Robert B. Parker's the Hangman's Sonnet

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  He tried unsuccessfully to smile. “As I recall, you were doing pretty well yourself.”

  “Stupid me, I was trying to slow you down and now I’m suffering for it. Now please get showered and dressed.”

  “Why?”

  “When our phones ring at the same time, what does it usually mean?”

  “Trouble.”

  “Give the police chief a cigar.”

  “Details?”

  “Molly said she thinks it’s a homicide. All I’ve got is an address.”

  He didn’t exactly spring to his feet.

  “You need help, Jesse?”

  He laughed. It cost him to laugh. He winced in pain.

  “I’m not going to lecture you, because I’m no one to talk and because I don’t know what it feels like to lose someone that close. It’s your life to piss away if that’s what you want, but I think you should give it a rest for a few days. End of speech. I’m going to put up that coffee now.”

  Jesse popped the two tablets into his mouth, drank the water, and headed slowly up the stairs. As he did, he thought about what Tamara had said to him. Problem was he felt so vacant inside that he didn’t know what to fill the emptiness with. At least he understood what was at stake, empty or not. He’d landed in Paradise after screwing up in L.A., but where does a man land after he screws up in Paradise?

  9

  Jesse climbed into his Explorer, which was still parked in the Gray Gull’s lot, and waited for Tamara to drive away before checking himself out in his visor mirror. He supposed he looked about as good as anyone who felt like he did was going to look. He remembered what Tamara had said to him yesterday about his eyes. Only today it really was the Visine that had cleared the red out. He’d given his face a quick shave after his shower and splashed on some extra Paco Rabanne in the hope it might cover the stink of scotch in his sweat or at least distract people who got close to him. The coffee and Fiorinal had helped more than he expected they would, but not so much that he felt like doing anything more than sleeping for a week. Still he wasn’t going to get any sleep, not for a while, anyway. He started up the SUV and turned out of the lot.

  The address was on Berkshire Street in the oldest part of Paradise, where the wealthier folks in town had lived before moving their fortunes and their families up to the big manor houses on the Bluffs. The homes in this part of town weren’t very big by today’s standards, certainly not as grand as the Victorian behemoths on the Bluffs, but many of them had water views and were within walking distance of the quaint small shops in town. You were also close enough to the bridge to Stiles Island that you could jog over and back, if running was your thing. Lately, Bostonians and New Yorkers armed with hedge-fund money and fantasies of a more rustic life had begun buying up the houses along Berkshire, Marblehead, Salem, and Salter Streets, a few of them converting the houses into B&Bs.

  Twenty-one Berkshire faced Pilgrim Cove and had so far escaped the clutches of city transplants but wouldn’t much longer, given the FOR SALE sign out front. Nor had it escaped the ravages of time and the weather. The old two-story’s gray clapboards were in poor shape, chipped and flaking, some almost completely bare of paint and exposed to the elements. The steps up to the front door sagged in the middle. The windows were all single-pane affairs that probably rattled like mad in anything more than a stiff breeze.

  Jesse wasn’t thinking about stiff breezes or real estate values when he turned off Marblehead onto Berkshire. Although he didn’t yet know who the victim was or the nature of the homicide, he was already at work on the case, running through scenarios, asking himself questions. Which other houses on the street had the best views of 21? If there was gunfire, would anyone else on the street have heard it? If the crime occurred during daylight, how might the killer or killers have exited the house without being seen? If the killer or killers had a vehicle, in which direction would they have fled? Like that. But when he approached the house, he stopped all the speculation and prepared himself to deal with what the crime scene presented. Experience had taught him that making prejudgments before getting to the scene could blind you to the evidence, and he couldn’t afford any more distractions than he was already dealing with.

  There were three Paradise PD cruisers parked out front: Molly’s, because she was the responding officer; Peter Perkins’s, because he was the only cop on the Paradise PD with forensics training; and Alisha’s, because she was there to handle whatever task Molly gave her. Tamara’s Wrangler Sahara was out front, as well as the medical examiner’s vehicle, waiting for the body. What confused Jesse was the fire department ambulance pulling away from the address, siren blaring. There wasn’t usually much need for an ambulance at a homicide. Because it was Sunday morning and people were either still at church or at brunch after church, there wasn’t much of a crowd. The siren would change that. Alisha, the newest addition to the force, was walking the tape and handling the few onlookers. She lifted the tape as Jesse approached.

  “Morning, Jesse.”

  “What’s the story with the ambulance?”

  “A MassExpress delivery guy was found tied up and semiconscious in the basement. That’s why we got the call. He never showed back at his depot last night. Staties found his truck abandoned in Salem.”

  Jesse nodded. “They retraced his route to see what packages got delivered, which ones didn’t, and tracked him back here. I’ll have to talk to him. What about the rest of it?”

  “Weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Old woman in her bed, but she didn’t die there. The house is a mess, but not much if anything seems to be missing. Molly and Peter are inside. They’ll fill you in.”

  Jesse was proud of Alisha, only the second woman to join the Paradise PD. So far, so good. The mayor and the Board of Selectmen had been less than thrilled at her hire, preferring someone with experience who was relocating or a retired big-city cop who brought his pension and benefits with him. Jesse could see their point of view, except he knew their real objection was to something they would never admit. Alisha was African American, and Paradise was overwhelmingly white. He didn’t think much of Mayor Walker and her minions, but he didn’t think they were racists. They were small-town politicos reflexively averse to anything that might upset their constituents. In the end, the mayor backed him up. Good thing Jesse didn’t have to worry about pleasing voters.

  There was something else he liked about Alisha. She never asked him about his drinking or made a fuss about Diana’s death. She seemed to intuit that those were subjects Jesse would just as soon not discuss, especially with a rookie.

  “All right, I’m going in. There’s bound to be more of a crowd as folks get back from church and after Robbie’s guy used his siren. You need help, call Gabe. You don’t have to clear it with me.”

  “Watch your step when you go in. There’s a blood trail in the vestibule. I’ll be okay out here.”

  He was sure she would be. He was far less sure about himself.

  10

  When he got to the front door, he could feel the adrenaline kicking in. Even though he would pay a big price for it later, he was glad for the rush. It helped with the hangover. The only other thing that got his juices flowing like this was playing baseball on a big stage, and that part of his life had ended many years ago on a crappy infield in Pueblo, Colorado. Still, as much as he was energized, he never lost sight of the fact that someone had to die, often violently, for him to get this rush. He would have gladly traded in this feeling for there to never be another homicide within the confines of Paradise, but the universe didn’t work that way. There was no one out there to bargain with, except maybe the devil. And Jesse knew how those deals usually turned out.

  The front door was ajar and Jesse was careful not to use his hand to push it open or to grab the knob, though it looked like it had already been dusted. He nudged it open with his elbow and saw Molly standing in th
e hallway, scribbling notes on the pad she carried with her. He also saw the trail of dried blood Alisha had warned him about leading from the vestibule, down the hallway, and around the corner to where, he guessed, the stairs to the basement were located. There were smudged footprints and two different shoeprints in the blood, partials, but enough to make out size and manufacturer. Jesse didn’t assume that the two shoeprints were from two suspects. For all he knew, one of the prints came from the MassExpress guy. It would be foolish to draw any conclusions.

  “What do we have?” Jesse asked, getting Molly’s attention.

  “Peter’s already taken samples, photos, and done the preliminaries upstairs and on this level. He’s in the basement now, but Lundquist and the state forensics team will be here soon enough.”

  Jesse felt the heat rising under his skin. It was his call whether or not to bring in the staties. Ever since Healy had retired, he was less apt to rush to ask for help from the state police. He liked Lundquist, Healy’s acting replacement, well enough. Healy had given Lundquist his full backing. It was just that Jesse was slow to give his trust. He’d found that trust given slowly was like a smart investment. It paid dividends over a long period and when it went wrong, the damages were minimized.

  “Who told you to call in the staties?”

  “C’mon, Jesse,” she said. “Do you have any idea of how out of it you were yesterday after Suit and Elena left the reception? I’m surprised you can even stand up. And for goodness’ sakes, we tried calling you for a long time there. What would you have done? I was covering for you in case the mayor got wind of it. This way I could tell her you instructed me to get the state cops right on it.”

  He knew she was right, that he owed her his thanks, not his anger, which should have been reserved for himself. Molly had covered for him over the years on the few occasions he had lost control of his drinking. Beyond that, she had made the right call. If the rest of the crime scene looked anything like the hallway, Peter Perkins would be overwhelmed.

  “Where’s the body?”

  “Upstairs.” Molly pointed with her pen. “The ME is still up there with her.”

  “ID?”

  “Maude Cain, ninety-one. She’s lived here her whole life.”

  Jesse put up his palm. “Wait. Cain . . . Cain. Cain as in Zachariah Cain?”

  “That’s right. Cain as in the man the library is named for. They go back to before Paradise was Paradise.”

  Jesse knew some of the local history, but not as much as lifetime residents like Molly. Sometimes, as he had learned when the bodies of Ginny Connolly and Mary Kate O’Hara were found in a collapsed building on Trench Alley, small towns hid their pasts from outsiders. That’s why Molly, besides being the best cop he had, was invaluable.

  “Why didn’t the Cains build up on the Bluffs like the Salters and Rutherfords?”

  “They gave a lot of their fortune away to do good works. Their money was pretty much gone by the time Maude inherited this place from her mother.”

  “I see she was selling the house.”

  “She was old. I don’t think she could handle the upkeep anymore.”

  “Okay, I’m going up. And, Molly . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  As he walked to the staircase, he noticed the broken shards of porcelain, a few caked with dried blood, and the general destruction of the house. It didn’t take a seasoned homicide detective to figure out that whoever killed Maude Cain had come looking for something. The question was what had they come looking for? And had it been found?

  11

  King got back to the motel room with a sack full of fast-food cheeseburgers, a liter bottle of Coke, a six-pack of Coors, and the local papers. King winced at the pine disinfectant smell and the artificial floral stench of the cheap soap that hit him in the face when he stepped into the room. He kicked the door shut behind him and shook his head at the look of the place. All done up in deep browns and mustard gold, the place hadn’t seen new furnishings since the Carter administration, but they had to wait it out here only another day. Hump, his big body slouched across the ratty quilt, swung his legs off the bed at the sight of his pal. He muted the TV, the black preacher he’d been watching now silently waving his Bible around above his head like a machete.

  “Here.”

  King flung the bag of burgers on the bed and put the bottle of Coke on top of the fiberboard-and-veneer nightstand. He popped open a Coors and took the papers over to what passed for a desk.

  “This is Coke, King,” Hump said.

  “Yeah, and so what?”

  “I wanted Pepsi. Didn’t they have no Pepsi? Coke is too sweet.”

  “Hump, for chrissakes! You know how long it took me to find a fucking payphone. When I got to the store, I grabbed the first cola I found. Deal with it.”

  “Okay,” he said, unable to hide his disappointment.

  He felt a little better after inhaling two of the four cheeseburgers in the bag.

  “King, there’s two burgers left. You want—”

  “Knock yourself out. I ate.”

  Hump liked that. He could’ve eaten a half-dozen more, but four was good for now. He took a big pull on the Coke and made a face.

  “Why they make this stuff so sweet, King? Why do you think?”

  “Like I give a shit.”

  “They find the old lady yet? What’s the papers say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “They ain’t found her yet? Maybe it’ll be a few days and we can get far away.”

  “Nah, Hump, they’ll find her today, most likely. Even though we left the truck in Salem, the delivery company will just follow the route back to the old lady’s house. Anyways, we aren’t goin’ anyplace. I set a meet for tomorrow.”

  “But we didn’t find nothing in the house and we ripped the place all apart. Man, the walls in them old houses is tough to deal with. You can just punch through plasterboard, but those plaster-and-lath walls knocked the crap outta me.”

  “The man don’t know we didn’t find anything, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then we’re good. We’ll get the money outta him.”

  “How we gonna do that, King?”

  “You let me worry about that, okay?”

  “I always do. So when they find the old woman, what are they gonna do to us?”

  King snorted. “They gotta catch us first.”

  “I mean, it’s not like we really killed her or nothin’. She just kinda died.”

  “I’m not a lawyer, Hump, but I don’t think the cops’ll see it like that.”

  Hump got agitated, jumping off the bed. “But we didn’t try to kill her. And if she woulda just kept her yap shut, we wouldn’ta had to put nothin’ in her mouth.”

  “Who you trying to convince?”

  Hump didn’t like that, balling his huge hands into fists so tight the blood seemed to drain out of them. The veins in his thick neck popped out.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Relax, pal. Go back to watching your preacher and finish your food,” King said, finishing off his beer and popping open a second one. “When I’m done reading the papers, I’m going over to the office and see if they have a business center with a computer. This way I can find out up-to-the-minute stuff about if they found the body and what’s goin’ on.”

  Hump calmed almost as quickly as he had gotten riled. He unmuted the TV, opened up the wrapper on his third cheeseburger, and took a bite.

  “Let us, brothers and sisters, turn to Leviticus 24:17–21 for an answer to the question of vengeance and repayment for our most egregious of earthly sins. ‘If a man takes the life of any human being, he shall surely be put to death.’ Notice there’s no equivocation. No if, ands, or buts. No excuses. No guilty with an explanation. Now, what of a man at war as
opposed to the greedy man who murders in—”

  Hump couldn’t shut off the TV fast enough. His bite of cheeseburger went down hard. He took a big swallow of Coke. He stood up from the bed, looked in the mirror, and quickly headed for the door.

  King was confused. “What’s up? I thought you liked the burgers.”

  “I lost my appetite. I’m goin’ for a walk. I can’t breathe in here no more.”

  King rubbed the stubble on his cheeks as he considered the danger of Hump leaving the room. He decided not to try to stop him. He knew he couldn’t have stopped him anyhow. Hump wasn’t an easy man to stop once he got an idea in his head. Ideas weren’t his strong suit, but when he got them, he hung on to them.

  “Stay close. It’s gonna take a few days to play our hand. We don’t wanna attract attention.”

  But Hump was already out the door, heading to the office to ask about local churches.

  12

  Tamara Elkin was leaning over the body when Jesse stepped into the bedroom. He winced at the sour background odor of vomit. He’d been to countless crime scenes and witnessed bodies in all manner of decay, but rarely had he been as hungover as he was just then. Tamara turned to him, saw the look on his face, and smiled.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “I can’t say much without opening her up, but she definitely didn’t die in this bed.”

  “Anything you can say other than that so we can get started? Right now, I’ll settle for an educated guess.”

  “There’s what looks like tape residue around her mouth, wrists, and ankles. There are some fibers stuck to the adhesive on the dermas proximate to her mouth, so if I had to venture a guess, I’d say whoever ransacked the house shoved some kind of gag in her mouth, then taped over it. She most likely vomited into the gag, but I can’t say now whether that led directly to her death. She does have a split lip, which she received premortem. See the bruising there.” Tamara pointed her gloved index finger at Maude Cain’s face.