *

  —

  Her name was Ellen Chagnon. She said she was up in Boston from Florida, attending a bachelorette party for an old friend.

  “Where in Florida?” Jesse said.

  “Wellington.”

  “Where’s that?” he said.

  “West of West Palm.”

  She wore her red hair short, had a lot of freckles that she didn’t try to hide with makeup, was small, but with a nice figure. More than a nice figure. Her pale green T-shirt showed off what Jesse, as a trained investigato
r, thought were amazing breasts. They looked real, even though it was getting harder and harder for him to tell. The T-shirt also set off the red hair nicely, a darker shade of green than the eyes. She wore white jeans tighter than the T-shirt, which was saying plenty, and sandals. Apple Watch. No rings. He thought she was in her twenties, maybe thirties. Young, anyway. But the whole world was looking younger and younger to Jesse. Sunny said it was happening to her, too. She said you woke up one day and the kid from UPS was m’am-ing you.

  “I bartend in Wellington, a place called Oli’s,” she said. “Paul used to come in, a couple nights a week. Sometimes more.”

  “You ever get a last name?”

  She shook her head. “He was just Paul.”

  Like an AA meeting, Jesse thought. Just in a bar. First names only.

  “How’d he pay?”

  She let out some air. “Wow,” she said. “It was last winter. I think cash.”

  “Never a credit card?”

  “Might have,” she said. “There’s probably a way to check, even though nobody ever asked me to.”

  “I can,” Jesse said.

  She was in one of the chairs across from Jesse. And nervous, Jesse could see, busy with her hands, giving the appearance of constant motion even sitting down. Her fingernails were an even brighter green than her T-shirt. A couple times he saw her stop herself from chewing on a thumbnail. Probably worried it would ruin her manicure. He’d asked Sunny Randall once if she’d ever chewed her nails and she put out her hands, showing off her own latest manicure, and said, “Not anymore.”

  Most people, Jesse knew, went their whole lives without ever sitting in a police station for a conversation like this about a murder. It was showing now with Ellen Chagnon.

  “How did he die?” she said. “It didn’t say in the story.”

  No reason not to tell her.

  “He was shot,” Jesse said.

  “Jesus,” she said. “Somebody shot him?”

  “They did.”

  “Was it, like, a robbery or something?”

  “To be determined,” he said.

  He smiled. Amiable Jesse. Small-town chief, putting his visitor at ease. And a pretty hot visitor at that.