Night Passage (16 page)

When Jesse Stone pulled his unmarked car up onto the grass beside them, the two boys Michelle was sitting with got up and moved sullenly away. Michelle did not. She took a last long drag on her joint, and dropped it in the street and scuffed it out with the heel of her red sneaker, looking all the time straight at Jesse as he got out of the car and walked toward her.

“You gonna bust me, Jesse?”

She put a heavy stress on the name, to remind him that she was not speaking respectfully to an officer of the law.

“Probably not,” Jesse said.

He sat down beside her on the stone wall.

“How you doing?” he said.

Michelle snorted, as if the question were too stupid to answer. Jesse nodded as if she had answered. The kids who had moved sullenly off lingered now, near the shopping center, watching. The traffic was sparse at midmorning, and the bird noise was easily audible in the burial ground behind them. It was late in September and the leaves had just begun to turn on some of the early trees, showing a touch of yellow or red against the still predominant green. Jesse was quiet. Michelle looked at him sideways, puzzled, annoyed, and stubborn. She was a small girl with a thin face that would have been pretty had it not been so empty. There was a streak of lavender in her blond hair, and her fingernails were painted black. She wore jeans and red sneakers and a blue sweater with the sleeves too long so that only the tips of her fingers were visible. She had a small gold bead in one nostril.

She struggled to be as quiet as Jesse, but she couldn’t.

“You going to run me off the wall or what?” she said.

“No,” Jesse said.

“So how come you’re sitting here?”

“I was thinking what a waste of time this deal is for both of us,” Jesse said.

“What deal?”

“You sit on the wall and smoke dope. I chase you off. You come back. I chase you off. You come back. It’s a waste of my time and yours.”

“I’m not wasting my time,” Michelle said.

“Really?”

“Really. It’s a free country. I should be able to do what I want.”

“And this is what you want?” Jesse said. “Sit on the wall and smoke dope.”

“You can’t prove I’m smoking dope.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“So why don’t you leave me alone then?”

“Why don’t you go to school?”

“School sucks,” Michelle said.

Jesse grinned.

“Babe, you got that right,” he said. “You know that Paul Simon song, ‘When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school/It’s a wonder I can think at all’?”

“Who’s Paul Simon?”

“A singer. Anyway, yeah, school sucks. It’s one of the great scams in American public life. On the other hand, most people grind through it. How come you don’t?”

“I don’t have to, I’m seventeen.”

“True,” Jesse said.

They were both quiet for a time. Michelle kept looking at Jesse as covertly as she could.

“My sister says she sees you sometimes down the Gray Gull having drinks,” she said.

“Un huh.”

“So how come that’s okay and smoking dope isn’t?”

“It’s legal and smoking dope is illegal.”

“So that makes it right?” Michelle said.

“Nope, just legal and illegal.”

Michelle opened her mouth and then closed it. She was trying to think. Finally she said, “Well, that sucks.”

Jesse nodded.

“Lot of things suck,” he said. “After a while you sort of settle for trying not to suck yourself, I guess.”

“By pushing kids around?” Michelle said.

Jesse turned his head slowly and held her gaze for a moment.

“Am I pushing you around, Michelle?”

She shrugged and looked absently at the white meeting house across the street.

“What do you think you’ll be doing in ten years?” Jesse said.

“Who cares?” Michelle said.

“Me,” Jesse said. “You ever see any thirty-year-old people sitting on the wall here, smoking dope?”

Michelle gave a big sigh.

“Oh please,” she said, drawing out the second word.

Again Jesse nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. Lectures suck too.”

She almost smiled for a moment, and then looked even more sullen to compensate. The boys by the shopping center had tired of watching them and drifted off. On the front porch of the town library, across the common, a young woman with a small child clinging to her skirt, and another on her hip, was sliding books into the library return slot. Jesse wondered briefly when she got time to read.

“You think I’m going to end up like her?” Michelle said, nodding at the woman.

“No,” Jesse said.

“Well, I’m not,” Michelle said.

Jesse was quiet.

“So what about right and wrong?” Michelle said after a time.

“Right and wrong?”

“Yeah. You said stuff was just legal or illegal. Well, what about it being right or wrong? Doesn’t that matter?”

“Well, I’m not in the right or wrong business,” Jesse said. “I’m in the legal and illegal business.”

“Oh, that’s a cop-out,” she said. “You just don’t want to answer.”

“No, I don’t mind answering,” Jesse said. “That was part of my answer. There’s something to be said for trying to do what you’re paid to do, well.”

He was aware that she was suddenly looking at him directly.

“And sometimes that’s the best you can do. The other thing is that most people don’t have much trouble seeing what’s right or wrong. Doing it is sometimes complicated, but knowing the right thing is usually not so hard.”

“You think so,” Michelle said in a tone that said she didn’t.

“Sure. You and I both know, for instance, that sitting on the wall all day smoking grass isn’t the right thing for you to do with your life.”

“Who the hell are you to say what’s right for me?” Michelle said.

“The guy you asked,” Jesse said. “And chasing you off the wall is obviously not the right way to help you do the right thing.”

“So why the hell are you sitting here blabbing at me?” Michelle said.

Jesse smiled at her.

“Trying to do the right thing,” he said.

Michelle stared at him for a long moment.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You’re weird.”

Jesse took a business card out of the pocket of his white uniform shirt and gave it to Michelle.

“You need help sometime,” Jesse said, “you can call me.”

Michelle took the card, as if she didn’t know what it was.

“I don’t need any help,” she said.

“You never know,” Jesse said and stood up. “It’s what else we do,” Jesse said, and turned and walked back to his car.

She stared at him as he walked and watched the car as it pulled away. She watched it up Main Street until it turned off onto Forest Hill Avenue and out of sight. Then she looked at the card for a moment and put it into the pocket of her jeans.

The disk jockey at the 86 Club wore a ruffled white shirt and a tuxedo vest with silver musical notes embroidered on it. He played records and did some patter but the noise with or without the music was so loud in the low room that no one could hear what he said. A few people danced, but most of them were sitting and drinking at tiny tables, jammed into the space in front of the long bar.

Tammy Portugal was alone, crowded onto a barstool, drinking a Long Island iced tea and smoking Camel Lights. She was wearing tight tapered jeans and spike heels and no stockings and a short-sleeved top that exposed her stomach. She had put on her best black underwear, too, in case anything developed. She had cashed her alimony check. There was money in her purse. The kids were at her mother’s until tomorrow afternoon. She had a night, and half a day, when she could do anything or nothing, however she pleased.

Across the room she knew he had been looking at her and finally she let her eyes meet his. He looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but handsomer. Fabio, maybe. Big muscles, long hair. His pale eyes had a dangerous look, she thought, and it excited her. She had seen him before on her night out, and she had watched him as he moved through the bar. Watched how careful other men were around him. Watched how many of the women looked after him as he walked past. She had, she knew, been thinking of him when she put on the good black underwear. She wondered if he was gentle in bed, or rough. She felt the sudden jolt along her rib cage as she realized he was walking toward her.

“Hi,” he said. “What are you drinking?”

She liked the way he came on to her. He didn’t ask if she was alone. A man like him wouldn’t have to worry about whether she was alone. If he wanted her, he’d take her.

She told him what she was drinking, trying to keep her voice down. She liked the throaty sound one of the actresses made on one of her soap operas, and she practiced it sometimes with a tape recorder when she was alone.

He wedged his body into the crowded bar, making room beside her where there had been none. “Seven and ginger,” he said to the bartender, “and a Long Island iced tea.”

He leaned one elbow on the bar and looked straight on into her eyes. She swiveled on her barstool, as if to talk with him better, and managed it so that her knee would press against his thigh.

“I’ve seen you before,” he said to her.

They had to lean very close to each other to be heard over the clamor of the hot room.

“I’m out about once a week,” she said, “looking for the right guy.”

“Maybe you’re in luck,” he said.

“Maybe I am.”

She tilted her head back a little and lowered her eyelids and gave him an appraising look.

“You must be single,” he said. “I had something like you at home, I wouldn’t let you out.”

“Divorced,” she said.

“Because?”

“Because my husband was a jerk.”

“Was?”

“He’s still a jerk,” she said, “but he ain’t my husband anymore.”

“Kids?”

“Two. My mother’s got them until tomorrow afternoon.”

He nodded as if that answered the final question. He was wearing a dark blue polo shirt and white pants and boat shoes with no socks. Everything fitted tightly over his obvious musculature, and when he raised his glass to drink, his bicep swelled as if it would burst the short sleeve.

The disk jockey said something into the microphone which nobody could hear, and played a record. She couldn’t hear it but she knew it was slow because the few people on the floor were touch-dancing.

“Dance?” he said.

She slid off the barstool.

“Sure,” she said.

There were two big speakers at opposite corners of the small dance floor and when they got onto the floor they could hear the music. It was slow. Pressed against him, she felt the tension building in her. She could feel the thick slabs of his muscles. Muscles where she didn’t know people had muscles. They danced two numbers, his huge hand low on her back, pressing her steadily in against him.

“You’re free until tomorrow afternoon,” he said as the second record stopped playing, and the DJ began his chatter while he cued a new record.

“As a bird,” she said.

“You wanna go someplace?” he said.

“And do what?” she said, looking upward at him as seductively as she knew how. She had practiced that in the mirror at home.

“We could get naked,” he said.

She giggled and thought about seeing that body without clothes on. It was a little frightening and a little enticing and she was interested in a way she didn’t understand but which was not merely sexual. She giggled again.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go someplace and get naked.”

Anthony DeAngelo had never seen a murdered person before. He’d seen a couple of people killed in car accidents, and he’d even done mouth-to-mouth on a guy who was having a heart attack and died while DeAngelo was working on him. But the naked woman in the junior high school parking lot was his first murder victim. There were bruises on her face, and her head was turned at an awkward angle. Someone had written slut in what looked like lipstick across her stomach. DeAngelo tried to look at her calmly as he called in on his radio. He didn’t want the kids being herded past the scene by teachers to think he was frightened by it. But he was. This wasn’t accidental death. This stiffening corpse lying naked in the dull mist, on the damp asphalt in the early morning, had died violently during the night at the hands of a terrible person. He didn’t know exactly what he should do, standing there talking into his radio. He wanted to cover the poor woman but he didn’t think he ought to disturb the crime scene. Rain wasn’t heavy. Probably didn’t bother her anyway. He wished Jesse would hurry up and get there. In the school the kids were crowded at the windows despite the best efforts of the teachers. The school bus driver who had spotted the body first was standing beside DeAngelo’s cruiser. She looked for people to talk to, to tell about what she had seen and how she was the first to see it, and oh God, the poor woman! But DeAngelo was still on the radio and the junior high school staff was fruitlessly busy trying to protect the kids from seeing the corpse. He felt better when Jesse pulled up in the unmarked black Ford with the buggy whip antenna on the back bumper swaying in decreasing arcs as the car stopped and Jesse got out.

“Anthony,” Jesse said.

He walked over and looked down at the body.

“ ‘Slut,’ ” he said.

“Yeah. Like the car. Like the cat,” DeAngelo said.

Jesse nodded, still looking at her.

“Clothes?” he said.

DeAngelo shook his head. “I haven’t seen any.”

The town ambulance pulled into the parking lot and behind it Peter Perkins in his own car, a Mazda pickup. Two young Paradise firemen who doubled as EMTs got out and walked almost gingerly toward the crime scene. Peter Perkins got out of his truck. He was in jeans and a tee shirt with his gun strapped on and his badge on his belt. A thirty-five-millimeter camera hung around his neck. He went to the bed of his pickup and got his evidence kit. One of the EMTs knelt beside the body and felt for a pulse.

After a moment he said, “She’s dead, Jesse.”

“Un huh.”

“What do you want us to do, Jesse?”

The EMT was not quite twenty-five. His name was Duke Vincent. Jesse played softball with him in the Paradise town league. Like DeAngelo, Vincent had seen death. But never murder. Vincent’s voice was calm but soft, and Jesse knew he was feeling shaky. Jesse remembered the first time he’d seen it. It was a lot worse than this, a shotgun, close up, he remembered.