She smiled, but it quickly vanished. “Remember when I told you that it would take some twisted logic for me to explain how taking the medical examiner’s job here was career advancement?”
“A long story for another time,” he said.
She nodded. “Exactly.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “Now’s the time.”
She smiled without joy. “It would seem to be.”
The server returned with the scotch and started to ask about a food order. When he saw the scowl on Jesse’s face, the server disappeared.
“Perfect timing,” she said. She gulped her scotch and took a second to compose herself. “Two years ago, I was working a night rotation and I signed off on an autopsy done by a more junior colleague on a nineteen-year-old female suicide. The deceased had been found unresponsive in the bathroom at a friend’s party in Greenwich Village. It all seemed like a pretty straightforward opioid overdose. There were no signs of violence, no physical trauma. The victim had ready access to the drugs. Grandma had terminal cancer. The girl also apparently had a history of chronic depression. But the family refused to accept our findings.”
“Parents never want to hear that their kid’s killed herself. Means they failed.”
“Especially politically connected parents with money.”
“Lots of those in New York City,” he said.
“They brought in their own expert and had a second autopsy done.”
“And?”
“And their expert found something we missed, some very slight swelling around a tiny puncture wound that he claimed was an injection site. With this one fact, he fabricated a ludicrous scenario involving forced ingestion of pills and a lethal injection. It was absurd.”
“But.”
“But the doctor who performed the original autopsy had missed the swelling and I missed that he missed it.”
“That couldn’t be enough to get you fired,” Jesse said.
“It could be if you were having an affair with the person who screwed up the autopsy and if a jealous, backstabbing son-of-a-bitch coworker whispered in your boss’s ear.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I didn’t get fired, exactly,” she said. “None of this was leaked to the media, but it was made pretty clear to me that if I pushed back, there would be consequences. So I got pointed to the exit door and got a kick in the ass for a good-bye present. I took a year off and traveled to let things settle out before I began applying for jobs. Not too many takers, though. I guess not many folks believed I just wanted a more quiet life than New York City offered.”
“Or just maybe there were carefully directed whispers.”
“Maybe. So you can see why I thought that your questioning my findings about Maxie Connolly’s COD would make me think you knew,” she said, her voice brittle.
He nodded. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”
“I suppose what happened to Maxie Connolly might’ve been the result of foul play, but I didn’t find any evidence indicating that it was.”
No one needed to teach Jesse Stone a lesson on following the evidence.
“Do you really think it was a homicide?” she asked.
He explained about the missing cell phone and about what they had so conveniently discovered under Wiethop’s bed.
“It was like it was left there for us to find. It should have been gift wrapped with a bow on it.”
“Or maybe the guy wasn’t exactly a criminal genius.”
“He was a con, Doc. I could tell. He reeked of jail time. He might not have been a genius, but he was a criminal and he wasn’t a kid. He’d know not to leave evidence around like that even if he was taking off for good. Without that stuff there, no one would have even cared that he left. Leaving that stuff under his bed was like leaving a sign that said Come and get me.”
“What’s that expression cops always use? If criminals had half a brain—”
“We’d be in trouble.” Jesse nodded. “If we had only found the phone or a suicide note by where Maxie went over the Bluffs, I would feel better about it being a suicide.”
“It was pretty windy the night she died, Jesse. The note might’ve blown out to sea from up there for all you know and the cabbie might’ve taken the cell phone with him when he split.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“Look, Jesse...” Tamara stared into her empty glass.
He understood. “Don’t worry about it. No one will hear about what happened in New York from me, not even if my hunch turns out to be right. I don’t throw my friends under the bus.”
“Good to know.”
“Can’t afford to,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“Don’t have many friends.”
Tamara Elkin smiled again and let out a big sigh of relief.
Jesse said, “Can we order now? I’m pretty hungry.”
She nodded and Jesse waved to the waiter.
46
After his rendezvous with Tamara Elkin, Jesse went back to his house and poured himself a few fingers of Johnnie Walker Black. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to drink it. He just turned the glass around and around in his fingers, staring at it. He had struggled with drinking for most of his adult life and had, with Dix’s help, come to a sort of peace about it with himself. It was the same kind of uneasy Zen he’d reached about his shoulder injury: He wasn’t ever going to play shortstop in the major leagues and he was never going to stop drinking. When he finally accepted the reality of his drinking, it ceased filling in every crease and crack in his life. The struggle no longer took up so much of his energy.
The strange thing is that he could stop the physical act of drinking. Had stopped for weeks at a time. For months at a time. But the thirst, the desire, never left him. So even when he wasn’t drinking, he never stopped wanting to. He played out the rituals of it with club soda and lime. He still came home and discussed his woes with his poster of Ozzie Smith, glass in hand. It was folly and somewhere he knew it. Like many things drinkers do, he told himself he was doing it to prove a point to the world when, in fact, the world didn’t care and it proved very little. As was often the case, it was Dix who’d held the mirror up to Jesse’s version of the emperor’s new clothes.
One day he got fed up with Dix and told him so.
“You know I come in here every week and tell you I haven’t had a drink in months and you can’t be bothered to say a word about it.”
“Dickens got paid by the word, Jesse, not me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you don’t pay me to pat you on the back for being a good boy.”
“An occasional attaboy would be nice.”
“If I thought it was called for, I’d give it.”
“And not drinking for nearly a year doesn’t call for it?”
“Look, Jesse, like I said, I’m not here to pat you on the back and you’re not here to be a good patient. You drinking or not drinking doesn’t change the nature of my job. Other than not actually ingesting alcohol, have you changed?”
“I guess not.”
“I never fooled you that talk therapy was going to do much to stop your drinking. If you want to stop, you’ll stop. But if you do, when you do, do it for yourself because it’s what you want, not to prove something to me or Jenn or anyone else. What you’re doing now, it’s like someone proving he can hold his breath for a long time. No matter how long he holds his breath, it doesn’t mean he’s going to actually stop breathing. Eventually, he’s going to take another breath.”
That night Jesse went home and stopped holding his breath. And when he drank again it was as if he had lost the weight of the baggage he’d been toting around with him since he’d left L.A.