Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

46

After his rendezvous with Tamara Elkin, Jesse went back to his house and poured himself a few fingers of Johnnie Walker Black. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to drink it. He just turned the glass around and around in his fingers, staring at it. He had struggled with drinking for most of his adult life and had, with Dix’s help, come to a sort of peace about it with himself. It was the same kind of uneasy Zen he’d reached about his shoulder injury: He wasn’t ever going to play shortstop in the major leagues and he was never going to stop drinking. When he finally accepted the reality of his drinking, it ceased filling in every crease and crack in his life. The struggle no longer took up so much of his energy.

The strange thing is that he could stop the physical act of drinking. Had stopped for weeks at a time. For months at a time. But the thirst, the desire, never left him. So even when he wasn’t drinking, he never stopped wanting to. He played out the rituals of it with club soda and lime. He still came home and discussed his woes with his poster of Ozzie Smith, glass in hand. It was folly and somewhere he knew it. Like many things drinkers do, he told himself he was doing it to prove a point to the world when, in fact, the world didn’t care and it proved very little. As was often the case, it was Dix who’d held the mirror up to Jesse’s version of the emperor’s new clothes.

One day he got fed up with Dix and told him so.

“You know I come in here every week and tell you I haven’t had a drink in months and you can’t be bothered to say a word about it.”

“Dickens got paid by the word, Jesse, not me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you don’t pay me to pat you on the back for being a good boy.”

“An occasional attaboy would be nice.”

“If I thought it was called for, I’d give it.”

“And not drinking for nearly a year doesn’t call for it?”

“Look, Jesse, like I said, I’m not here to pat you on the back and you’re not here to be a good patient. You drinking or not drinking doesn’t change the nature of my job. Other than not actually ingesting alcohol, have you changed?”

“I guess not.”

“I never fooled you that talk therapy was going to do much to stop your drinking. If you want to stop, you’ll stop. But if you do, when you do, do it for yourself because it’s what you want, not to prove something to me or Jenn or anyone else. What you’re doing now, it’s like someone proving he can hold his breath for a long time. No matter how long he holds his breath, it doesn’t mean he’s going to actually stop breathing. Eventually, he’s going to take another breath.”

That night Jesse went home and stopped holding his breath. And when he drank again it was as if he had lost the weight of the baggage he’d been toting around with him since he’d left L.A.

This was different. He kept staring at the scotch in his glass. It was just as pretty to him as it had always been. He knew that even nondrinkers, or beer and wine drinkers, often wished they liked scotch because it was so damned beautiful. Yet he just didn’t feel like drinking. He kept seeing the look on Tamara’s face and how she gulped down the scotch when the waiter brought it to the table. She hadn’t said it outright, but she and Jesse were a lot alike. He had been where she was now. He imagined he hadn’t looked too dissimilar from her in the wake of his dismissal from the LAPD. It haunted him still. Maybe, he thought, this was the moment he and Dix had talked about. The moment when he decided for himself that he wanted to stop and would stop drinking. He knew better than to delve too deeply into it, that if it was the moment, he would know it only in retrospect.

Jesse turned on his TV and tuned it to the news. He realized it was a mistake almost as soon as he had done it, but it was already too late. There on the screen before him was a reporter he recognized from one of the big Boston stations. She was an older, handsome woman with perfectly cut, shoulder-length graying hair and striking blue eyes. She and Jesse had crossed paths a few times in the past and they had a kind of grudging respect for each other. She believed in what presenting the news used to mean and Jesse believed in being a good cop, no matter what. But Jesse realized that as fair as the reporter was and as disinterested in salacious speculation as she might be, there was no good way to spin what was going on in his town. He had three homicides — four, if his hunch was right — on his hands and he wasn’t any closer to solving them than he was the morning they removed the debris of the collapsed building. If anything, he had more questions and was further away.

The reporter might have had a Cronkite-era ethic, but she also had an eye for the dramatic. She did her report from Trench Alley, the wind whipping the remnants of the crime scene tape so fiercely that it made snapping noises. The overcast skies and Sawtooth Creek as a backdrop only enhanced the drama. As she spoke, old photographs of Ginny and Mary Kate flashed over her shoulder. Basically, she rehashed what was already on the public record. She discussed Maxie Connolly’s “suicide” and the discovery of the body in the tarp. Images of Maxie and of the dead man’s tattoo replaced those of the girls. Although she took no visible delight in it, the reporter reminded her audience that neither the state police nor the Paradise PD had made any progress in solving the crimes nor in identifying the mysterious victim in the blue tarp.

Then, as a closing shot, the reporter had her cameraman move the focus away from her face. He zoomed in on the floor of the old factory building, specifically at the police barricades surrounding the two holes in the concrete slab where the bodies had been found. Piles of flowers, wreathes, dolls, notes, and crucifixes had been laid around the barriers to create a makeshift memorial to the dead girls. Wisely, the reporter remained silent for several seconds before signing off.

When Jesse looked back down at the glass in his hand, he noticed it was empty.