Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  “Sometimes they’re the same,” Karina said. “Secrets and ghosts.”

  He asked if she wanted him to drop her somewhere. She said she wanted to walk. He told her it was a long walk back to the Cains’. She said she didn’t care.

  “Good luck,” he said, shaking her hand when they were back in front of his building.

  “Maybe you’re the one who needs luck,” she said.

  “You can say that again,” Jesse said.

  Forty-Eight

  Ellen Chagnon, Jesse’s bartender friend from Florida, called in the late afternoon and asked if Jesse had forgotten her. Never, he said. She called him a liar and said that they hadn’t forgotten him down there, and that her manager had found a credit card receipt with Paul’s name on it.

  He asked her to send a screenshot, and within seconds his cell phone pinged and there it was. He thanked her. She said that maybe someday he could thank her in person. He told her he was kind of involved with somebody these days.

  Ellen Chagnon said, “I’m not jealous.”

  “Good to know,” Jesse said.

  “You think this will help?” she said.

  “Like they say,” Jesse said. “Couldn’t hurt.”

  Jesse told Suit to call Dan Malmon at the DA’s office, send him the screenshot, and tell him they needed to subpoena Hutton’s credit card history from Capital One.

  “On it,” Suit said at his desk. Then he grinned and said to Jesse, “What’s in your wallet?”

  “What?”

  “The Capital One commercials,” Suit said. “With Samuel L. Jackson and Jennifer Garner?”

  “Who’s Jennifer Garner?”

  “Seriously?” Suit said. “She was married to Ben Affleck.”

  “The actor who’s the Red Sox fan,” Jesse said.

  “Luther,” Molly said from behind them, “I don’t know why you even try.”

  “Dan knows the drill,” Jesse said, ignoring them. “He’s just got to find the rep from Capital One. They all have one. Tell them it’s exigent circumstances.”

  “Life and death,” Suit said.

  Molly said, “You have learned well, grasshopper.”

  “What grasshopper?” Suit said.

  Sunny was at Molly’s house, walking Rosie the dog. Jesse told Molly and Suit he was going out for a drive.

  “Anywhere in particular?” Molly said.

  “Securing the perimeter,” he said.

  “You want to get away and think and you don’t want us bothering you,” she said.

  “Sounds so impersonal when you put it that way,” he said.

  “Dinner later with the women in your life?”

  “Sounds good.”

  He thought about calling Dix, seeing if Dix had time this afternoon. Sometimes his brain just worked better when he was in the same room with Dix. Hanging around with someone smarter.

  He drove aimlessly for a while, past Indian Hill overlooking the harbor, where they’d once found the body of a radio guy named Walton Weeks. Then he was going over the bridge and into Stiles Island, thinking back to the time when the bridge had blown and the island had essentially been taken hostage by Jimmy Macklin and Wilson Cromartie, known as Crow. Then to Paradise Neck on the causeway and back.

  Karina Torres had talked about ghosts and the Cains. They weren’t the only ones who had them. But you thought too hard on them, Jesse knew from experience, and they could drive you to drink. He drove to Marshport for the six o’clock meeting at the First Episcopal Church.

  Couldn’t hurt.

  Forty-Nine

  Why would Bryce and Whit have been arguing about money?” Jesse said to Lily.

  “I forget sometimes,” Lily said, “Are you investigating us, or your murder?”

  “I can’t do both?” Jesse said.

  They were at a window table at the yacht club the next morning. Lily had told Jesse she preferred meeting there, wanted to get out of the house. Karina, she told him, was packing up Whit Cain’s clothes, and she didn’t need a front-row seat to that. Jesse had asked if it was all right to wear jeans to the yacht club, it had been so long since he’d been there he’d forgotten the dress code. Lily reminded him that he’d be there with her, and could wear whatever the fuck he wanted to.

  “In answer to your question,” she said, “my son and my husband argued about everything.”

  She wore what looked to be business clothes. A pale green linen blazer over a white shirt. Black pants. When Jesse had told her she looked nice before sitting down she told him to get over it, she was on her way to a board meeting.

  “Should be spelled B-O-R-E-D,” she said.

  Now she tilted her head slightly. “Only Karina could have told you they were arguing about money,” she said. Lily smiled. “But then she never thought of herself as working for me, not from the start. Always him. I always wondered if she’d been one of his girls down in Florida, as much as they both denied it.”

  Jesse tucked that observation away and returned to the topic of Bryce and Whit. “Seems odd, though,” Jesse said. “Wouldn’t their wars about money have been fought a long time ago?”

  “Odd for everybody else,” she said, “or for the Cains?”

  “Was it about the will?”

  “My,” Lily said, “how truly chatty Miss Karina has become. At this rate, she’s going to be lucky to make it to the end of the month.”

  “She’s leaving?”

  “Bryce’s decision,” Lily said. “But I didn’t do much to stop him.”

  Jesse said, “I think she still sees herself as taking care of him.”

  “What, his ashes?”

  Jesse sipped coffee, Lily her tea. For the moment Jesse felt as if they’d gone to neutral corners.

  Lily said, “I still don’t see what this has to do with this man Paul Hutton’s death.”

  “Still trying to figure out why he was here.”

  Lily smiled again. “The existential question,” she said. “Why are any of us here?”

  “I heard there were also arguments between Whit and you,” Jesse said.

  No point in trying to protect Karina now. They were past that. Jesse imagined her packing up her own belongings before the day was out.

  “Karina,” Lily said.

  “Don’t blame her,” Jesse said.

  “She will be well compensated with parting gifts,” Lily said. “Or maybe she thinks of it as combat pay at this point.”

  “Don’t mess with Lily Cain,” Jesse said.

  “We’ve known each other a long time, Jesse,” she said. “By now you should know as well as anyone that I’m a good sport until I’m not.”

  “Were you always this tough?”

  “Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Don’t you think I had to be?”

  “Was there an issue with the will?”

  “No.”

  “No recent changes that might have upset Bryce?”

  “Bryce was about to get everything he wanted,” she said. “The money and the power.”

  “Didn’t he have enough of both already?”

  Lily sighed. “The only way my son was ever going to get out of his father’s shadow,” she said, “was when there was no shadow.”

  Jesse imagined Karina now, in the big bedroom on the second floor, packing up secrets along with the old man’s clothes. Maybe ones she hadn’t shared with Jesse.

  “Could Paul Hutton have had something on Whit?” Jesse said. “Something he thought he could use to shake him down, like shaking a money tree?”

  “Many tried that with my husband,” Lily said. “Hardly any ever succeeded.”

  “What happened to them?”

  She smiled. “They went away and never came back.”

  “I thought that’s the way Whit’s father was supposed
to have done business,” Jesse said.

  “My husband,” she said, “never completely abandoned those methods. Especially if he thought someone was after his money.”

  “Paul Hutton was abandoned as a baby in Florida,” Jesse said, “not far from Palm Beach. Left in a dumpster.”

  “Good Lord,” she said. “Who would do such a thing?”

  “Someone.”

  “And you think it’s somehow part of the story?” Lily said.

  “His story, anyway.”

  “You don’t give up.”

  “If it was a member of your family who got shot in the back of the head, would you want me to?” Jesse said.

  Lily smiled a thin smile. “Which member?”

  She sighed again. “Jesse, I would help you if I could,” she said. “You know I would. But I can’t.”

  “There was a reason he came here.”

  “You’re convinced he wanted something from us.”

  Jesse shrugged.

  “If he’d lived,” Lily said, “he would have had to take a fucking number.”

  She said “fucking” loud enough that the nearest waiter turned his head.

  “Man, you are tough,” Jesse said.

  He smiled at her now.

  “You know the old line about how getting old isn’t for sissies?” Lily said.

  “Lot of people gave Paul Newman credit,” Jesse said. “But an old actor I knew back in L.A. said it was actually Bette Davis.”

  “Either way,” Lily said. “Being a Cain isn’t for sissies, either.”

  “You must have wanted it,” Jesse said. “And Whit.”

  “Not as much as he wanted me,” Lily said.

  Fifty

  Candace Pennington’s wife was waiting for Jesse when he got back to the office.

  She introduced herself as Anderson Pennington, told Jesse she went by Andy, and that she had taken Pennington as her married name. All in the first thirty seconds, before she got to it.

  “Candace is missing,” she said.

  They were in the front lobby. She was short and dark-haired, looked older than Candace. There was so much nervous energy to her Jesse imagined a sprinter about to come out of the blocks.

  “Let’s go into my office,” he said.

  He saw Suit at his desk. No sign of Molly or Sunny. Jesse motioned her into his office, and into a chair across from his desk.

  “I think she’s been taken,” Andy Pennington said. “And that’s my best-case scenario.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jesse said.

  She clasped her hands in front of her.

  “I haven’t heard from her since she left here yesterday,” she said. “I was in Los Angeles, about to get on a flight. Delayed, of course. Originally supposed to get in about midnight. Didn’t end up landing until two.”

  You had to let them tell it their way.

  “She called when I was going through security,” Andy Pennington said. “Said she was going to see an old friend. It was a bad connection. Kept breaking up. One of those stupid ‘Can you hear me?’ calls. I told her I’d call her when I was at the gate. When I tried, it went straight to voicemail. I texted her from the plane. No response.”

  “Might she have had a couple drinks at dinner and decided to spend the night?” Jesse said. “Rather than leave her car?”

  “I’ve already checked every hotel and inn around here,” she said.

  She hugged herself now, as if to keep herself from flying apart.

  “Do you have that friend-finding app on your phone?”

  “We both do,” Andy Pennington said. “But it’s either died or been turned off. Or somebody smashed it to bits. The last location was Paradise.” She shook her head. “What a fucking name for this place, by the way,” she said.

  Jesse verified Candace Pennington’s number with her, wrote it down. Told her that if the phone was still intact, they had ways to ping it, through her carrier.

  “Could she have lost the phone somehow?” he said.

  “Impossible,” she said. “She’s one of those people who takes her phone with her into the bathroom.” She was rocking back and forth now in her chair. “Something terrible has happened,” she said. “You know how you know things? I know.”

  Then she muttered, more to herself than to him, “I never should have let her come back here.”

  “If she’s still here,” Jesse said, “we’ll find her.”

  It was just bullshit small talk. He wasn’t sure if she was even listening to him. She was helpless and angry and scared. Growing more frantic by the moment. He imagined the inside of her head being filled with voices, all her own.

  “We may find out there’s a simple explanation,” Jesse said.

  “Stop saying ‘we’!” she said. “There is no we. There’s just Candace out there somewhere. All because she came back to this godforsaken place.”

  “Her text didn’t say who the old friend was?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did she still have friends up here?”

  “A few girls who didn’t abandon her back then,” Andy Pennington said. “She said most of the girls treated her like she was wearing some sort of scarlet letter, the bitches.”

  “Do you remember any names?”

  She shook her head again.

  “It has to be Bo Marino,” she said. “Candace told me what was going on up here. That he’d come back for you and your friends. But maybe it was her he wanted all along.”

  Jesse asked her if Candace had an E-ZPass on her car. She said she did. Jesse asked if she could get the number.

  She pulled it up on her phone and gave it to him. “I pay the bills,” she said.

  He told her he would check to see if there had been any activity on the pass, and that they would recanvas all the hotels and inns. He asked if Candace had ever been in contact with Kevin Feeney.

  “The other member of the Paradise Three?” she said. “Never.”

  “Candace said she had a gun,” Jesse said, “and that she knows how to use it.”

  “Damn right,” she said. “Concealed carry permit and everything. Just like a big girl.”

  “Would she have it with her?”

  Candace hadn’t had a purse with her when she’d come to the office. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to bring a gun into a police station.

  “I’m sure she had it with her,” Andy Pennington said. “She doesn’t go to Whole Foods without it.”

  Jesse said to her, “Without offending you, I need to ask one more question.”

  “Everything is offending me this morning,” she said.

  “If she somehow saw Bo Marino in Paradise,” he said, “is there any chance that she was the one after him, and not the other way around?”

  Fifty-One

  Jesse told her he would be in touch as soon as he heard something. She said she was driving back to Newton, just because she didn’t want to be in Paradise, Massachusetts, five minutes longer.

  When she was gone, Suit knocked on Jesse’s door and told him he’d just received Paul Hutton’s credit card records from the DA’s office.

  “How far back do they go?” Jesse said.

  “Ten years,” Suit said.

  “Fuck,” Jesse said.

  “Took the bad word right out of my mouth,” Suit said. “Anything in particular we’re looking for here?”

  “Anything interesting and everything.”

  “Fuck,” Suit said.

  “We just need to get a sense of where he spent whatever money he had,” Jesse said. “Where he ate and drank. Amazon charges. Plane tickets. Car rentals. Flag what you think needs to be flagged and we’ll go over it together when you’re done.”

  “Ten years,” Suit said.

  “You want me to get Gabe or Peter to help?” Je
sse said.

  “I got this,” Suit said.

  “Pretend you’re following the guy,” Jesse said.

  “Through a goddamn spreadsheet?” Suit said. “Not exactly a high-speed chase.”

  Jesse called Molly, who was on her way in with Sunny. He told her about Andy Pennington, and told her they should take a detour to Kevin Feeney’s office. If Bo had somehow surfaced with Candace, maybe Feeney was in danger, too.

  They called back fifteen minutes later and said there was no one at the office. No answer when they tried Feeney’s phone. No sign on the door that he’d be back in fifteen minutes. They said they were on their way to his house next. Called back again and said nobody was home and no car in the driveway. Yesterday’s Globe on the doorstep.

  He looked down at the yellow legal pad in front of him. He’d written PARADISE THREE when Andy Pennington had used the expression. But there was an unwilling fourth person there that night: Candace. Her life about to be changed forever. Like all of them. Only she was the one who’d had no choice in the matter.

  “Four people there that night in high school,” Jesse said to Molly. “Right now they’re all gone.”

  “All?” she said.

  “Bo, Kevin, Troy, Candace.”

  He was on speaker. He heard Sunny say, “Kevin said if he had to, he could go someplace where Bo couldn’t find him.”

  “Maybe he did,” Jesse said.

  “Or maybe he’s missing along with Candace,” Molly said.

  “Or he’s the reason Candace is missing,” Jesse said.

  Molly said, “Maybe we need to track down Kevin’s wife and talk to her.”

  “Remind me where she is,” Jesse said.

  “He said she was visiting family in Vermont,” Molly said.

  “We know what her name is?” Jesse said. “Or maiden name?”

  “Never asked,” Molly said. “She only came up in passing.”

  “Maybe we need to find out,” Jesse said.

  He sat there at his desk and stared back down at his pad. PARADISE THREE. He picked up his pen and scratched out three and wrote a 5 over it.