“Is there a big kick?”
“No.”
Jennifer ate some more sandwich and wiped her mouth.
“If I’d known I was going to eat with someone I wouldn’t have ordered this sandwich,” she said.
Jesse nodded.
“You don’t say much, do you?”
“No,” Jesse said. “I don’t.”
“Why is that, most guys I know around here talk a mile a minute.”
“That’s one reason,” Jesse said.
Jennifer laughed.
“Any other reasons?”
“I can’t ever remember,” Jesse said, “getting in trouble by keeping my mouth shut.”
“So what kind of cop are you? You a detective?”
“Yes.”
“LAPD?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you, ah, stationed? Are cops stationed?”
“I am a homicide detective. I work out of police headquarters downtown.”
“Homicide.”
“Yes.”
Jennifer was silent for a moment thinking about the gap between the world she lived in and the one he worked in.
“Is it like, what? Hill Street Blues?” she said.
“More like Barney Miller,” he said.
It was his standard answer, but it was no truer than any other, just self-effacing, which was why he used it. Being a homicide cop wasn’t like anything on television, but there wasn’t much point in trying to explain that to someone who could never know.
“You an actress?” he said.
“Yes. How did you know?”
It was another thing he always said. He had a good chance to be right in Los Angeles, and even if he were wrong, the girl was flattered.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “And you have a sort of star quality.”
“Wow, you know the right things to say, don’t you.”
“Just telling the truth,” Jesse said.
“Right now I’m working at the reception desk at CAA,” Jennifer said. “But one of the agents has noticed me and says he’s going to get me some auditions during pilot season.”
“You done any work I might have seen?”
“Mostly nonspeaking parts, crowd scenes, things like that. I’m in a play three nights a week just down the street here. It’s a modern version of a Greek tragedy called The Parcae. I play Clotho.”
“Sounds really interesting,” Jesse said. “I’d like to come see it.”
“I can leave a ticket for you at the box office. All you have to do is let me know the night.”
“How about tonight?” Jesse said.
“Sure.”
“Maybe have a bite afterward?”
“That would be very nice,” she said.
“Good,” Jesse said. “I’ll meet you afterward in the lobby.”
She smiled and stood and disposed of her tray.
“If you don’t like the play, don’t arrest me,” she said.
“I’ll like the play,” Jesse said.
He watched her as she walked away. He knew he’d hate the play, but it was part of what he was willing to pay in order to see that body without the Lycra. . . . At Santa Rosa he crossed the Pecos. It was a pretty ordinary-looking little river to be so famous. What the hell made it so famous? Was it Judge Roy Bean? The law west of the Pecos? Small things pleased him as he drove. He liked seeing the towns that had once marked Route 66: Gallup, New Mexico, Flagstaff, Arizona, Winona. He liked seeing the occasional wind-driven tumbleweed that rolled across the highway. He liked seeing road signs for Indian reservations and places like Fort Defiance. Past Santa Rosa he pulled off of the interstate to get gas and a ham-and-cheese sandwich at a gas station/restaurant in the middle of the New Mexico wilderness. It was the only building in sight with views in all directions to the empty horizon. He pumped his own gas, and a skinny girl with pale skin and a tooth missing took his money and sold him a sandwich. He sat in the car and ate the sandwich and drank a Coke and thought about how alone the skinny girl was and wondered about what she did when she wasn’t working the gas station and selling the pre-wrapped sandwiches. Probably went someplace and watched television off a dish. The sense of her aloneness made him feel a little panicky, and he put the car in gear and drove away, finishing his sandwich on the move. As he drove he ran the ball of his thumb over his wedding ring, in a habitual gesture. But of course there was no wedding ring, only the small pale indentation on his third finger where the ring had been. He glanced at the indentation for a moment and brought his eyes back to the road. The sun was behind him now, the car chasing its own elongated shadow east. He wanted to make Tucumcari by dark. . . . The play had been incomprehensible, he remembered. A lot of white makeup and black lipstick and shrieking. He took her up to a place on Gower called Pinot Hollywood that was open late and featured a martini bar. They drank martinis and ate calamari and talked. Or she talked. She chattered easily and without apparent pretense. He listened comfortably, glad not to talk too much, pleased when she asked him a question that he could answer easily, aware that though she talked a lot she was quite adroit at talking about him. After the bar closed he drove her to West Hollywood where she had an apartment on Cynthia Street above Santa Monica Boulevard. It was 2:30 in the morning and the street was still. At the door she asked if he’d like to come in. He said he would. The apartment was living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. It had been built into one corner of the building so that all the rooms were angular and odd shaped. The living room overlooked the street. The bedroom allowed a glimpse of the pool.
“Would you like a drink, Jesse?”
“Sure,” he said.
She was wearing a little black dress with spaghetti straps and backless high-heeled shoes. She put her hands on her hips and smiled at him. Maybe a little theatrical, but she was an actress.
“Let’s have it afterward,” she said.
Her bedroom was neat. The bed freshly made. She had probably planned, this afternoon, to ask him in. He watched her undress with the same feeling he used to have when, as a small boy, he unwrapped a present. She folded her dress neatly over the back of a chair and lined her shoes carefully together under it. She squirmed out of her underpants and dropped them into the clothes hamper in her closet. She wiped her lipstick off carefully and dropped the tissue in the wastebasket. They made love on top of the bedspread, and lay together afterward in the dim bedroom listening to the comforting white noise of the air conditioning.
“You’re very fierce, Jesse.”
“I don’t mean to be,” he said.
“No, it’s fine. It’s exciting in fact. But you seem so, um, so still, on the outside and then, you know, wow.”
“You’re pretty exciting,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t like to talk about his emotions.
“I try to be,” she said.
They lay quietly on their backs. His arm under her neck. Her head on his right shoulder.
“I wouldn’t want to make you mad,” Jennifer said.
“You won’t.”
They lay quietly for a while longer, then she got up and put on a longish tee shirt and made them a drink. He felt like a fool sitting naked, but he didn’t want to be so formal as to get fully dressed. He settled for putting his pants on, and leaving his gun holstered on top of her dresser. They sat on stools at the tiny counter that separated her kitchen from her living room, and sipped white wine.
“How’d you get to be a cop, Jesse?”
“I was going to be a baseball player,” Jesse said. “Shortstop. Dodgers drafted me out of high school, sent me to Pueblo. I was doing okay and then one night a guy took me out on a double play at second base. I landed funny, tore up my shoulder, ended the career.”
“Oh, how awful,” she s
aid. “Does it bother you still?”
“Not if I don’t have to throw a baseball.”
“Couldn’t you have played where it didn’t matter?”
“No. I hit okay for a shortstop, but I was going to make it on my glove.”
“Glove?”
“I was a much better fielder,” Jesse said, “than I was a hitter.”
“And you couldn’t just field?”
“No.”
“How old were you?”
“Nineteen,” Jesse said. “I came home, worked construction for six months, joined the Marines, got out, took the exam for fire department, police, and DWP. Cops came through first.”
“Do you miss baseball?”
“Every day,” Jesse said.
“Isn’t it kind of depressing being a policeman?” she said. “You know, seeing all that awfulness.”
Again he was aware of how skillfully she turned the conversation to him. He enjoyed her interest, but more than that he admired her skill.
“I like police work,” he said. “You’re with a bunch of guys, but the work is mostly one on one. Sometimes you get to help people.”
“And the awful things?”
“There’s not as much as you think,” he said.
“But there is some,” she said.
“Sure.”
“What about that.”
“That’s just how it is,” Jesse said.
“That’s all?”
“What else,” Jesse said. “Life’s hard sometimes.”
“So you don’t let it bother you.”
“I try not to,” Jesse said.
Chapter 6
Jo Jo Genest first got into the money business through a guy named Fusco that he met at the gym in Somerville.
“Guy I know,” Fusco said, “is looking to smurf some cash.”
Jo Jo was sitting spread legged on the floor doing lat pull-backs.
“Whaddya mean smurf?” he said.
“You know, go around to banks,” Fusco said. “Deposit cash for him so he can wire transfer it later.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why the whole thing,” Jo Jo said.
His movements as he pulled the cables and raised the weight were smooth and appeared effortless. His muscles moved like huge serpents under his pale skin.
“Man, where you been,” Fusco said.
“I been around,” Jo Jo said. “Maybe I’m being smart. Tell me the deal.”
Fusco sat on a weight bench with a towel over his thighs. His stomach pushed against his tank top. His thin legs were very white and hairy in blue sport shorts.
“Guy I know makes a lotta money in ways that maybe he shouldn’t, you unnerstand? Lotta money. He needs to wash it, you unnerstand, launder it, so the government can’t find it and if they do, they can’t trace it to him.”
Jo Jo let the cable go slack on the lat pull machine and mopped his face with a hand towel, waiting for the lactic acid to drain from his muscles.
“So he needs to get the dough into banks so that he can transfer it around, maybe overseas.”
“Like to a numbered Swiss bank account,” Jo Jo said.
“Sure,” Fusco said, “like that. Anyway what you do is go around with a sack full of cash and buy cashier’s checks or money orders for amounts small enough so they don’t get reported.”
“What happens then?”
“You give them to me.”
“What do you do with them?”
“None of your business.”
“Aw, Fusco, come off it. You know I’m all right or you wouldn’t have told me this much. What happens to the checks and money orders, they get sent to a Swiss bank?”
Fusco grinned. “You really like them Switzers, don’t you,” he said. “Usually it’s the branch of some South American bank in Florida.”
“So don’t they get reported?”
“No. It’s not a cash deal. CTRs are required only for cash.”
“CTR?”
Jo Jo had begun a second set, holding his upper body still, isolating the muscles. His voice showed no sign of strain.
“Cash Transaction Report.”
“So you change the cash into something else and you don’t have to report it,” Jo Jo said.
“Bada bing,” Fusco said, shooting at Jo Jo with his forefinger. “You want some?”
“How much?”
“Half a percent,” Fusco said. “Everything you smurf. Plus expenses.”
Jo Jo pulled the bar toward him and moved a huge stack of iron plates up by means of a cable-and-pulley arrangement. He held the bar tight against his stomach, then very slowly let it down. Fusco watched him with admiration.
“You gotta focus on the muscle,” Jo Jo said. “You got to be thinking about it when you work it. On this one it’s the lats, nothing else, just think about the lats, Fusco.”
“Half a percent,” Fusco said again. “You interested?”
“Sure,” Jo Jo said.
Chapter 7
In Tucumcari Jesse stopped at a Holiday Inn just off the interstate on old Route 66. There was a gas station across the street, and a field where horses and one mule grazed, and nothing else. He had a club sandwich in the motel restaurant and got some ice and went to his room where he sat with the door open and sipped scotch and watched the few people still using the pool in the courtyard. There was a couple with two children using the pool. The children were unpleasant—unkind to each other, demanding of their parents. The father looked awkward in his ill-fitting bathing suit, white-bodied, hairy, and soft. The mother was bottom-heavy and knew it, wearing a bathing suit with a tiny skirt in a useless attempt to conceal her disproportion. Her parents were with them. The grandmother was a thin old woman in matching beige pants and blouse. Her hair was evenly gray and curled tightly to her head. Whenever the mother spoke sharply to one of her children, the grandmother would intervene. The grandfather looked like he might once have done heavy labor. His forearms were still thick and there was a hint of muscle pack in his sloped shoulders. But his stomach was big and his white legs in their pink polyester shorts were blue-veined and rickety-looking. The grandfather had a grim look, as if the family trip had not been his idea. Jesse imagined the man’s dismay at his family. Still it was family, three generations of it. Jesse felt remote as he sat, as if he were viewing himself from far away, a tiny figure, diminished by distance, dwindling as he sat. . . . In the morning he was on the interstate before seven and crossed into the Texas panhandle before eight. There were signs for Big John’s Steak House in Amarillo. A seventy-two-ounce steak. Eat it in an hour and get it free. By ten he was in Amarillo. Big John was not alone. The highway was suddenly beset by motels and fast food, car dealers and steak houses and gas stations. Then he was out of Amarillo and back onto the plains. The Big John’s signs faced the other way now, luring the westbound travelers. On each side of the highway the open range reappeared, dotted occasionally with cattle grazing on the unappetizing brown grass. Once in a while there would be a gate, usually made of iron piping, with a sign indicating a cattle baronage. But he never saw any houses, or any cowboys, mostly just brown grassland beyond the wire fencing that lined the highway, and now and then a water cistern. The grass did not look nourishing. He had the cruise control on seventy, but the distances were so great and the sky so high and the horizon so distant that the car seemed in the ulteriority of his imagination a beetle scuttling without measurable progress beneath a limitless sky across an uncomprehending plain. . . . They’d been married a month when they had dinner at a table in the rear at Spago with Elliott Krueger. He had been across the street from Spago once, at 2:35 in the morning, on the crime-scene team, when a Chicano coke dealer named Street Duck had been killed by somebody
who shot him five times in the stomach at close range with a nine-millimeter pistol. No one had seen the shooting. Elliott was about fifty. His thick black hair was touched with gray, his short careful beard was touched with more. He was medium height, medium build. He didn’t look like he exercised. He had on an unconstructed linen jacket with the sleeves pushed up over his forearms. He wore a Rolex watch. It had been Jesse’s experience that people who really had a lot of money didn’t waste it on Rolex watches. In the bad neighborhoods, on the other hand, a Rolex watch on a kid meant he was so tough that no one dared to take it away from him. Elliott had a girlfriend with him. Her name was Taffy. She seemed about sixteen, but she might have been twenty. Wearing a flowered dress with a very short ruffled skirt, she sat silently beside Elliott like an obedient spaniel waiting for a command.
“It’s my business to know this sort of thing,” Elliott said to Jesse. “And your wife here has the goods.”
Jesse nodded.
“Oh, Elliott,” Jennifer said. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”
“My right hand to God,” Elliott said, and put his right hand in the air. “I see twenty girls a day. All of them are good-looking. Everybody out here is good-looking, you know? But none of them come alive through the lens like you do, Jennifer.”
Jesse sipped the tall scotch and soda he’d ordered.
“What are you working on now, Elliott?” Jennifer said.
“Got a thing in development at Universal,” Elliott said. “Absolutely amazing story about a plastic surgeon, got an Oedipal deal going with his mother. Women come to him for a makeover and he does a surgical reconstruction so that they look like his mother, then he kills them. Great vehicle for Tommy Cruise.”
“I love the concept,” Jennifer said. “Do you love it, Jesse?”
“Love it,” Jesse said. Tommy Cruise.
“Maybe I can bring you aboard, Jesse, you know, you being a cop and all, could use a little professional consult on this. You ever dealt with psychopathic killers?”
“Not my job to decide if they’re psychopaths,” Jesse said.
Robert B Parker: The Jesse Stone Novels 1-5 Page 3
