Night Passage E-Book

Robert B Parker

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 360

Beschreibung

The First Jesse Stone Mystery After a busted marriage kicks his drinking problems into overdrive and the LAPD unceremoniously dump him, 35-year-old Jesse Stone's future looks bleak. He is shocked, however, when a small Massachusetts town called Paradise hires him as their police chief. Once on board he doesn't have to look for trouble in Paradise - it comes to him. For what is on the surface a quiet New England community quickly proves to be a crucible of political and moral corruption - replete with triple homicide, tight Boston mob ties, flamboyantly errant spouses, maddened militiamen and a psychopath-about-town who has fixed his violent sights on the new lawman. He finds he must test his mettle and powers of command to emerge a local hero - or the deadest of dupes.

Leseprobe

THE FIRST JESSE STONE MYSTERY

After a busted marriage kicks his drinking problems into overdrive and the LAPD unceremoniously dump him, 35-year-old Jesse Stone's future looks bleak. He is shocked, however, when a small Massachusetts town called Paradise hires him as their police chief. Once on board he doesn't have to look for trouble in Paradise - it comes to him. For what is on the surface a quiet New England community quickly proves to be a crucible of political and moral corruption - replete with triple homicide, tight Boston mob ties, flamboyantly errant spouses, maddened militiamen and a psychopath-about-town who has fixed his violent sights on the new lawman. He finds he must test his mettle and powers of command to emerge a local hero - or the deadest of dupes.

Filmed starring Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone

Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) has long been acknowledged as the dean of American crime fiction. His novels featuring the wise-cracking, street-smart Boston private-eye Spenser earned him a devoted following and reams of critical acclaim, typified by R.W.B. Lewis’ comment, ‘We are witnessing one of the great series in the history of the American detective story’ (The New York Times Book Review).

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Parker attended Colby College in Maine, served with the Army in Korea, and then completed a Ph.D. in English at Boston University. He married his wife Joan in 1956; they raised two sons, David and Daniel. Together the Parkers founded Pearl Productions, a Boston-based independent film company named after their short-haired pointer, Pearl, who has also been featured in many of Parker’s novels.

Robert B Parker died in 2010 at the age of 77.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR NIGHT PASSAGE

‘Parker’s sentences flow with as much wit, grace and assurance as ever, and Stone is a complex and consistently interesting new protagonist’

- Newsday

‘…Parker’s dialogue is always cutting and laugh out loud funny…’

- Donna Leon

‘The spare style of Parker’s third-person narrative cleans the air’ –

- New York Times

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR ROBERT B. PARKER

‘Parker writes old-time, stripped-to-the-bone, hard-boiled school of Chandler…His novels are funny, smart and highly entertaining…There’s no writer I’d rather take on an aeroplane’

–Sunday Telegraph

‘Parker packs more meaning into a whispered “yeah” than most writers can pack into a page’

–Sunday Times

‘Why Robert Parker’s not better known in Britain is a mystery. His best series featuring Boston-based PI Spenser is a triumph of style and substance’

–Daily Mirror

‘Robert B. Parker is one of the greats of the American hard-boiled genre’

–Guardian

‘Nobody does it better than Parker…’

–Sunday Times

‘Parker’s sentences flow with as much wit, grace and assurance as ever, and Stone is a complex and consistently interesting new protagonist’

–Newsday

‘If Robert B. Parker doesn’t blow it, in the new series he set up in Night Passage and continues with Trouble in Paradise, he could go places and take the kind of risks that wouldn’t be seemly in his popular Spenser stories’

– Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

THE SPENSER NOVELS

Sixkill

Double Deuce

Painted Ladies

Pastime

The Professional

Stardust

Rough Weather

Playmates

Now & Then*

Crimson Joy

Dream Girl(aka Hundred-Dollar Baby)

Pale Kings and Princes

School Days*

Taming a Sea-Horse

Cold Service*

A Catskill Eagle

Bad Business*

Valediction

Back Story*

The Widening Gyre

Widow’s Walk*

Ceremony

Potshot*

A Savage Place

Hugger Mugger*

Early Autumn

Hush Money*

Looking for Rachel Wallace

Sudden Mischief*

The Judas Goat

Small Vices*

Promised Land

Chance

Mortal Stakes

Thin Air

God Save the Child

Walking Shadow

The Godwulf Manuscript

Paper Doll

THE JESSE STONE NOVELS

Split Image

Stone Cold*

Night and Day

Death in Paradise*

Stranger in Paradise

Trouble in Paradise*

High Profile*

Night Passage*

Sea Change*

THE SUNNY RANDALL NOVELS

Spare Change*

Shrink Rap*

Blue Screen*

Perish Twice*

Melancholy Baby*

Family Honor*

ALSO BY ROBERT B. PARKER

Brimstone

Poodle Springs

Resolution

(and Raymond Chandler)

Appaloosa

Love and Glory

Double Play*

Wilderness

Gunman’s Rhapsody

Three Weeks in Spring

All Our Yesterdays

(with Joan H. Parker)

A Year at the Races

Training with Weights

(with Joan H. Parker)

(with John R. Marsh)

Perchance to Dream

*Available from No Exit Press

For Joan:

Anywhere you are is Shangri-la

1

At the end of the continent, near the foot of Wilshire Boulevard, Jesse Stone stood and leaned on the railing in the darkness above the Santa Monica beach and stared at nothing, while below him the black ocean rolled away toward Japan.

There was no traffic on Ocean Avenue. There was the comfortless light of the streetlamps, but they were behind him. Before him was the uninterrupted darkness above the repetitive murmur of the disdainful sea.

A black-and-white cruiser pulled up and parked behind his car at the curb. A spotlight shone on it and one of the cops from the cruiser got out and looked into it. Then the spotlight swept along the verge of the cliffs and touched Jesse and went past him and came back and held. The strapping young L.A. patrolman walked over to him, holding his flashlight near the bulb end, the barrel of it resting on his shoulder, so he could use it as a club if he needed to. The young cop asked Jesse if he was all right. Jesse said he was, and the young cop asked him why he was standing there at four in the morning. The cop looked about twenty-four. Jesse felt like he could be his father, though in fact he was maybe ten years older.

“I’m a cop,” Jesse said.

“Got a badge?”

“Was a cop. I’m leaving town, just thought I’d stand here a while before I went.”

“That your car?” he said.

Jesse nodded.

“What division you work out of?” the young cop said.

“Downtown, Homicide.”

“Who runs it?”

“Captain Cronjager.”

“I can smell booze on you,” the young cop said.

“I’m waiting to sober up.”

“I can drive you home in your car,” the young cop said. “My partner will follow in the black and white.”

“I’ll stay here till I’m sober,” Jesse said.

“Okay,” the young cop said and went back to the cruiser and the cruiser pulled away. No one else came by. There was no sound except the tireless movement of the thick black water. Behind him the streetlights became less stark, and he realized he could see the first hint of the pier to his left. He turned slowly and looked back at the city behind him and saw that it was almost dawn. The streetlights looked yellow now, and the sky to the east was white. He looked back at the ocean once, then walked to his car and got in and started up. He drove along Ocean Avenue to the Santa Monica Freeway and turned onto it and headed east. By the time he passed Boyle Heights the sun was up and shining into his eyes as he drove straight toward it. Say goodbye to Hollywood, say goodbye my baby.

2

Tom Carson sat in the client chair across the desk from Hastings Hathaway in the president’s office of the Paradise Trust. He felt uneasy, as if he were in the principal’s office. He didn’t like the feeling. He was the chief of police, people were supposed to feel uneasy confronting him.

“You can quietly resign, Tom,” Hathaway said, “and relocate, we’ll be happy to help you with that financially, or you can, ah, face the consequences.”

“Consequences?” Carson tried to sound stern, but he could feel the bottom falling out of him.

“For you, and if necessary, I suppose, for your wife and your children.”

Carson cleared his throat, and felt ashamed that he’d had to.

“Such as?” he said as strongly as he could, trying hard to keep his gaze steady on Hathaway.

Why was Hathaway so scary? He was a geeky guy. In the eighth grade, before Hasty had gone away to school, Tom Carson had teased him. So had everyone else. Hathaway smiled. It was a thin geeky smile and it frightened Tom Carson further.

“We have resources, Tom. We could turn the problem over to Jo Jo and his associates, or, depending upon circumstance, we could deal with it ourselves. I don’t want that to happen. I’m your friend, Tom. I have so far been able to control the, ah, firebrands, but you’ll have to trust me. You’ll have to do what I ask.”

“Hasty,” Carson said. “I’m the chief of police, for crissake.”

Hathaway shook his head.

“You can’t just say I’m not,” Carson said.

“You don’t make the rules in this town, Tom.”

“And you do?” Carson said.

His face felt stiff as he spoke and his arms and hands felt weak.

“We do, Tom. Emphasis on the ‘We.’ ”

Carson was silent, staring at Hathaway. The mention of Jo Jo had made him feel loose and fragmented inside. Hathaway took a thick stationery-sized manila envelope from his middle drawer.

“You aren’t much of a policeman, Tom, and it was just a sad accident that you learned things. But you did, and you were right to come first to me. I’ve been able to save you so far from the consequences of your knowledge.”

“What if I went to the FBI with this?”

“This is what I’m trying to forestall,” Hathaway said. “Other people, people like Jo Jo, would prevail. And your family …” Hathaway shrugged and held the shrug for a moment, and sighed as if to himself, before he continued.

“But we both know, Tom, you are not made of that kind of stuff. The better choice for you, and I’m sure you recognize this, is to take our rather generous severance package. We’ve found you a house, and we’ve contributed some cash to help you in relocation costs. The details are in here.”

“What if I promise not to say a word about anything, Hasty. Why can’t I just stay here. You’d have a chief of police that won’t give you any trouble.”

Hathaway shook his head slowly as Carson spoke. He smiled sadly.

“I mean, you know, the next chief,” Carson said, “might be harder to deal with.”

Hathaway continued his sad smile and slow head shake.

“I am trying to help you, Tom,” Hathaway said. “I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself.”

“I’m no troublemaker,” Carson said. “How can you be sure you won’t just get a troublemaker?”

“We have already chosen your successor,” Hathaway said. “He should be just right.”

He held the envelope out toward Tom Carson and, after a moment of empty hesitation, Carson reached out and took it.

3

Jesse drove out Route 10 past upland, where he picked up Route 15 and followed it north to Barstow, where he went east on Route 40. He didn’t turn on the radio. He liked quiet. He set the cruise control to seventy and kept a hand lightly on the steering wheel and slowly settled into himself and allowed his feelings to seep out of the compacted center of himself. He no longer had a badge. He’d turned it in with his service pistol. There was no wedding ring on his left hand. He smiled without pleasure. Turned that in too. It made him feel sort of scared to be without a badge or a wedding ring. Not quite thirty-five and no official status anymore. With his right hand he fished in the gym bag on the front seat beside him until he found his off-duty gun, a short-barreled Smith & Wesson .38. He arranged it near the top of the bag, where it would be easy to reach, and he let his hand rest on it for a time. It made him feel less insubstantial. He stopped at a truck stop outside of Needles, sat at the counter and had orange juice, ham, eggs, potatoes, wheat toast, and three cups of coffee with cream and sugar. It made him feel good. The place was full of truckers and tourists, and he was alone among them. No one paid any attention to him. They were going where they would and he was on his way east. He went to the men’s room and washed his hands and face. Back in the car, cruise control set, he felt a small freshet of excitement. It was afternoon now, the sun was behind him. Shining on what he had left. The road spooled out ahead of him, straight to the horizon, nearly empty. Freedom, he thought, and smiled again, no badge, no ring, no problem. You look at it the right way and that’s freedom. He nursed the excitement as long as he could, trying to build on it.

He stayed the night in Flagstaff, 250 miles north of where he had been born, and went to the motel bar for supper. He ordered scotch on the rocks and a chicken breast sandwich on a croissant. There were a couple of guys in plaid shirts and those little string ties they wore in places like Arizona, the kind with the silver hasp where a knot should be. Both bartenders were women wearing white shirts and black ties and short red jackets. One was a fat blond woman, the other a more slender dark-haired Hispanic girl who would be fat in five more years. Beyond the bar was a room with tables and a dance floor, and the setup for a disc jockey. No one was in the room yet. An unlit piece of neon script over the disc jockey stand spelled out “Coyote Lounge.” He sipped a little scotch, felt the cold heat spread from his esophagus. A tall well-built man in his thirties came into the bar wearing a big Stetson hat and earphones. He seemed to be bouncing slightly to music that only he heard. He had on a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and tight jeans and two-toned lizard-skin cowboy boots. The tiny tape player was tucked into his shirt pocket and the slender cord ran up under his chin. He looked as if he’d just come from a shower and a shave and his cologne came into the bar ahead of him. Clubman, maybe. Jesse watched him. There was nothing particularly interesting about him except that Jesse watched everything. The cowboy ordered a nonalcoholic beer and when it was served he left the glass and picked up the bottle and carried it with him as he walked along the bar looking everything over.

“When’s that dancing start?” he said to one of the bartenders.

He spoke loudly, perhaps because he needed to speak over the music in his ears. He drank his nonalcoholic beer from the bottle, holding it by the neck.

“Nine o’clock,” the Hispanic girl said. She had no accent.

The cowboy looked around the bar at Jesse, at the two guys in plaid shirts drinking beer, at the two bartenders.

“Anybody know a happening place around here?”

One of the beer drinkers shook his head without looking up. Nobody else even acknowledged the question. Everybody knows it, Jesse thought. Maybe it’s how loud he talks. Or how he looks like a model in one of those western-wear catalogs. Or the way he walks around in the little backwater bar, like he was strolling into the Ritz. Whatever it was, everyone knew he was a guy who, encouraged by an answer, would talk to you for much too long. The cowboy nodded to himself, as if his suspicions were confirmed, and walked into the empty dance hall and walked around it, looking at the caricatures of dapper semi-human coyotes hanging on the walls. Then he put his half-finished bottle of nonalcoholic beer on the bar, surveyed the bar again, and walked out.

“Takes all kinds,” the blond bartender said.

A jerk, Jesse thought. A good-looking jerk, but just as lonely and separate as the homely ones. His sandwich came. He ate it because he needed nourishment, and drank two more scotches and paid and went to his room. Nothing was going to happen when they opened up the dance floor that Jesse wanted to watch.

In his room he got the travel bottle of Black Label out of his suitcase and poured some into one of the little sanitary plastic cups he found in the bathroom. The walk down the hall for ice seemed too long so he sipped the scotch warm. He didn’t turn on the television. Instead he stood at the window and looked out at the high pines that rimmed the hill behind the motel. He’d grown up in Tucson when The Brady Bunch was hot, and while it was only four or five hours away, it could have been another planet. Tucson was sunlight and desert and heat, even in January. Up here they had winter. It was 7:45, getting dark. He was still in the same time zone. Jennifer would be home from work. Actually she’d probably be fucking Elliott Krueger about now. He let the images of his wife having sex roll behind his eyes as he stared at the now-dark windowpane and sipped his scotch. His reflection in the windowpane looked somber. He grinned at it, and raised his glass in a toasting gesture. Go to it, Jenn, fuck your brains out. It’s got nothing to do with me. The bravado of it, buoyed with the scotch, made him feel intact for a moment, but he knew it was scotch, and he knew it was bravado, and he knew there was nothing behind the smile in the empty window.

4

Hasty Hathaway had never really worked. His father had made a great deal of money in banking, and while he spent time in his office at the bank he’d inherited, he was mainly busy with being the most prominent citizen in Paradise, chairman of the Board of Selectmen, Commander of Freedom’s Horsemen, and president of the Rotary Club. He stood now in his bedroom with the closet door open thinking about which jacket to wear. His wife lay in bed in her nightgown watching him.

“What about the blue seersucker?” he said.

“Blue looks good on you, Hasty,” Cissy said.

“New chief of police is arriving this week,” Hasty said, “from California.”

“Didn’t you meet him already?”

“Chicago. Burke and I went out to interview the finalists. Stayed at the Palmer House.”

Hasty pulled out the blue seersucker and put it on and turned so Cissy could see him.

“Good,” she said. “Are you going to wear that plaid bow tie?”

“You think I should?”

“It would go very nicely with that shirt and jacket.”

“All right, then,” Hasty said and took it off the tie rack on the back of the closet door.

“Is he a nice boy?” Cissy said.

“The new chief? Well, I hope he’s more than that,” Hasty said. “But he is young, and looks younger than he is. And he has a good record.”

“And he’ll fit in?” Cissy said.

“Yes, we were careful about that,” Hasty said. “That was one of Tom Carson’s problems, so we were all especially alert to that. He’s one of us. Not wealthy of course, but the right background generally. College-educated, too.”

“Really? What school?”

“Out there,” Hathaway said. “One of the big ones, USC, UCLA, I can’t keep them straight. Criminal justice. He took courses at night.”

“It’s always a shame, I think, when a young man can’t get the full college experience. You know, not only classes, but football games and pep rallies, proms, intense discussions in the dorms.”

“I know, but many young men are not as fortunate as we were. They have to make do.”

“Yes.”

As he did every morning Hathaway had a bowl of Wheaties for breakfast and two cups of coffee. Cissy sat across from him in her bathrobe with black coffee and a cigarette. He had quit twenty years earlier. They both wished she could quit, but she couldn’t, and they had concluded that there was no point discussing it. She was a tallish woman with a youthful body. She rarely wore makeup, and if she did it was only lipstick. Her blond hair was starting to show silver and she wore it long. It looked nice with her youthful face.

“Well,” he said, “have to run. Got a bank to run. Got a town to manage.”

“Busy, busy,” she said.

It was what she always said, because that was what he always said. She put her cheek up to be kissed. He kissed it and left, walking out the back door and down the driveway toward the town hall. His clothes always looked slightly unfashionable, as if he had spent money on them a long time ago and then outgrown them. The trouser cuffs were always too high. The jacket sleeves always showed too much shirtsleeve. His belt seemed too high and the waist of his suit coat always seemed a little pinched. Like her smoking, it was something put aside in the long years of marriage, under the heading “for better, for worse.” She put his cereal bowl and coffee cup in the sink, poured herself another cup of coffee, and lit another cigarette and hugged her robe a little snugger around her and looked out at the flower garden which occupied most of her backyard. She’d been flattered to marry a man from such a good family. Later maybe she’d take a bath and shave her legs.

5

The first day’s drive had been tan and parched, the hillsides littered with beige rocks. Every once in a while a tiny funnel of wind ran up a drywash and spiraled a handful of dust across the interstate. Jesse had seen no wildlife, and no vegetation other than the lifeless-looking desert scrub. He saw no water until he crossed the Colorado River near Needles. He was driving the Explorer. He’d left Jennifer the red Miata with the balloon note that she’d pay out of her first big break, she said. Now on his second day out, he was still in the mountains, east of Flagstaff. Green, clean, cool, full of evergreen trees. Very different from the southern Arizona of his childhood. The water bounded down gullies and gushed out of fissures in the rock face. The water ran with an abandon that Jesse had never seen, as if God had too much of it and had simply flung it at this part of the landscape. On cruise control, the car itself seemed to flow through the rich green personless landscape. He turned on the radio and pushed the scan button. The digital dial flashed silently as the radio sought unsuccessfully for a signal strong enough to stop on. One way to tell when you’re in the boonies. It was clear in the mountains and still crisp. Even in late spring, there were still patches of snow, under the low spread of the biggest pine trees. Elliott had probably already screwed her under a tree. By the time he had reached Albuquerque he had dropped two thousand feet, though he was still high. It was impossible to drive across the country without imagining Indians and cavalry and wagon trains and mountain men, and Wells Fargo and the Union Pacific. Deerskin trousers and coats made of buffalo hide and long rifles and traps and whiskey and Indians. Bowie knives. Beaver traps. Buffalo as far as you could look. White-faced cattle. Chuck wagons. Six-guns with smooth handles. Horse and man seemingly like one animal as they moved across the great landscape. Hats and kerchiefs and Winchester rifles and the creak of saddles and the smell of bacon and coffee. East of Albuquerque he was back into sere landscape with high ground lying ominously in the distance, like sleeping beasts at the point where the vast high sky joined the remote landscape. At a rest stop the sign warned of rattlesnakes. He stopped for gas at an Indian reservation in New Mexico. He didn’t know what kinds of Indians they were. Hopi maybe, or Pima. He didn’t know anything about Indians. The gas was cheaper on the reservation and so were cigarettes because neither was subject to federal tax. Signs for miles along the interstate advertised the low price for cigarettes. A couple of Indian men in jeans and white tee shirts and plastic mesh baseball caps were hanging around the self-service pump. One of them eyed the California plates on the car.

“Where you headed,” he said with that indefinable Indian accent.

“Massachusetts,” Jesse said.

The two men looked at each other.

“Massachusetts,” one of them said.

“All the way to Massachusetts?” the other one said.

“Yeah.”

“Driving?”

“All the way,” Jesse said.

“You got to be shitting me, mister. Massachusetts?”

Jesse nodded.

“Massachusetts,” he said.

“Jeesus!”

The pump shut off and Jesse went into the tiny station to pay. There was some motor oil on a shelf. There was the electronic cash register on a tiny counter. There was a fat old Indian woman at the register in a red tee shirt that had “Harrah’s” printed across the front in black letters. A cigarette was stuck in the corner of her mouth and she squinted through the smoke as she took Jesse’s money and rang it up. The rest of the store was filled with stacked cartons of cigarettes.

“Cigarettes?” she said.

“Don’t smoke.”

She shrugged. As Jesse pulled away from the pumps he could see the two Indian men looking after him, talking excitedly. Massachusetts! There was nothing else in the shale and scrub landscape but the station and the two men…. The first time he met Jennifer she had blond hair. He had played basketball for an hour at Sports Club LA, where Magic sometimes worked out, against a bunch of former college players and one guy who’d spent a couple of years as the eleventh man on the Indiana Pacers. Showered and dressed, he was drinking coffee at a table for two in the snack bar during a crowded noontime when she asked if she could sit in the empty seat across from him. He said she could. It was a big part of why he came to Sports Club LA. He didn’t really need to work out much. At six feet and 175 it was as if he’d been born in shape and never really had to work at it. He’d been a point guard at Fairfax High School, the only white point guard in the conference, and he could climb a long rope hand over hand without using his feet. At the Academy he had been the fastest up the rope in his class. Mostly he came to Sports Club LA because he knew there would be many good-looking young women there in excellent physical condition, and he hoped to meet one. He played some handball, some basketball, and drank coffee in the snack bar where, had he wished to, he could have had a blended fruit-and-yogurt frappe or some green vegetable juice. Jennifer set her tray down and smiled at him.

“My name’s Jennifer,” she said.

“Jesse Stone.”

“What are you having?” she said.

Her eyes were blue, the biggest eyes Jesse had ever seen, and the lashes were very long. She was wearing cobalt-and-emerald spandex and her fingernails were painted blue.

“Coffee.”

“Wow,” Jennifer said. “Here in the health food bar?”

Jesse smiled. Jennifer had some kind of sandwich with guacamole on whole wheat bread. When she took a bite the guacamole oozed out of the edges and dribbled on her chin. She giggled as she put the sandwich down and wiped her chin with a napkin. He liked the way she giggled. He liked the way she seemed unembarrassed by slobbering her sandwich on her chin. He liked the way her green headband held her hair back off her face. He liked the fact that her skin was too dark a tone for her blond hair, and he wondered momentarily what her real color was.

“So, you in the business?” Jennifer said.

“I’m a police officer,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“God, you don’t look like one.”

“What do I look like?” Jesse said.

“Like a producer, maybe, or an agent. You know, slim, good haircut, good casual clothes, the Oakley shades.”

Jesse smiled some more.

“You carry a gun?” Jennifer said.

“Sure.”

“Really?”

Jesse opened his coat and turned his body a little so that she could see the nine-millimeter pistol he wore behind his right hip.

“I’ve never even picked up a gun,” Jennifer said.

“That’s good.”

“I’d love to shoot one. Is it hard to shoot one?”

“No,” Jesse said. The gun nearly always worked. Unless they were sort of late-age hippies and then it turned them off. “I’ll take you shooting sometime, if you’d like.”

“Is there a big kick?”

“No.”

Jennifer ate some more sandwich and wiped her mouth.

“If I’d known I was going to eat with someone I wouldn’t have ordered this sandwich,” she said.

Jesse nodded.

“You don’t say much, do you?”

“No,” Jesse said. “I don’t.”

“Why is that, most guys I know around here talk a mile a minute.”

“That’s one reason,” Jesse said.

Jennifer laughed.

“Any other reasons?”

“I can’t ever remember,” Jesse said, “getting in trouble by keeping my mouth shut.”

“So what kind of cop are you? You a detective?”

“Yes.”

“LAPD?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you, ah, stationed? Are cops stationed?”

“I am a homicide detective. I work out of police headquarters downtown.”

“Homicide.”

“Yes.”

Jennifer was silent for a moment thinking about the gap between the world she lived in and the one he worked in.

“Is it like, what? Hill Street Blues?” she said.

“More like Barney Miller,” he said.

It was his standard answer, but it was no truer than any other, just self-effacing, which was why he used it. Being a homicide cop wasn’t like anything on television, but there wasn’t much point in trying to explain that to someone who could never know.

“You an actress?” he said.

“Yes. How did you know?”

It was another thing he always said. He had a good chance to be right in Los Angeles, and even if he were wrong, the girl was flattered.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. “And you have a sort of star quality.”

“Wow, you know the right things to say, don’t you.”

“Just telling the truth,” Jesse said.

“Right now I’m working at the reception desk at CAA,” Jennifer said. “But one of the agents has noticed me and says he’s going to get me some auditions during pilot season.”

“You done any work I might have seen?”

“Mostly nonspeaking parts, crowd scenes, things like that. I’m in a play three nights a week just down the street here. It’s a modern version of a Greek tragedy called The Parcae. I play Clotho.”

“Sounds really interesting,” Jesse said. “I’d like to come see it.”

“I can leave a ticket for you at the box office. All you have to do is let me know the night.”

“How about tonight?” Jesse said.

“Sure.”

“Maybe have a bite afterwards?”

“That would be very nice,” she said.

“Good,” Jesse said. “I’ll meet you afterwards in the lobby.”

She smiled and stood and disposed of her tray.

“If you don’t like the play, don’t arrest me,” she said.

“I’ll like the play,” Jesse said.

He watched her as she walked away. He knew he’d hate the play, but it was part of what he was willing to pay in order to see that body without the Lycra…. At Santa Rosa he crossed the Pecos. It was a pretty ordinary-looking little river to be so famous. What the hell made it so famous? Was it Judge Roy Bean? The law west of the Pecos? Small things pleased him as he drove. He liked seeing the towns that had once marked Route 66: Gallup, New Mexico, Flagstaff, Arizona, Winona. He liked seeing the occasional wind-driven tumbleweed that rolled across the highway. He liked seeing road signs for Indian reservations and places like Fort Defiance. Past Santa Rosa he pulled off of the interstate to get gas and a ham-and-cheese sandwich at a gas station/restaurant in the middle of the New Mexico wilderness. It was the only building in sight with views in all directions to the empty horizon. He pumped his own gas, and a skinny girl with pale skin and a tooth missing took his money and sold him a sandwich. He sat in the car and ate the sandwich and drank a Coke and thought about how alone the skinny girl was and wondered about what she did when she wasn’t working the gas station and selling the pre-wrapped sandwiches. Probably went someplace and watched television off a dish. The sense of her aloneness made him feel a little panicky, and he put the car in gear and drove away, finishing his sandwich on the move. As he drove he ran the ball of his thumb over his wedding ring, in a habitual gesture. But of course there was no wedding ring, only the small pale indentation on his third finger where the ring had been. He glanced at the indentation for a moment and brought his eyes back to the road. The sun was behind him now, the car chasing its own elongated shadow east. He wanted to make Tucumcari by dark … The play had been incomprehensible, he remembered. A lot of white makeup and black lipstick and shrieking. He took her up to a place on Gower called Pinot Hollywood that was open late and featured a martini bar. They drank martinis and ate calamari and talked. Or she talked. She chattered easily and without apparent pretense. He listened comfortably, glad not to talk too much, pleased when she asked him a question that he could answer easily, aware that though she talked a lot she was quite adroit at talking about him. After the bar closed he drove her to West Hollywood where she had an apartment on Cynthia Street above Santa Monica Boulevard. It was 2:30 in the morning and the street was still. At the door she asked if he’d like to come in. He said he would. The apartment was living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. It had been built into one corner of the building so that all the rooms were angular and odd shaped. The living room overlooked the street. The bedroom allowed a glimpse of the pool.

“Would you like a drink, Jesse?”

“Sure,” he said.

She was wearing a little black dress with spaghetti straps and backless high-heeled shoes. She put her hands on her hips and smiled at him. Maybe a little theatrical, but she was an actress.

“Let’s have it afterwards,” she said.

Her bedroom was neat. The bed freshly made. She had probably planned, this afternoon, to ask him in. He watched her undress with the same feeling he used to have when, as a small boy, he unwrapped a present. She folded her dress neatly over the back of a chair and lined her shoes carefully together under it. She squirmed out of her underpants and dropped them into the clothes hamper in her closet. She wiped her lipstick off carefully and dropped the tissue in the wastebasket. They made love on top of the bedspread, and lay together afterward in the dim bedroom listening to the comforting white noise of the air conditioning.

“You’re very fierce, Jesse.”

“I don’t mean to be,” he said.

“No, it’s fine. It’s exciting in fact. But you seem so, um, so still, on the outside and then, you know, wow.”

“You’re pretty exciting,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t like to talk about his emotions.

“I try to be,” she said.

They lay quietly on their backs. His arm under her neck. Her head on his right shoulder.

“I wouldn’t want to make you mad,” Jennifer said.

“You won’t.”

They lay quietly for a while longer, then she got up and put on a longish tee shirt and made them a drink. He felt like a fool sitting naked, but he didn’t want to be so formal as to get fully dressed. He settled for putting his pants on, and leaving his gun holstered on top of her dresser. They sat on stools at the tiny counter that separated her kitchen from her living room, and sipped white wine.

“How’d you get to be a cop, Jesse?”

“I was going to be a baseball player,” Jesse said. “Shortstop. Dodgers drafted me out of high school, sent me to Pueblo. I was doing okay and then one night a guy took me out on a double play at second base. I landed funny, tore up my shoulder, ended the career.”

“Oh, how awful,” she said. “Does it bother you still?”

“Not if I don’t have to throw a baseball.”

“Couldn’t you have played where it didn’t matter?”

“No. I hit okay for a shortstop, but I was going to make it on my glove.”

“Glove?”

“I was a much better fielder,” Jesse said, “than I was a hitter.”

“And you couldn’t just field?”

“No.”

“How old were you?”

“Nineteen,” Jesse said. “I came home, worked construction for six months, joined the Marines, got out, took the exam for fire department, police, and DWP. Cops came through first.”

“Do you miss baseball?”

“Every day,” Jesse said.

“Isn’t it kind of depressing being a policeman?” she said. “You know, seeing all that awfulness.”

Again he was aware of how skillfully she turned the conversation to him. He enjoyed her interest, but more than that he admired her skill.

“I like police work,” he said. “You’re with a bunch of guys, but the work is mostly one on one. Sometimes you get to help people.”

“And the awful things?”

“There’s not as much as you think,” he said.

“But there is some,” she said.

“Sure.”

“What about that.”

“That’s just how it is,” Jesse said.

“That’s all?”

“What else,” Jesse said. “Life’s hard sometimes.”

“So you don’t let it bother you.”

“I try not to,” Jesse said.

6

Jo Jo Genest first got into the money business through a guy named Fusco that he met at the gym in Somerville.

“Guy I know,” Fusco said, “is looking to smurf some cash.”

Jo Jo was sitting spread legged on the floor doing lat pull-backs.

“Whaddya mean smurf?” he said.

“You know, go around to banks,” Fusco said. “Deposit cash for him so he can wire transfer it later.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why the whole thing,” Jo Jo said.

His movements as he pulled the cables and raised the weight were smooth and appeared effortless. His muscles moved like huge serpents under his pale skin.

“Man, where you been?” Fusco said.

“I been around,” Jo Jo said. “Maybe I’m being smart. Tell me the deal.”

Fusco sat on a weight bench with a towel over his thighs. His stomach pushed against his tank top. His thin legs were very white and hairy in blue sport shorts.

“Guy I know makes a lotta money in ways that maybe he shouldn’t, you unnerstand? Lotta money. He needs to wash it, you unnerstand, launder it, so the government can’t find it and if they do, they can’t trace it to him.”

Jo Jo let the cable go slack on the lat pull machine and mopped his face with a hand towel, waiting for the lactic acid to drain from his muscles.

“So he needs to get the dough into banks so that he can transfer it around, maybe overseas.”

“Like to a numbered Swiss bank account,” Jo Jo said.

“Sure,” Fusco said, “like that. Anyway what you do is go around with a sack full of cash and buy cashier’s checks or money orders for amounts small enough so they don’t get reported.”

“What happens then?”

“You give them to me.”

“What do you do with them?”

“None of your business.”

“Aw, Fusco, come off it. You know I’m all right or you wouldn’t have told me this much. What happens to the checks and money orders, they get sent to a Swiss bank?”

Fusco grinned. “You really like them Switzers, don’t you,” he said. “Usually it’s the branch of some South American bank in Florida.”

“So don’t they get reported?”

“No. It’s not a cash deal. CTRs are required only for cash.”

“CTR?”

Jo Jo had begun a second set, holding his upper body still, isolating the muscles. His voice showed no sign of strain.

“Cash Transaction Report.”

“So you change the cash into something else and you don’t have to report it,” Jo Jo said.

“Bada bing,” Fusco said, shooting at Jo Jo with his forefinger. “You want some?”

“How much?”

“Half a percent,” Fusco said. “Everything you smurf. Plus expenses.”

Jo Jo pulled the bar toward him and moved a huge stack of iron plates up by means of a cable-and-pulley arrangement. He held the bar tight against his stomach, then very slowly let it down. Fusco watched him with admiration.

“You gotta focus on the muscle,” Jo Jo said. “You got to be thinking about it when you work it. On this one it’s the lats, nothing else, just think about the lats, Fusco.”

“Half a percent,” Fusco said again. “You interested?”

“Sure,” Jo Jo said.

7