Although he felt a warm sense of relief, Jesse sat stony-faced. A week could be an eternity or it could be over in the blink of an eye, but at least he still had his job and a chance to do right by the dead girls.
“Did you hear me, Jesse?”
“I’ve got a bad shoulder, not bad ears.”
“The mayor wanted your ass on a silver platter and she wanted it right now. My other colleagues were pretty tepid in their support of you. I bought you a week.”
“A week to solve three homicides, two of which happened twenty-five years ago. Should I find the killers of Judge Crater in my spare time?”
“Jesse, you can be an ungrateful SOB and a hard man to like sometimes.”
“Sorry, Bill. I know that most of the time you are my sole backer in town.”
Marchand grabbed at his chest to feign a heart attack. “I think I need another drink and some CPR. Was that an apology I just heard coming out of your mouth?”
“Giving me a time limit isn’t going to solve these cases for you or for anyone you bring in to sit in this chair.”
“I know that, Jesse. I told them all that. I told them that till I was blue in the face.” Marchand stood, looking worse than he had when Jesse had laid eyes on him earlier. He walked to the office door and turned back to Jesse and in a voice as cool as a crocodile’s said, “You’ve got a week.”
50
Stu Cromwell was happy to see Jesse walk into his office. It was easy for Jesse to read Stu’s smile. Murder sells papers, and just recently Paradise had plenty to sell. And Jesse knew that the few crumbs he’d thrown Cromwell’s way had let the newspaperman sell some stories to larger news services and earn a little money beyond the sales of his own paper, the circulation of which was forever dwindling. Until their last visit together, Jesse hadn’t realized just how dire the paper’s situation was. If the current events kept the paper going a little longer, so be it.
Cromwell nodded, gestured to the empty seat across from him, but didn’t get up.
“Jesse.”
“Stu.”
Cromwell reached into his drawer, pulled out a fresh bottle of Canadian Club and two glasses. “Drink?”
“Everybody’s starting early today.”
“How’s that?”
“Forget it, Stu. None for me, but go right ahead.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, twisting the cap and breaking the seal. “You sure?”
Jesse nodded. Cromwell poured and sipped.
“You’ve been hitting it mighty hard lately, Stu. Last time I was in here, the bottle was still pretty full.”
Cromwell looked confused, then recovered. “Yeah. Between Martha and the long hours since the bodies have been discovered. You know how it is.”
“I do.”
“So what can I do you for, Jesse? You have something for me?”
“I might, but first I’d like to talk about Paradise.”
“What about it?”
“When the girls went missing, what was the town like? I haven’t been able to get a grip on that, no matter how many old files I read or pictures I look at. Everyone tells me it was smaller then. I get that much.”
Cromwell poured himself some more rye, then put away the bottle and the extra glass he’d taken out for Jesse. He sat back in his seat.
“It was a different place back then,” he said, a wistful look on his face. “Obviously we were just as close to Boston, but it might as well have been a different world. It was a smaller town with a small-town feel. But for the ocean and the whaling nonsense, it was more like northern New England, more Maine or New Hampshire than a secondary suburb of Boston. Does that make any sense?”
“Some.”
“It was less affluent. The old families that had established the town were either dying off, moving out, or running out of funds. Stiles Island wasn’t very developed yet. The people who lived here then were, for the most part, people born and raised here. We’d had a few ‘white flight’ refugees from Boston, but not many to speak of. There wasn’t a whole lot of crime.”
“Sounds a little too good to be true.”
Cromwell sipped some more of his drink. “Don’t misunderstand. It wasn’t nirvana. We had our issues. The Swap was getting pretty bad and there weren’t a whole lot of jobs being created in the area. We had our share of abusive parents, wife beaters, drunks, and thieves, but until the girls went missing, most people left their cars and houses unlocked.”
Jesse asked, “Are you saying that the town changed when Mary Kate and Ginny went missing?”
“No. It had already started to change, but that July fourth is a convenient line of demarcation. By the time the girls disappeared, the whole world had changed. It had begun to contract, and as the world seemed to get smaller, Paradise seemed to lose its small town — ness. Maybe it was AIDS or MTV or the first computers, I don’t know. It just became harder to be apart from the rest of the world. Stiles Island was slated for development. The yacht club was expanding and people with money had begun to move in from Boston and New York City. But when the girls went missing, it became an easy dividing line with which to view Paradise’s history. And here’s the hardest part to believe. Paradise supported two daily newspapers. Amazing.”
Jesse took it all in, thinking if he had any other questions. Cromwell got impatient.
“Anything else, Jesse? You mentioned you had something for me.”
“I said I might have something for you.”
“Do you?” He finished his drink.
“Remember I told you about Maxie Connolly’s missing items?”
“Was on this morning’s front page.” He held up a copy of the paper for Jesse to see, his index finger pointing at the headline:
“I take it you haven’t seen this until now,” Cromwell said.
“I’ve been a little busy today, Stu.”
“Sorry, but what about Maxie’s missing items?”
“They’re not missing anymore. We found them in the apartment of a cabdriver, a man with a record named Rod Wiethop. W-i-e-t-h-o-p.” Jesse spelled it out and slid a file across Cromwell’s desk. “Here’s his driver’s license photo, his license plate number, and a description of his car. As far as we know, he was the last person to see Maxie alive.”
“I take it Mr. Wiethop isn’t in police custody?”
Jesse nodded.
“Do you think he robbed her?”
“Possibly.”
Cromwell smiled. “Possibly?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Are you now questioning whether or not Maxie committed suicide?”
“Draw your own conclusions. That’s what newspaper people do, isn’t it?”
Cromwell’s smile got bigger. “Can we go off the record?”
“Okay,” Jesse agreed. “Off the record.”
“Do you think Wiethop killed her?”
“No.”
“But you think somebody did?”
“Maybe.”
Cromwell was silent.
“You have my permission to attribute all the on-the-record stuff to me. You print any of that off-the-record stuff and attribute it to me, Stu, we’ll have a major problem. It’ll be personal, not official.” Jesse walked to the door. “By the way, I’m about to call a press conference for...” He looked at his watch. “For one p.m. You’ll want to be there.”
“About Maxie?” Cromwell asked.
“Everything but. Maxie’s your exclusive.”
“Anything else, Jesse?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What?”
“Bring a big notepad. You’ll need it.”
51
That was the odd thing, that it should have been the three of them to have killed the girls. It wasn’t like they were that close, not then and certainly not now. Of all the many things haunting him about that long-ago Fourth of July, it was that it should have been the three of them. There were a thousand what-ifs that might have changed all their destinies, but it was his curse that he should be bound to these two morons for eternity. They had been teammates. Friendly enough, but not really friends. John and Alexio were buds. He and Zevon were close, but it wasn’t like they all hung out together. Before that night, he couldn’t recall a single time when he’d hung out with Millner and Dragoa without the other guys around.