Night Passage (6 page)

“What an asshole,” he said.

His voice seemed so loud in the quiet room that he wondered if someone next door could hear him talking to himself. When you start talking to yourself … He smiled and sipped his scotch. He could see himself in the full-length mirror on the wall beside the bed. He raised the glass at himself. Get a grip, Jesse. Then he leaned back in the chair, holding the whiskey in both hands, and closed his eyes and thought about the next day. Maybe three drinks a day.

Jo Jo Genest was always alert when he went to the South End. There were a lot of fags down there and he was ready to retaliate if one of them was flirtatious. Jo Jo could bench-press five hundred pounds. At six feet, he weighed 283 and, under the pressure of his latissimus dorsi, his arms stuck out as he walked. He crossed with the light at Clarendon Street near the Cyclorama, and went a half block west on Tremont, and went down three stairs to a basement-level storefront in one of the old brownstones. In black letters on the big glass window of the store was written Development Associates of Boston. He opened the door and went in. A good-looking young man with dark curly hair and a diamond earring sat at the reception desk, sorting mail. He looked up when Jo Jo entered.

“Is it Tarzan or one of the apes,” the young man said.

The young man was always saying stuff like that to him, and he never liked it. If he didn’t have business to do here, he’d slap the little faggot upside the head. Maybe someday.

“Gino back there?” he said.

“Sure.”

Jo Jo nodded and went past the young man through the open archway into the back room. Gino Fish was sitting at a round antique table, in a high-backed antique chair. He was tall and thin with gray hair. Along the right-hand wall, a little behind Fish, sat Vinnie Morris with his chair tipped back and balanced on its back legs. Vinnie was listening to earphones from a small portable tape player clipped to his belt.

“How’s it going, Gino,” Jo Jo said.

“Fine,” Fish said.

“Vinnie,” Jo Jo said, “how they hanging?”

Vinnie Morris always made Jo Jo a little uneasy. The uneasiness puzzled Jo Jo. He weighed a hundred pounds more than Vinnie. But there was something about Vinnie’s stillness. And when Vinnie moved he moved with such quickness and economy. And he had heard that Vinnie could shoot better than anyone in Boston. And Vinnie always seemed a little scornful of Jo Jo, which didn’t make any sense because Jo Jo could have broken him in two like a twig, and Vinnie better not try anything with him, or he would.

There were two big suitcases on the floor next to Vinnie. Fish nodded at them.

“Two million,” Fish said, “and change.”

“No sweat, Gino.”

“I’m sure,” Fish said.

“Thing is, Gino, I been getting three and a half on it, and I gotta split it with some people. Makes the math a little complicated. I was looking to get four even on this one, if I could.”

Fish sat silently and looked at Jo Jo, his hands resting on the table, his long fingers interlaced. Fish pursed his lips while he thought about this.

“We could cut it to two,” Fish said. “That would simplify the math even further.”

Jo Jo laughed.

“I know you’re kidding, Gino. But I’m coming cheap at four percent. Not many guys can move two million, three for you bang bang like that, you know?”

Again Fish was quiet, pursing his lips. This time he was quiet for quite a while. It made Jo Jo nervous. He didn’t like being nervous, and especially didn’t like being made nervous by two guys he could crush like a couple of grapes. They should be nervous of me, he thought.

“What you say is true, Jo Jo,” Fish said. “Not many men have your contacts in this. But that doesn’t mean no one does. I’ll give you the four, but I don’t want you coming in next week and asking for five.”

“Hey, Gino, I don’t do business that way. I say four, it’s four and that’s it.”

“Fine,” Fish said, and nodded at the suitcases.

Jo Jo went and picked them up. Each of them weighed more than 120 pounds, but if they were too heavy Jo Jo didn’t show it. The trapezius muscles bunched along the top of his shoulders and the triceps defined themselves more deeply along the backs of his arms.

“I’ll take care of this today, Gino,” he said.

“I’m sure you will,” Fish said.

“Take it easy,” Jo Jo said.

Neither Fish nor Vinnie spoke and Jo Jo left the office and went through the anteroom and out the front door. The good-looking young man came in with the mail and put it on the table in front of Gino.

“What do you think,” he said. “Cute?”

Fish glanced up at him and snorted and began to open the mail.

“What do you think, Vinnie,” the young man said.

“He’s a jerk,” Vinnie said. “He thinks muscles matter.”

“Well, maybe they do to me,” the young man said.

Vinnie shrugged and turned up the volume on his tape player. The young man went back out to the anteroom smiling.

Outside on Tremont Street, Jo Jo walked a half block back up the street, and, out of sight of Gino’s office, put the bags down on the curb and waited for a cab.

Jesse drove into Paradise at ten in the morning with the sun shining straight at him so that he had to put the sun visor down even with sunglasses on. He could smell the Atlantic before he saw it. Before he went to the town hall, he found the beachfront along Atlantic Avenue and parked and got out and walked onto the beach and looked at the eastern ocean. It probably had something to do with closing a circle. What circle it was, Jesse didn’t know. But it did no harm to look at the ocean. He stood for a while, then got back in the car and drove slowly along Atlantic Avenue, following the directions they’d sent him, to the town hall. The east in Jesse’s imagination had always been New England: village greens, and white steeples and weathered shingles and permanence. He had always liked to imagine it in winter when the clear virtuous cold was antipodal to the hot desperation of Los Angeles. It wasn’t winter when he arrived. It was late June and the narrow streets were dappled by the sunlight shining through the full-foliaged arch of old trees. It wasn’t clean and cold, but it was clean and warm and he liked it.

He met the town, or as many members of the town as were interested, including most of the police department, in the auditorium of the brick town hall. The Board of Selectmen sat on stage in folding chairs. Jesse stood, while the chairman of the Board of Selectmen introduced him from a lectern, reading into an insensitive microphone from a sheet of paper with his remarks typed out on it.

“It gives me great pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, to present Paradise’s new police chief, Jesse Stone.”

The chairman of the board was named Hasty Hathaway. He wore a pink shirt and a plaid bow tie and a seersucker jacket that appeared too small for him. Jesse wore his dark suit with a white banded-collar shirt and no tie. He wore the short .38 in a black holster in back of his right hip. Hathaway handed Jesse the new badge that said “Paradise Police Department” around the outside, and “Chief” across the center.

Jesse slipped it into his shirt pocket.

“As most of you know, Chief Stone comes to us from Los Angeles, California, where he is a ten-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, serving most recently as a homicide detective. He holds numerous departmental citations, and was once featured in
Parade
magazine’s list of America’s Top Cops. Chief Stone was selected for this post after an exhaustive search from a field which included a number of very viable candidates. I’d like to thank all the members of the search committee who gave unsparingly of their time, and my thanks also to Lou Burke, who served us so well as interim chief. I know he and all the men, and women, of the Paradise Police Department will continue to serve with the devotion to duty that has marked this department since its inception. Chief Stone, would you care to say a few words?”

“I’m glad to be here,” Jesse said into the microphone. “Right now, everyone in the room knows more about the town than I do. I’ll need your help. Thank you.”

He stepped away from the microphone. Hathaway looked as if he were hoping for more. But he rallied.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s give Chief Stone a round of applause.”

Everyone clapped. Jesse went upstairs with Hathaway and the town legal counsel, whose name was Abby Taylor, and signed several papers. While he was signing them he noticed that the town counsel was wearing a nice-looking pale yellow suit, with a short skirt.

Then he went next door to the brick wing where police and fire were housed and sat down in the swivel chair in his new office. Lou Burke came in with a Sig-Sauer nine-millimeter pistol.

“The one Tommy Carson turned in,” Burke said, “when he got fired.”

“Thanks,” Jesse said. “I’ve got my own gun.”

Burke shrugged and put the pistol on the desk.

“Belongs to the department,” he said. “Goes with the job.”

Jesse picked up the gun and put it in the right-hand drawer of the desk.

“Have a seat,” Jesse said. “I might as well start learning.”

Burke sat. He was a compact man with dark skin and an advanced case of male pattern baldness. What hair remained along the sides of his head was black and cut very close.

“Is this a first-name department?” Jesse said.

“Has been.”

“Good. How you feel about them bringing me in from the outside, Lou?”

Burke sat quietly for a moment as if thinking about the question.

“Relieved,” he said finally.

“You didn’t like being chief?”

Burke shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Pay’s not worth the aggravation,” Burke said.

“Tell me about the aggravation,” Jesse said.

“You’re used to a big force,” Burke said. “Big city. Lotta cops, lotta people, you get to keep some distance from the civilians. Here you’re a town employee. Everybody knows everybody. The civilians are in our face twenty-four hours a day. For crissake you have to attend Rotary Club meetings.”

“Rotary Club?”

“Yeah. They didn’t mention that to you? Chief of Police here is automatically a member of the Rotary Club, meets every Wednesday at the Paradise Inn.”

“How’s the food?” Jesse asked.

“You like chicken pot pie?”

Jesse shrugged.

“That’s how the food is,” Burke said.

“Well,” Jesse said, “we’ll see about Rotary.”

A big yellow cat came silently into Jesse’s office and jumped up onto the window ledge and curled up on himself and went to sleep in the sun.

“Who’s this?” Jesse said.

“Captain Cat,” Burke said. “Wandered in here five years ago. We feed him.”

“Cop house cat,” Jesse said.

Burke nodded.

“Tell me about the town legal counsel,” Jesse said.

“Abby? She works for the firm in town. Big firm for a small town, ten, twelve lawyers. Real estate, wills, estate planning, that kind of stuff. Gives the town about ten hours a week pro bono.”

“You like her?”

“Sure.”

“What do you like best about her?”

“She’s got a nice ass,” Burke said.

“I noticed.”

“And she’s usually got a hair across it.”

Jesse grinned.

“You’re not too careful, are you?” Jesse said.

“No,” Burke said. “I ain’t.”

“Good,” Jesse said.

“You didn’t ask me about Hathaway or any of those people,” Burke said.

“Thought that might be pushing you a little hard this early in the game,” Jesse said. “I’ll find out about them myself.”

Burke nodded.

“Selectmen get elected by the town,” Burke said. “Town and the police don’t always agree on how things get done.”

“Lou,” Jesse said, “no cop counts on elected officials.”

Burke grinned.

“Well,” he said. “You ain’t as young as you look.”

“Maybe I’m not,” Jesse said.

Lou Burke sat with Hasty Hathaway on the bench outside the meeting house on the town common. Hathaway had a bag of popcorn which he was feeding to some pigeons that had gathered.

“You got any pets, Lou?” Hathaway said.

“No.”

“I’d like to have some animals, but Cissy …” He shook his head and held out a piece of popcorn on his upturned palm. A pigeon circled it, hesitated, feinted once, then darted in and grabbed the corn. “I guess Ciss just isn’t an animal person.”

“Sure,” Burke said. “They’re not for everybody, I guess.”

“You know Ciss, used to having her house just so. God knows what she’d have been like if we’d had kids.”

“Easy to get set in your ways,” Burke said.

The common was a small green triangle at the intersection of three streets. There was a white eighteenth-century meeting house set on it, where at Christmas the women’s auxiliary of something or other, Burke had never really known what, sold greens and fruitcake and handmade satin bows.

“So what do you think of Stone?” Hathaway said.

He took a handful of the popcorn and scattered it on the grass in front of the bench.

Burke was silent a moment, watching the pigeons hop and flutter after the popcorn.

“Well,” Burke said finally, “it’s too soon to say, I guess.”

“I realize that, but what’s your impression.”

“He might not be the answer,” Burke said.

“Really?” Hathaway seemed surprised. “Why do you say so?”

“I don’t know exactly, there’s just something … he’s got more iron in him than I was expecting.”

“Lou, he’s a lush,” Hathaway said. “He was fired for drinking on duty. His personnel file said he was unfit for police work.”

“Yeah, I know,” Burke said. “But he doesn’t give me that feeling. He was a homicide cop in L.A., remember.”

“And he was half gassed when we interviewed him in Chicago,” Hathaway said.

Burke shrugged.

“Well, let’s keep our eyes open,” Hathaway said. “What we don’t want is some born-again straight arrow poking his sober nose in where it shouldn’t go.”

Burke nodded.

“I still don’t see why you wouldn’t take the job, Lou,” Hathaway said. “It would have worked out so well.”

“No,” Burke said. “I’m a lot more effective if I’m not in charge. I’m the chief and things go bad, everybody lands on me. I’m just a cop following orders and no one pays me much attention. I know as much as I would being chief, and I’m a lot less visible. I do us more good where I am.”