Stone's Throw

by Mike Lupica

  “Once this deal goes through, I am rich as shit all over again.”

  “But if it goes sideways,” Jesse said, “you’re screwed sideways.”

  Cole was a law student, not a forensic accountant. But the kid had done good.

  “It sounds like you did burn through an awful lot of money in an awfully short time,” Jesse said.

  “You have all the fun I’ve had,” Lawton said, “eventually you have to pay some dues.”

  “Somebody is killing people over this land,” Jesse said. “I’m going to find out who it is.”

  Lawton came back across the deck and sat down, then leaned forward in his chair.

  “For the last time,” he said, “you’ve got me all wrong. Did I get hurt with some bad investments and some truly shitty judgments? Guilty. But if you think that I’ve had people killed this close to cashing out, you’re nuts.”

  “Unless the people who got killed were in the way.”

  “They weren’t.”

  “Any chance I’m going to find a connection between you and an ex-cop named Richie Carr?” Jesse said.

  “The guy I read shot your deputy and the tree hugger?” Lawton said. “No.”

  “Blair,” Jesse said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The tree hugger. Her name is Blair. And if you call her a tree hugger again I am going to come over there and stick your elbow in your ear.”

  “Sorry,” Lawton said.

  Jesse said, “You ever hear of a guy named Darnell Woodson?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Richie Carr’s partner. If I do some digging, any chance I might find a connection between him and you?”

  “Knock yourself out, because I never heard of the guy,” he said. “But you’ll probably have as much luck with that digging as those kids did digging those graves on my land.”

  Jesse got up and walked over to Lawton, close enough that Lawton couldn’t have gotten up if he wanted to. So Jesse was looking straight down at him. A cop thing.

  “You still lying to me, Thomas?” Jesse said.

  “I’m just trying to get out of the way and let this happen now,” Lawton said.

  Jesse stood there for a moment longer. Lawton continued to stare up at him. There was just a hint of fear in his eyes, as if he was afraid Jesse might suddenly slap him.

  “Those kids couldn’t stop this deal from going through,” Lawton said. “Neil wouldn’t have been able to stop it if he lived.”

  “Maybe I still can,” Jesse said.

  “I thought you told Gary Armistead and me that wasn’t your job,” Lawton said.

  “I lied,” Jesse said.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  “Admit you were surprised when you opened the door,” Molly said to Crow.

  They were in the small kitchen of his Airbnb. He’d made coffee for them and then poured a little whiskey out of his flask and into the mugs before he brought them to the table.

  “I got that doorbell cam thing on my phone,” Crow said. “The way I set it up, the range extends to the street. So I saw you pull up. My world, you don’t much like surprises.”

  Molly saw him almost smile then. Almost, but not quite.

  “But there are exceptions to every rule,” he said.

  She sipped some coffee. The whiskey made it go down much easier.

  Moth to a flame, she thought.

  “I just wanted to thank you,” she said, “for being concerned about Blair.”

  “Not that it’s helping her very much.”

  “Still,” Molly said.

  “That the only reason you came?” Crow said.

  “Sorry,” Molly said. And shrugged. “All I got.”

  “I’m not sorry,” Crow said.

  They both knew what he meant.

  “Well, I am,” Molly said.

  She had taken a shower and fixed her hair and her face and put on one of her favorite shirts and her favorite pair of white jeans, Seven brand, a gift from Sunny Randall.

  “I never should have let it happen,” Molly said.

  “We both let it happen,” Crow said. “And we both know that, by then, there was no stopping it.”

  “There’s always a way to stop it,” Molly said. “I could have said no.”

  “No to me or no to yourself?”

  He poured a little more whiskey into his mug. He offered it to Molly. She shook her head.

  “I should have said no to it, to us, to everything,” she said. “But that’s in the past, where it belongs.” She absently rubbed her arm where she’d been shot. “I just finally came to the conclusion that I needed to stop blaming you. Being mean to you. Jesse’s right. I’m mostly angry at myself.”

  Crow stared at her. Again, he almost smiled.

  “You read Hemingway?” he said.

  Didn’t see that coming.

  Molly told him she assumed just about everybody had read at least one Hemingway book.

  “I’m not a big reader,” Crow said. “But I read just about everything he ever wrote. And one time he wrote that what’s moral is what feels good after. That’s the part most people quote. But he followed the line up by saying that what’s immoral is what makes you feel bad after.”

  “I remember both lines,” Molly said.

  “So which one is it with you?” he said. “If we’re speaking about us.”

  “There is no us,” Molly said, “other than the ‘us’ working this case together.”

  “But there was.”

  “For one night,” she said. “The one night when I cheated on a man I’ve loved pretty much my whole life. I don’t cheat on anything, Wilson. I tell the kid at the checkout counter if they somehow undercharged me at the grocery store. If the government sends too much money after we file our taxes, I calculate the difference and send it back. That’s me. Not that night.”

  She drank the last of her coffee.

  “With me, the immoral beats the moral that Hemingway wrote about all day long,” Molly said.

  Now Crow smiled.

  “We could do it again,” he said, “just to make sure.”

  “Could,” she said. “But can’t. And won’t.”

  “But not because you don’t want to.”

  “I didn’t come here to have this conversation,” Molly said to him.

  “We seem to be having it anyway,” Crow said.

  She wanted to do something, right now, to change the energy in the room. Now that they were working together, she had started to wonder all over again what it would be like to be alone with him, to be this close to him. No, she thought. That wasn’t right. She knew exactly what it would be like. Coming here had just confirmed it.

  “What I want,” she said finally, her voice sounding thick, “is to go home and check in with the hospital one last time on Blair and then get into bed.”

  “You could do that here.”

  “No,” Molly said. Now she smiled. “There. I said it.”

  “Can I at least walk you to your car?” Crow said.

  “No,” Molly said again.

  Saying it was actually easy, once you got the hang of it.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Mayor Gary Armistead announced on Friday morning that he had moved up the Board of Selectmen’s vote, which he said would now take place the following Wednesday.

  “Surprised he didn’t just go ahead and get the thing passed in the middle of the night,” Jesse said.

  “You still think that he might end up with a piece of this deal when this is all over?” Molly said.

  “I’ve had this feeling all along that our Gary already knows who’s going to walk away with the land,” Jesse said. “That the whole thing about sealed bids is bullshit. So maybe it’s not him looking for a piece of the action as much as leverage with the winner. Pol
iticians love people, especially rich people, who owe them favors.”

  She said she was going back to the hospital. She went over at least once a day. This was the best time for her to do it. A few minutes later Suitcase Simpson came in with Neil’s tox screen, the one Dev Chadha had sent over. The one that said oxycodone had been in Neil’s system when he died.

  Jesse called Dev.

  “Pain pills?” he said. “Really?”

  “Or he ingested it without knowing because somebody wanted to knock him out,” Dev said. “Oxy is a pretty potent knockout drug if somebody wants to use it that way.”

  “He had enough of it in him to knock him out?” Jesse asked.

  “Hell, yes,” Dev said.

  “Did Neil have a prescription for the stuff?”

  “Gene Bednarik was Neil’s doctor,” Dev said. “He’s a friend. I called him when I got the results back and asked if Neil was in some kind of pain that might have required oxy. He said not once in the twenty years he’d been treating him.” Dev paused. “And by the way, Chief? Neil also had some wine in his system, too. Even if he had popped one of those pills, he couldn’t have been enough of a dumbass to wash it down with alcohol.”

  “So he could have been unconscious when he died,” Jesse said.

  “It’s the way I’d bet,” he said.

  There was a silence then, until Dev said, “Why did somebody want it to look like a suicide with Neil?”

  “Maybe to throw me off and buy some time,” Jesse said. “Like one of those misdirection plays they talk about in football. Keep me off balance. Or looking over there, when I needed to be looking somewhere else. Basically keep me from getting up into their shit for as long as possible, at least until the deal went down.”

  He ended the call. Sat with Dev’s paperwork on the desk in front of him.

  Richie Carr was an ex-cop. Could he have tried to stage a suicide, and put his hands on oxy, and beaten Ben Gage before he shot him? No reason why he couldn’t have done all of those things. If it was Carr, he’d done a pretty good job making it look as if Neil had shot himself. Just not good enough.

  He’s not as good a cop as I am.

  Sunny sometimes talked about the “MacGuffin” when she was working a case of her own. She said it was the thing in Hitchcock movies that drove the story. An object sometimes. An event. Even a piece of paper. Something that motivated the characters, and kept raising the stakes.

  What was it here?

  Suit came back into Jesse’s office just as Jesse was about to head over to Daisy Dyke’s and pick up sandwiches for him and Suit and Molly, since it was his turn.

  “I found kind of an interesting phone call Neil made on his landline,” Suit said. “The day he died.”

  “I thought we couldn’t get the records on the landline, either,” Jesse said, “thanks to our hardo district attorney.”

  Suit smiled.

  “We couldn’t,” he said. “But here’s the thing: I went over to talk to Neil’s old assistant. Lauren Potter? I went out with her in high school.”

  “Of course you did,” Jesse said.

  “Anyway, Lauren went to the ladies’ room while I was there,” Suit said. “And I looked on her desk and happened to see mail addressed to Neil, from last month. His phone bill was in the stack.”

  “And you took it.”

  “Without hesitation,” Suit said. “I think he must have used his cell phone more. Because there weren’t all that many outgoing calls from his desk phone over the past month.”

  “Neil never treated any kind of phone as a pacifier,” Jesse said. “He liked to conduct business face-to-face, as often as he could.”

  “On his last day,” Suit continued, “he made one call to the Gull. Another was to his wife, or ex-wife, or whatever we’re calling her.”

  “That lines up,” Jesse said. “She told me he asked her out to dinner. Told me how badly she felt that she turned him down.”

  “But it turns out there was one call that wasn’t local,” Suit said. “That was the interesting one.”

  “And you checked out the number,” Jesse said.

  “I did.”

  Then Suit told him who the recipient was.

  “No shit,” Jesse said.

  “None,” Suit said.

  Jesse was already getting the keys to the Explorer out of the top drawer of his desk.

  “You know what a MacGuffin is?” Jesse asked him.

  “Only if it’s like a McMuffin,” Suit said.

  By then Jesse was already out the door, calling Crow on his way to the parking lot, asking if he wanted to make a quick road trip, that his heritage might turn out to be useful for once.

  FIFTY-NINE

  The offices of the Peccontac Tribal Nation, next door to its museum, were in Clifton, Mass, a little under an hour from Paradise. Jesse had called the number Suit had given him, gotten no answer, and decided to drive over with Crow from Paradise anyway.

  The tribal leader, Terry Harvey, was in his own office when he got there, looking as if he’d just moved in, boxes stacked against the walls. He explained that the building they were in, home to the sovereign government of the Peccontac people and its various branches and programs, had undergone a massive and long-overdue renovation, and that he’d gone on vacation to get away for a few weeks while the job was finally completed.

  When he’d introduced himself and given his title, Harvey had smiled at Jesse’s obvious surprise. He was in his mid-thirties, Jesse guessed, maybe younger, and looked more like a preppie than someone with his title and responsibilities.

  “You were perhaps expecting a headdress and war paint?” Harvey said.

  “I hope I’m more evolved than that with cultural assessments,” Jesse said.

  “I’m trying to bring him along,” Crow said. “Slow process.”

  Harvey explained that he’d attended Harvard and Harvard Law, joining the biggest law firm in Boston after graduating from the law school.

  “Cone, Oakes,” Harvey said. “You’ve heard of it?”

  Jesse said that, as a matter-of-fact, he had.

  “They came at me pretty hard. I was Harvard, I was Native American, I checked a lot of boxes for them.”

  “You know Rita Fiore?” Jesse said.

  “Doesn’t every lawyer in town know her?” Harvey said. “I actually worked on a couple cases for her.”

  Terry Harvey told them he’d finally decided he wanted to do more with his life than practice law after his father, the tribal leader before him, had died. He came home to Clifton and made it his mission to give Peccontac Nation an even greater sense of community and pride and shared history. Their museum, he said, fully funded by their government, was one of the best of its kind for any tribe in North America, and his personal pride and joy.

  He wore a button-down shirt, a sleeveless sweater vest, khaki pants. Jesse thought he actually looked more like the leader of Vineyard Vines.

  Harvey nodded at Crow.

  “Who are your people?” he said.

  “Apache,” Crow said.

  “Which tribe?”

  “Kiowa,” Crow said.

  Jesse knew Crow was bluffing. The one time Jesse had pressed him on the tribe of his ancestors, Crow had said Jicarilla. Molly said he’d told her Mescalero. Neither one of them had been sure he was even Apache.

  “We don’t run into a lot of Apaches in this part of the country,” Harvey said.

  “You should be fine with him if you don’t make any sudden moves,” Jesse said.

  “I’ve actually been expecting someone from your town to reach back out to me,” he said.

  “Back out?” Jesse said.

  “I was just clearing my messages,” he said. He grinned rather sheepishly. “My wife made me promise no business while we were away. The very last message bef
ore the tape cut off turned out to be from your mayor.”

  “You know he’s since died,” Jesse said.

  “I read that,” Harvey said. “I actually tried to call up his replacement before you showed up, but forgot it was Saturday.”

  Jesse asked if he could hear the message. Harvey reached over to his phone setup and pushed PLAY.

  “Mr. Harvey,” he said, “this is Mayor O’Hara calling from Paradise. In a bit of a rush right now, and you’re probably gone for the day. But I would like to take a ride over tomorrow and ask you some questions about tribal history, and some property up here. There may be some question . . .” That was where the message ended.

  “This is about the land being sold in Paradise, is it not?” Harvey said. “Do you think Mr. O’Hara was suggesting the land might belong to us?”

  Jesse sat there, processing the possibilities.

  “My people have an expression that might cover this,” he said. “Fuckin’ ay.”

  There was a huge map on the wall behind him.

  “The Peccontac people have literally been around Massachusetts for thousands of years,” Terry Harvey continued. “More in the Marshport and Oxbow area, and up the coast north of Paradise, or so I thought.” He hooked a thumb at the map behind him. “New maps, even from the olden days, are constantly turning up. We were mostly comprised of agrarian and fishing communities, all the way into the 1800s. And spoiler alert? We have always been of the belief that the government stole land from us and began selling it to the white founders of those towns. We’ve just never had enough proof on that particular area. Some of our tribal leaders tried to challenge a big chunk of property in Oxbow after the First World War. Where that state park is now.”

  Near where Molly had found Blair Richmond.

  “But the case went nowhere.” Harvey continued. “Again, because of lack of proof. I frankly wasn’t following what was going on in Paradise all that closely, because I’ve never seen any credible documentation about the land there. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong to us.”

  He sighed.

  “This goes on all the time, of course, all around the country,” he said. “Most of the times, when our side has won, it turns out that there was no federal sign-off on land like this. And when tribes have been able to prove it, they’ve been able to prove that nobody can sell it, because it still belongs to this tribe or that. At the very least, if there is authentic proof, it becomes a fate worse than death for the person trying to sell the land and the one trying to buy it, because of a thing called ‘clouded title.’ ”