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Fool's Paradise

Page 6

by Mike Lupica


  He asked if she had any idea what Paul did for a living.

  “He said he worked with horses,” she said. “A groom, maybe? Wellington is pretty big horse country.”

  “I thought Central Florida was horse country,” Jesse said.

  “It is,” she said. “But we’ve got one of the biggest equestrian festivals in the country. In Wellington, I mean. Starts in December and goes all the way to April.”

  “So there’s barns there.”

  “A bunch. Most of them over near the show.”

  “He ever mention which one?” Jesse said.

  She shook her head.

  “He ever mention whether he lived in Wellington or just worked there?”

  “He actually did one night,” she said. “He said he lived where he worked. Said it was a short commute to the stalls every morning.”

  “But not which barn.”

  “It wouldn’t have meant much to me if he had,” she said. “One ear and out the other. The only horses I care about are the ones carrying around polo players with accents. And riding pants.”

  She smiled. Jesse smiled.

  “He drink a lot when he was at your bar?” Jesse said.

  “It’s not a juice bar,” she said.

  “The reason I ask,” Jesse said, “is that I happened to meet him at an AA meeting the night he died.”

  “You’re AA?” she said.

  “I am,” she said.

  “But you’re the chief of police.”

  “They like me a lot better now that I’m sober.”

  She tilted her head and smiled again. More with her eyes this time. “And me a bartender,” she said.

  Jesse smiled. “You ever remember seeing Paul drunk?”

  “He’d come in on Fridays sometimes,” she said. “Happy hour. I told him one time he didn’t seem too happy. But drunk? I don’t ever remember him falling out of there, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Anything else he ever said that you think might help me find out more about him?” Jesse said. “Find out who he really is? Or was?”

  She steepled her fingers under her chin. She had nice hands. Jesse noticed people’s hands. Sunny had beautiful hands.

  He was thinking about her more and more these days.

  “It was usually crowded,” she said. “He was just one of those guys. You know? He acted alone even with people all around him.”

  “I know the type,” Jesse said.

  I was the type, he thought.

  “I wish I could help more,” she said.

  “You’ve helped more than you realize,” Jesse said. “It was nice of you to make the trip up here.”

  “I guess I just didn’t think it was something you just called in,” she said. “Man, it’s creepy, seeing a picture of someone you know like that, and finding out he’s dead.”

  Jesse stood and came around his desk. She stood. He thanked her again for calling. She was smiling at him again. They stood facing each other. Someone walking into his office—like Molly—might have suggested Ellen Chagnon had invaded Jesse’s personal space. It just didn’t feel like an invasion.

  “I was going to offer to buy you a drink,” she said. “But that’s kind of off the table, huh?”

  “It’s a nice offer,” he said. “But it looks like I’m going to be jammed up on this for a while.”

  “Can’t blame a girl for trying,” Ellen Chagnon said.

  “I never have,” Jesse said.

  Eleven

  Jesse called the chief of police in Wellington after Ellen Chagnon left, told him he was working a homicide and that the victim was someone who’d worked with horses there. The chief asked if he had a name, and not for any of the horses. Jesse said all he had was a first name.

  “That ought to narrow things down considerable,” the chief said. “You and me working together, we’ll probably crack the case no problem.”

  His name was Ed Johnson. It was a southern accent, but one that Jesse thought could have come from anywhere south of Baltimore. Johnson said he’d be happy as a pig in slop to help out any way he could. He asked Jesse how many people lived in his town. Jesse told him. He asked Jesse how many he had on his force. Jesse told him. Chief Ed Johnson told him he had eight cops on his force, nine counting himself.

  “It’s like we’re in a special club of small-town po-licing,” he said to Jesse. “We should have decoder rings and a secret handshake.”

  Then he told Jesse that there were a “pantload” of barns in Wellington, but a lot of them were empty in the summer, the owners and the trainers and the grooms traveling to shows around the country and as far away as Canada. But he could probably wrestle up a list. Jesse said he’d be grateful.

  “You fixing on coming down here?” Johnson said.

  “Thinking about it,” Jesse said. “You find an app yet that solves this shit for you?”

  “Still lookin’,” Johnson said.

  “Think there’s any kind of app better than you?” Jesse said.

  “Fuck no,” Johnson said. “Where’d be the fun in that?”

  “You ever do cop work anyplace except where you are?” Jesse asked.

  “SID in Miami,” Johnson said. “Did a full twenty.”

  “You miss it?”

  Johnson snorted. “Depends on the humidity, and whether another one of those El Chapos has shot up another El Fuckhead.”

  He said he’d send along a list in the morning. Jesse thanked him. Johnson said to give him a shout if he came down, he’d buy Jesse a drink.

  Jesse said he’d like that. It was easier that way. Not everybody wanted to hear his life story.

  Before Jesse left the office he stopped by Molly Crane’s desk.

  “I’ve been forgetting to ask,” he said. “How you doing with your friend Annie? She ready to come by and talk to me?”

  Molly shook her head. “I think she’s sorry she even talked about it with me,” she said. “She basically just wants to forget it ever happened. She says she hasn’t touched a drink since Saturday night. Who knows? Maybe she’ll end up going to meetings with you.”

  “Keep trying,” Jesse said. “Before this guy tries again. Or does more than try.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  Jesse smiled at her. “You ever wonder which one of us is really the boss of this place?”

  She smiled, even more wickedly than usual.

  “I never wonder, actually,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Jesse thought about calling Sunny when he got home, even thought about asking her if she wanted to make a quick road trip to Florida with him. But he did not. He wanted to give himself some quiet time to think about what Ellen Chagnon had told him. Ellen, the smoking-hot bartender. He didn’t remember many who looked like her when he was still drinking, at happy hour or any hour. But then Jesse had never been a happy drunk. Just a drunk.

  Buy you a drink, the chief in Wellington had said.

  I’d like that, Jesse had said.

  He baked a small swordfish steak he’d bought at the fish market off Geary Street, green beans on the side, sprinkled with some Parmesan. Fixed himself a small salad. He used to eat out a lot more, but that had meant a drink before dinner and then maybe some wine during. Maybe a scotch for dessert. And not just one. He was better off at home now. Getting better at cooking for himself.

  When he finished eating, he washed the dishes by hand, brewed some coffee, stayed at the table. He still didn’t have a last name for his victim, but he had an occupation. He had a bar in Wellington, Florida. If Ellen knew him, maybe some of the other bartenders did. Maybe they had a last name.

  Jesse had a yellow legal pad in front of him. The pads always helped him think better. He wrote:

  WHY?

  Why was Paul in Paradise? Why the stop a
t Whit and Lily Cain’s home? Whit Cain spent a lot of time in the same part of Florida. Did the Cains own horses? Lily had never mentioned it if they did. If he didn’t fly to Florida, he could stop by and ask. But horses would make sense as a hobby for a wealthy man. Jesse had seen a piece on SportsCenter one time, just wanting ball scores, about how Springsteen’s daughter was a rider, and had even gone to the Olympics.

  Jesse looked at his watch. It was still just nine o’clock, too soon for bed. The rest of the night stretched out in front of him. The faint hum of the air conditioner was almost impossible for him to hear, as if drowned out by the quiet of this place. His new home. The one without a bottle of scotch in it.

  He didn’t want a drink tonight as much as he wanted something to happen. Maybe needed something to happen. Maybe that was why he was thinking of going to Florida. He had a travel budget, one he hardly ever used. Nora Hayes, big boss at the Board of Selectmen now, had even kicked in more money this year. Molly said Nora probably thought of it as a tip. Nobody would complain about him spending the money to go down there if it helped him clear a murder in the middle of the summer season.

  He took his coffee cup and turned on the television and put on the Red Sox game. It wasn’t that he felt like watching the game as much as the sudden urge he had to drown out the quiet around him. As if he were asking the announcers, Dave O’Brien and Jerry Remy and Dennis Eckersley, if they’d mind keeping him company.

  But he couldn’t focus on the game. He was impatient with his lack of progress, even though he’d made minor progress today. He felt as if he were missing something.

  Now he wanted a drink.

  He walked over to the table next to the Ozzie Smith poster where he kept the glove he’d worn in the minors. He’d had it restitched a few times and still used it for softball, even though it was an infielder’s glove that was really too small for softball. He used it anyway. Maybe because of vanity. Probably because of vanity. And memory, a way of reminding them—reminding himself—that he’d been a real ballplayer once. The new glove, the one Cole had bought him, didn’t feel like this on his hand. Jesse knew it never would.

  The signed Ozzie ball was in the pocket.

  Jesse took the ball and glove with him out onto the terrace. He felt the ocean breeze on his face immediately, sensed the vast and powerful expanse of it out past Lighthouse Point, a few lights from big boats in the distance. There were clouds tonight, a lot of them. Jesse had heard on the car radio on the way home that a late storm had been forecast, sometime before midnight.

  He began to toss the ball into the pocket of the glove. Better a ball in his hand than a drink. He was thinking about the Cains again, what possible connection Paul could have had to them. Throwing the ball harder now into the glove, the sound as sweet and familiar as the crack of the bat.

  There was a sudden, bright flash of lightning out over the water now, the attendant and immediate clap of thunder to go with it, startling him.

  Jesse didn’t close the glove in time and the ball fell to his feet.

  “Error, shortstop,” he said. “E six.”

  It was when he was turning to reach down for the ball that he heard another sharp explosion in the night sky. For a moment, less than that, Jesse processed it as another part of the storm over the water.

  Then the bullet caught up with the sound of a gun having been fired, and shattered the glass in the door behind him.

  Twelve

  Jesse scrabbled back through the door, staying as low as he could without putting his hands down into the broken glass. He crawled through the living room, on elbows and knees, pulling on the string of the standing lamp next to his chair to throw the room into darkness, reaching up to grab his Glock where he’d left it on the table next to the front door. Then he was through the door and down the two flights of steps, out the side door, and into the rain.

  The rain hit him like a flurry of punches, the wind blowing hard off the water, the storm already seeming to be at full force. The lightning still splashed across the sky, the sound of the thunder mixing now with the roar of the rain.

  Jesse could only guess the exact angle of the shot. There had been no time for him to look through the iron rails of the terrace for movement in the street, or in the distance. The harbor was to the left. Too many possible witnesses there, even late at night, at least before the storm had come. The beach was at the end of Front Street, to his right.

  The shot could have come from the street, the shooter finding enough cover to hide himself. Or maybe just not giving a shit. Maybe he’d been watching Jesse’s condo and there he was, standing on the terrace, and he’d seized the opportunity and taken the shot.

  Jesse had been standing there, pounding the ball into the glove.

  But then he’d moved.

  The dropped ball maybe saving his life.

  He moved along the end of the building, still not sure if the shooter was out here and still close. Maybe he thought he’d hit Jesse and put him down, and was gone.

  With a rifle, the shooter could have set up at the end of Front Street, or the beach. Jesse came into the open now, gun pressed to his right leg, and ran as hard as he could toward the water, a high, singing sound in his ears, like a siren, as loud as the storm.

  Somebody had taken a shot at him.

  The fucking chief of police.

  He couldn’t throw a baseball the way he once could, his right shoulder having turned to shit a long time ago. But he could still run. He’d started running again, a few miles a few days a week, a few months after rehab. Again. Dix said it was another way for him to feel as if he were doing something more than running in place.

  He zigzagged across Front Street and through the rain, in and out of the flashes of light from the sky, like spotlights being turned on and off. The wind slapped against his face all the way to the beach, Jesse running with his gun now pressed tight to his chest, the way he’d been taught as a rookie, finger off the trigger but against the frame of the gun. Indexing, they’d called it at the Academy. The finger was braced, but off the trigger. Preventing what they called a “sympathetic reaction” from the trigger while you were running. Lessons learned, and remembered.

  If it was me, Jesse thought, and I hadn’t driven a car into the neighborhood where I was going to take the shot, I would have run this way, to the beach and then away from the harbor, in the general direction of Stiles Island. Jesse faced in that direction now. There was one more flash of light in the sky. One last muted sound of thunder in the distance, to the north.

  Then the storm was gone as quickly as it had come, as if it had gone crashing to the bottom of the sea.

  Jesse stood there, soaking wet, chest still heaving, gun back at his side.

  Then he turned and walked off the beach, looking around him and behind him every few steps, walked back up Front Street until he was home. Once inside, he picked up his cell phone where he’d left it in the kitchen and called his own police department.

  “This is Jesse Stone,” he said to Jeff Alonso, working the overnight shift tonight. “I need to report a shooting.”

  “Where?” Jeff Alonso said.

  “My house,” Jesse said.

  Thirteen

  The official description of the bullet Jesse found lodged in the wall near the television set was “projectile evidence.” He put on the crime scene gloves he kept in a drawer in his bathroom, carefully dug out the bullet, and bagged it. In the morning he would have one of his cops on duty drive it to the state lab, where they’d measure the lands and grooves that cut into bullets as they spun through the barrel—essentially a way of fingerprinting the gun that had fired it—and compare the results against the larger database to determine if the gun had been used in a previous crime.

  Jesse had already applied his own eye test to the bullet, and would have placed a significant bet on it being a .223, which meant the gun that
fired it was likely an AR-15.

  “I love it when they call them ‘sport rifles,’” Molly said.

  “Tonight somebody was hunting me,” Jesse said.

  He’d collected his glove and ball from the terrace. When Jesse had told Molly what had happened she’d said, “I’ll never make fun of baseball ever again.”

  “Finally,” he’d said.

  He had called her after calling the station because he knew he was just opening himself up to a world of hurt if he waited until morning to tell her about the shooting. He’d asked her if they should awaken Suit, too. Molly told Jesse there was no need. If the two of them couldn’t find the bullet they should think about doing something else for a living, maybe opening a bowling alley.

  By now Jesse had changed into dry clothes and brewed a pot of coffee. He was still riding an adrenaline high, and now so was Molly, who had come to like police work as much as Jesse did. A late bloomer.

  Molly wore a gray sweatshirt that miraculously had no writing of any kind that Jesse could see, or logo. Jeans. Running shoes. A PPD ball cap. It was one of those moments when Jesse could see clearly the girl she had been, but what she would look like when she was old at the same time.

  “So we have now had two shootings in our little town in less than a week,” Molly said. “We both know what the chief of police always says about coincidence.”

  “No way God would leave that much to chance,” Jesse said.

  The clock on the kitchen wall said it was 12:45. Nearly three hours since whoever tried to shoot Jesse had taken the shot.

  “It was a long gun with me,” Jesse said. “A .22 with Paul.”

  “The guy could own more than one,” Molly said.

  “There’s no connection between Paul and me.”

  “Other than AA.”

  “Totally random.”

  “Or not,” Molly said. “I’ll refer you back to what you just said about coincidence.”

 

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