Blue Screen (9 page)

R
ICHIE HAD DROPPED
Rosie off with Spike that afternoon, and she and Spike were in my loft in South Boston when I came home. They both kissed me. Spike settled for one, affectionate and passionless. Rosie inflicted the death of a thousand laps. Spike opened a bottle of Riesling and we sat at my little window alcove and sipped wine together. I had an extra-wide custom chair that I sat in to eat, which allowed Rosie to sit beside me. She sat there now, thrilled to have me home, and hopeful, probably, that we might have something to eat with the wine.

“Eat on the plane?” Spike said.

“Something unutterable,” I said, “which contained pasta.”

“Best not to think of it,” Spike said.

“Have you been here long?” I said.

“Richie delivered Rosie around four,” Spike said. “I been here since.”

“You haven’t been trying on my clothes, have you?”

“I wanted to,” Spike said. “But there was a size problem.”

“God, I hope so,” I said.

“Tell me about LA,” Spike said.

Which I did. By the time I got through, we had opened a second bottle of Riesling and my coherence was becoming endangered.

“Erin was a hooker,” Spike said.

“Yes. I suppose that’s why she pretended that Misty was just her assistant. The rigmarole with names. Keep her origins a mystery.”

“She seems to keep getting rescued by men and being rebuilt. First the pimp…”

“Gerard,” I said.

“Then Buddy Bollen.”

“She married Gerard,” I said.

“And she lives with Buddy.”

I nodded.

“How’s the pimp?” Spike said.

“What’s he like?”

“Yeah.”

“What you’d expect. Self-important. Soulless. Filled with contempt for women. Except that he claims still to be in love with Erin. It doesn’t fit.”

“Things don’t,” Spike said.

“Be easier if they did,” I said.

“But boring,” Spike said.

“Still a man who exploits women for money,” I said.

“Not all whores are exploited,” Spike said.

I was a woman. I knew the official woman’s view of prostitution. I started to say it.

“It’s not a victimless crime,” I said. “The whores are victims.”

“Some,” Spike said. “Perhaps many. Nobody likes giving BJs at truck stops. But you’ve known whores who liked being whores.”

I drank some wine. I looked at Rosie. She appeared agnostic about the question.

“I…yes. I have,” I said. “Especially the high-end hookers. They like the good clothes, the nice restaurants, the luxury hotels, the good money. Hell, they like the sex. Don’t tell anyone in Cambridge I said that. I may have to go there someday.”

“Maybe Erin liked it,” Spike said. “Given the way you describe her situation with Buddy, maybe she still does.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Maybe the pimp really does love her,” Spike said.

“Maybe.”

“And while we’re speaking the unspeakable, maybe you did the nasty again with Tony Gault.”

“It wasn’t nasty,” I said. “You’re just jealous.”

“I only met him once when he was in Boston,” Spike said.

“You know how you are,” I said.

Spike grinned.

“I know how both of us are,” he said. “You’re easy.”

“I am not easy,” I said. “But I’m fun.”

P
ARADISE, MASSACHUSETTS
, in late November was the perfect reentry fix from Southern California. It was gray. Snow was spitting. And the wind off the Atlantic was persistent. I parked in the lot next to the Paradise police station and went in to see the chief.

“Back from California,” I said. “Ready to compare notes.”

“Do you eat lunch?” Jesse said.

“I do.”

“Me too,” Jesse Stone said. “Let’s compare notes over it.”

“That would be very nice,” I said.

We walked together through Paradise to a restaurant called Daisy’s. The owner was a strapping woman with humorous eyes. Jesse introduced us. She showed us to a table, put two menus down, and left.

“Sandwiches are good here,” Jesse said. “They bake their own bread.”

I ordered tunafish on light rye. He ordered a lobster club on anadama bread. We both had mango iced tea.

“How’s Cronjager,” Jesse said.

“Good. He seems like a good man.”

“He is. Did you meet Elaine?”

“Yes. Smart woman.”

“She is,” Jesse said. “Good woman, too.”

“It’s like she’s the real captain,” I said.

Jesse nodded.

“She thinks so, and Cronjager lets her. How’s he look.”

“Mature, gray hair, healthy.”

“Hair was gray when I knew him,” Jesse said. “What do you know?”

“Me first?” I said.

He nodded. I told him what I knew about Erin and Misty. Jesse listened quietly. While I talked he sipped his iced tea occasionally and didn’t eat his sandwich.

“You think Gerard actually loves her?” Jesse said when I finished.

“I think he thinks he does,” I said.

Jesse nodded.

“Hard to know the difference sometimes,” he said.

I took a ladylike little bite of my sandwich and looked at him for a moment while I chewed it. When people are quiet there’s a tendency to think that there is more to them than there seems to be. Usually you’re wrong. But sometimes there is.

“Pimps don’t usually love women,” I said.

“No,” Jesse said. “They don’t. But sometimes the women think they do, and sometimes the pimps think they do, too.”

“Believe their own con,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“So do you think he flew out here in a jealous rage and killed Misty to punish Erin for leaving him?”

“Seems a reach,” Jesse said.

“He claims to be a martial-arts master.”

“So he would probably know how to snap a neck,” Jesse said. “If he ever used it for real.”

“Not just mat exercises?”

“For real is different,” Jesse said.

“Do you know anything?” I said.

“Very little,” Jesse said. “But I’m used to it. Fingerprints are meaningless. Everybody at SeaChase used the gym, even Buddy. Plus the people who installed it, cleaned it.”

“Alibis?”

“Not many. Most people at SeaChase were alone during the time when Erin could have died. A few off-duty employees were with significant others. But nobody has an ironclad alibi. Including you.”

“Am I a suspect?” I said.

“No.”

“Any suspects?”

“No.”

“How do you want to use what I’ve learned,” I said.

“It’s your stuff,” he said. “How do you want to use it?”

Jesse took his first bite of sandwich. I thought for a minute while he chewed.

“I think you should bring her in and break it to her without saying where it came from,” I said.

“If I bring Erin in, Buddy will come, too,” Jesse said.

“And no doubt a lawyer.”

“No doubt,” Jesse said. “You want to be there?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t want to take credit for blowing her cover.”

“No.”

“She hired you to find out who killed Misty; what you’re doing is what you were hired to do,” Jesse said.

“Even if she killed her sister?” I said.

“You think she did?”

“It doesn’t seem like she would,” I said. “Their history is Erin taking care of Misty.”

Jesse nodded.

“Be interesting to see what you’d do if she did,” Jesse said.

“She hired me to find the killer,” I said.

Jesse said “Yes” and took another bite of his sandwich.

“Do you know anything else?” I said. “If not useful, at least interesting?”

Jesse chewed carefully and swallowed and drank some tea.

“Talked with Roy Linden,” Jesse said.

“The baseball coach,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What did you talk about?”

“He and I knew some of the same people,” Jesse said. “We talked about that and after a while we talked about Erin.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he’s got his official position,” Jesse said.

“Which is that Erin will be a great major-league baseball player,” I said.

“Um-hmm,” Jesse said.

“But?”

Jesse shook his head.

“She won’t,” I said.

“Roy doesn’t think so,” Jesse said.

“Because?”

“She won’t hit major-league pitching,” Jesse said.

“But she can play the field?”

“Probably. He thinks she can probably run down a lot of balls in center field and probably catch most of them. She’s got a mediocre arm, but plenty of big-league outfielders do. She can probably run the bases pretty good.”

“But she won’t hit,” I said.

“Roy doesn’t say so, but that’s what he thinks.”

“How long has he been coaching her?”

“Since she’s been with Buddy,” Jesse said.

“So this is not a new plan,” I said.

Jesse shook his head.

“How do you know people that Roy Linden knows?”

“We both played in the Pacific Coast League,” Jesse said.

“Baseball?”

“Yep.”

“Did you ever play anywhere, like, you know, a place I’d have heard of?”

“Played at Albuquerque,” Jesse said. “Triple A.”

“What’s Triple A?”

“One level short of the major leagues,” Jesse said.

“But you didn’t make the major leagues?”

“Hurt my shoulder, couldn’t throw anymore,” he said. “I was a shortstop.”

“Oh, what a shame,” I said. “Do you miss it?”

“Yes.”

“If you hadn’t gotten hurt, would you have made the big leagues?”

“Yes.”

“You keep a baseball glove in your office.”

“I play in the town softball league.”

“So you can still play softball.”

“I can throw well enough for that,” Jesse said.

“Maybe you should go with me to watch Erin train with Roy Linden. Every morning. Taft University.”

“What would that tell us?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it would be good to know what you thought of her chances.”

“And it’s always better to know than not know,” Jesse said.

“I think so,” I said.

“And you’re fun to be with,” Jesse said.

I smiled at him.

“You have no idea,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Maybe I do,” he said.

My face felt a little warm. I hadn’t meant to say that. The waitress came and refilled our iced-tea glasses. I put some Equal into my iced tea and sipped some. Jesse looked at me carefully. He probably looked at everything that way. Still, I was aware that I had dressed very thoughtfully when I decided to come see him. Gray jeans, a white shirt with big cuffs, worn with the shirttails out, a black velveteen jacket, and short boots with heels that should have been higher, but, being a detective, I felt that I needed the capacity for sudden mobility. Still, it was a great look, even without the stiletto heels, because it could be considered dressing up, or dressing down. I felt good about it.

“Was that before, it must have been, before you became a cop, that you got hurt.”

“Yes.”

“So,” I said, “how did you end up here?”

“My marriage went south. I drank too much. Got fired.”

“By Captain Cronjager,” I said. “Why did you come here?”

“They’re the ones would have me,” Jesse said.

“The drinking is under control,” I said.

Why was that my business?

“At the moment.”

“And you’re divorced?”

“More or less,” Jesse said. “But we’re giving it another try.”

“She move back in?” I said.

Why was
that
my business?

Jesse smiled. “She lives in Boston,” he said. “We have sleepovers.”

“How’s that going?” I said.

“Day at a time.”

“I’m divorced, too,” I said.

Why was that his business?

“Neat and clean?”

“I guess,” I said. “He’s remarried.”

“But?” Jesse said.

“We’re not fully, ah, disengaged, I guess.”

He nodded.

“Children?” I said.

“No.”

“Me either.”

It was like we were filling out each other’s résumé: Which side of the bed do you prefer? How do you like your eggs in the morning? Do you sleep in the nude?

“I have a dog,” I said.

Jesse nodded.

“I like dogs,” he said.