“And the other one?”
“Unknown contributor.”
“Not Wiethop?”
“Definitely not Wiethop,” Healy said.
“Doesn’t make sense. Did the unknown contributor leave semen?”
“No semen. Skin cells. Lots of ’em. Some gray facial hairs, too.”
“Gray facial hairs and skin cells,” Jesse said to himself out loud.
“Wait, it gets even stranger. Wiethop did leave prints and DNA on the other things you guys found in his apartment, but the unknown contributor left nothing on those items. Only on the panties. What do you think?”
Jesse said, “I think someone’s jerking us around.”
“Wiethop?”
“Maybe, but I doubt it. He’s an ex-con cabdriver living over a deli, not a rocket scientist. For now, I’m more focused on Dragoa.”
“Like I said, Jesse, the marine unit’s out there searching. Between them and the Coast Guard, they’ll find the boat.”
“Do me a favor, Healy. Fax me the report.”
“Already done. Jameson still unconscious?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You have that talk with Molly Crane yet?”
“Just got done.”
“How’d she take it?”
“About as well as you’d expect,” Jesse said, “but she alibied Zebriski for the entire night of that July fourth. She wouldn’t lie to me about that.”
“You sure about that, Jesse? You remember being young and in love. Women are kinda peculiar about their first loves.”
“I’m sure.”
“But why kill this Zebriski guy if he had no part in it? And what was he doing back in Paradise?”
“Those are two of the million-dollar questions.”
There was a knock at the bathroom door. “C’mon, man, sometime this week, huh?”
“Okay, Healy. Talk to you tomorrow.”
When Jesse stepped out of the men’s room, one of the news crews’ cameramen was on the other side of the door.
“Sorry about that, Chief. I didn’t know it was you in there.”
“If you knew it was me, would you have had to go any less?”
“I guess not. And speaking of that...”
Jesse stepped out of his way.
74
Stu Cromwell was in his office, a nearly empty bottle of rye and a pretty tall glass of it on the desk in front of him. Although he had told Jesse to come in, he looked lost in thought and time. Maybe it was Martha. Maybe not. Maybe, Jesse thought, Cromwell was just drunk.
“Bad time?”
“The last few years have been a bad time,” Cromwell said, eyes still looking into the middle distance. “Since Al Gore invented the fucking Internet, it’s been a bad time for newspapers. Why should today be an exception?”
“Fair question. How’s Martha doing?”
“Just a matter of time for her.”
“Matter of time for all of us, Stu.”
“She’s got less of it than most,” the newspaperman said, finishing the rye in his glass and pouring some more. He didn’t offer any to Jesse. “If she wasn’t in so much pain, I’d say she was the lucky one. But there I go again, feeling sorry for myself.”
“Sorry it’s been rough.”
“Sorry. Yeah, me, too, for a lot of things. You know Edith Piaf, Jesse?”
“The singer?”
Cromwell nodded, taking another drink. “She has this song, ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.’ I have no regrets. I wonder if she meant it. Do you think she meant it? You think it’s possible to have no regrets? I wonder sometimes what that would be like, having no regrets.”
“Everybody’s got regrets.”
Cromwell laughed, but it was unclear exactly why. “I had a roommate in college, Jeff Rosen. His dad was a rabbi. He told me once that his dad used to say that to live was to have regrets. Do you think that’s true? I guess you do.”
“What’s going on, Stu?”
Cromwell ignored the question.
“Regrets. We all have ’em. Some of us more than others.”
Jesse asked the question he had asked before. “What’s going on?”
Cromwell went silent and looked at Jesse as if just realizing Jesse was really there with him. “Why are you here, Jesse?”
“To keep my word. I’ve got something for you.”
Cromwell laughed that odd laugh again and tossed some legal-looking papers at Jesse. “The bank’s foreclosing on me.”
“Sorry to hear it. Isn’t there anything you can do? Can you stall them?”
Cromwell finished his drink and poured the remainder of the bottle into his glass. “We’ve depleted most of Martha’s inheritance propping the paper up and they’ve already restructured the loans three times. This is the end, das Ende.”
“What will you do?”
He laughed. It was a hollow laugh. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll open up a self-defense dojo for broken old men. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Chief,” Cromwell said, an unfamiliar nasty edge to his voice. “I’ve got black belts in jiujitsu and aikido, though I haven’t trained in years. I’m the world’s most dangerous newspaperman... ex-newspaperman. Maybe you can use me on the Paradise PD. I hear you’re another man short. Suit okay?”
“Banged up.”
“And the other man?” Cromwell asked, unable to turn off his newspaper instincts.
“Not great. Still unconscious. When are you closing shop?”
Cromwell looked at his watch. “As of two hours ago.”
Jesse stood and offered his hand to Cromwell, but Cromwell was off in his head somewhere again.
“Old men do very foolish things, Jesse. Desperately foolish things. They do things to hold on to the crumbs they’ve accumulated, only to find out the crows have already eaten the crumbs. But you can’t take things back, can you? You can’t undo things once they’re done.”
“If we could undo things,” Jesse said, “Piaf would be right and Rabbi Rosen would be wrong.”
“So even though I have no paper to print the story in, let me feel like a newspaperman one last time. Tell me what you came to tell me. Please.”
“It’s about Maxie Connolly. Doesn’t matter now.”
Cromwell finished the rye in his glass and with tears in his eyes began singing in French, “‘Non, rien de rien...’”
Jesse closed the door behind him. Even halfway down the stairs, he could still hear Cromwell singing.
75
Jesse had a long talk with Ozzie Smith over a few Black Labels. The thing with Suit hadn’t hit him until he was on the way home that evening. He’d taken his usual drive around town, but added a slow cruise along Trench Alley past what was now a cracked concrete slab where the bodies had been found, and a drive up into the Bluffs. With the exception of the detour down Trench Alley, it was the same route he’d taken the night of the nor’easter. That storm had brought more with it than wind and snow. It brought with it the past.
As he sat in his Explorer on the grounds of the old Rutherford mansion, the place where he’d confronted John Millner the night of the storm, Jesse remembered something he’d once read in a magazine on a long bus trip from Vero Beach to Fort Myers. That’s what you did in spring training, you rode buses to away games. And on those long, boring bus rides, you read or played cards or listened to music. That was a special spring, the spring he’d been anointed, the spring when the GM of the Dodgers told him that if he hit at all in Triple-A, he’d be a September call-up to the big club.
The article he’d read on that long-ago bus ride was about an almost perfectly preserved P-38 Lightning discovered in the North African desert. It had disappeared in late August 1944 and the military had given up all hope of ever finding it. The article said that this sort of thing wasn’t that unusual. That in the scheme of things, given the enormous scale of Allied air force operations during the war, dozens of planes had gone missing in every theater of battle, the most famous being a B-24D Liberator called Lady Be Good, lost in Libya in 1943 and discovered in 1958. The remains of the crew were discovered miles away from the wreckage in 1960. He remembered that he’d heard about the Lady Be Good even before reading about it. You grow up in Arizona, the home of the airplane graveyard, you hear stories. And the Lady Be Good incident had inspired one of his favorite Twilight Zone episodes.