Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Twenty-Six

Emma Cleary said she’d never been in a police station in her life, not one single time. So she asked Jesse if they could meet for lunch at the Gull.

“You would be the prettiest lunch date I’ve had in a long time,” Jesse said.

“Shut it,” Miss Emma said.

Jesse knew she lived with her daughter, Maryanne, an English teacher at Paradise High, over on the west side of town, maybe four or five blocks from Charlie’s house. Before he ended the call, he asked if Miss Emma needed him to pick her up.

“I’ll be walking, thank you.”

“All the way to the Gull?”

“I’m a senior citizen, young man, not a goddamn invalid.”

She was waiting for Jesse at the Gull when he arrived, the lunch crowd there as loud and brisk and busy as usual. She gave him a wave from the window table. Jesse didn’t know her well, but well enough, from the times he’d run into Charlie and Miss Emma — he had difficulty thinking of her any other way — around town. She reminded him a little of Betty White, not that he was going to share that observation with her, especially not after Betty White had passed away the previous year at the age of ninety-nine.

Fluffy white hair, bright blue eyes, not much more than five feet tall by now, if that, shrinking the way old people did. She stood to greet him and he saw that she was wearing khaki pants, a pink sweater, shoes to match the sweater. Jesse noticed that she slipped easily out of her booth when she rose to greet him. He recalled Charlie telling him that Miss Emma still rocked yoga classes a couple days a week. He should have known better than to offer her a ride. Something else Charlie had told him. She liked to walk everywhere, even though she still drove herself when she needed to in a Jetta of her own.

Jesse waited until after they ordered their salads to say, “I’m truly sorry for your loss, Emma.”

“Shouldn’t that be my line, too?” was her reply.

She had hearing aids, both ears. It appeared to be her only concession to her age, which was the same as Charlie’s; they’d graduated Paradise High the same year. She married her high school sweetheart and Charlie married Maisie. Then after both high school sweethearts were gone, they somehow found their way back to each other.

And were supposed to live happily ever after.

“How are you doing?” Jesse asked.

“I’m pissed off, is how I’m doing. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love again. Neither was he. But we did. Now he’s gone and I’m still here, and I’m just going to have to call bullshit on that.”

The blue eyes were flashing now. I could put them on top of one of our patrol cars, Jesse thought.

“So just what am I supposed to do about bullshit like that, Jesse?”

He grinned. “Have lunch with me.”

“I want you to promise me you’re going to find who did this to my Charlie.”

“I don’t make promises I’m not sure I can keep,” Jesse said. “But my plan is to catch him.”

“The fucker.”

Jesse tried not to smile. He knew from Charlie that the petite old lady across from him could swear like Samuel L. Jackson.

“You’ll really do that for me?” she said.

“All due respect?” Jesse said. “I’ll be doing it for me.”

He told her then about what he’d found on Charlie’s laptop, asked if he had mentioned anything at all to her about a sudden interest in cryptocurrency or Bitcoin or anything like that. Emma Cleary said that he was more likely to have been discussing kryptonite. All she knew, she said, was that his hair had been on fire over the past month about the scam calls. She kept telling Charlie to let them go. But he’d gotten more and more fixed on them.

“Dog with a bone,” she said. “Old dog.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It was like he’d decided that he was, by God, going to crack one more case. I’m sure he told you that I lost a fair amount of money I really couldn’t afford to lose a while back and felt like an old fool after I did. Gave somebody my Medicare ID number during COVID, and paid a heavy price for it.” She gave a vigorous shake to her head. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Agree to disagree on the old fool part, Emma. Calls like those cleaned out people of all ages to the tune of about thirty billion dollars last year. Billion with a b. Pretty sure all of that money didn’t come from your age grouping.”

“I still felt like a dumb shit afterward. It’s why I was cheering him on while he tried to find out who was at least behind some of these goddamned calls.”

She drank some water, her hand shaking, put her glass back down. Jesse noticed that she had barely touched her salad. But he hadn’t done much better. Nothing about this felt social.

“The last time I spoke with my Charlie was the night it happened,” she said. “I could tell he was preoccupied. I always could. I asked him what was bothering him. He said nothing was bothering him. I told him something was bothering him. He told me I didn’t know everything. I said, ‘About you I do, old-timer.’ Then he laughed and told me he loved me and said he’d call me later, he thought he might have caught the bastards.”

“That was all?”

“Like he had all the time in the world,” she said. “Like the two of us, old as we were, had all the time in the world.”

She started to cry now. She was one tough old broad, in all the good, old-fashioned definitions of that, from the old days, when you could call someone as terrific as Miss Emma a great broad and not get flogged in the public square.

She didn’t make a sound as the tears fell over her cheeks. She just sat there, looking at him across the table, until she finally reached up and dried them with her napkin.

“Still an old fool,” she said.

“Still agreeing to disagree.”

Jesse paid the check. Miss Emma pointed at both their salad bowls and said the next time they met up to not eat, lunch was on her. Jesse told her he never passed up a free meal, especially when it was with a pretty girl.

“Shut it,” Miss Emma said.