Trouble in Paradise E-Book

Robert B Parker

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 300

Beschreibung

The Second Jesse Stone Mystery Stiles Island is a wealthy and exclusive enclave separated by a bridge from the Massachusetts coastal town of Paradise. James Macklin sees Stiles Island as the ultimate investment opportunity: all he needs to do is invade the island, blow up the bridge, and get to work. To realise his investment, Macklin, along with his devoted girlfriend, Faye, assembles a crew of fellow ex-cons - all experts in their fields - including Wilson Cromartie, a fearsome Apache. James Macklin is a bad man - a very bad man. And Wilson Cromartie, known as Crow, is even worse. As Macklin plans his crime, Paradise Police Chief Jesse Stone has his hands full. He faces romantic entanglements in triplicate: his ex-wife, Jenn, is in the Paradise jail for assault; he's begun a new relationship with a Stiles Island realtor named Marcy Campbell; and he's still sorting out his feelings for attorney Abby Taylor. When Macklin's attack on Stiles Island is set in motion, both Marcy and Abby are put in jeopardy. As the casualties mount, it's up to Jesse to keep both women from harm.

Leseprobe

The Second Jesse Stone Mystery

Stiles Island is a wealthy and exclusive enclave separated by a bridge from the Massachusetts coastal town of Paradise. James Macklin sees Stiles Island as the ultimate investment opportunity: all he needs to do is invade the island, blow up the bridge, and get to work. To realise his investment, Macklin, along with his devoted girlfriend, Faye, assembles a crew of fellow ex-cons - all experts in their fields - including Wilson Cromartie, a fearsome Apache. James Macklin is a bad man - a very bad man. And Wilson Cromartie, known as Crow, is even worse.

As Macklin plans his crime, Paradise Police Chief Jesse Stone has his hands full. He faces romantic entanglements in triplicate: his ex-wife, Jenn, is in the Paradise jail for assault; he's begun a new relationship with a Stiles Island realtor named Marcy Campbell; and he's still sorting out his feelings for attorney Abby Taylor. When Macklin's attack on Stiles Island is set in motion, both Marcy and Abby are put in jeopardy. As the casualties mount, it's up to Jesse to keep both women from harm.

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 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:Paradise Regained

1

When he was sleepless, which was less often than it used to be, Jesse Stone would get into the black Explorer he’d driven from L.A. and cruise around Paradise, Massachusetts, where he was chief of police. Nights like tonight, with the rain slanting down through the dark, and the streets shiny in the headlights, were the ones Jesse liked best. It would have been nice, Jesse thought, on a night like this, to have been a town marshal somewhere in the old west, where he could have relaxed into the saddle under his oilskin slicker with his hat yanked down over his eyes and let the horse find its own direction. He drove slowly past the town common with its white colonial meetinghouse on which the rain had fallen for two hundred years. The blue glare of the mercury street lamps diffused by the rain was restrained and opalescent. Except for the headlights of the Explorer, there were no other lights in this part of town. The neat houses with large lawns around the common were still and unlit. Nothing moved. The town library was blank. The high school stood inert, its red brick glistening with rain, its black windows implacable in the arc of headlights as Jesse turned into the parking lot.

He stopped the car for a moment and flicked on the high beams. The headlights rested on the baseball diamond: the rusting screen of the backstop, the slab of rubber on the pitcher’s mound, bowed slightly, the hollow in front of it where the high school kids lunged off the rubber, trying to pitch off leg drive like Nolan Ryan. When he’d been in the minors, he could play the deepest short in the league because he had the big arm and could make the throw from the hole. Gave him range. Gave him more time. He could run. He had good hands. He could hit enough for a middle infielder. But it was the arm. Bigger arm than Rick Burleson, they used to tell him. Ticket to the show. Jesse rubbed his right shoulder as he looked at the baseball field. He remembered when he hurt it, at the start of a double play. It had been a clean take out. And it ended his career…

Jesse let the car slide forward and turned and went down Main Street toward the water. He pulled off the street into the empty parking lot at Paradise Beach. He let the motor idle. The rain intensified the sea smell. In the headlights the surf came in and curled and crested and broke, the black ocean making the hard rain seem trivial. A thermos of pina coladas would be nice to drink sitting here, and maybe some music. He thought about Jenn. She had an infinite capacity for romance. If she were here, she would lean back with her eyes closed and talk with him and listen to him and let herself feel the romance of the late night and the rain and the sound of the ocean. And let him share it with her. Sometimes he thought he missed that more than anything else in the marriage. Ten years in L.A. Homicide hadn’t extinguished his sense of romantic possibility. It had demonstrated beyond argument that romance was not at all likely. But in showing its evanescence, experience had made Jesse more certain that the possibility of romance was the final stay against confusion. Maybe for Jenn too. Long after the divorce, they were still connected. When she heard last year that he was in trouble, she’d come east. It wasn’t the kind of trouble she could help with. She would have known that. She had come, simply, he supposed, when he allowed himself to think about it, to be there. And she was still here, living here. And what the hell were they going to do now? He put the car in drive and turned slowly out of the parking lot and drove along the beachfront toward downtown. Neither booze nor his ex-wife were good for him, and he shouldn’t spend too much time thinking of them.

The marquee of the movie theater was unlit. The stores were dark. The street lights cycled through the red, yellow, green changes unobserved. He went up Indian Hill and into Hawthorne Park. He parked very near the edge of the high ground and shut off the headlights and let the car idle again while he looked out over the harbor. To his left the harbor emptied into the open ocean. To his right the harbor dead-ended at the causeway that ran from Paradise to Paradise Neck. The neck was straight across the harbor, a low dark form with a lighthouse on the north point. Just inside the lighthouse point, a hundred yards off shore, crossing the T of the point at a slant, was Stiles Island. The near end of it shielded the harbor mouth, the far end jutted beyond the point into the open sea. In the channel, between the island and the neck, where the land pressed the water on either side, Jesse knew that the ocean currents seethed dangerously, and the water was never still. But from here, there was no hint of it. The calm sweep of the lighthouse just touched the expensive rooftops of the carefully spaced houses, and ran the full length of the barrel-arched bridge that connected it to the neck. The rest was darkness.

Jesse sat for a long time in the darkness looking at the ocean and the rain. The digital clock on the dash read 4:23. In clear weather the eastern sky would be pale by now and in another half hour or so, this time of year, it would be light. Jesse turned on the headlights and backed the car up and headed back down the hill to shower and change and put on his badge.

2

By the time Macklin was out of jail for a week, he had acquired a brown Mercedes sedan, which he stole from the Alewife Station parking garage, and a 9-mm semiautomatic pistol that he got from a guy he’d done time with named Desmond. Macklin used the nine to knock over a liquor store near Wellington Circle. With the money from the liquor store, he paid Desmond’s cousin Chick, who worked at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, to fix up a registration in the name of Harry Smith and scam a legitimate license plate. He had the car painted British racing green. Then he bought a fifth of Belvedere vodka and a bottle of Stock vermouth and drove over to see Faye.

As soon as he walked in the apartment, she slipped out of the bathrobe she was wearing and in five minutes they were making love. When it was over, Faye got up and made them each a martini and brought the drinks back to bed.

“Saved that up for a year and a half,” Macklin said.

“I could tell,” Faye said.

They were propped among the pink and lavender pillows on Faye’s king-sized bed with the martinis next to Macklin’s pistol on the bedside table. The bedroom walls were lavender, and the ceiling was mirrored. The condominium was in the old Charlestown Navy Yard, and through the second floor windows they could see the Boston skyline across the harbor.

“You too?” Macklin said.

“Me too what?” Faye said.

She had a rose tattooed at the top of her right thigh. “You been saving it for a year and a half?”

“Of course,” she said.

Macklin drank some of his martini. The sheets on Faye’s bed were lavender.

“Nobody else?”

“Nobody,” Faye said.

Staring up at the mirrored ceiling, she liked the way they looked. He was slim and smooth. He was so blond that his hair was nearly white. He looked a little pale now, but she knew he’d get his tan back. She loved the contrast of his white-blond hair and his tan skin. She examined herself carefully. Boobs still good. Legs still good. They ought to be. Forty-five minutes every day on the goddamned StairMaster. She rolled onto her side, and looked at her butt. Tight. StairMaster does it again.

“Checking out the equipment?” Macklin said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Seems to be working okay,” Macklin said.

She giggled.

“How about yours?” she said.

“Pretty soon.”

They finished their martinis in silence. “What are we going to do?” Faye said.

“The same thing mostly,” Macklin said, “but I was thinking maybe we could try it in the chair.”

Faye giggled again. “I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean what are we going to do, you know, like with our life?”

“Besides this?”

“Besides this.”

Macklin smiled. He sat up higher in the bed and poured another martini for himself and one for Faye.

“Well, tomorrow,” Macklin said, “we’re going up to Paradise and look at real estate on Stiles Island.”

“What’s Stiles Island?”

“Island in Paradise Harbor. It’s connected to the rest of the town by a little bridge. Bridge is gated and there’s a guard shack and a private security patrol. Everybody lives there is rich. They got a branch bank out there just for them.”

“How do you know about this place?”

“Guy I was in jail with, Lester Lang, kept talking about it, called it the mother lode.”

“You ever seen it?”

“Nope.”

“We going to buy property out there?” Faye said.

“Nope.”

“So why we going up there to look at real estate?” “We’re scoping the place.”

“For what?”

“For the mother of all stickups,” Macklin said.

Faye put her head against his shoulder and laughed, “I’ll drink to that,” she said, touching the rim of her glass to the rim of his.

3

Suitcase Simpson came through the open door into Jesse’s office without knocking. He said, “Jesse, was that your ex-wife I seen on TV last night?”

“I don’t know, Suit,” Jesse said. “What did you see?”

“Channel Three News,” Simpson said. “They got a new weather girl, Jenn Stone.”

She’d used her married name.

“Weather girl?” Jesse said.

“Yeah, they said she was from Los Angeles and were joking around with her about how it would be pretty different trying to report New England weather.”

“And it looked like Jenn?”

“Yeah, I only seen her that one time, but you know she’s not somebody you forget.”

“No,” Jesse said, “she’s not.”

“Was she a weather girl in L.A.?” Simpson said. “No, she was an actress.”

“Well, maybe she’s acting like a weather girl.”

“Maybe,” Jesse said. “Was she on at six or eleven?”

“I saw her at six,” Simpson said.

“I’ll take a look tonight,” Jesse said.

“I guess she’s not going back to L.A.,” Simpson said. “Looks that way for now,” Jesse said.

Simpson stood for a moment, as if he wanted to say other things but didn’t know how to. Finally he said, “Well, I figured you’d want to know.”

“I would, thanks, Suit.”

Simpson hesitated another moment and then nodded as if answering yes to a question no one had asked, turned, and went out of the office.

She’s using her married name.

Jesse swiveled his chair around and put his feet up on the windowsill and looked out. It has to be Jenn, he thought. It’s too big a coincidence. Three thousand miles away from her, he’d gotten his feelings under control. He hadn’t stopped loving her, but the fact that he did love her didn’t mean he had to be with her, and it didn’t mean he couldn’t love anybody else. Or at least it hadn’t meant that, or he’d thought it hadn’t meant that, while she was three thousand miles away in bed with a movie producer. But here …

Molly Crane came in from the desk.

“Jesse,” she said, “the fire this morning down at Fifty-nine Geary Street? Anthony says it looks like it was set, thinks you should have a look.”

Jesse swiveled slowly back around. “Geary Street,” he said.

“They got the fire pretty well knocked down,” Molly said. “But Anthony’s there and the fire captain.” Jesse nodded.

“They’re waiting on you, Jesse.”

Jesse smiled. Molly was like a third-grade teacher. “On my way,” he said.

He didn’t use the siren. One of his hard rules for the department was no sirens, no flashing lights, unless it was a time-sensitive emergency.

That end of Geary Street converged with Preston Road to form a triangle two blocks from the beach. Fifty-nine Geary was at the apex of the triangle. It was separated from the next house by a vacant lot. Both Geary and Preston were blocked off when Jesse arrived. Pat Sears was rerouting traffic away from the area. Jesse stopped beside him.

“You want me to get couple more people down here for traffic?” he said.

Pat blew his whistle and vigorously gestured a Buick station wagon to proceed past Jesse’s car.

“You bet,” he said to Jesse. “We need somebody down the other end, and maybe another guy up there.” He nodded toward the traffic trying to inch past the fire captain’s car that jutted out into LaSalle Street.

“I’ll call Molly,” Jesse said and drove down to the fire scene. There were half a dozen fire trucks. Both of the Paradise trucks and four from neighboring departments. Jesse parked among them and got out. Arleigh Baker, the fire captain, was standing on the front lawn. Technically, as director of Public Safety, Jesse was the fire chief too. But since Jesse knew little about fighting fires, and Arleigh knew a lot, Arleigh ran the fire department. He was short and fat and looked slightly Napoleonic in his helmet, boots, and raincoat.

“Looking good, Arleigh,” Jesse said.

“I look like a goddamned asshole in this outfit,” Arleigh said. Jesse smiled, and looked at the still smoking remnant of the house. Its superstructure was still standing. There was a hole in the roof, and all the windows were out. Part of the front wall had burned away. Inside was black with ash and crisscrossed with charred timber.

“Suspicious origin?” Jesse said.

“Take a look,” Arleigh said and started for the front door.

The fire had been at its most intense in the living room, to the right as Jesse entered the front door. Most of the floor was gone, and part of the back wall had burned through to the kitchen behind it. On the left-hand wall, where the fire hadn’t bitten, the word FAGGOTS was spray painted in large black letters.

“Watch your step,” Arleigh said.

Jesse was wearing sneakers. The floor was still warm in places and there were pieces of lath lying about bristling with thinshanked nails. Jesse stepped carefully through the debris. In his boots, Arleigh paid it no heed.

Up the stairwell it said FAGGOTS, and in two of the upstairs rooms, where the damage was largely smoke staining, the word was curlicued repetitively on the walls.

“Not an inventive bastard,” Jesse said.

“We’ll have the state fire marshal in here later on,” Arleigh said. “Give us something more definitive. But it looks to me that the fire started right in the middle of the living room floor. That’s unusual, unless somebody just dumped a can of gasoline on the rug and let her rip.”

He was red-faced and sweating inside his heavy coat.

“And if it was set, it’s logical to assume that the people who wrote FAGGOTS did the setting.”

“People? Plural?”

“Yeah,” Jesse said. “At least two people did the graffiti.”

“How the hell can you tell?” Arleigh said.

“Work South Central L.A. for a while,” Jesse said, “get to see a lot of taggers. You know who lives here?”

“No.”

“We’ll ask around,” Jesse said.

4

“This is not encouraging,” Macklin said as he slowed the Mercedes. The traffic was at a dead stop ahead on LaSalle Street. “We want to take that right.”

“There’s a cop directing traffic,” Faye said. “He’s not letting anyone down there.”

“Fire,” Macklin said. “See the fire chief car sticking out into the road? That’s what’s causing the whole thing.” He shook his head. “Firemen and cops,” he said. “Park any friggin’ place they feel like it. Don’t give a goddamn how bad they screw up the traffic.”

Macklin had spent time in the tanning salon at Faye’s complex so he had a prosperous tan. He was wearing a gray Palm Beach suit and a blue oxford shirt with a button-down collar. He had on a yellow silk tie and a yellow pocket silk. The 9-mm pistol was in the glove compartment.

“How hard would it have been,” he said, “for the asshole to have pulled up onto the grass?”

Faye smiled. She had on a subdued tan suit, with a long jacket and short skirt, and her hair was up and gathered in a French twist at the back. The car inched forward.

“It’s a house fire,” Faye said. “I can see the trucks down the side street.”

“And they can’t fight it without fucking up the traffic all the way back to Lynn?” Macklin said.

“I think it’s out,” Faye said.

“It’s like the law don’t apply to them, you know? Like there’s one law for us and no law at all for them,” Macklin said.

Faye turned and looked at him. She smiled widely.

“There’s a law for us?” she said. “Jimmy, you’re a crook. You don’t pay any attention to the law at all.”

Macklin inched past the cop directing traffic and squeezed past the fire captain’s car and picked up speed. His shoulders were shaking with silent laughter.

“Oh yeah,” he said.

They turned right past the movie theater and drove along Ocean Avenue to Preston Road past Geary Street, which was still closed off, to the causeway and out onto Paradise Neck. The neck was thick with trees and big lawns, the big old shingle houses back from the narrow road and barely visible. They went past the yacht club, a rambling white building that faced the harbor, and around lighthouse point and pulled onto the elegant little bridge that arched the narrow stretch of angry surf to Stiles Island. On the island end was a guard shack. Macklin stopped and lowered his window. A tallish, gray-haired man in glasses came out wearing a blue blazer and carrying a clipboard. A blue plastic name tag on his blazer said STILES ISLAND SECURITY and under that his name, J. T. McGonigle.

“Hi,” Macklin said,” we have an appointment with Mrs. Campbell.”

“Your name, sir?”

“I know this sounds corny,” Macklin said, “but it’s Smith.”

The guard consulted his clipboard. “Mr. and Mrs.?”

“Yep.”

“Right over there, sir. Please park in the designated space.” “Thank you.”

As they drove through the gate, the guard copied down the license plate number. Past the guard shack, to the right, was a small building done in weathered shingles with colonial blue shutters. A discreet sign beside the door said STILES ISLAND REALTY in gold letters on a dark blue background. A Lexus sedan was parked next to the building, and two spaces beside it were marked VISITORS.

“Stiles Island is too classy to have customers,” Macklin said.

“What are our first names?” Faye said.

“I’ll be Harry,” Macklin said. “You got a favorite?”

“How about one of those really jerky names that WASP women have, like Muffy or Choo Choo?”

“Jesus,” Macklin said, “I can’t go around calling you fucking Muffy.”

“Rocky?” Faye said.

“Rocky?” Macklin said.

Faye nodded. Macklin nodded and put out his clenched fist. Faye tapped it lightly with hers.

“Way to go, Rocky,” he said.

They got out of the car.

“Where we from?” Faye said.

“I’ll think of someplace,” Macklin said. “You know how I hate to plan stuff.”

The real estate office was furnished with colonial furniture and nautical prints. Mrs. Campbell was a tall woman with platinum hair, a lot of makeup, and a good figure. She was a little long in the tooth, Macklin thought, but she’d probably be a pretty good lay.

“I’m Harry Smith,” Macklin said. “My wife, Rocky.”

“Where you folks from?” Mrs. Campbell said.

She was wearing a blue pantsuit and a white man-tailored shirt, open at the throat. “Concord,” Macklin said.

“And you’re interested in property on Stiles Island?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Macklin said.

“Well, we have a couple of homes for sale, and of course, we can arrange for you to build if you wish.”

“What do you think, hon?” Macklin said.

“I think the first thing we should do is tour the island,” Faye said. “We’re not just purchasing a piece of property, you know. We are buying into a community.”

“Good point,” Mrs. Campbell said. “Why don’t I drive you around and acquaint you with the place, and we can talk as we go. Will you be financing this purchase yourself?”

“It’ll be cash,” Macklin said.

“And are you more interested in building or buying something already built?”

“We’re open on that,” Faye said. “Aren’t we, Harry?” “Sure are, Rocky.”

Mrs. Campbell went around her desk to get her purse. Macklin noticed that the pantsuit fit snugly over her butt. And there was something in the way she walked. Fucks like a weasel, Macklin thought. He didn’t know exactly how he knew that. Maybe the way she stood or the way she walked or the sense of how conscious she was of her body. Maybe it was magic. But he was rarely wrong about such things. He filed the information.

5

The two men who owned the home on Geary Street sat together in Jesse’s office. One was a tall slim man with a shaved head and a dark tan. He wore gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses. His companion was stockier, with a blond crew cut and a clipped moustache. Both men were older than Jesse. Forty-two, forty-three, Jesse speculated. The taller man’s name was Alex Canton.

“We were in Provincetown for a few days when it happened,” Canton said. “One of the neighbors called us. We came right back.”

“The fire was set,” Jesse said. “We assumed it was from the graffiti, and the way the floor burned. But the state Fire Marshal’s Office makes it definite. A combustible liquid, probably gasoline, was poured over the rug in the living room and ignited.”

“We know who did it,” Canton said. “Howard and I are both sure of it.”

Jesse glanced at the notes on his yellow legal pad. Howard’s last name was Brown.

“Who?” Jesse said.

“Alex, we can’t really prove it,” Brown said.

“We know it was them,” Canton said.

“Who?” Jesse said.

“The fucking Hopkins kids,” Canton said.

“Full names?”

“Earl,” Canton said, “I think is the older one. And Robbie.”

“Ages?”

“Oh, maybe fifteen and fourteen, in there. Neither one of them drives a car yet.”

“Had trouble with them before?” Jesse said.

He knew the answer before he asked the question. Of course they’d had trouble. Two openly gay men in an openly heterosexual environment with a lot of affluent teenage kids hanging around with nothing to do. Let’s go down and harass the queers.

“Nothing big, they’d make remarks when they went by the house,” Brown said.

“Such as?”

“Oh, some kind of rhyme about Mister Brown goes down. Stuff like that. I been gay a long time. I’ve heard worse.”

“Anything else?”

Brown and Canton looked at each other as they thought about it.

“No,” Canton said.

“Mr. Brown?”

“No, uh-uh.”

“So how do you know they set the fire?”

Canton looked at Brown. “You say, Howard.”

“I was standing in the driveway, looking at what’s left, and they came riding by on bicycles. Both the Hopkins boys and their friend. I don’t know his real name, kids call him Snapper. They all had these big smirks on, and they sort of slow down and start riding their bicycles in big circles in the street. Then the older one, Earl, starts riding no hands and he says to me, ‘Hey Mr. Brown,’ and I looked, and he made a gesture of lighting and throwing a match. And all three of them are smirking.”

Brown shook his head. “I wanted to kill the little punks.”

He shook his head again. Sadness and anger about equal, Jesse thought.

“But of course, I didn’t say a word. I just got in my car and drove off,” Brown said.

“They ever threaten you?” Jesse said. “Not until this,” Canton said.

Brown shook his head.

“Well, we’ll talk with them,” Jesse said.

“Talk. The little bastards burned our house down and you’ll talk with them?”

“It’s a cop euphemism,” Jesse said. “I’ll have them in. We’ll question them.”

“You can’t arrest them?” Brown said.

“Not on what you’ve given me.”

“They practically admitted they did it,” Brown said.

“Or maybe they just took pleasure in reminding you someone did it,” Jesse said.

“If you’d been there and seen the look on their faces, all three of them,” Brown said.

“But I wasn’t,” Jesse said. “And the DA wasn’t. I can’t get them indicted on what you’ve said.”

“So they’ll get away with it,” Canton said, like a man confirming a long-held assumption.

“Maybe not,” Jesse said. “We’re kind of resourceful.”

“Well,” Canton said. “I tell you one thing right now. I’m getting a gun. I’m not going to let the yahoos win.”

“See Molly at the desk,” Jesse said. “She processes the gun stuff.”

“You’ll approve it?”

“You have the constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” Jesse said.

“Christ,” Canton said, “I never thought I’d need to.”

“Hopkins family got money?” Jesse said.

“I think so,” Brown said. “Why?”

“Turns out the kid did it, you might have a civil suit against the family, or your insurance company might.”

“My God, I never thought of it,” Canton said. “Should we talk to our claims adjuster about it?”

“Might be wise to talk first with a lawyer,” Jesse said.

“You recommend anyone?”

“There’s a woman in town,” Jesse said. “Abby Taylor. Used to be town counsel. She can either help you or send you to somebody.”

“But what if you can’t prove they did it?” Canton said.

“You can still sue,” Jesse said. “Civil cases have different rules.” “Could you write that lawyer’s name down?” Brown said.

Jesse wrote Abby’s name on a sheet of yellow paper, along with her phone number, which he knew quite well. Brown took the paper and folded it over and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

“So that’s going to be it?” Canton said.

“Is what going to be it?” Jesse said.

“That’s your little law enforcement gesture? Give us the name of a lawyer, tell us to sue?”

Jesse leaned back in his chair and looked at Canton for a moment.

“You’re a gay man,” Jesse said. “And you’re mad as hell. And you’re not used to straight cops working very hard to solve your problems. But maybe you should wait until I take a run at the thing, before you decide I’m an incompetent bigot.”

“That’s fair enough,” Brown said. “We can’t assume he’s a homophobe, Alex.”

“Maybe,” Canton said. “But he’s one of the few I’ve met that aren’t.”

He stared hard at Jesse, a red flush of anger still brightening his face.

“I’m not so sure,” Jesse said. “There might be a lot of cops who don’t really much care what you do with a consenting adult.”

“You’ve never been gay,” Canton said.

“You have me there,” Jesse said. “And you didn’t come here to argue police tolerance with me. What I can do is tell you that everyone in this town is entitled to the protection of the police. And everyone will get it as long as I’m chief. Including you.”

“Alex, he has the right to prove his homophobia before we condemn him.”

“And he probably will,” Canton said. “I’m going to apply for that gun permit. Don’t think I won’t.”

Jesse smiled pleasantly.

“I don’t think you won’t,” he said.

6

Macklin sat with Faye on the deck outside the Gray Gull Restaurant overlooking the harbor. They were drinking cosmopolitans. Faye had hers straight up in a big martini glass. Macklin was drinking his on the rocks. The late afternoon sun had gotten low enough behind the buildings to throw elongated shadows of the wharf office and the sail loft out onto the water.

“Faye,” Macklin said, “you look more like the wife of a WASP millionaire than any of the real ones I’ve ever known.”

“So maybe that means I don’t,” Faye said. “And exactly how many WASP millionaires’ wives have you known?”

“If I knew one, she’d look like you,” Macklin said.

He had loosened his tie and taken off his coat. He sat now with his legs out in front of him, leaning back in his chair. There was a breeze off the water.

“You told that woman we were from Concord,” Faye said.

“Sure,” Macklin said. “I lived there for a couple years.”

“In Concord?”

Macklin grinned. “MCI Concord,” he said. “The prison.”

Faye laughed. “Jimmy, you’re crazy.”

“Can’t get too solemn about this shit,” Macklin said.

A waitress went by. Macklin gestured at her for a refill.

“And maybe, whaddya got. Some fried clams? Give us an order of fried clams,” he said. “But bring the drinks first. Don’t wait for the clams.”

“Yes sir.”

Macklin watched her as she walked away. Nice butt. Young. Probably some college kid working for the summer.

“So what did we learn about Stiles Island today?” Faye said.

“Three quarters of a mile long,” Macklin said, gazing out across the harbor at the near end of it. “About a quarter of a mile wide. Fifty estates so far. Room to build another fifty. Cheapest one is eight hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. Adults only. No children. No dogs.”

“Most people can afford eight-hundred-seventy-five-thousand-dollar houses are too old to have children anyway,” Faye said.

Macklin nodded.

“Only access is across that bridge,” he said. “All the power lines are under the bridge, all the phone lines, even the water pipes are incorporated into the bridge understructure.”

The waitress brought them two more cosmopolitans. The pink drinks looked just right, Macklin thought, out here on the deck of the weathered shingle restaurant with the harbor below them. Macklin liked things to be right.

“There’s a branch of Paradise Bank,” he said. “With safe deposit boxes. There’s a private boat club on the harbor end of the island, only place on the island where you can land a boat. There’s a health club with a drug store and beauty salon and a restaurant with a big plate glass picture window looking out on the ocean side. And there’s a private security patrol, a man on the bridge twenty-four hours, and a two-man cruiser patrolling the island twenty-four hours. Everybody got a radio that connects to the security headquarters in the other side of the real estate office and to the Paradise Police.”

Faye held her glass with the fingertips of both hands. She was watching him over the rim of it as he talked. When he finished she whistled very softly. “And I thought all you were doing was watching Mrs. Campbell’s ass,” she said.

Macklin grinned. “Attention to detail,” he said.

A gull coasted down, sat on the fence railing about five feet away, and waited. The waitress brought flatware wrapped in napkins, and an order of fried clams in a small paper napkin-lined wicker basket. She put the clams on the table between them and placed two small paper cups of tartar sauce beside the basket.

“Catsup?” she said.