Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

74

Stu Cromwell was in his office, a nearly empty bottle of rye and a pretty tall glass of it on the desk in front of him. Although he had told Jesse to come in, he looked lost in thought and time. Maybe it was Martha. Maybe not. Maybe, Jesse thought, Cromwell was just drunk.

“Bad time?”

“The last few years have been a bad time,” Cromwell said, eyes still looking into the middle distance. “Since Al Gore invented the fucking Internet, it’s been a bad time for newspapers. Why should today be an exception?”

“Fair question. How’s Martha doing?”

“Just a matter of time for her.”

“Matter of time for all of us, Stu.”

“She’s got less of it than most,” the newspaperman said, finishing the rye in his glass and pouring some more. He didn’t offer any to Jesse. “If she wasn’t in so much pain, I’d say she was the lucky one. But there I go again, feeling sorry for myself.”

“Sorry it’s been rough.”

“Sorry. Yeah, me, too, for a lot of things. You know Edith Piaf, Jesse?”

“The singer?”

Cromwell nodded, taking another drink. “She has this song, ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.’ I have no regrets. I wonder if she meant it. Do you think she meant it? You think it’s possible to have no regrets? I wonder sometimes what that would be like, having no regrets.”

“Everybody’s got regrets.”

Cromwell laughed, but it was unclear exactly why. “I had a roommate in college, Jeff Rosen. His dad was a rabbi. He told me once that his dad used to say that to live was to have regrets. Do you think that’s true? I guess you do.”

“What’s going on, Stu?”

Cromwell ignored the question.

“Regrets. We all have ’em. Some of us more than others.”

Jesse asked the question he had asked before. “What’s going on?”

Cromwell went silent and looked at Jesse as if just realizing Jesse was really there with him. “Why are you here, Jesse?”

“To keep my word. I’ve got something for you.”

Cromwell laughed that odd laugh again and tossed some legal-looking papers at Jesse. “The bank’s foreclosing on me.”

“Sorry to hear it. Isn’t there anything you can do? Can you stall them?”

Cromwell finished his drink and poured the remainder of the bottle into his glass. “We’ve depleted most of Martha’s inheritance propping the paper up and they’ve already restructured the loans three times. This is the end, das Ende.”

“What will you do?”

He laughed. It was a hollow laugh. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll open up a self-defense dojo for broken old men. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Chief,” Cromwell said, an unfamiliar nasty edge to his voice. “I’ve got black belts in jiujitsu and aikido, though I haven’t trained in years. I’m the world’s most dangerous newspaperman... ex-newspaperman. Maybe you can use me on the Paradise PD. I hear you’re another man short. Suit okay?”

“Banged up.”

“And the other man?” Cromwell asked, unable to turn off his newspaper instincts.

“Not great. Still unconscious. When are you closing shop?”

Cromwell looked at his watch. “As of two hours ago.”

Jesse stood and offered his hand to Cromwell, but Cromwell was off in his head somewhere again.

“Old men do very foolish things, Jesse. Desperately foolish things. They do things to hold on to the crumbs they’ve accumulated, only to find out the crows have already eaten the crumbs. But you can’t take things back, can you? You can’t undo things once they’re done.”

“If we could undo things,” Jesse said, “Piaf would be right and Rabbi Rosen would be wrong.”

“So even though I have no paper to print the story in, let me feel like a newspaperman one last time. Tell me what you came to tell me. Please.”

“It’s about Maxie Connolly. Doesn’t matter now.”

Cromwell finished the rye in his glass and with tears in his eyes began singing in French, “‘Non, rien de rien...’”

Jesse closed the door behind him. Even halfway down the stairs, he could still hear Cromwell singing.