The Hangman's Sonnet

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Jesse bristled at that. Not only was Bascom condescending to dictate how Jesse should deploy his department, but they’d gone over his head, directly to the mayor. Beyond that, the last thing Jesse wanted to deal with in high summer in a seaside town like Paradise was a celebrity invasion. As an L.A. cop, he’d seen what nightmares star-studded events created even in a town that lived for them and was equipped to handle them. Jesse kept his cool, ignoring Bascom and talking directly to Bella Lawton.

  “That makes you PR,” he said, nodding at Bella.

  She smiled her electric-white smile. “Very good, Jesse. Yes, I’ll be handling all the traditional, digital, and social media for the gala. And with all due respect to Roger’s understated assessment of the attendees, we anticipate several megastars from across the artistic spectrum to be there. We’re still waiting on Jay Z and Beyoncé, Clooney, and Jagger’s people to give us a firm yes. But those are only some of the A-listers we’re looking at.”

  Had he not been so desperately craving a drink at that moment, Jesse might have chided Bella for giving herself away. He had always been good at seeing the truth beneath the bullshit. It was one of the qualities that made him a great cop. What Bella had really said was that the response to the invitations wasn’t what they had hoped for and they were going to put on a full-court press. Press being the operative word.

  “Okay, thank you for notifying me,” Jesse said. “I’ll be in touch. If you don’t mind, I’ve got to get ready for this wedding.”

  Bascom just stood and left. White, confused by Jesse’s terse dismissal, hesitated for a beat or two, then followed Bascom toward the office door. Only Bella lingered.

  White called to her, “Bella, are you coming?”

  “Go on, Stan. I’ll be out in a second.” She waited for White to leave before turning back to Jesse. “I guess I overplayed my hand there with the A-list-megastar routine. How did you know?”

  “I worked LAPD for a long time and my ex-wife was an actress. Not many PR ploys I haven’t seen.”

  “Sorry, Jesse, I meant no disrespect.”

  “I can take it.”

  She leaned across his desk. “I just bet you can.”

  A loud few seconds of silence followed as they both let Bella’s comment hang there between them. She placed a business card on the desk, took a pen out of her bag, and wrote something on the back of the card.

  “Listen, Jesse, I might have oversold it, but we really are expecting a crowd and there will be some marquee names among them. So please don’t totally discount what we’ve said. That’s my cell number on the back of the card. Call me . . . anytime.”

  When she left, Jesse picked up the card, but he was too preoccupied to care. Instead, he pulled out his side drawer and looked for the bottle he knew wasn’t there. It was only another few hours, he told himself, and then went back to pounding the ball into his glove.

  3

  He’d already pulled the dresser drawers out one at a time, running his latex-gloved hands through the old lady’s clothes. He’d turned the drawers over, searching for a hidden key, a note with instructions, or an envelope. Something. Anything. Now he moved on to her bedroom closet, gagging at the lavender, lilac, orange peel, and clove stench of the big potpourri sachet on the shelf. It wasn’t just the potpourri getting to him. It was the way the mildew and camphor mixed and clashed with each other. Maybe it wasn’t that at all. Since coming into her bedroom, he hadn’t been able to escape the memories of his own grandma. Memories of how she used to powder herself up and pile on the clownish face paint over her sagging chicken skin, how she sprayed on sickly-sweet old-lady perfume to cover up the telltale scent of her own decay. He couldn’t escape the feeling that she was watching him, judging him, especially when he touched the old lady’s underthings. That really gave him the creeps.

  After patting down her dresses, her coats, and inspecting each of her shoes, he grabbed a chair. He stood on it and began to remove things from the shelf: hat boxes, cardboard boxes, photo albums, letters bound together with faded red ribbon. This was more like it. He tossed each item onto the bed, gladly leaving the white satin sachet bag behind. As he stepped off the chair, there was a knock at the bedroom door. Heart thumping, he froze, one foot still on the chair seat, the other on the floor. He laughed at himself for reacting. The cops wouldn’t have knocked, and unless the old biddy had Houdini skills, she was still tied up in the basement.

  “What is it, Hump?”

  A linebacker-sized man in his forties with a face pitted like a bad country road stepped into the bedroom. Six-foot-three and two-forty, going soft around the middle, he looked like he’d forgotten to take his shoulder pads off after practice.

  “King,” he said. “Why are you dumping out the old girl’s panties and stuff on the bed?”

  King shook his head at his ex-cellmate. There was a reason everyone who knew him called him Hump. Hump was a good guy and somebody you wanted on your side in a prison fight, but he wasn’t the brightest gem in the jewelry box.

  “Yeah, Hump. The thing we’re looking for can be hidden anywhere. Don’t pass nothing up. Look under lamps, ashtrays, under the phone. Come on, we went over all this already, right? It’s worth ten grand to us.”

  “But why are you dumping—”

  “Because I’m looking for a key, a safe combination, a note with numbers on it . . . like that. The man didn’t say we would definitely find it here, only that it might be here.”

  “Okay, King. I got it.”

  “Hump, I’m glad I cleared that up for you, but why’d you come up here in the first place?”

  “The old gal.”

  “What about her?”

  “I don’t think she’s doing too good.”

  King raced right past Hump, taking the steps two at a time, and barreled into the spindly-legged table at the base of the stairs. The collision knocked a white-and-blue-speckled ewer and basin off the table. The antique porcelain smashed onto the wide plank flooring and cracked into a hundred nasty-looking shards. He didn’t stop to check out the mess he’d made, hoping the job wouldn’t end up the same way. He turned down the hallway and headed for the rickety basement stairs. They creaked and moaned under his weight.

  “Hey, lady! Lady, you all right?” he called out to her even before he reached the basement slab.

  She didn’t answer. They’d been pretty gentle with her, up to a point. Sure, they’d made a show of their handguns, threatening to use them on her if she didn’t behave. Maybe Hump had tugged her white hair a little too hard and King had had to slap her when she started squawking. The blow split her lip and she bled a lot more than he expected a dried-up old prune like her to bleed. Her skin was so brittle, so papery and white, she didn’t even look like she had any blood in her. But they’d been gentler with her after that, careful not to break her birdlike bones when they tied her to a lally column. They’d used duct tape to bind her hands behind her and to wrap her ankles to the base of the pole, making sure not to cut off her circulation. When she started squawking again, Hump had shoved a balled-up sock in her yap and covered it with a strip of tape.

  King called to her again. “Lady!”

  But when his eyes adjusted to the dim light and he saw her head slumped, body sagging, he knew it was a waste of breath. The only voice she would hear now was St. Peter’s. King felt her neck for a pulse even though he knew he wouldn’t find one. When he pulled the tape away from her mouth, King was sickened by the stink of vomit. The old lady had puked into her gag and choked to death, or maybe it had been a combination of things. Maybe it had just been her time. What the hell did he know about it?

  There was a loud pounding as Hump came down the stairs.

  “She okay?” he asked.

  “Dead.”

  He crossed himself. “Oh, jeez, King. We killed the old lady. You said this wasn’t that kinda job.”

 
; “Well, pal, she’s dead, and unless you know how to unscramble eggs or raise the dead, we better find what we came to find.”

  “What should we do with the old lady?”

  “We’ll figure that out later. For now, leave her. She’s not going anywhere.”

  Hump shrugged, turned, and went back upstairs.

  When Hump was gone, King prayed. Not for the old lady, but for himself.

  4

  There were probably places Jesse wanted to be even less than here, but he just couldn’t think of any at the moment. When he pulled his new Ford Explorer into the church parking lot and took his hands off the wheel, he noticed they were shaking worse than they had been when Bascom, White, and Bella were in his office, or earlier when he’d been standing before his steam-clouded bathroom mirror. Then he’d been studying the three-day growth of salt-and-pepper stubble along his angular jawline and square chin and the taut skin of his still-handsome face. He ran his fingers through his thick hair, found the gray creeping in there, too. He’d looked everywhere in the mirror except directly into his own eyes, because all he saw there was condemnation.

  Stepping out of the black SUV, Jesse ignored the brilliant sun in the flawless, achingly blue skies above Paradise. Somewhere, a part of him recognized it was a perfect day for a wedding, but it was a muted, distant part of him, a part that ached nearly as much as the skies. He shoved his hands into his tuxedo pants pockets as he walked, not because he didn’t want to see them shaking, but because he didn’t want anyone else to see. He had the rings in his right jacket pocket. He’d checked before leaving the station house. Twice since. Jesse Stone had rarely dropped ground balls hit at him a hundred miles an hour on iffy minor-league infields, so he knew he could handle giving the preacher two wedding bands without making an error.

  As skilled as Jesse had been at narrowing his focus to a laser point, at shutting out crowd noise or chatter from the opposing catcher, at ignoring competing theories about a crime, he had taken it to a whole new level. For the past several months, since witnessing the love of his life murdered right in front of him, Jesse had pared his existence down to three stark essentials: grief, regret, and Johnnie Walker Black. They had become like a noose around his neck to the exclusion of everything else, including his job as police chief.

  He had done this dance once before, in L.A., after Jenn had cheated on him. It had cost him old friendships and the trust and respect of his peers, and, in the end, it cost him his detective’s shield. That inaugural dance with scotch and regret was what landed him in Paradise to begin with. So far, mostly due to goodwill, sympathy, and a fair stretch of crimelessness in town, Jesse had avoided paying a price heavier than a hangover for his behavior. Molly, Suit, Peter, Gabe, Alisha, and just about everyone connected to the PPD had done their fair share of ass-covering for Jesse since Diana’s murder. Yet his recent lack of diligence hadn’t gone unnoticed by the Board of Selectmen or Mayor Walker. He had been warned in no uncertain terms to either clean up his act or be put on forced sick leave.

  But it wasn’t the warnings from the selectmen or the mayor that had temporarily shut the Johnnie Walker spigot on him. It was Molly Crane who’d done that. On Thursday night she’d locked Jesse’s office door behind her.

  “What is it, Molly?” he’d asked.

  Though he didn’t look up at her when she entered his office, Molly knew Jesse was annoyed at her. After more than a decade together, she had learned to read the subtleties in his voice and his body language. She’d had to learn. Jesse wasn’t a man to give much away, not about what he was thinking. Certainly not about what he was feeling. Just lately, though, there wasn’t much mystery to what he was thinking or feeling. And the open bottle of Black Label on Jesse’s desk cleared up any questions anyone might’ve had about his state of mind.

  “Look at me, Jesse Stone.”

  He didn’t, repeating the question. “What is it, Molly?”

  “It’s about Saturday.”

  Jesse finally looked up from his glass. “What about Saturday?”

  “Listen to me, Jesse. Saturday will be the most important day in Suit’s life and you’re the most important man in his life. Don’t you dare show up at the church drunk and don’t you dare disappoint Suit.”

  “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

  “That’s a good question. Who am I talking to? It’s hard to know these days.”

  He seemed about ready to explode, but said nothing. Molly walked over by his desk, grabbed the smooth rectangular bottle, capped it, and moved back toward the office door.

  “Give the wallowing a rest for a few days,” she said. “You owe Suit that much. You want to drink yourself to death or lose your job, fine, but on Saturday you need to act the part of the best man.”

  And that was that. Self-control wasn’t usually an issue for Jesse, not even when it came to alcohol. He could go months without it. Had gone months without it. But as Dix had said to him, it was no more than a game he played with himself. It was like holding his breath. No matter how long he held it, he was bound to breathe again. And what did holding your breath ever prove? Problem was, Jesse didn’t care about proving anything to anyone, not anymore. Still, Molly was right, he owed Suit a lot, and Jesse Stone paid his debts.

  He walked around to the front of the old white church, its clapboards and pews said to have been cut from the same trees that went into the keels and strapping of the whaling vessels built in New Bedford, Mass. Jesse had always been skeptical of the claims linking Paradise to a whaling past, but he wasn’t thinking about that now. What he was thinking about was a dive into the deep end of a scotch-filled pool. He patted his jacket pocket once again and, feeling the rings, pulled back one of the church doors.

  5

  Tamara Elkin was pacing just inside the church doors. The medical examiner, usually given to loose-fitting sweaters, tight jeans, and pointy-toed cowboy boots, was decked out in a deep burgundy cocktail dress that clung to her athletic body and showed a fair bit of her long, muscular legs. She’d been an Olympic-class distance runner in college until a slip during a steeplechase took her off the track team and put her on track for medical school. The black stilettos emphasized the sculpted beauty of her legs.

  She lit up at the sight of Jesse, as she always did. Then she tempered her excitement, knowing that he was probably drunk and grieving. Those were pretty much givens these days. But she owed a lot to Jesse. He was the first person in the area to befriend her when she took the job as ME, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. She’d always wanted more than friendship from him, but less than commitment. Like Jesse, Tamara was divorced, and as she said, she was nobody’s Miss Right. For more than a year now, she had pressed Jesse to let her become more than a friend. She’d been careful to back off the pressure since Diana’s murder. If and when Jesse decided to let her in, Tamara didn’t want it to come with excuses. She didn’t want to hear that he had been too out of it to know what he was doing or that she was just a temporary salve for his pain. A friend with perks was one thing. A Band-Aid was something else.

  Still, she worried that even after he got over his grief, there would always be one thing standing in her way. Tamara wondered if Jesse would ever be able to get past the image of her doing Diana’s autopsy. She had tried to recuse herself from it, begged Jesse to let her find someone else for the job, but he was adamant that Tamara should do it.

  “She’s a person to you, not just another body,” he’d said. “Please, I don’t want a stranger to touch her.”

  Now he brightened at the sight of Tamara, smiling a half-smile.

  “Hey, you,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “You look stunning.”

  “Hey yourself, Jesse Stone. You don’t look too shabby your own self in that tux.”

  Tamara hugged him, and when she did she sniffed for hints of alcohol. She could feel her own smile when she detected
none. She pushed back, looking into his eyes. She was tall to begin with, and in heels her eyes met his. And with her impossible mane of brown curls piled atop her head, she was taller than him.

  “What are you smiling at, Doc?”

  “You, Jesse. Your eyes.”

  “No red, huh?”

  “No red. That because you used a whole bottle of Visine or—”

  “Haven’t had a drop of alcohol. Look,” he said, showing her his still-shaky hands.

  “That’ll recede in time.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. Not because he didn’t believe her, but because he didn’t intend to give the shakes a chance to recede. As Molly had said, he owed Suit to be all in today, to be present. Come tomorrow, all bets were off. If he felt like drinking, he would. And if he chose to, it would be a small gathering: Johnnie Walker, himself, and his poster of Ozzie Smith. What he enjoyed about Johnnie and Ozzie was that they didn’t do any talking, though Jesse did sometimes feel judged by Ozzie’s silence.

  “You better get inside,” he said. “Have you seen the bride?”

  “Elena looks gorgeous, but you shouldn’t worry about her. You better go find Suit. Last time I saw him, he was pacing a rut into the floor downstairs.”

  Jesse found Suit in a bare room with an empty coatrack, pacing as Tamara had described. For one of the few times since they had met, Luther “Suitcase” Simpson looked the part of a full-grown man. Suit, a former high-school football star, was always boyish in his looks and in his demeanor. All men, Jesse supposed, seemed to lose those last vestiges of boyishness when they were about to exchange vows. Jesse laughed to himself at the sight of Suit in a tuxedo. Though it was well tailored to his big body, poor Suit looked out of place in it. Unlike Jesse, Luther Simpson was not a man born to carry off a tuxedo.