Authors: Robert B. Parker
“You see something like that,” Simpson said, “chewed up, full of bloat, and stinking, makes you wonder about life and death, you know?”
Jesse nodded.
“I mean,” Simpson said, “it’s hard to imagine something like that going to heaven.”
“The body don’t go, anyway,” Arthur said.
“Yeah, I know.”
The three men didn’t say anything.
“You ever think about stuff like that, Jesse?” Simpson said.
Jesse nodded.
“So whaddya think?”
Jesse smiled.
“I think I don’t know,” he said.
“That’s it?” Simpson said.
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “
I don’t know
doesn’t mean there’s no afterlife. Doesn’t mean there is. Means,
I don’t know.
”
“That enough for you, Jesse?”
“Kind of has to be. Universe is too big and complicated for me to understand.”
“That’s where faith comes in,” Arthur said.
“If it can,” Jesse said.
“Can for me,” Arthur said.
Jesse nodded.
“Whatever works,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find out who our floater was.”
4
J
esse was leaning on the front desk in Paradise Police Headquarters reading the ME’s report on the floater. Molly was working the phones. It was only 8:40 in the morning and the phones were quiet.
“You think she came off one of the yachts?” Molly said.
Jesse smiled. Molly always looked too small for the gun belt. In fact there wasn’t all that much that Molly was too small for. She was dark-haired and cute, full of curiosity and absolute resolve.
“Only if they got here before Race Week,” Jesse said. “ME says she’s been in the water awhile.”
“Any signs of trauma?”
“Nope, but it’s pretty hard to tell. Crab, ah, markings indicate she was probably on the bottom, which might suggest she was weighted, and decomposition, tidal movement, whatever, pulled her loose and sent her up. Or she could just have been in shallow water.”
“Could be lobster markings,” Molly said.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Jesse said. “Next time I’m ordering dinner at the Gray Gull.”
He heard himself say Gray Gull the way locals did, as if it were one word, with the stress on
gray,
not
gull. I been here awhile,
Jesse thought.
I’m beginning to be local.
“It couldn’t be gulls?” Molly said.
“No.”
“How do they know?”
“They know,” Jesse said. “There’s evidence of blunt trauma on her body, but nothing that couldn’t have come from being rolled against rocks by the surf.”
“Oh. Well if she did come off a yacht, it’s strange no one has reported her missing.”
“No one seems to have reported her missing, yacht or no yacht,” Jesse said.
“We got five missing persons in the Northeast that could be her,” Molly said. “Except none of the dental IDs match.”
Jesse wore blue jeans and sneakers and a short-sleeved white police chief shirt, with the badge pinned to the shirt pocket. He carried the snub-nosed .38 that he’d brought with him from L.A. The issue gun, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, she knew, was in the right-hand bottom drawer of his desk. His hair was cut short. He was tanned, and, Molly always noticed this about him, while he wasn’t a particularly big man he seemed very strong, as if his center were muscular.
The phone rang and Molly took it and said, “Yes ma’am. We’ll have someone check right on it.” She wrote nothing down, and when she hung up she took no further action.
“Mrs. Billups?” Jesse said.
Molly nodded.
“Says there’s a man she doesn’t recognize walking past her house. He looks sinister.”
“How many is that so far this month?”
“Four,” Molly said.
“And this year?”
“Oh God,” Molly said, “infinity.”
“Mrs. Billups hasn’t got much else to occupy her,” Jesse said. “Who’s on patrol?”
“Suit.”
“Have him drive slowly past her house,” Jesse said.
“There’s nothing there, Jesse.”
“I know, and you know. But Mrs. Billups doesn’t know.”
“You are awful tenderhearted,” Molly said, “for a guy who banged Carl Radborn in the balls with a stick.”
“She’ll peek out the window when she sees the patrol car,” Jesse said. “Have Suit give her a little wave. Maybe a thumbs-up.”
Molly shook her head in slow disapproval, but she turned as she did so, and called Simpson on the radio.
“Go do another Mrs. Billups drive-by,” she said.
“Oh shit, Molly, that old biddy sees things every day.”
Jesse leaned into the microphone.
He said, “Serve and protect, Suit.”
There was silence for a minute, then Simpson said, “Aye, aye, skipper.”
Jesse went into the squad room in back and got two coffees and brought one in for Molly.
“If you’re missing from a town or a city, people might not notice right away,” Jesse said. “But a yacht?”
“So she’s probably not off one of the yachts.”
“Or, if she is, people don’t wish it known,” Jesse said.
“Which would mean that someone murdered her.”
“Or that someone doesn’t want anyone to know she was on the yacht.”
Molly nodded.
“Like somebody else’s wife,” she said.
“Or a hooker, or a juror in a pending civil trial, or something neither of us can think of.”
“There’s nothing neither of us can think of,” Molly said.
“Except who the floater is.”
“ME can’t give you anything?”
“Sure they can,” Jesse said.
He looked at the ME’s initial report.
“Floater was about thirty-five. Alive she was about five-seven, probably weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. Brown eyes, natural brunette. She was wearing an expensive dress and silk underwear when she died. She had been drinking. She showed traces of cocaine, and she was a smoker. Her breasts had been enhanced. She was alive when she went in the water. She was not a virgin.”
“No kidding.”
“Just running down the list, Moll,” Jesse said. “She had never had children.”
“We could start checking with plastic surgeons,” Molly said. “See if any enhancement patients are missing.”
“If it were done by a plastic surgeon,” Jesse said. “Any MD can do this kind of surgery.”
“But most intelligent people wouldn’t go to an allergist or somebody,” Molly said. “Would you?”
“For breast enhancement?” Jesse said.
“You know what I mean,” Molly said.
Another call came in. Molly answered and listened and wrote down an address.
“Okay, Mr. Bradley,” she said. “I’ll have an officer there in a few minutes. Call back if there’s any problem. And stay away from the animal.”
“Rabid animal?” Jesse said.
“Skunk. Guy working on a roof up on Sterling Circle says it’s staggering and walking in circles in the street. He was on his cell phone.”
“Suit should have saved Mrs. Billups by now. Have him go up and shoot the skunk.”
“What if it’s not really rabid?” Molly said.
“Family can sue us.”
Molly called Simpson. When she was through she turned back to Jesse.
“Do people like urologists really do plastic surgery?”
“They may legally do so,” Jesse said. “Some people don’t know one doctor from another. In the white coat they all look the same.”
“A woman wearing silk underwear would know,” Molly said.
Jesse grinned.
“Depends who bought the underwear,” he said.
“Still, odds are it would be a plastic surgeon. I can make some calls.”
“Sure,” Jesse said. “If we’re lucky, maybe she did them around here.”
“Of course,” Molly said. “She could have driven here from Grand Junction, Colorado, and parked on the Neck someplace and jumped in.”
“Except we haven’t found any abandoned vehicles,” Jesse said.
“Or someone was with her and threw her in and drove away.”
“Or she’s a space alien,” Jesse said.
“Or, just shut up,” Molly said.
“I am the chief law enforcement officer of Paradise, Massachusetts,” Jesse said. “And your chief. Surely you can be more respectful than that.”
“Of course,” Molly said. “I’m sorry…shut up, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“Are they all through with her?” Molly said.
“The coroner? No, this is a preliminary report. They’re still poking around.”
“Ick,” Molly said.
“Cops don’t say ‘ick.’”
Molly laughed and leaned over the desk and kissed Jesse on the forehead.
“Do cops do that?” Molly said.
“Oh yeah,” Jesse said, “most of them.”
The phone rang again and Molly answered, “Paradise Police,” while Jesse took the coroner’s report back to his office.
5
D
ix always looked so clean,
Jesse thought. His white shirts were always brilliant white. His head gleamed as if he had just shaved it, and his face glistened with aftershave.
“Jenn asked me the other day if it bothered me about her being with other men.”
Dix nodded. He sat with his elbows on the arms of his chair, his hands clasped chest high. They were big square competent hands.
“I said it did.”
“You wanna talk about that?” Dix said.
“Yes.”
“Whaddya want to say?”
“I, well, I mean I hate it,” Jesse said. “But that doesn’t seem too weird.”
“Hate it that she was with other men?”
“Them having sex,” Jesse said.
Dix nodded. Neither of them said anything. Dix’s desk was completely empty except for a phone and a calendar pad. His degrees were on the wall, and there was a couch, which Jesse had never used, against the wall behind him.
“Does it bother you to think of them talking intimately, laughing together, sharing a joke, enjoying a meal, watching a ball game?”
“Sure. Isn’t it, to use a nice shrink word,
appropriate,
to be jealous when your wife’s cheating on you?” Jesse said.
“It is certainly human,” Dix said. “Is it with the same intensity that you think of her having sex?”
“No.”
“Is she cheating on you now?”
“No. Right now we’re good.”
“So?” Dix said.
Jesse started to speak and stopped and sat. Dix was quiet.
“I can’t seem to let it go,” Jesse said.
“What part can’t you let go of?” Dix said.
“Her having sex. I think about it. I imagine it. I can’t get rid of it when I’m with her.”
Dix waited, his head cocked slightly. Jesse was staring at his hands, which were clasped in front of him. After a time he looked up at Dix.
“It’s like, almost, like I maybe don’t want to let it go.”
Dix’s face changed just enough for Jesse to see that he approved of the direction the conversation was taking.
“What the hell do I get out of it?” Jesse said.
“Something,” Dix said. “Or you’d let it go.”
“Yes.”
Again they were silent. The hushed whir of the air conditioning was the only sound in the office. It was hard to imagine Dix being hot, or tired, or puzzled, Jesse thought. No one could put up with silence like Dix could. It was like his natural element. Jesse felt winded. He took in another big breath.
“You went out with a lot of other women after your separation and divorce,” Dix said.
“Sure.”
“Did you imagine them with other men?”
“Not really,” Jesse said. “I love Jenn. I liked everyone I slept with. But I never loved them the way I love Jenn.”
“Therefore?” Dix said.
“Therefore I didn’t care who else they’d slept with,” Jesse said.
“Excuse the cliché,” Dix said. “But isn’t that more about you, about how you felt, than it is about Jenn or the other women?”
Jesse looked blankly at Dix for a moment.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” Jesse said.
“You’re human,” Dix said. “A common ailment.”
6
W
hen Jesse got back to the station Jenn was in his office, sitting at his desk with the swivel chair tilted back, her legs crossed under her short skirt, showing a lot of thigh. Jesse felt the little pinch of desire in his stomach. He always felt it when he saw her. It was so consistently a part of being with her that he just thought of it as part of the nature of things. He had always assumed it was what everyone felt when they looked at the person they loved. Why worry about it now? Was he looking for something to worry about?
“Oh Jesse,” she said. “I have great news. They’re doing an hour-long special at the station on Race Week. And I’m going to be the on-camera host and do the voiceover, too.”
“Wow,” Jesse said.
“It’s not just some feature for the six o’clock news,” she said. “It’s a full-hour feature and the company plans to syndicate it.”
“That’s great, Jenn.”
“I’ll be here every day with the crew. I’ll have input. Jesse, this is a really big break for me. We’re owned by Allied Broadcasting, and they have stations in most of the major markets.”
Jesse went around the desk and bent over and kissed her. She put her arms around his neck, kept her mouth pressed against his and let him pull her from the chair when he straightened up. They held the kiss a long time. When they broke, Jesse exhaled audibly.
“When’s it being broadcast?” he said.
“Well, in syndication it varies by market. But we’re hoping to show it next year around Race Week,” Jenn said.
Jenn kept her arms around his neck and her body pressed against him.
“So you have a whole year to edit and do whatever you do,” Jesse said.
“Yes. Lay in the narration, the music track, enhance the pictures, spruce up the sound. A lot of work, and it gives you an idea of how much hope they have for this, that they’d give us so much time.”
“A year,” Jesse said.
He felt the press of her thighs against him, of her breasts. He felt the miasmic press of emotion that he always felt.
“Not really a year. They need it finished in December for the syndication deal.”
“Still a lot better than editing this afternoon for on air tonight,” Jesse said.