Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  “Your guy and Samantha Cain were in the twenty-five percent range,” she said. “I’d like to take a closer look at her form, but while we have a record that she had an account, the account itself has been deleted.”

  “‘Deleted’ meaning what?”

  “That all the information is gone.”

  “Even you can’t access it.”

  “Not sure God could,” she said.

  “Who deleted it?” Jesse said.

  “I’m assuming either her or her father, since it was the father’s credit card that was used,” she said.

  “So what was Hutton’s relationship with the kid?”

  “Not a hundred percent certain, but by the numbers, likely uncle and niece.”

  She then explained the various possibilities involving the girl’s grandparents. Possibilities and probabilities. Some of which took Jesse to where he wanted to go, some of which didn’t. When she was finished, he had her take him through it again.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You still owe me a drink,” she said.

  “Rain check.”

  “Liar,” she said. “You’re in a relationship, aren’t you?”

  “Trying to be.”

  “Does she know?”

  “I’m the cop,” he said. “I’ll ask the questions.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Her name is Sunny,” Jesse said.

  “So that’s what that meant.”

  “My safe word when I’m in the presence of an attractive woman,” he said.

  “I scared you?”

  “Hell yes.”

  She laughed again and said, “Hold the thought if you ever take me up on the rain check. And let me know how this all comes out.”

  He said he would, thanked her again, started walking back to where he’d parked the Explorer, near the Old South Meeting House.

  When he was out of the downtown area, he called Bryce Cain and told him to be at the station in an hour.

  “That sounded an awful lot like an order.”

  “You can come to me or I can come to you,” Jesse said. “Your call.”

  “What’s this about?”

  Jesse said, “Family matter.”

  Sixty-Seven

  Jesse and Molly and Suit were in Jesse’s office before Bryce Cain arrived.

  “Well, at least we know why Paul Hutton was here,” Molly said. “A reunion.”

  “Or a shakedown,” Suit said.

  “He didn’t seem the type to me,” Jesse said.

  “Because you were at one AA meeting together?” Molly said.

  Jesse took his glove and ball out of the bottom drawer of his desk, snapped the ball into the glove.

  “I’d like to know how many Cains knew he was a relation,” Jesse said.

  “Can you ask the kid?” Suit said.

  “Hiking with some of her friends through the Alps,” Jesse said.

  “You can’t track her down?”

  “To do that I’d have to ask her grandmother,” Jesse said.

  “You can’t put off talking to her about all this forever,” Molly said.

  “Bryce first,” Jesse said. “He’s the one who paid.”

  “But it was the girl’s sample,” Molly said.

  “You think her grandmother knows about this?” Suit said.

  “I got the sense when I was with them that the two of them do more than their share of head-butting,” Jesse said. “Lily gave the impression that Samantha’s kind of wild.”

  “How old?” Molly asked.

  “Twenty-one.”

  “She’s pretty, she’s young, she’s rich as shit,” Molly said. “I would’ve been wild, too.”

  “Wilder,” Jesse said.

  Molly put her thumb on the end of her nose and wiggled her fingers at him.

  “Lily’s a tough nut,” Jesse said.

  “Tough enough to leave a baby in a dumpster when she wasn’t all that much older than her granddaughter is now?” Molly said.

  Jesse said, “Nothing tough about that.”

  * * *

  —

  Cain was in casual work clothes: blazer, pink shirt, jeans, loafers, no socks. His hair was brushed back and landed nearly on the collar of the jacket. Jesse always wanted to ask him who told him he looked good with Fabio hair.

  “I’m going to need to talk to Lily about what I’m going to tell you,” Jesse said.

  “She’s in Palm Beach,” she said, “packing up the old man’s stuff, getting ready to sell the place.”

  “That didn’t take long,” Jesse said.

  “When my mother wants to turn the page,” Cain said, “she doesn’t screw around.”

  Jesse told him what he knew.

  “Bullshit,” Cain said.

  “Which part?”

  “I don’t know anything about a DNA test,” he said. “Why in the hell would I need one? To see if I’m related to any other royal families?”

  “You weren’t listening,” Jesse said. “But I’m assuming that happens a lot.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Your daughter took the test,” Jesse said. “You just paid for it. You’re saying you didn’t know?”

  “Got any kids, Stone?”

  “Son. Grown.”

  “And he doesn’t know your credit card number and security code?”

  “I’ll have to ask him.”

  “Well, if he doesn’t, you’re one of the chosen few.”

  “You don’t check your credit card bills?”

  Cain made a snorting noise and shook his head. Like the steak he’d ordered wasn’t rare enough.

  “I have people to do that,” he said.

  “Well, she took a test,” Jesse said. “And got a match with a guy who came to your parents’ house the same night somebody shot him dead at the lake. It means he’s related to your daughter and might be related to you.”

  Jesse could almost see wheels turning inside Cain’s head as he put a hand to his face and pulled hard on his cheeks.

  “Or he could be related to my dear, estranged wife,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Jesse said. “He could be. Then why did he go to Lily and Whit’s house and not go looking for your wife? But if it’s you, he was your half-brother. Which also would have made him one of Whit’s heirs.”

  “You don’t know that,” Cain said. “Unless you saw the will.”

  “Actually, I did,” Jesse said.

  “No fucking way?”

  “I’m the chief,” Jesse said. “I know shit.” He smiled. “You’re telling me you don’t want to know if Lily might have been the guy’s mother or Whit the father?”

  Cain snorted.

  “Are you drinking again?” Cain said. “It would have to be the old man. All the fucking around he did finally caught up with him.”

  “I assume you’re going to ask Lily about this,” Jesse said.

  “First chance,” Cain said.

  “You think she might already know?”

  “She’s Lily Cain,” Bryce said. “She knows shit.”

  Jesse sipped coffee gone cold. “Samantha didn’t tell you about this?”

  “We don’t talk much these days,” Cain said.

  “Forget about your father for a moment,” Jesse said. “You’re convinced Paul Hutton wasn’t Lily’s son?”

  “Leaving a kid in the trash?” Cain said. “Listen, she’s always joked about growing up in White Trash, Florida. But come on, Stone. You know her. There’s no way.”

  “But Hutton still could have been an heir,” Jesse said.

  “So you think I killed him over money?”

  Jesse said, “Love and money.”

  “What?”

  “Two things that peopl
e kill for.”

  “Unless your poor vic was related to my wife.”

  “Easy to find out.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Cain said. “I didn’t even know that guy was in town until you came to the house and told me somebody shot him. I didn’t know about the goddamn test until you just told me. If you don’t believe me, ask my kid when she gets back from Europe.”

  “For the last time,” Jesse said. “You were home alone after the theater thing?”

  “Phone off,” he said. “Passed out after half a bottle of Dewar’s. Living the dream.”

  Then he said, “Are we done?”

  “For now.”

  Bryce Cain got up and walked to the door.

  “Hey?” Jesse said.

  Cain turned.

  “Who do you think might have wanted Hutton dead?”

  “Your problem. Not mine. Now fuck off.”

  When he was gone, Molly came into the office and said, “How’d that go?”

  “The last thing he said was for me to fuck off.”

  “That well, huh?” Molly said.

  “I need a break, Mols,” he said.

  The next day he got two.

  Sixty-Eight

  Lily Cain returned to Paradise two days later and called Jesse, telling him they needed to talk. He said he’d been expecting her call. Asked where she wanted to meet.

  “I’ll come to you,” she said. “I need to clear some things up, for both of us,” then added, “as a friend.”

  Jesse asked if she’d find it inappropriate to come to his place. She said not at all, he should know by now she wasn’t that much of a lady. She asked if he had anything to drink there. He said that if she meant liquor, no. She said she’d bring her own.

  When she was in the living room, she took off her Paradise Yacht Club ball cap and shook her long hair loose. She was wearing jeans and sneakers, a windbreaker. Just folks.

  “Do I get a tour?” she said.

  “Trust me,” Jesse said, “you don’t want one.”

  “Then how about a glass with ice,” she said, as she pulled a pint of Crown Royal out of the side pocket of the windbreaker.

  Jesse went into the kitchen and got the same kind of tall glass he once used when it was the cocktail hour here. When he came back, Lily was on his terrace. Probably thinking how much better her view was. Jesse handed her the glass and led her back into the living room and gestured at the small couch across from his television chair.

  She poured whiskey into her glass and took a healthy swallow. Put the glass down on a coaster. Smiled at Jesse and said, “Bryce told me about your conversation.”

  “I expected that he would.”

  “Let me tell you a story,” she said.

  “I’m here.”

  “If one of us was Paul Hutton’s parent, it had to be Whit,” she said. “Because I sure as shit wasn’t his mother.”

  She took a smaller sip of whiskey, closed her eyes, let it run through her and settle. He knew the feeling. Like you’d wrapped your insides in a warm blanket.

  “Samantha didn’t tell her father or me that she planned to take a goddamn DNA test,” Lily said. “She’s hardly ever around these days. They barely speak when she is. We barely speak. If we say up, she says down. Point is, I never got the chance to talk her out of it.”

  Jesse waited.

  “But some of her friends were doing it, and so she did, too,” Lily said. “She only came to me about it when she got a match. As you can imagine, I blew several fuses. And reminded dear Samantha that she was a Cain. And that we didn’t share our secrets with others, especially ones literally written in blood.”

  “Had Hutton reached out to her?”

  “Not yet,” Lily said. “I told her the implications of a stranger knowing he was related to us in some way, that it was practically an invitation for someone to come looking for money. I told her to turn the account over to me, it simply wasn’t safe any other way.”

  “She went for that?”

  Lily smiled. “You know me, Jesse,” she said. “I can be quite persuasive when I need to be, even with a pigheaded young woman who reminds me far too much of myself at her age.”

  “Wasn’t she even curious?” Jesse said.

  “Mildly,” Lily said. “But if it’s not really about her, she loses interest pretty quickly. I explained to her that although I didn’t want to burst her bubble about her grandfather, he might have a family tree apart from our own that looks like the Old Testament.”

  She sighed. “Then I reminded her again that I had given her a trip through France and Switzerland and Italy for her birthday and told her to let me handle it before people got hurt.”

  “Did you tell your husband about any of this?” Jesse said. “Or all of it?”

  “I told him,” she said. “I wasn’t surprised, wasn’t even angry, really. I asked who he thought the mother might be. He looked at me and said, ‘It could have been anybody.’”

  “Did he tell anybody else?” Jesse said. “He seemed to share a lot with Karina.”

  “He’s the one who told me not to tell anybody,” she said. “He always talked about keeping the circle tight. Said to let him take care of it, or have it taken care of. He winked at me and said, ‘The way we used to take care of things in the old days.’” She shrugged. “When Paul Hutton turned up dead, I just assumed that he had taken care of things.”

  She drank. Jesse studied her face as she did, trying to imagine the girl she had been, the one who’d stolen the old bastard’s heart when they were both young.

  “You knew all this the first time I came to the house,” he said, “the morning we found the body.”

  “I was a Cain,” she said. “Keeping the circle tight.”

  “Didn’t you want to know if your husband had it done?”

  “More truth, Jesse? I didn’t. I was just glad it was over.”

  She leaned forward, eyes on him, the full force of her focused on him. Who she was. Who she wanted to be.

  “And now I very much want this to be over for you,” she said.

  “That your late husband may have been complicit in a murder?” he said. “Not your call, Lily.”

  “If he was or he wasn’t,” she said, “we’ll never know. Just let it be enough that this is what I believe happened.”

  “And everybody lives happily ever after,” Jesse said. “Except for Paul Hutton, of course.”

  “He’s gone!” Lily said. “Whit is gone! I want you to leave what’s left of my family alone.”

  “You think Hutton was coming after some of his money and Whit hired some old friend to take him out?”

  “It makes sense to me, in an odd way,” she said. “One last time, even in that chair, the life coming out of him, he got to feel like Whit Cain.”

  There was still some whiskey in her glass. He felt the urge to go across the room and finish it himself.

  “Noble,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Noble of you to protect the good name of a man you say you stopped loving a long time ago.”

  “Not noble,” she said. “Just practical. By now you should know we’re very practical people.”

  Jesse stood up and walked to the terrace door and stared out at the night. When he turned around he said, “The only problem for me, just as a practical matter, is that you’re full of shit.”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Whit wasn’t the father,” he said. “You were the mother. And Whit didn’t hire somebody to kill Hutton. You killed him, Lily.”

  He sat back down in the armchair and said, “Now let me tell you a story.”

  Sixty-Nine

  Samantha isn’t the only one who reached out to Paul Hutton through the 4Bears messaging system,” Jesse said. “You messaged him, too, after
you took over the account, and before you closed it down.”

  Jesse had called Gwen Hadley the day before and asked if anyone else in the Cain family had ever taken a DNA test, telling her he was specifically interested in Bryce’s wife, Tess. She told him she would have checked for that before, except she’d been on the clock that day. No, she said, Tess Cain had never taken a test.

  But Lily Cain had.

  He stood with his back to the terrace door, the lights of Paradise behind him, and the ocean behind them.

  “You knew that Whit wasn’t his father,” he said.

  “And how did I know that?”

  “Because you panicked after there was a match with Hutton and Samantha,” Jesse said. “Because you knew a kid of yours was out there, one you’d left in a dumpster.”

  “And this you know . . . how?” Lily said.

  “Because 4Bears told me.”

  “Those companies promise confidentiality,” she said.

  “This is a homicide investigation,” Jesse said. “Shit happens.”

  She started to get up. “I’m not listening to any more of this.”

  “Sit,” he said, with enough snap in his voice that she did.

  “I don’t know who you were back then, and how your life brought you to putting an infant in a fucking dumpster,” he said. “Maybe I’ll never know. It turns out that there’s not much history anybody can find on you before you became Mrs. Whit Cain, because I’ve spent the last couple days trying my ass off. Maybe if I wanted to do a deeper dive, I could find out.”

  She raised her chin slightly. Almost imperiously. Still Lily.

  “Good luck with that,” she said.

  But nothing more than that.

  “But now you knew it had to be him,” Jesse said. “And you reached out.”

  “I did no such thing,” she said.

  Jesse said, “We didn’t find a cell phone on Hutton, and there was no service plan on his credit card bills. He’d probably bought a prepaid phone with cash. But once I got a warrant for your call records, I found a number for that. You called it, a couple times from Palm Beach. And he called you a lot after that, not that he ever got through.”