Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  Sister Theresa lowered her voice and leaned forward.

  “After you meet her,” she said, “you might wonder where His Holiness ranks below her.”

  She walked down a short hallway and came back a couple minutes later with a small, white-haired woman wearing blue jeans and pink running shoes and a rose-colored sweatshirt rolled to her elbows. If she’d been around as long as Sister Theresa said, she had to be somewhere between seventy-five and eighty. But she seemed to be bouncing toward Jesse as much as walking, as if the best part of her day was starting right now. Somehow he imagined a gymnast who’d just stuck a landing and wanted you to know she was damn proud of it.

  “Beth,” she said, sticking out her hand.

  “Jesse,” he said.

  “Guess you already know I’m allegedly in charge around here,” she said.

  “Allegedly?” Jesse said. “As soon as I saw you coming up the hall, I stood up a little straighter, Sister.”

  “Don’t blow smoke up my butt, young man.” She smiled, white teeth set off against her tan. “I’m told you want to know about Paul Hutton.” He could see green eyes narrowing behind her round, wire-rimmed glasses. “Something has happened to him, hasn’t it?”

  “He died,” Jesse said.

  “How?”

  “Shot to death in my town in Massachusetts.”

  She gestured in the direction of a small sitting room just off the lobby. The furniture reminded Jesse of her. Old. Sturdy. But she already reminded him of a line he’d heard once in a bar from an old actor friend: I can play younger.

  She sat down on the sofa. Jesse took the armchair to her right.

  “Shot to death,” she said.

  “Afraid so.”

  He watched as she made a quick sign of the cross, then said, “What do you want to know about him?”

  “He told a friend of mine he was abandoned,” Jesse said. “I guess the best place to start is with his birth parents.”

  “Good luck with that,” she said.

  “Who brought him here?”

  She snorted.

  “Brought him here?” she said. “He got left in a dumpster.”

  So that’s what he’d meant when he told Karen Boles it was no accident his life had turned into a dumpster fire, Jesse thought.

  Sister Beth said, “That poor boy got put in a dumpster by somebody who didn’t care whether he lived or died. It was a big story around here for a couple days. The dumpster baby. Please help us find who left the dumpster baby. Then the papers and the police moved on. Doesn’t work that way around here. He was ours. Him and his troubled damn soul.”

  She asked if Jesse wanted something to drink. Jesse said he was fine. He asked if anybody ever adopted the boy.

  “There was one couple finally,” she said. “From up in Stuart, who couldn’t have children of their own. I think that lasted a year. He was around thirteen or fourteen at the time.”

  “Already more than just a troubled soul?”

  “Just trouble,” she said. “He started stealing from them. Was already drinking. Getting into fights at school. Never got arrested, as far as I knew. But the diocese wouldn’t let us take him back after the Stuart couple surrendered him. That’s when he started bouncing from one group home to another.” She sighed. “Then I lost track of him.”

  “Never heard from him again?”

  “No, that’s the thing,” she said. “I was getting to that. He stopped by out of the blue a few months ago. Sometime in March, I think it was. Said he wanted me to know that he was back on what he called the straight and narrow. I remember asking if that meant regular attendance at Sunday Mass. He said no. Told me he’d been a bad drunk, but that he’d stopped. Seen the light, he said.”

  Sister Beth said, “The boy, I still thought of him as a boy, said it had taken him his whole life, but he was finally feeling good about himself. Said he might even be ready to know who he really was.”

  “Metaphysically?” Jesse said.

  “You talk pretty for a cop.”

  “Somebody told me once that the key to life was hanging around with people smarter than you,” Jesse said. He grinned. “Doing a little of that right now.”

  “More smoke up my butt,” Sister Beth said.

  “What did he mean about finding himself?”

  “I asked him that myself,” she said.

  “What did he say?”

  “Just hugged me and told me that he’d be in touch,” she said. “Where’s his body?”

  “In the morgue,” he said.

  “How long does it stay there?” she said. “I’d like you to have it shipped down here so I could give that boy a proper Catholic burial.”

  “I’m gonna need to hold on to it for a while longer,” Jesse said.

  “You let me know when you’re done with it,” she said. “Or else.”

  “If I ever mess with you, Sister,” Jesse said, “it will mean my life has taken a wrong turn.”

  “More smoke,” she said.

  “How’d you come up with the name Paul Hutton?” Jesse said. “Just curious.”

  “Paul because of my late brother,” she said. “Died in that damn war in Vietnam. Hutton? I never told him this and he never asked. But it was the brand name on the dumpster.”

  Jesse stood. So did she. She wasn’t more than five feet tall, if that. Jesse still wasn’t sure he could take her in a fair fight.

  As she walked him to his car, she said that this seemed more than just another case for him. Jesse told her about meeting Paul Hutton at the AA meeting, that he was a recovering alcoholic himself. But that he was trying to stay the straight and narrow now.

  “I’ll pray for you, too,” she said.

  He grinned again. “Dirty job,” he said.

  “I don’t like to make snap judgments about people, Chief Jesse Stone,” she said. “But you seem like you might have a bit of a troubled soul yourself.”

  “Sister,” he said, “you have no idea.”

  He was on his way back to the airport when Suit called.

  “Well, I might’ve spoke too soon at the lake that day,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means we’ve got ourselves another floater.”

  Jesse reached over and turned down the volume on the car radio.

  “You know who it is?”

  “Troy Drake,” Suit said.

  Forty-Two

  Molly, Sunny, and Suit were waiting for him at the station when he got back to Paradise at around eight o’clock.

  By now Suit had filled him in on the discovery of Troy Drake’s body at a small dock maybe half a mile from the Stiles Island Bridge. It was all done by the book after that: The ME wagon had arrived not long after Suit did. Then he ID’ed the body before it was tarped and loaded onto a gurney and wheeled up into the wagon for the ride to the morgue, where Dev went to work immediately.

  Suit said, “You were right the first time I ever saw one of those. One floater is too many.”

  “How long did Dev think the body had been in the water?” Jesse said.

  “He guessed a day, at least,” Suit said. “Maybe two. The crabs had already done a pretty good job on the poor bastard.”

  “You know if Dev has talked to the evidence specialist from the staties?” Jesse said.

  “I did,” Molly said. “He was with Dev when I called.”

  “I don’t suppose he was shot with a .22,” Jesse said.

  “No gunshot wound,” Molly said. “No initial sign of blunt-force trauma. You know Dev. He’s not much of a bear for speculation. But he’s thinking Troy might have taken a flyer off the bridge.”

  The guy who had sat in Jesse’s office and said the only person he ever thought about killing was himself.

  Sunny had just made more coffee. Je
sse had tasted his and said it was strong enough to fuel a small plane. She said, “You’re welcome.” Jesse told them that when he was still playing ball, there was one coffee urn for the players and one for everybody else. He said the player urn made Red Bull seem like a sedative.

  Jesse reminded Sunny what Drake had said to him about suicide.

  “Did he seem depressed to you?” she said.

  “Who the hell knows?” Jesse said. “When he left here I thought he was probably headed for the nearest bar.”

  “We could check around town to see if anybody’s seen him the last couple days,” Molly said.

  “Let’s say he was a jumper,” Sunny said. “Do we intuit that guilt may finally have caught up with him?”

  “I do like the way my new partner talks,” Molly said.

  “Few don’t,” Jesse said.

  “Or did somebody throw his ass off the bridge?” Suit said.

  They sat and drank coffee. If Jesse had any more, he wasn’t going to get to sleep until Labor Day.

  “Where’s Rosie the dog?” he said to Sunny.

  “Anxiously awaiting Molly’s and my return, I expect.”

  Molly said, “Bo Marino is still out there somewhere.”

  “Isn’t he,” Jesse said.

  He knew he should be tired. Flying always made him tired, but he wasn’t, and he knew it wasn’t just Sunny Randall’s coffee. It was another body. The added mystery of it. The responsibility.

  “We liked Bo for the attacks on us because of how much we disliked him when he was a mean kid,” Molly said. “But now one of the other three mean kids involved in the rape of Candace Pennington is dead, and Bo is missing.”

  “Something at that house didn’t feel right,” Sunny said. “Could Bo be a victim and not a suspect?”

  “Or maybe he killed Troy Drake after he missed on Jesse and me and tried to rape Molly,” Suit said.

  Molly sipped her new cup of coffee and winced.

  “Maybe Troy knew something,” she said.

  “And maybe,” Sunny said, “we need to tell Kevin Feeney that he might be in danger.”

  “Not if Drake was a jumper,” Jesse said.

  “Or,” Suit said, “maybe Drake’s death, whether he killed himself or not, had nothing to do with what happened to us.”

  “Let’s see what Dev comes up with,” Jesse said.

  He had waited to tell them about his day. Now he did. Everything he’d learned from Sister Beth about Paul Hutton being the baby left in a dumpster forty years ago.

  “Who does that?” Molly said.

  “Maybe that’s what he spent his whole life wanting to know,” Sunny said.

  “Something brought him here,” Molly said.

  “Or somebody,” Jesse said.

  “From everything you know,” Sunny said, “there were two people at the Cain house that night. The old man and the nurse.”

  “You think Karina might know more than she’s telling?” Jesse said.

  Sunny winked at him.

  “Just about all women do,” she said.

  Forty-Three

  The next morning Jesse and Bryce Cain were in Cain’s office on the top floor of the old Paradise Bank building, a block up from the movie theater. Jesse idly wondered, but decided not to ask, if Bryce Cain had missed a day’s work since his father had died.

  “I don’t have a lot of time for you” was his greeting as Jesse sat down.

  “You rarely do,” Jesse said.

  “Why do you suppose?”

  This was a trip down a rabbit hole for which Jesse didn’t have the time or energy.

  “How’s your mom doing?” he said. “I haven’t spoken to her since I saw her at the hospital the day your dad died.”

  “She’s fine,” Bryce said. “Like the divorce they’ve been in the process of having, just without any papers, is final.”

  “How about you?” Jesse said.

  “What about me?”

  Jesse took a closer look at him. He had a can of ginger ale on the desk in front of him, and a glass next to it filled with ice. He’d either skipped shaving that day or was unshaven by design, to have that stubbled look. There was puffiness under his eyes. The long hair looked like it needed washing. It was when he reached for the glass that Jesse saw the noticeable tremor in his hand. Maybe you had to have been a boozer to pick up the signs that Bryce Cain was hungover. If Jesse came around the desk, he was sure he’d be able to pick up the faint stink of last night.

  “How are you dealing with his death?” Jesse said.

  “All due respect?” Cain said. “None of your fucking business.”

  “Thanks for the pro tip.”

  “Why are you really here, Stone?” he said. “Because we both know it’s not for grief counseling.”

  “Something’s been bothering me,” Jesse said. “The time I came to the house and Lily wasn’t there, you used Paul Hutton’s last name. Only, at that point, I’d never mentioned his last name to anybody outside my department.”

  “I don’t remember saying that.”

  “I do.”

  “Who the hell knows how I knew his last name?” Cain said. “Maybe one of your cops mentioned it to somebody who mentioned it to me.”

  “Who?”

  “Who what?”

  “Who mentioned it to you?” Jesse said. “I could go talk to that person and ask which one of my cops gave out Hutton’s last name.”

  Cain put his palms up in a helpless gesture.

  “You want to know the truth?”

  “Always a good option,” Jesse said.

  “I have no idea why I would have known his last name.”

  “Unless maybe you knew it before he got here.”

  “I told you already,” he said. “My mother told you. We have no idea who this guy was. And if I did, why would I lie to a cop about it?”

  “Good question,” Jesse said.

  Bryce Cain shook his head suddenly, the way horses do with flies. Jesse wasn’t sure whether the question had startled him. Or if he was just buying time, through the fog of what was clearly a hangover. Jesse knew the look.

  “Maybe you mentioned the guy’s name and don’t remember,” Cain said. “They say that drinking kills brain cells. Maybe you lost more than you think when you were on the sauce.”

  “‘On the sauce,’” Jesse said. “You don’t hear that a lot anymore.”

  “Even I know people don’t have to talk to cops if they don’t want to,” Cain said. “Even when they’ve got nothing to hide. So we’re done here.”

  “Do you have something to hide?”

  Cain blew out a lot of air, slapped his palms on his desk, stood up.

  “Done,” he said.

  Jesse stood up himself, knowing they were done, at least for now.

  “Bryce, you need to know something,” he said. “If there was a connection between Paul Hutton and your family, eventually I’m going to find it.”

  He knew it wasn’t much of an exit line, but would have to do for now. He walked through the outer office, giving Cain’s secretary his best public servant’s smile on his way past her.

  He thought of something Dix had told him one time about narcissists, and their lying to maintain the image they held of themselves. And how getting called out as liars made them angry.

  “They know that one of these days their bullshit is going to be exposed,” Dix had said.

  Just not today, Jesse thought.

  Forty-Four

  I stopped being afraid of Bo Marino a long time ago,” Kevin Feeney said.

  He had been out on a job when Molly had called him. Now he was back at his office. Molly and Sunny were there with him. He’d acted surprised that Troy Drake was dead, but not shocked. Or disappointed.

  “Do you think
he killed himself?” Feeney said.

  “Unless somebody put him in the water,” Molly said. “Maybe from the bridge.”

  “Wouldn’t somebody have seen two people walking on the bridge?” Feeney said.

  “Not necessarily,” Molly said. “Depending on the time of night.”

  “What about security cameras?” Feeney said.

  “On the bridge? In the process of being replaced, unfortunately,” Molly said.

  “You think Bo might have had something to do with it?” Feeney said.

  “At this point, we’re not ruling anything out,” Molly said. “We went up to Maine hoping to talk to him. But he hadn’t been in his house for at least a week.”

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” Feeney said. “Say it is Bo. Why would he blame me or Troy for what happened with Candace Pennington? He’s the one who got us involved. You could make a case that he’s the one who tried to ruin our lives, right?”

  “We just want you to be aware of the potential threat,” Molly said, “to both you and your wife. Is she back yet from Vermont?”

  “She goes for three weeks every summer,” he said. “Her dad passed away last year. It’s a chance for her to get some quality time with her mom.”

  They could hear his phone buzzing. He took it out of his pocket, looked at it, shook his head. “Shit,” he said. “I gotta go back. Somebody unplugged something at the job I just left.”

  “Just a couple more questions,” Molly said. “Did Troy Drake attempt to reach out to you after Chief Stone brought him in for questioning?”

  “He called, actually.”

  “Do you remember when the call was?” Sunny said.

  Feeney frowned. “The day before yesterday,” he said. “Said he wanted to talk, to clear the air once and for all. Said that he’d always felt as bad that he didn’t stop me from going along as he was for going along himself.”

  “What did you say to that?” Molly said.

  “I wanted to tell him that he was full of shit, but what would have been the point in that?” Feeney said. “But he was full of shit. Troy liked watching Bo do it as much as he liked doing it himself. He liked being there. And Bo told both of us that if we didn’t go along, he’d tell everybody that neither one of us could get it up.”