Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  Suit grinned. “Somebody die?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Jesse said, and told him.

  Suit let out a low whistle. “No shit,” he said. “You want me to come along?”

  Jesse told him sure. They walked to his car. Now two people who’d been at the Cains’ on the Saturday night of Fourth of July weekend were dead. Both right after talking about making amends.

  What were the odds?

  * * *

  —

  When they got to the hospital Suit went inside to check on whether or not the doctors were finished with Whit Cain’s body.

  Jesse stayed outside because when they’d pulled up to the Emergency Room entrance, he’d spotted Lily Cain in a small alley, smoking a cigarette.

  “Odd day to start smoking,” Jesse said.

  She did not seem startled to see him. Just took another drag and blew smoke toward the sky.

  “You going to report me to the principal?” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Lily,” he said.

  He leaned against the wall next to her.

  “I honestly wish I could say the same, Jesse,” she said. “I don’t frankly know what I am. Relieved, maybe?”

  “You two were together a long time.”

  He saw a small smile work its way across her face.

  “Define ‘together,’” she said.

  She took another drag of her cigarette, blew out the smoke, dropped the butt to the ground, and snuffed it with her black running shoes.

  “Don’t report me to the authorities for that, either,” she said.

  “I know it’s easy to forget sometimes,” he said. “But I am the authorities.” He turned to face her fully. “Why are you here?” he said. “Been my experience that most people are relieved when the body is taken.”

  “I know it’s easy for you to forget sometimes,” she said. “But the Cains, bless our hearts, have never been most people. I mean, that’s always been the object of the game, right, Jesse?”

  He knew she was right. As much as he liked her, and he liked her a lot better than most of the rich in Paradise, he never forgot that there was a gulf between her world and his—even in a town this small—that was as wide as the ocean.

  “Other than Karina,” Lily said, “you were probably the last person to have a real conversation with him.”

  Jesse said, “Surprised me, to tell you the truth. How present he was.”

  She was wearing a pale blue cotton hoodie with the yacht club emblem on it.

  “Karina said he was full of piss and vinegar when you were with him.” She smiled another thin smile. “Do people still say that?”

  Jesse smiled. “Most people? Probably not.”

  “How come you haven’t told me it’s a blessing that his suffering is over?” she said.

  “’Cause I usually think that’s a load of crap,” he said. “And you probably do, too.”

  “This is going to sound terrible,” she said, “but, fuck it, I’m going to say it anyway: You know the one for whom this is a blessing? Me.”

  “Honest,” he said.

  “Getting to where I am in the world,” Lily Cain said, “and in this town, isn’t for the faint of heart.”

  She showed no urge to leave this spot, go back inside, go home. She apparently just wanted to talk. He’d always known how tough she was. He’d seen it when she wanted something done in Paradise, whether the theater marquee or something else. She didn’t back up. Even from this.

  “You know what he told me one time, the first time I ever caught him cheating on me?” Lily said. “He told me that it didn’t matter to him, and shouldn’t matter to me. That I was the only woman he’d ever loved.” She shook her head. “But then you know what he told me, practically in the next breath? That he sure liked a lot of them.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I slapped him,” she said. “He laughed and told me he deserved it, but to remember one thing. They’d all want to put flowers on the top of the casket. And so would I.”

  “From what Bryce told me, there isn’t going to be a casket,” Jesse said.

  “Imagine that,” Lily Cain said. “Whit would have been so disappointed, to lose one last show of their affection.”

  Jesse said, “When I talked to him yesterday, he talked about making amends. Any idea what he meant by that?”

  “None,” she said. “But it might have been just the ramblings of a dying man. A figure of speech. Because making amends would mean he was thinking about somebody other than himself, which he never really did.”

  “Ask you something?” Jesse said.

  She turned to face him.

  “Why did you stay with him?” he said.

  Now she smiled fully. “I thought I’d told you this once before,” he said. “I still loved being a Cain long after I’d stopped loving him.”

  “Ties that bind,” Jesse said.

  “Something like that,” she said.

  She turned to face him. He remembered Jenn one time trying to find the perfect shade of blue to paint the walls in one of her apartments. She finally settled on what she called “ice blue.” It was the color of Lily Cain’s eyes in that moment.

  “I used to love to go to New York for shows,” she said, “from the time we got married. By myself, or with a friend sometimes. Whit wasn’t much for the theater. But my favorite was Follies. You’re probably too young to know it, but there was a song in it that I’ve never forgotten. You know how it ends, Jesse? ‘Look who’s here. I’m still here.’”

  He watched her walk around the corner. People talked all the time about grieving widows. Jesse wondered how many actually grieved, when you got right down to it.

  Thirty-Nine

  Molly and Sunny went in through the back door, after Sunny had retrieved her lock-picking pouch from the glove compartment of her car.

  “Can you get something like that at Best Buy?” Molly said.

  “It was a gift,” Sunny said. “Friend of mine named Ghost Garrity.”

  “Thief?”

  “He prefers performance artist,” Sunny said.

  Molly watched with admiration as Sunny worked her magic with a wrench and pick on the deadbolt. Short end of the wrench into the bottom of the keyhole. Pick into the top part of the lock. It took her less than five minutes. Molly knew because before Sunny had started she said, “Time me.”

  “When I get home, I’m changing all the locks at my house,” Molly said.

  Molly wasn’t sure what to expect once they were inside, just knowing the kind of general slob Bo Marino had been as a teenage boy. Slob in his thinking, worse slob in his behavior. At the time, he’d made his father look like a prince of the city in comparison.

  But the place was surprisingly neat. It was a small house consisting of a living room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining area with a table. The first thing they looked for was a laptop, but they couldn’t find one. A pair of Timberland boots, caked with dirt, rested near the back door. There were a couple pairs of faded carpenter jeans and short- and long-sleeved shirts hanging in the closet of the bedroom. There was one piece of luggage that they could find, the kind of small one on wheels you could fit into the overhead compartment.

  There was milk and bread in the refrigerator, the milk past its sell-by date, the bread starting to mold. There were two bottles, unopened, of Mountain Dew. They went through all the kitchen cabinets and could find no liquor of any kind. Like Jesse’s condo, Molly thought.

  There was a pack of condoms in the top drawer of the bedside table. Not a single book or magazine anywhere. The living room was dominated by a mounted Samsung television that Molly guessed was a fifty-incher. Maybe bigger than that.

  All of his toiletries seemed to be in place on the counter in the bathroom: razor, shaving cream, a small jar of Old Spice po
made. Deodorant. Tylenol and Zantac in the cabinet above the sink. Shampoo in the shower.

  “This look to you like the home of someone who packed for a vacation?” Molly said.

  There were wall air conditioners for the living room and bedroom, both turned off. The temperature outside was in the low 80s. The heat seemed more oppressive inside, the air thick and hot and heavy and stale. Molly walked over and threw the switch on the living room air conditioner, and it groaned to life.

  “We won’t be here long enough for me to stop feeling as if I’m standing in a pool of my own sweat,” Sunny said.

  “We’re assuming he owns a car, right?” Molly said.

  “Hard to believe he was the type to be Ubering back and forth to work,” Sunny said. “Unless he lost his license somewhere along the way.”

  “Easy enough to check,” Molly said.

  “Just because there’s a suitcase in the bedroom doesn’t mean it’s his only one,” Sunny said. “And he could have shopped for the basic bathroom stuff when he got to his destination.”

  “Paradise?”

  She looked at Sunny, who shrugged.

  Molly said, “He’s been gone over a week. Maybe he’s on his way back.”

  “Or still there.”

  “Or on the run,” Molly said.

  Molly went into the kitchen and went through a couple drawers before finding a plastic sandwich bag. She took it to the bathroom and put Bo Marino’s toothbrush inside.

  “You can never have enough DNA, that’s my motto,” Molly said.

  “You think he’s the one?” Sunny said.

  “Put it this way,” Molly said. “I don’t think he’s not.”

  They went through the house a second time. Molly pointed out that there wasn’t just an absence of reading material of any kind. There wasn’t a single photograph anywhere.

  “Airbnb’s are more personal than this,” Molly said.

  While Molly kept opening drawers, Sunny pulled out her phone and tried to find any sort of presence for Bo on social media. Molly had already looked for any trace of Bo Marino in the system from the time he’d left Paradise, but had found none. The only time he had been arrested was because of what he and Troy Drake and Kevin Feeney did to Candace Pennington.

  “This could be a wild-goose chase,” Sunny said. “So far all we’ve really got to go on is the other loser that Jesse hauled in . . .”

  “Troy Drake,” Molly said.

  “Just because he had the fixings for a bomb doesn’t mean he or Marino is the one,” Sunny said.

  “Call it a gut feeling that one of them is involved,” Molly said. “Even though there are a lot of other people probably holding grudges against Jesse and Suit and me.”

  “But now Bo Marino is missing, even if he’s technically not a missing person.”

  “He’s not anything,” Molly said. “He’s not even a suspect. Maybe I am trying to talk myself into something. Maybe my gut is wrong this time.”

  “That happen much before?”

  Molly grinned. “Rarely.”

  “That’s my girl,” Sunny said.

  They left the house through the back door. Molly asked if Sunny could lock a deadbolt from the outside.

  “Watch me,” Sunny said.

  Then they walked back to the car. Molly took one last look at Bo Marino’s house.

  “But what if it is him?” she said.

  “Then he’s still out there,” Sunny said.

  “I had a feeling you were going to say that,” Molly said.

  Forty

  Sunny dropped Molly in Paradise and kept going to Boston, on her way to pick up her dog, Rosie. Molly said she could spend the night in Boston if she wanted, and come back up in the morning. Sunny said she hadn’t been dismissed by the boss, and would be back sometime after dinner.

  “Since you’re now referring to Jesse as your boss,” Molly said, “wouldn’t this fall into the category of workplace romance?”

  “Turns me on just thinking about it,” Sunny said.

  “What doesn’t these days?” Molly said.

  Now Molly and Jesse were in his office, in the late afternoon.

  “So where’s Bo?” Jesse said. “From what you guys saw, it’s like he left and has no immediate plans of coming back.”

  “Does that make him more of a suspect?” she said.

  “Doesn’t make him less of one.”

  “It certainly does not,” she said.

  “You checked out Hasty?” Jesse said.

  “If he was orchestrating all this from Concord,” Molly said, “he was doing it on a phone somebody smuggled in for him.”

  “Email?”

  “He’s not on CorrLinks,” Molly said. “It’s a way for federal prisoners—”

  “I know what it is, Mols.”

  She gave him a thumbs-up. And a look.

  “And I should know you’d know,” she said. “If he’s emailing people on the outside, he’s found a way to game the system.”

  “Once a slippery bastard, always a slippery bastard,” Jesse said. “What about the missus? She been to visit recently?”

  “According to the logs,” Molly said, “the only time she went to see him was to bring him their divorce papers, about five years into his stretch.”

  “Stretch?” Jesse said. “You watch too much TV.”

  “Do not.”

  “You went that far back?”

  “You know me,” she said. “I went all the way back.” She put her head back, closed her eyes, sighed. Loudly. “God, I need a drink.”

  As soon as she said it she came forward in her chair, hands up, as if surrendering.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be,” he said. “I need one, too.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  Jesse said, “I call the chief up in Biddeford and tell him that you went up there, and why. Maybe have him keep an eye on the house.”

  “I assume you’ll be leaving out the part about me and your girlfriend breaking and entering.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Sure,” Molly said. “Go with that.”

  After Molly left he closed the door, reached into the top drawer of his desk, and took out the file he’d been keeping on Paul Hutton, spread everything out on the desk in front of him. Went all the way back, the way Molly had on Hasty. Reread the notes he’d taken in Florida after his meeting with Karen Boles, who’d told Jesse about Paul Hutton having been an orphan.

  In the quiet of his office, with the last of the afternoon sun knifing through the blinds behind him, he stared down at the page in front of him and underlined orphan now.

  Twice.

  He was guessing Paul Hutton was around forty when he died. Maybe more, maybe less. He’d told Karen Boles that he’d grown up in that area. Jesse wondered now how many orphanages there were in that part of Florida that would have been in business around the time Paul Hutton was born.

  Maybe he hadn’t gone back far enough trying to figure out who the guy was.

  Jesse got up now and opened the door. Suit was still at his desk. Jesse waved him over.

  “Got another job for you,” he said, then told Suit what he needed. In the morning Jesse was on the first flight from Boston back to Palm Beach, thinking he was the only guy up here who’d turned into a snowbird in the middle of summer.

  Forty-One

  Nora Hayes wasn’t thrilled signing off on another Florida trip, but Jesse assured her there was plenty left in the PPD piggy bank.

  “Piggy bank, Jesse?” she said. “How old are you?”

  Suit had done good, fast work trying to find an orphanage where Paul Hutton might have been left sometime in the late ’70s or early ’80s. There turned out to be several in the state that had been around that long
. He made some calls despite it being late in the day, and finally got a hit at a place called the Palm Beach County Catholic Youth Home. The woman Suit had spoken to said that yes, they’d taken in a baby whom they’d given the name Paul Hutton in the fall of 1979. Suit asked if there was anybody at the orphanage now who’d been around then, and learned that Sister Beth, who ran the place, had worked there at the time. He told Jesse, who decided to go down there and talk to Sister Beth himself.

  “Once a flatfoot, always a flatfoot,” Jesse had told Molly at dinner. “Cole tells me that all the time.”

  “Look ’em in the eye,” she said.

  “I really have taught you so well.”

  “You wish,” she said. “Surprised you didn’t ask Sunny to go with you.”

  Jesse said, “By the time I get back, I expect the two of you will have located Bo Marino.”

  “You wish,” she said.

  The Palm Beach County Catholic Youth Home had been established in 1968. It was a mile east of 441, maybe two miles from an entrance to the Florida Turnpike, the building looking more like an old red-brick Catholic school that Jesse had briefly attended the year he and his parents had lived in Santa Clarita.

  A young woman at the front desk introduced herself as Sister Theresa. She had short dark hair, big brown eyes. Jesse was long past thinking that nuns were supposed to be dressed in black robes. Sister Theresa wore a short-sleeved polo shirt, cargo shorts, and had a nose ring. Jesse had no way of knowing where Jesus came down on those.

  Jesse showed her his badge and his ID card. She said she had spoken to one of his detectives the night before. “Suitcase Simpson,” Jesse said.

  “Suitcase?” she said.

  Jesse said the nickname came from an old-time ballplayer. Sister Theresa seemed about as interested in that as if Jesse had tried to tell her how the Asian markets had opened.

  “You want to see the Boss Sis,” she said. “She’s been around here almost since the place opened.”

  “Boss Sis,” Jesse said. “How far is that below Pope?”