Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  She looked at him. Big brown eyes, alive and alert despite the hour and circumstances.

  “You were lucky tonight, Jesse,” she said.

  “And me, usually with the surest hands in the men’s softball league.”

  “It’s not funny, damn it!” she said. “And then you go chasing after the guy in the storm?”

  “I remember reading something once about why this guy loved Gunga Din,” Jesse said. “He talked about stupid courage.”

  They both drank coffee. Maybe they both knew they weren’t going to do much sleeping.

  “Really stupid,” she said.

  “Good thing Suit’s not here,” Jesse said. “You know how he hates it when Mom and Dad fight in front of him.”

  “I’m not his mom,” she said. “Or your wife.”

  He smiled.

  “I tell Suit all the time I don’t need another wife,” he said. “I’ve got you to tell me what to do.”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “See there?”

  But she was smiling back at him. They sat across the butcher-block table from each other, just a few feet but all of their shared history between them, history and love and respect and friendship. He had left the terrace door open a crack. The sound of the ocean was much fainter than it had been a few hours before, the east wind barely more than a whisper.

  “Maybe the guy who shot Paul thinks he told me something, or thinks I know something I shouldn’t,” Jesse said. “Even though I really don’t know shit at this point.”

  “You’re assuming the shooter is a guy,” Molly said.

  “Figure of speech.”

  “But if it’s not the same shooter,” Molly said, “you’re telling me some rando tried to shoot the chief of police tonight?”

  “If it’s someone I previously pissed off,” Jesse said, “we’d be talking about a pretty long list.”

  “Most of the ones you’ve pissed off the most are either dead or in jail,” Molly said.

  “It’s where AA tells you drunks end up if they don’t stop,” Jesse said.

  “We can still start compiling a list of possibles in the morning,” Molly said.

  She took her cup to the sink, emptied the last of the coffee, rinsed it, opened the door to the dishwasher and placed it inside. Then she told him not to get up, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and left.

  Jesse sat there for a few minutes after she was gone, staring at the bullet in the Baggie on the table in front of him. Picturing himself dropping the ball and turning to reach down for it. He got up and shut off the kitchen light and locked the terrace door and headed for his bedroom, thinking:

  Maybe there was shit God left to chance after all.

  Fourteen

  Molly and Suit and Jesse were in his office early the next morning when Molly suggested that they should put a protective detail on Jesse, maybe in three eight-hour shifts, now that somebody had used him for target practice with an assault weapon.

  “Hard no,” Jesse said. “We don’t have the numbers. That’s one thing. And I don’t need somebody to hold my hand.”

  “I’m not talking about somebody holding your hand,” Molly said. “Just watching your back in case this guy tries again.”

  “I’d be happy to do it,” Suit said.

  “I know you would,” Jesse said. “I just think it’s bad optics for the chief of police to need a bodyguard.”

  “The way I see it,” Molly said, “it would be much worse optics if the next time somebody took a shot at you they hit what they were aiming at.”

  “If you don’t want one of us to do it,” Suit said, “we could ask Sunny.”

  Molly grinned. “And she’d probably do it for free,” she said. “Guard Jesse’s body, I mean.”

  “She’d have to do it in Florida the next couple days,” Jesse said.

  “You’re going down there?” Suit said.

  “So far what the bartender told me is the best lead we got,” Jesse said.

  “The chief in Wellington would probably be willing to put one of his people on it and save you a trip,” Molly said.

  “But they wouldn’t be as good as me,” Jesse said.

  Now Suitcase Simpson grinned. “Nobody better,” he said.

  “Just ask him,” Molly said.

  “He’s the chief, after all,” Suit said.

  Molly asked if Jesse needed her to make a flight reservation, and book a hotel. Jesse said he already had, that he was leaving in the late afternoon for West Palm Beach and had booked himself into a Hampton Inn in Wellington. She asked if he’d booked a rental car. He said he’d forgotten. She said she’d take care of it.

  Jesse called Cole on his way to the airport, told him where he was going and why.

  “Old-fashioned police work,” Cole said. “What did they used to call you guys back in the day, flatfoots?”

  “Even if we had high arches.”

  Jesse had gone back and forth inside his own head about telling Cole that somebody had tried to kill him. But told him now. Molly and Suit were like family, but Cole was the only real family he had. Jesse sometimes thought of their relationship the way he thought about himself:

  Work in progress.

  “If he tried once, he could try again,” Cole said. “Maybe you need to catch this guy before you do anything else.”

  “Thought about it,” Jesse said. “But for now I’m staying with the real murder and not the attempted one.”

  “When you get back from Florida, I’ll come for dinner,” Cole said.

  “Molly thinks I need a bodyguard when I get back.”

  “I volunteer,” Cole said. “I’m already great at surveillance.”

  “Did one of your commanding officers tell you that?”

  “It was more something I intuited.”

  “Being the cocky bastard you are.”

  “Where do you think I get it from?”

  Jesse said he’d call in a couple days. Cole told him to watch his ass.

  “That’s my line,” Jesse said. “Now that you’re a statie.”

  “I love you,” Cole said.

  It was something he’d been saying lately when they’d get off the phone, as if it were a new jacket he was trying on for size.

  “Yeah, well, don’t make a big deal out of it,” Jesse said.

  He had satellite radio in the Explorer. He put on the channel for Sinatra, who used to say he was sorry for all the people who didn’t drink.

  Frank was finishing up “Angel Eyes.”

  ’Scuse me while I disappear.

  Jesse wasn’t disappearing. Wasn’t running away from anything, including whoever had taken the shot at him last night. He was just being a cop. Working a case about an ex-drunk who hadn’t been as lucky as Jesse had been on his terrace.

  He knew he could have asked for help in Florida. He’d worked with Kelly Cruz, a kick-ass detective out of Fort Lauderdale, on the Florence Horvath case. They’d made a good team. But he didn’t want to hand this one off. Kelly Cruz was damn good. Just not as good as he was. He hadn’t been bullshitting Molly and Suit in the office. He’d never thought anybody was better than he was, whether he’d ended up in Paradise, Massachusetts, or not. Had thought that even before he got sober.

  Jesse had booked himself an aisle seat close to the front of the plane with extra leg room. When they’d reached their cruising altitude a pretty blond flight attendant came along with the cart and asked if he wanted something to drink.

  “Always,” he said.

  She smiled at him with a lot of white teeth and said, “I meant right now.”

  “So did I,” Jesse said.

  He asked her for a bottle of water. It was one of the small ones you got on airplanes. Jesse finished it in about three gulps. Then he put the seat back as far as it
would go and stretched out his legs as far as they could go and closed his eyes. He was still tired because of all the sleep he’d lost the night before.

  He didn’t wake up until the pilot made the announcements about final preparations for their landing at West Palm Beach.

  Fifteen

  Chief Ed Johnson’s list of local horse barns was waiting for Jesse when he checked into the Hampton Inn, along with a note that read: Call me if you want a ride along. Just thinking about a real-live murder investigation almost made my dick hard.

  Jesse called and thanked him for the offer.

  “What you’re doing, we could have done for you,” Johnson said.

  “It’s not the same as doing it yourself,” Jesse said.

  “Never was for me,” Chief Johnson said.

  “Anything pop yet on the shooting down here you told me about?” Jesse said.

  “Need some luck,” Ed Johnson said.

  “Don’t we all,” Jesse said.

  Jesse had asked at the front desk where the nearest pizza place was and was told the Mellow Mushroom was within walking distance. He went and came back with a small mushroom and green peppers pie, got a couple Cokes from the vending machine off the lobby, and sat and looked over Ed Johnson’s list while he ate pizza.

  The barn names meant nothing to him. The only thing Jesse really knew about horses was that he’d watch the Belmont Stakes if one of them had a chance to win the Triple Crown. Johnson had included a map of Wellington with the list, but the geography meant nothing to Jesse, either, other than showing him that the barns formed a perimeter around the grounds for the Wellington horse festival on Pierson Road, which Waze told Jesse was only ten minutes away with no traffic. He couldn’t imagine there would be much in Florida in the middle of July. When he was on the jetway after the plane door opened, he felt as if he’d walked into a melting furnace.

  When he finished eating he got into his rental car and took the short drive to Oli’s, in the big outdoor mall next to the hotel. He took a seat at the bar and ordered a club soda. The woman bartender, dressed in a black tank top and with sleeves of tattoos on both arms, asked if he wanted a lime with it. Jesse told her sure. Live it up.

  When she brought his drink back he got right to it, telling her who he was and why he was here and what Ellen Chagnon had told him.

  She said, “The guy got murdered? Holy holy.”

  “You recognize him?”

  She held the picture up and studied it, then shook her head.

  “Let me go ask Alex,” she said. “The manager.”

  She walked back to the kitchen. A couple minutes later the manager came back with the bartender. He said he didn’t recognize Paul and that he’d asked the waiters, and none of them recognized him, either.

  “But you gotta remember something,” Alex said to Jesse. “If he was in here drinking when Ellen said he was, it was the season.”

  He made “the season” sound as if it explained everything except interest rates.

  Jesse thanked him and made the short drive back to the Hampton Inn and watched a ball game on ESPN from his bed until he was asleep and the ball game was watching him. Big night in horse country.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning he started out in an area called Palm Beach Point. There were a lot of barns there. No one recognized Paul at any of them, nor at the barns in what was called Grand Prix Village.

  Someone finally did in the afternoon, at Stony Hill Stables on Appaloosa Trail.

  The manager, a short, sturdy-looking woman in riding clothes with vivid blue eyes and a straw-colored braid that went all the way down her back, introduced herself as Karen Boles. Jesse introduced himself, showed her the badge, showed her the picture of Paul, and asked if she knew him. She said he’d worked for her until the end of January.

  “Paul Hutton,” she said. “Did he do something?”

  “He was murdered,” Jesse said.

  “Oh no,” she said.

  Her legs seemed to buckle slightly. She put a hand to her mouth. Her reaction was genuine, Jesse thought, unless she was a better actress than Meryl Streep.

  “How did he die?”

  Jesse told her that he’d been shot.

  “Sweet Jesus,” she said. “I wondered what happened to him after he left.”

  “What did he do for you?” Jesse said.

  “He was one of our grooms,” she said. “Lived in the apartment over the barn.” She jerked her head toward a large wooden structure. Jesse wished they were inside. He would have offered to buy one of her horses to get out of the sun.

  “You ask for any references when he got here?” Jesse said.

  “There was one place, over in Ocala,” she said. “Closed up about six months ago when the owner went back to Buenos Aires. But it’s a transient world, Chief. Trainers got vetted. Grooms not so much, especially when one leaves in a hurry and you need to replace them.”

  “He ever talk much about his life?”

  “Not much,” she said. “Not much of a talker, our Paul. He said that he was an orphan, that he’d been abandoned.”

  “You ask him where?”

  “I did,” she said. “He said he didn’t want to talk about it. Just told me one time that it was no accident that his life had turned into a dumpster fire. I remember asking him what he meant by that, but he shut down. We never had the conversation again.”

  Jesse said, “Why did he leave?”

  “He was asked to,” she said. “Or told to, that would be a more accurate way of putting it.”

  “By you?”

  “By me and the owners,” she said. “Mr. and Mrs. Packer.”

  “He wasn’t good at his job?” Jesse said.

  “He was fine with the horses, great with them, actually,” she said. “He just turned out to be way better at being a fall-down drunk.”

  Everyone at the barn knew he drank, Karen Boles said. Paul Hutton never went out with the other horse people on Sunday nights, which she said was the biggest party night during the festival, because the place shut down on Monday. A friend of hers, another trainer, said he spotted him at Oli’s a few times and said hello, but that she just assumed he did most of his drinking in the apartment. But she could smell the alcohol on him a lot of mornings. There got to be too many mornings when the other groom would have to go bang on the apartment door to wake him up. Finally one morning they found him passed out in a stall next to one of the horses, and let him go.

  “How did he take it?” Jesse said. “Getting fired.”

  “He was as polite as ever,” she said. “Said he’d finally hit bottom, and that it was time to get better. Left in a hurry. I told him that if he ever got himself straightened out, to give me a call. I kind of liked the guy. He just finally couldn’t control his drinking.”

  Jesse told her there was a lot of that going around.

  “He say where he was headed when he left here?”

  “No,” she said. “Kept to himself till the end.”

  They stood in the open area in front of the barn entrance in the afternoon heat. Jesse could occasionally hear the sound of the horses from inside. At least they were out of the sun. He thought it might be hotter than it had been when he got off the plane yesterday, but it would have been like trying to compare two flames on the same stove. He’d always heard people talking about what it was like in Florida in the summer. Now he knew. Before long he imagined sweat would be spilling down his arms and off his fingertips and creating one more man-made lake in Florida.

  “He have any friends?” Jesse asked.

  “We have a pretty small operation here,” she said. “Not like the bigger, fancier barns. I guess he was closest to the other groom, Hector.”

  “Could I talk to him?”

  “He’s the one who left in a hurry,” Karen said. “
He got wind of an ICE sweep. Then he was the one in the wind.”

  “Paul leave anything behind?” Jesse said.

  “After he was gone I cleaned out the apartment, even though the guy who ended up replacing him lives with his wife over in Royal Palm,” she said. “He only left a few things. Some clothes, a couple books.”

  “Laptop?”

  She shook her head.

  “You throw his stuff out?”

  “Nah, I just put stuff in a box. I figured if he ever came back, it would still be here for him.”

  “Still got it?”

  “Storage room in the back of the barn,” she said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  She walked him past the horses and to the back of the barn and showed him the small storage area. There were some saddles stacked against the wall, bridles hanging, spurs. Old boots lined up under the bridles.

  There wasn’t much in the box. A pair of jeans, a few T-shirts. A faded green University of Miami sweatshirt.

  “This all of it?” Jesse said.

  Karen Boles nodded. “Almost like he was never here at all,” she said.

  “Then he was in the wind until he showed up in my neck of the woods,” Jesse said.

  “When you find out what happened to him,” she said, “will you give me a call?”

  “When I find out?” Jesse said. “Not if?”

  “I’m good at reading people,” she said. She smiled. “Even if you missed a few jumps, you’re the type that would finish the damn course.”

  She was still smiling.

  “Or you can just give me a call if you’re ever back down here,” she said. “You ever get up on a horse?”

  “Only on carousels.”

  “Maybe I could teach you how to ride.”

  Jesse said he’d take her up on that if she promised he wouldn’t fall off. Karen Boles said that nobody had fallen off her yet. She laughed. He laughed. Then headed for the rental car. He didn’t have much of a love life back home. But first Ellen the bartender had come on to him. Now the horse trainer. A small sampling, but he still seemed to have it with the women of Wellington, Florida.