Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Twenty-Three

They were still treating it as an active crime scene. But Jesse still had the key to the house that Charlie had given him a long time ago.

“Why do I need a key when you insist on leaving your door unlocked?” Jesse had asked him once.

“I want you to have it in case it is locked the night the Messenger of Death beats you here one night.”

“Messenger of Death?” Jesse had said.

“You never had a tarot card reading?” the old man had said.

“Wait, you did?”

Charlie had winked. “Miss Emma made me.”

Now Jesse stood just inside the door, in a darkness so profound, a quiet that made it difficult for Jesse to get enough air into him once he was inside. All he could think of was that, son of a bitch, the Messenger of Death had beaten him here the other night.

But which messenger?

Jesse wondered, not for the first time since Charlie’s death, what he might do if he ever got his hands on the killer, and there was nobody else around.

Could I kill him?

Or her?

Jesse knew the answer to that one. What did they say in the lawyer shows on TV? Never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.

Jesse knew.

He knew.

Turned on some lamps now, and overhead lights. The place, as always, was military neat. No surprise there. Charlie had been a Marine as a kid, sure he was going to be shipped out during the Cuban Missile Crisis, having no idea back in the early sixties that he might have been enlisting to go fight a war.

Kitchen counter spotless. Everything in the silverware drawer neatly arranged. Refrigerator was still well stocked. Cans and spices, also neatly arranged, in the cupboard. Jesse pulled open the freezer drawer and smiled at the half-full bottle of Grey Goose.

Jesse went up the stairs and into his bathroom. Opened the cabinet over the sink. Heart pills there, cholesterol meds. Bottle of Viagra, the prescription recently filled. Jesse smiled again. Maybe it wasn’t just Miss Emma who had been aspirational.

“Charlie,” Jesse said out loud. “You dog.”

He thought about the night he went to Neil O’Hara’s house, after Neil had been shot in the head at The Throw. Going through his things. It was always the same, no matter who the vic was, whether it was a friend or not. No matter how much it hurt. He was looking for something he had missed. Something they’d all missed. Something that didn’t belong. Something that should have been here, and wasn’t. Something that would open a door for him, get him out of what so often felt like a locked room when he was looking for clues.

Looking for something that would help him find out who had done something like this to a wonderful old man. What did people always say when someone around Charlie’s age would die? Eighty’s a good, long life.

Not if you were looking for eighty-one, it wasn’t.

Past midnight now.

Jesse went to the top of the stairs, looked down at the chairlift Nicholas had gotten for Charlie, one the old man said he refused to use. “It’ll be there when you need it, Gramps,” Nicholas had told him, and Charlie had said, “When I’m dead.”

It was at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe Charlie was secretly using it. And just never made it back to the second floor the night he died.

Jesse walked into Charlie’s bedroom now. He was sure he could still pick up the faint scent of the sandalwood cologne that had been a Christmas gift from Miss Emma, what she said was the sweet smell for her sweet man.

There was a small writing desk on one side of the room. Jesse went through the drawers. The top middle drawer had a stack of phone bills on it. Jesse opened the envelopes and saw all the numbers circled. “Scam” he’d written in the margins.

Charlie’s laptop was on top of the desk. Whoever had done it to Charlie had left the laptop. But why not take it along with the cell? Maybe the guy was in a rush after he did it, and never made it up the stairs. Maybe something outside spooked him. Voices, perhaps. The lights from a car. Or a car horn. Maybe he grabbed what he could grab and ran, like the bitch that he was.

Gabe hadn’t even taken the laptop to the station. He’d gone through it here, after Nicholas had given him Charlie’s password. Before Gabe had backed everything up, he told Nicholas he was worried that he might find something embarrassing.

“Not unless you count getting his ass kicked online in rummy,” Nicholas had told Gabe.

Jesse sat down at the desk, opened the laptop, typed in the password. He saw how much Amazon shopping Charlie did. He’d told Jesse that online shopping had become his guilty pleasure. When Jesse reminded Charlie that he was always talking about how much better he liked the world when there were only three TV networks, Charlie said, well, yeah, that was before he found out Amazon would deliver groceries to his door.

Jesse saw that Charlie bought a lot of audiobooks. He loved to read and hated to admit it, but his eyes were going, even with the special, oversized reading glasses he wore, at least when Miss Emma wasn’t around.

There were a lot of baseball websites in his browsing history, most of them involving old-time ballplayers. Jesse even saw that a week or so ago Charlie had accessed the site for the Albuquerque Dukes, the team Jesse had played for until the Dodgers had moved them to Portland twenty years earlier. Maybe he was trying to find out just how good Jesse had been in his last season of organized ball.

Charlie had also visited “Minor League Stats and History” at Baseball-Reference.com. Jesse never did. He never went back and looked at his stats, mostly because he knew them as well as he knew his Social Security.

Somehow he felt like a peeper more than ever, invading Charlie’s privacy, learning his secrets, as innocent as they were. He was the one afraid that he might find something embarrassing.

But thankfully did not.

Jesse had been searching the browsing history on Google Chrome. He switched over to Safari now, the history quite limited. Maybe Charlie had just started using it, and Jesse found it impossible to believe Charlie had any reason to clear it.

Every single item on his Safari history involved the same subject, including a Los Angeles Times article on this particular subject.

“You have got to be shitting me,” Jesse said out loud.

He copied all of the links, forwarded them to his own email address, closed the laptop, left.

When he got home he found Suit on the floor outside the door to his condominium.

Not dead.

But probably wishing he was.