“Look, whatever your name is, I’m sure—”
“Forget my name and forget the stalling. See, here’s the thing, I was going to leave it alone. I figured, how much could I hit some poor working stiff up for ’cause I caught him meeting some old broad up in the Bluffs? It didn’t seem worth the trouble. Why am I going to screw up some guy’s marriage for a few hundred bucks? But when the police chief shows up at my door and starts busting my chops about the blonde, I got kind of curious, you know? Then when I find out the blonde offed herself, going over Caine’s Bluff, I’m thinking maybe she had a little help with the takeoff. Funny thing is, I got a way of tracking down plate numbers and when I traced yours... man, I really got interested.”
“Damn it!”
“You got that right. See, like I said, I’m here to do you a favor.”
He put on a brave act. “Even if you do have a photo of my car going up to the Bluffs, so what? It’s evidence of nothing. I could have gone up there two weeks ago, last year, last evening. In any case, electronics are easily tampered with. There’s nothing tying me to that unfortunate woman or to her suicide. Sorry, you’ll have to go squeeze some other orange to get your juice.”
Rod Wiethop pulled something out of his pocket and held it in the yellowish beam of the streetlight. “You know, I don’t think so, mister. I think I’m gonna be able to squeeze all the juice I need outta you for as long as I’m thirsty. See, after the chief come talk to me, I went down to the garage and went over my cab. People are dropping all kinds of stuff in the cab all the time: drugs, groceries, gifts, underwear... all sorts of things. And the blonde, she dropped this.”
“An envelope. Why should I care—”
“You know, I’m losing my patience with you now,” Wiethop said. “I ain’t your wife. Deny, deny, deny might work with her, but not with me. See, I got this letter here from you to the blonde that would pretty much blow your life up. Man, what were you thinking to put that stuff down in writing?”
“I wasn’t thinking at all. That was the problem. Perhaps you’re right, let’s discuss your terms over a drink. Come in.”
Wiethop smiled. “That’s more like it. I guess I could use a friend.”
“Yes,” he said, “friends.”
39
Tamara Elkin tried pouring Jesse another drink, but he waved her off. She decided she’d had enough as well and put the bottle back in the kitchen. When she came back into Jesse’s living room, she plopped herself down in his recliner across from the sofa on which Jesse had kicked up his feet. Neither of them spoke and neither seemed the least bit uncomfortable. Then she became aware of Jesse staring at her hair.
“Many men have tried to figure out the enigma that is my hair, Jesse Stone,” she said, a laugh in her voice. “And many have failed.”
“Any live to tell the tale?”
“The lucky ones.”
He shook his head at her, smiled. But she noticed something off in his smile.
She asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Jesse, we’ve been friends for, what, two days? And no offense, but you’re not as inscrutable as you’d like to believe you are. So let’s hear it.” She crooked one of her long, tapered fingers at him and wiggled it. “Something’s bothering you. Besides, isn’t sharing part of the whole friendship thing?”
“The panties,” he said.
“I don’t know about you. You’re sending me mixed messages there, Chief. I thought discussing my underwear was off-limits if we were going to be pals.”
“Not yours. Maxie Connolly’s.”
She laughed that deep laugh of hers. “You, sir, are a unique individual. Given my chosen career, you can imagine I’ve had some strange discussions in my time, but discussing a dead woman’s missing panties is a first.”
He smiled, but again it was a troubled smile. “It’s more than her panties,” he said. “Her handbag and cell phone are missing, too.”
“I can’t help you there, but like I said on the phone, some gals do go commando-style. And from what the buzz is around about her, it seems to me the late Maxie Connolly might have been a prime candidate for AARP Commando of the Year Award.”
“If all that was missing was her panties, it wouldn’t bother me as much. I saw surveillance video of her leaving her hotel room with her bag and she went straight from the hotel to the Bluffs.”
Tamara asked, “How did she get there?”
“Cab.”
“Well, Sherlock, you might want to have a talk with the cabdriver.”
“Did that.”
“And?”
“And I think I better go have another talk with him,” Jesse said. “And you, Doc, I think it’s time for you to get going.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. We can’t do friendly sleepovers every night.”
“Tempted?”
He said, “I didn’t think there was any question of that.”
Tamara stood. “Just checking. You know, I won’t hold it against you if you give in to it on occasion.”
“But I will.”
She wagged a finger at him. “Oh, you’re one of those.”
“One of those what?” Jesse asked.
“Moralist.”
He tilted his head. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“What would you say?”
“That I can usually sense right from wrong.”
“I don’t know, Jesse. I look at the world and the bodies that come into my morgue and I wonder if I know what’s right anymore.”
“Let’s say I know what’s wrong. Easier to know what’s wrong.”
“You’re an interesting man, Jesse Stone, but you’re out of place here.”
“In Paradise?”
“Yes, but that’s not what I mean, exactly,” she said. “I mean you were born in the wrong century. You should have been sheriff in a small frontier town.”
He didn’t say anything to that because he’d had that same thought a thousand times himself. It was one of the reasons he loved Westerns so much. As a kid, he often pictured himself as the sheriff in High Noon or as Wild Bill Hickok cleaning up Dodge City. When he thought about it seriously, Jesse realized that right and wrong probably weren’t any less complicated back then, but it was easier to pretend they were.
When Tamara had gone, Jesse sat in front of the TV and clicked through the channels, looking for a Western.
40
Jesse tried to reconcile the size of the closed white coffin with the skeleton of the girl inside. He tried to reconcile the images of the girl, of her mugging for the camera with Molly and Ginny, with the dirty bones found in a hole on Trench Alley. He stopped soon after he began. These weren’t the kinds of things Jesse focused on. He didn’t see the point. The dead were just that, dead. If humans possessed souls and if there was something that came after this world, Mary Kate’s had gone there a long time ago. The rest of it, these few hours at the funeral home, were for the less fortunate, the ones left behind to suffer.
Jesse made his appearance at the funeral home before receding into the backdrop. He paid his respects to Tess O’Hara and Mary Kate’s sisters and their families. One of the grandkids looked a lot like her late aunt. Mary Kate’s father was nowhere in sight. No surprise in that. But Jesse was surprised by the paltry turnout. Then he remembered what Healy had said to him about small towns and shame. They all just wanted to forget, to go to work, come home and have dinner with their families, watch TV, and be left alone. They wanted to forget. It was Jesse’s job to remember.
He had given Molly the day off to attend the wake and the service, but she came and sat beside him in one of the empty back rows of folding chairs at the funeral home. Molly’s jaw was clenched tightly. Lately, that seemed to be her default expression. The rest of her face was blank, her eyes far, far away.