Death in Paradise

Chapter Forty

Jesse had a lunch scheduled with Norman Shaw on Paradise Neck at the Boat Club. He arrived a few minutes late and found Shaw at the bar, talking with someone.

"Chief Stone," Shaw said. "Michael Wasserman."

Jesse shook the man's hand.

"Wasserman's organizing an event," Shaw said. "And I'm agreeing to be honorary chair."

Jesse nodded.

"I'll get a table," Jesse said. "You can join me when you're through."

"I always sit at the same table," Shaw said. "Just tell the girl you're joining me."

The table was at the window, and from it, Jesse could see the town proper, rising up from its working waterfront, to the town hall bell tower at the top of the hill. He watched Shaw shake hands again with Michael Wasserman and come across the room toward him. Shaw had on cream-colored slacks and a raspberry-colored linen jacket over a forest green polo shirt.

"Great view, isn't it?" he said as he sat down.

"Yes."

A gray-haired motherly looking waitress appeared immediately.

"Want a drink?" Shaw said.

"Iced tea," Jesse said.

Shaw made a face as if the thought of iced tea were repellent.

"Ketel One on the rocks," he said without looking at the waitress. "Twist."

"Thank you, Mr. Shaw," the waitress said, and plodded away.

Shaw picked up a menu.

"Food's mediocre here," he said. "But the view's great and they mix you a hell of a cocktail."

Jesse thought about the mixing skill involved in putting together a vodka on the rocks. What Shaw meant is what most drinkers meant. The drinks were large.

The waitress brought their drinks, took their lunch order, and left them alone. The vodka was in a wide lowball glass. Shaw took a long pull on it, the way people drink beer.

"So, Stone," Shaw said, leaning back in his chair. "What can I do for you?"

As he spoke he didn't look at Jesse. He looked around the room.

"I'm interested in your relationship with Gino Fish."

Shaw continued to scan the room. "Why?" he said.

"His name came up in a case," Jesse said.

"What case?"

"Have you spent much time with Gino?" Jesse said.

"What's this about? You talked with my wife, didn't you? Gino's a casual friend."

Shaw spotted someone on the other side of the dining room, and smiled, and nodded and with his forefinger made a little jabbing gesture of recognition.

"Michael DeSisto," Shaw said. "Runs some kind of school out in Stockbridge."

"When did you see Gino last?" Jesse said.

Shaw nodded at someone else, near the bar. He shrugged in answer to Jesse's question.

"I see a lot of people," Shaw said. "Hard to keep track."

"I always thought writers were alone a lot," Jesse said.

He had in fact never thought that, but he needed to keep Shaw talking. Jesse was pretty sure that Shaw would not stop with one vodka.

"When I write, I write," Shaw said. "When I party, I party. What is it you're after, Stone?"

Jesse smiled his friendliest smile, but it didn't help anything, because Shaw wasn't looking at him. He was still looking around the dining room. Jesse wondered if he was desperate to be recognized, or if maybe it was a posture, designed to show Jesse how little importance Shaw attached to him.

"No idea," Jesse said. "I'm hoping I'll know it when I see it."

Shaw nodded without paying much attention and gestured at the waitress. Without further instructions she brought him another vodka. Jesse smiled to himself. Boozers were predictable, Jesse thought, and don't I know it. When the drink came, Shaw picked it up and stood.

"Excuse me a minute," he said. "Got to say hello to an old friend."

Standing, he took a swallow of the vodka and then carried the glass with him to a table of four well-groomed women having lunch. He stood with a hand on the back of a chair, bending over the table, holding his drink in the other hand. He said something. The women laughed. Jesse waited. Shaw had as much swagger, Jesse thought, as a guy with a potbelly, skinny legs, and a silly haircut could achieve. The women laughed again. Shaw laughed with them. Then he kissed one of them on her perfect blond head and came back to Jesse's table. As he walked past the waitress, he murmured to her. Shaw sat back down across from Jesse and looked out at the harbor.

"I've fucked all four of those broads at one time or another," Shaw said.

"Isn't that nice for you," Jesse said. "When's the last time you saw Gino Fish?"

The waitress appeared with a new vodka for Shaw. It was a double. Shaw took a large swallow.

Shaw leaned back in his chair again and seemed somehow to expand. For the first time since they had been seated, Shaw looked straight at Jesse.

"Actually, Gino and I are talking about doing a book together."

Under the pink-toned sun color on his face, the broken blood vessels made a darker red web on the skin above his cheekbones.

Jesse said, "Un-huh."

"About the gangster life," Shaw said. "Disaffection, opposition, freedom, violence."

"Un-huh."

Shaw drank some more.

"This country started in rebellion against established laws," Shaw said.

Jesse nodded.

"And Gino Fish, in himself, is almost entirely outside any established norms."

"Un-huh."

Shaw grinned suddenly, almost genuinely, at Jesse.

"Sort of a queer Godfather," he said.

"How do you collaborate?"

"Gino and I get together, couple times a week," Shaw said.

Despite the fact that he was clearly drunk, Shaw was focused as he talked about his writing, in a way he had not been before that.

"And talk?"

"Yeah. Gino likes to talk about himself."

Lunch arrived.

"When the book gets written," Jesse said, "do you share the royalties?"

"Everybody thinks it's royalties," Shaw said. "It ain't. It's the advance, stupid. You know?"

Jesse ate some clam chowder. Shaw paid no attention to his scrod. His speech had thickened noticeably. He'd been at the bar when Jesse arrived. He'd had three, one of them a double, since Jesse had arrived. The conversation wasn't going to last too much longer.

"So he gets half the advance?"

"Naw, it's all mine," Shaw said. "Gino jus' wants a book about him. He…"

Shaw stopped talking for a moment and looked at Jesse as if he were having trouble remembering who Jesse was. Then he put his head down and rested it on top of his scrod and went to sleep.