“No.”
“Know where she is now?” Kelly Cruz said.
“No.”
“Know any other friends of hers?”
“No.”
“Do you know Corliss and Claudia Plum?”
“Twins?” Mandy said.
“Yes.”
“Corliss and Claudia, yeah. They been on the boat with Tommy, pretty sure. I mean how many twins you meet, let alone named Claudia and Corliss. Yikes.”
“They party with Tommy too?”
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“Absolutely. College cuties, you know.”
Kelly Cruz took out the three head shots Jesse had sent.
“Know any of these?” she said to Mandy.
Mandy studied the pictures.
“I mighta seen them around the marina, hard to say. Pic -
tures aren’t really great, you know?”
“I know,” Kelly Cruz said.
Mandy looked some more.
“I can’t tell,” she said. “Everybody hangs around the marina looks the same, tan, blond. Boys, girls, doesn’t matter.
Hard to remember.”
Kelly Cruz nodded and took the pictures back. She took a card out of her purse and handed it to Mandy.
“Anything occurs to you, call me.”
“Sure,” Mandy said and tucked the card into her bra.
“Tommy give you money?” Kelly Cruz said.
“He helps out, bless his horny little heart.”
“So what are you doing now,” Kelly Cruz said, “while Tommy’s away?”
Mandy paused to light a new cigarette.
“I have other friends,” she said.
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I been working my little butt off for you down here,” Kelly Cruz said on the phone.
“Glad to know it’s little,” Jesse said.
“Perky, too,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Even better,” Jesse said. “What do you know.”
“I talked to the vic’s parents,” Kelly Cruz said. “The old man is off in happy land someplace. Booze, denial, Alzheimer’s, I don’t know. But as far as he knows, everything is dandy and let’s have a cocktail.”
“How about the mother?”
“She knows. And she doesn’t know what to do with it, and so she pretends she doesn’t know, and let’s have a cocktail.”
S E A C H A N G E
“She know the twins aren’t in school?”
“Yes,” Kelly Cruz said. “I feel kind of bad for her.”
“She know anything else?”
“She knows that Florence was pals with Thomas Ralston.”
“Son of a gun!” Jesse said.
“And the twins,” Kelly Cruz said, “Corliss and Claudia, were also pals with Thomas Ralston.”
“You got that from the mother too?”
“No. I did some follow-up,” Kelly Cruz said. “I’m trying to make sergeant.”
“Follow-up and a perky little butt,” Jesse said. “You’re a lock.”
“Yeah. Ralston led a pretty lively sex life. You want to hear?”
“I do,” Jesse said.
Kelly Cruz told him everything she’d learned. Jesse listened silently. When she was through he told her what he knew about Harrison Darnell.
“And Darnell’s parked right beside Ralston?” Kelly Cruz said.
“In the same harbor,” Jesse said. “And, I don’t think they call it parked. I think it’s anchored, or moored, maybe.”
“I’ll make a note,” Kelly Cruz said. “So they both knew Florence Horvath. They both have the same, ah, atypical sexual interests. And they were both . . . anchored . . . in Paradise Harbor when Florence washed ashore.”
“Yes,” Jesse said. “Does that seem significant to you?”
“I might check it out, I was you,” Kelly Cruz said.
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“Thanks,” Jesse said.
“You’re welcome, but there’s one other thing, maybe,”
Kelly Cruz said. “One of the people I talked with down here, a girl, maybe twenty-one, twenty-two, mentioned that Florence Horvath seemed a little old for Thomas Ralston.”
“She was thirty-four,” Jesse said.
“No accounting for taste,” Kelly Cruz said. “Maybe he passed her on to Darnell.”
“Darnell seems somewhat able to tolerate age diversity,”
Jesse said.
“I’ll keep snooping around when I’m not busy with my real job,” Kelly Cruz said.
When she hung up Jesse sat silently, looking at nothing.
The scientists had established that all the tapes were recent.
He wondered who the redhead was. He hadn’t seen her on Darnell’s yacht. There were several he hadn’t seen. He had to talk with Katie DeWolfe. And her mother. He couldn’t let it slide. She was fifteen. Her mother had to know, too. Molly hadn’t mentioned a father. Sometimes he thought the fathers were harder. Maybe just because I’m male. He’d have Molly sit in. She knew the mother. When he sat at his desk, Jesse was more comfortable when he took the gun off his hip and laid it on the desktop. He looked at it now, lying there. Be simpler if they would let him just shoot people who deserved it. Who would decide? I would. What if you’re wrong? Ah, there’s the rub.
He stood and went out to the desk.
“Can you arrange for Katie DeWolfe and her parents to come see me?” he said.
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“Father’s not around,” Molly said. “They’re divorced.”
Jesse nodded.
“I should be the one,” Molly said. “I know Katie, and I know her mother.”
Jesse nodded again.
“You’re going to ask me to sit in, too,” Molly said.
“Aren’t you.”
Jesse continued to nod. Molly stared past him for a moment. Then she breathed in audibly.
“Any special time?” she said.
“Soon as they can,” Jesse said. “But, you know, try to ac-commodate to them. I’ll be available.”
Molly continued to stare at nothing. Jesse could hear her breathing.
“I wish you could do it,” Molly said.
“I can. But I thought it might be more comfortable for them if you did.”
“It will be,” Molly said.
Jesse nodded.
“This is not going to be fun,” Molly said.
“I never promised you fun.”
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K atie DeWolfe was scared. Her small face was pinched with it. She walked stiffly and swallowed frequently. Her mother had the
same look. They looked alike. They were both slender, and blond, and had about them a look of furtive sexuality. Jesse could never quite pin down what the look was. But he always knew it when he saw it, and in those instances when he’d had occasion to test it, he had always been right.
Molly brought them both in, introduced everyone, got the DeWolfes seated, facing the desk, and sat herself in a straight chair crowded in to Jesse’s left.
“Do you know what this is about, Katie?” Jesse said.
S E A C H A N G E
Katie shook her head.
“You’re sure?” Jesse said.
“I got no idea,” Katie said.
Jesse nodded and took a breath.
“Okay,” he said. “There’s no easy way to say it. I have a videotape of you having sex with a man named Harrison Darnell.”
“You’re lying,” Katie said. “It’s not me.”
“No, honey,” Jesse said. “It’s you.”
Mrs. DeWolfe said in a strangled voice, “Katie?”
“No way,” Katie said.
“I can play the tape,” Jesse said.
“It’s not me.”
Jesse nodded. He picked up the remote from his desk and aimed it and clicked and the tape began to roll with a closeup of Katie’s face, looking straight up at the camera over a man’s shoulder. Katie dropped her head and closed her eyes. Her mother stared at the tape. The camera pulled back to show the two of them naked and copulating.
“Stop it,” Mrs. DeWolfe said. “For Christ’s sake, stop it.”
Jesse clicked the tape off.
“She’s fifteen,” Mrs. DeWolfe said.
“I know,” Jesse said.
Mrs. DeWolfe looked at Molly.
“Molly, for crissake,” she said, “what am I supposed to do?”
“If Katie cooperates,” Molly said, “we can probably work something out?”
“Cooperates?” Katie said. “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”
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“No,” Jesse said. “But he did.”
“I’m not ratting Harrison out,” she said. “No way. No way.”
Mrs. DeWolfe said, “Katie, my God.”
“Oh, like you’re so lily pure. You been oinkin’ a different guy every week since Daddy left.”
“Katie, that’s not true. And if it were, it doesn’t mean you should. I’m a grown woman, for God’s sake.”
“So am I,” Katie said.
She stuck her chest out, so that her small breasts pushed against her cotton tank top.
“You seen the movies.”
Her mother slapped her across the face. Katie slapped back at her and her mother gripped her wrists and they grap-pled there, still seated. Jesse put his head back against the back of his swivel chair and closed his eyes for a moment.
“Molly,” he said.
But Molly was already up and separating the two women.
Jesse opened his eyes.
“Who’s on the desk?” he said.
“Arthur,” Molly said.
Jesse picked up the phone and called the desk.
“Arthur,” he said. “Step into my office for a moment.”
He hung up and the door opened and Arthur Angstrom stood there.
“Take Mrs. DeWolfe out to the front,” Jesse said. “Get her seated and be sure she stays there until I holler.”
“Okay, Jesse.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Mrs. DeWolfe said.
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“You are, ma’am,” Jesse said. “Easy? Or hard?”
She lingered for a minute but Jesse could tell her heart wasn’t in it and she stood.
“I’ll be right outside,” she said to her daughter.
Arthur took her arm and they went out. Molly closed the office door. Jesse leaned back in his chair and looked at Katie. She looked back at him, trying for defiance.
“So?” she said.
Jesse smiled.
“So,” he said.
“Like you never had sex?”
“I’m proud to say I did have sex, and hope to again,” Jesse said.
“So, you think I’m too young?”
“Probably,” Jesse said.
“You never had sex when you was my age?”
“No,” Jesse grinned again. “But it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
“Everybody my age has had sex,” she said.
“Probably not all of them with a stranger forty years older, in front of a video camera,” Jesse said.
“Turn you on?” she said.
She looked at him with her eyes wide open. Jesse looked back. Big, blue, innocent and stupid, he thought.
“You were maybe the twenty-fifth person I looked at,”
Jesse said. “I was a long way past turning on.”
“So, you gonna arrest me, or what?”
“I don’t quite know what to do with you, Katie. Let’s try talking about things, just sort of pleasantly. I won’t be a 1 6 5
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tough guy, and you won’t be a sexpot, and we’ll see where the conversation takes us.”
She frowned, trying to puzzle out what he had said.
“You married?”
“Divorced,” Jesse said.
“Got a girlfriend?”
Jesse smiled. “Actually, I’m living with my ex-wife,” he said.
“That’s weird.”
Jesse continued to smile.
“Yes,” he said. “It certainly is.”
“If you’re divorced, how come you live together.”
“It has to do with love,” Jesse said.
“You love her?”
“I think we love each other,” Jesse said.
“So how come you got divorced?”
“Long answer,” Jesse said. “The short version is, we had problems we couldn’t solve.”
“And now you can?”
“Maybe.”
“You gonna get married again?”
“I don’t know.”
“They got divorced five years ago,” Katie said.
“Your parents,” Jesse said.
“Yes,” Katie said. “I don’t care.”
Jesse nodded.
“And I don’t want you giving me a lot of crap about broken homes and that shit,” Katie said.
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“Okay,” Jesse said.
“I always been kind of wild,” she said.
“Must worry the hell out of your mother,” Jesse said.
“She’s scared out of her gourd I’ll get pregnant, like she did.”
“Which was why she married your father?”
“Yeah, and had me.”
“Your father worry about you?” Jesse said.
“He’s in Louisville, Kentucky,” she said.
“So you don’t see him so often.”
“For sure,” she made it one word. “He got married again.
Got a kid.”
“And,” Jesse said, “I gather your mother dates.”
“She’s boy crazy,” Katie said. “Like me.”
“Or occasionally,” Jesse said, “man crazy.”
“You mean Harrison? Yeah. I really showed him something. He said he couldn’t believe how great I was. He’s got this huge yacht and tons of money. My mother’s probably jealous. She’s always pigging these losers.”
“So how’d you meet Harrison?” Jesse said.
“Actually I met Tommy first and he introduced me to Harrison.”
“Tommy?” Jesse said.
“Tommy Ralston. He’s got a yacht, too. The Sea Cloud. ”
“How’d you meet Tommy?” Jesse said.
“Cathleen Holton,” Katie said. “Cathleen brought a bunch of us out to Tommy’s boat. She said it was a chance to meet some really cool guys.”
“She have a boat?” Jesse said.
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“Naw, Tommy sent a launch for us.”
“How many were you?”
“Excuse me?”
“How many of you went out.”
“Me,” she said. “And Cathleen, Beth, Nancy and Brittany, five all together.”
“All around your age?”
“I’m the youngest,” she said. “I always hang around with older kids.”
Jesse nodded.
“Tell me about what happened on the boat.”
“It was wild,” Katie said. “There were four guys and a couple of older women. We had drinks, and we smoked some weed, and the guys said it was like an initiation. We all had to have sex with all the guys.”
“Everybody cool with that?” Jesse said.
“Everybody but Nancy. She started to cry and said she didn’t feel good and wanted to go home.”
“And did she?”
“They said they’d have somebody take her home in the launch, but she had to do a striptease first.”
“She mind?”
“She didn’t want to, but they said she had to if she wanted to go home . . . so she did. It was pretty pathetic.”
“And then she went home?”
“Yeah, one of the sailors took her in the launch.”
“And the rest of you partied.”
“Yes.”
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“And the older women?”
“First they watched, then they joined in.”
“Hell of a good time,” Jesse said.
“Sure, and then Tommy said I was so good that he wanted me to meet his dear friend, and said could I come back tomorrow, and I said sure, and so the next day the launch took me to Harrison’s boat. Just me.”
Jesse was silent. Katie looked at him oddly, like she wanted something. Jesus Christ, she wants approval. He took a breath.
“Most people,” he said, “are probably doing mostly what they need to do. And maybe you need to do this. But it’s not a good way for you to live.”
“Why not,” she said.
“Again,” Jesse said, “long answer. Short version is you don’t become more important because a lot of people are willing to fuck you.”
“I’m not trying to be important,” she said. “I’m just having some fun.”
“I need the names of the other girls,” Jesse said.
“Are you going to tell them I told?”
Jesse looked at Molly, who had said not a word during the entire conversation. She shrugged and shook her head.
“To tell you the truth, Katie,” Jesse said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I’ll start by taking names.”
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J enn always brushed her teeth before bed.
Jesse lay in bed on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, watching her
through the open door of the bathroom. She was wearing one of his shirts, just the way she used to, and when she bent over to rinse her mouth, her butt showed. Jenn turned off the bathroom light and got into bed beside Jesse.
“Were you leering at me?” Jenn said.
“I was admiring your butt,” Jesse said.
“It is cute, isn’t it.”
“So you don’t mind admiring,” Jesse said.
S E A C H A N G E
“Admiring is good; leering is good.”
“I was admiring,” Jesse said.
Jenn tuned her head and kissed him lightly.
“Tell me about your day,” she said.
He knew she was mocking their domesticity.
“Any day that ends up with us in bed,” Jesse said, “is a good day.”
“Oh,” she said, “you charming devil.”
“I would like to get through with this floater case,” Jesse said. “It’s turned into a goddamned cesspool.”
“The one where you were watching the dirty movies?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s gotten worse.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“I do,” Jesse said. “It’s one of the things I really missed when you were gone.”
“Talking to me?”
“I could always talk to you,” Jesse said.
“So talk,” Jenn said.
They had left the balcony doors open, and they could hear the sound of the harbor as Jesse talked, lying on his back in the nearly dark room, looking up the blank, uninteresting ceiling. Jenn turned on her side toward him as she listened.
Through the open French doors, they could hear a boat mo-tor. Softer, more persistent, so familiar in its endless rhythm as to be nearly soundless was the movement of the waves against the causeway at the south end of the harbor. Jenn 1 7 1
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already knew some of the story, about the videotapes from Darnell. He told her the rest. He told her what Kelly Cruz had learned. He told her about Katie DeWolfe.
“So the bastards recruit?” Jenn said when he was finished.
“And apparently swap.”
“Tapes, too,” Jenn said, “wouldn’t you guess?”
“They probably leer at them,” Jesse said.
“Almost certainly,” Jenn said. “And, my God, what about the women on board? You know the older women? What are they?”
“Put the young ones at ease. Maybe. On the other hand, Katie says, they ‘jump right in.’”
“Jesus,” Jenn said. “You can get them both, can’t you? For statutory rape?”
“I can always do that,” Jesse said. “I want them for murder.”
“Both of them?”
“Whoever killed her,” Jesse said. “And whoever helped.
And whoever knew.”
“What if neither of them did it?” Jenn said.
“One of them did it. Maybe both.”
“You’re so sure?”
“I’m so sure.”
She continued to lie on her side, looking at him. He continued to look at the ceiling.
“If I was looking at your butt and just thinking it was a good-looking butt?” Jesse said after a while.
“That would be admiring,” Jenn said.
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“And if I also imagined holding on to your butt while we were making wild and exotic love?”
“That would be leering.”
“And is one better than the other?” Jesse said.
“Jesse, this sex case is making you crazy,” Jenn said.
“You think?”
Jenn took in a deep breath.
“I am your main fucking squeeze,” she said. “You are supposed to admire me and leer at me and feel desire and act on it.”
“Act on it?”
“Yeah, act. That too much for you, Hamlet?”
Jesse grinned at her.
“Then out swords,” he said, “and to work withal.”
“That’s not Hamlet,” Jenn said.
“Jose Ferrer said it in some movie I saw.”
“That was Cyrano de Bergerac.”
“Close enough,” Jesse said, and pressed his mouth on hers.
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36
T hanks for coming in, Mr. Ralston,” Jesse said.
Thomas Ralston’s head was shaved. He
had a deep tan. He was a little taller than Jesse. Six feet, maybe. And he was the kind of fat guy who pretends that it’s brawn. His white shirt had epaulets. It was unbuttoned halfway down his fat tan chest. He had on tan linen slacks and brown leather sandals. A gold cross on a thick chain nes-tled among the gray chest hairs. He kept his wraparound sunglasses on indoors.
“What’s this all about, Chief?” he said.
“Just routine,” Jesse said. “We’re looking into a homicide.
Woman from Fort Lauderdale named Florence Horvath.”
S E A C H A N G E
“Never heard of her,” Ralston said.
“Well, that answers one question,” Jesse said. “We think she may have come off one of the yachts here for Race Week.”
Ralston shrugged.
“So, you being registered in Fort Lauderdale and all.”
“Sure,” Ralston said. “Perfectly understandable. Why do you think she fell off a yacht.”
“I didn’t say she fell,” Jesse said.
“Whatever. You got any evidence?”
Jesse took out his head shots from the Horvath video.
“Know any of these three people?” Jesse said.
Ralston studied the pictures for a time, then shook his head and handed them back.
“Don’t know any of them,” he said.
Ralston took a leather cigar case out of his shirt pocket.
“Care for a cigar, Chief?” Ralston said. “The real thing. I’d deny it in court, of course. But genuine Cuban.”
“No thank you,” Jesse said.
Ralston shrugged and began to take out a cigar.
“There’s a town ordinance against smoking on town property,” Jesse said.
Ralston paused and shook his head and then put the cigar back in the case and the case back in his pocket.
“Amazing,” he said.
“Know anyone named Katie DeWolfe?” Jessie said.
Jesse could almost hear something click shut inside Ralston. He seemed to think about the name for a moment.
Then he shook his head.
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“No,” he said. “I don’t. Why do you ask?”
“Know Harrison Darnell?”
“Darnell?” Ralston said. “Yeah. Sure. I know him a little.
Not well. Just casual, you know? Yachting isn’t that big a world. He’s on the Lady Jane, I believe.”
“Also out of Fort Lauderdale,” Jesse said.
“Oh, sure, that’s right. Of course. That’s why you’re asking. The Fort Lauderdale connection.”
“You think he might know Florence Horvath?” Jesse said.
“I just have no way to know, Chief . . . ?” Ralston looked at the nameplate on Jesse’s desk. “Jesse Stone, is it?”
Jesse nodded.
“I don’t know who Harrison Darnell knows or what he does.”
“What might he do?” Jesse said.
“I just told you I don’t know,” Ralston said. “I’m trying to be cooperative, Chief, but you seem hostile.”
Jesse nodded.
“Know anyone named Cathleen Holton?” Jesse said.
“No.”
“How about Corliss or Claudia Plum?”
“No. Who the hell are these people?”
“Mandy Morello?” Jesse said.
“No, for crissake, Chief. What’s going on here? You think I did something?”
“No,” Jesse said. “Just running through the list.”
“Well, no offense, but I’m getting tired of it. Can I leave?”
“Sure,” Jesse said. “Thanks for coming in.”
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K elly Cruz was in the manager’s office at the marina near the Boat Club. The manager was appropriately windblown and sun-
tanned, wearing a marina staff polo shirt and khaki shorts.
There was, Kelly Cruz noticed, a cute tattoo on his left calf.
Kelly Cruz liked tattoos in discreet moderation.
“Wow,” the manager said. “You’re pretty good-looking, for a cop.”
“I’m pretty good-looking for a person,” Kelly Cruz said.
“My name’s Kelly Cruz.”
“Bob,” the manager said.
“Do you have assigned mooring here, Bob?”
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“Sure,” the manager said. “Otherwise it’d be a free-for-all when they came in.”
“So you got a record of the mooring locations,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Course.”
The manager had thick black hair, cut short. His forearms and hands looked strong. He was wearing a nice aftershave.
“May I see them?”
“You bet,” the manager said. “Come around, we got it all on computer.”
Kelly Cruz stood beside him while he punched up the listings.
“Lookin’ for anybody special?” he said.
“Thomas Ralston.”
The manager scrolled down.
“Here we go, he owns Sea Cloud. Number 10A.”
“How about Harrison Darnell?”
The manager scrolled again.
“He should be 8A or 12A. I remember . . . yeah, 12A . . .
I remember they made a point of insisting on side-by-side moorings.”
“They registered together?”
“We don’t call it registered, Kelly. But yeah. They came in a year, year and a half ago, said they wanted to be far out, and they had to be side by side.”
“Do you know either of these gentlemen, Bob?”
“Nope. Just saw them when they contracted the moorings.”
“Do you know why they wanted to be side by side?”
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“Nope.”
“A guess?”
“Party together, I suppose. Two boats are better than one?”
“Two of most things are better than one,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Absolutely, Detective Kelly Cruz.”
“Kelly’s my first name.”
Bob grinned at her.
“I figured you weren’t Irish,” he said.
She smiled.
“You know anything interesting about either of these guys?” she said.
“Not a thing.”
“Know anybody named Florence Horvath?”
“Nope.”
“Corliss or Claudia Plum?”
“Nope. Great names, though,” Bob said. “You ever go out with people you’ve questioned, Kelly Cruz?”
“When I can get a babysitter.”
“Kids.”
“Yep.”
“Husband?”
“Nope.”
“That works,” Bob said.
“It does,” Kelly Cruz said, and handed Bob her card.
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38
H ealy took his hat off and put it on the edge of Jesse’s desk.
“I’m on my way home,” he said.
“Way to go,” Jesse said.
“Which means I’m off duty.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jesse said.
He went to the file cabinet, got a bottle of Bushmill’s Black Label, poured about two inches into a water glass and handed it to Healy.
“You still can’t join me,” Healy said.
“Almost eleven months now,” Jesse said. “Not yet. Maybe never.”
S E A C H A N G E
“Day at a time,” Healy said.
He took a sip, and put his head back, and closed his eyes.
“You don’t have to enjoy it so fucking much,” Jesse said.
“Sorry,” Healy said. “But you remember what the first one was like at the end of the day.”
“I do,” Jesse said. “It’s the fifth or sixth one I have trouble recalling.”
“I’ll try to be unemotional about the next swallow,” Healy said.
“Appreciate it.”
“So,” Healy said. “You asked me to stop by.”
“Remember the floater we had?” Jesse said.
“Horvath,” Healy said. “Been a long time in the water.”
“Well, lemme bring you up to date,” Jesse said.
Healy nodded and sat back with his Irish whiskey and listened.
When Jesse was through, Healy thought about things for a moment. Then he said, “You can get them on statutory rape anytime you want.”
“Yes.”
“But when you do,” Healy said, “they’ll get lawyered to the eyeballs, and you won’t get another word out of them.”
“Correct.”
“And it’s pretty hard to leverage statutory rape into a murder confession.”
“Pretty hard,” Jesse said.
“So right now you’re just stirring the mix.”
Jesse nodded.
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“So what do you want with me?”
“I don’t want to lose them.”
“You afraid they’ll run?”
“They know I’m interested,” Jesse said. “They’ve got money. They leave the jurisdiction, I’m going to have trouble getting them back.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have let them know you were interested.”
“Maybe. But I got no other way to go about this than to keep prying and asking and pushing and poking and looking around. And maybe the pressure will make one of them stupid.”
Healy nodded. “They aren’t charged with a crime,” he said. “They can go where they want to.”
“But they could be charged with statutory rape anytime,”
Jesse said.
“So you want me to help you keep track of them and if they try to depart we arrest them and charge them with the rape of a minor child.”
“Yes.”
“And tell them they have the right to an attorney.”
“Better than losing them,” Jesse said. “I don’t have the resources.”
“We can help you at the airport,” Healy said. “And the train stations.”
“And I need some clout with the Coast Guard. They’re stretched a little thin these days.”
“I can probably do something there. If I can’t, I can prob-1 8 2
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ably get you one of ours. What do you want, a patrol boat at the harbor mouth?”
“Plainly marked,” Jesse said.
“Soon?”
“Now,” Jesse said.
Healy sipped some whiskey.
“Soon,” he said.
They sat quietly.
“You got a theory?” Healy said after a time.
“Some kind of sex ring with these two clucks at the center,” Jesse said. “They bring some girls and recruit others, mostly very young. Florence would have been a bring-along.”
“And you figure something grew out of that scene that caused the death of Horvath?”
“Yes.”
“You figure Darnell did it?”
“Yes.”
“So where’s Ralston fit?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nowhere. Maybe he’s just a pervert and all we get him on is the stat rape charge.”
“Could have been Ralston,” Healy said.
“Could have. They were tight, we know that. Cruz in Fort Lauderdale found that out. Moorings at the outer ring. Side by side.”
“They were doing the same thing there,” Healy said.
“I’d guess,” Jesse said.
“You got anywhere to go now?”
“Nothing beyond the rape charge. Hell, I don’t even know 1 8 3
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if that will stick on Ralston. We got Darnell cold with it on tape. But the girl may not be a good witness against Ralston, and we got no tape.”
“Keep pushing,” Healy said. “These aren’t stand-up guys, I’d guess.”
“You’d be right,” Jesse said.
“And they’ve made a lot of messes in various places they’ve been. So one of them will scare and fuck up and you’ll catch him and it’ll either be him or he’ll give you the other one . . .”
“Or one of the messes they left behind will give them up.”
Healy nodded. They were quiet again. It was a late summer day. Still light, but the light slanting now from the west, and a darker tone. Healy sipped his whiskey. It would be nice, Jesse thought, to be able to sit at the edge of evening and sip a whiskey and talk. Maybe someday. Maybe not.
“You’re living with your ex-wife,” Healy said.
“We’re giving it another try.”
“Working?”
“So far,” Jesse said.
“Good,” Healy said, and sipped.
“You’re married,” Jesse said.
“Long time,” Healy said. “Some of it has been some pretty bad thrashing around, but we hung in there and it turned out good.”
Jesse nodded.
“Marriage is hard for cops,” Healy said. “Know a lot of them that can’t do it.”
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S E A C H A N G E
“Cop wasn’t the issue, I don’t think,” Jesse said.
“Some of the divorces are a mess. They hate each other, they fight over the kids and the money and anything else they can find.”
“I know marriages like that,” Jesse said.
“Yeah. But some of the breakups are bad. They loved each other, even liked each other, but they couldn’t do it.”
“Hard,” Jesse said.
“Hardest thing in the world, I think. Guys like us,” Healy said, “are not chit-chat guys. Closed in a little, maybe.”
Healy sipped whiskey, and sat a minute as it settled in.
“And the only people we know how to talk with is the women we marry,” he said.
“I know,” Jesse said.
“Then the marriage breaks up, and you need somebody to talk with more than you ever have and she’s the only one you can’t talk with. . . . Makes for a lot of guys alone with a bottle of vodka.”
“That’s why they have shrinks,” Jesse said.
“Lot of cops don’t do shrinks.”
“I do,” Jesse said.
“Which is maybe,” Healy said, “why she’s back in the house.”
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39
J enn’s dressing room was in the back part of a trailer, the remainder of which served as a production office.
“Just like a movie star,” Jesse said.
He sat on the little built-in banquette while Jenn took off her camera makeup.
“Big production budget,” Jenn said. “This isn’t just Channel Three. This is Allied Broadcasting, which owns five other stations in big markets all across the country. New York, Chicago, L.A. This is like national.”
Jenn washed her face carefully in the small bathroom, and S E A C H A N G E
came out and dried carefully, and began to reapply her own makeup.
“Why not just leave the other makeup on?” Jesse said.
Jenn glanced at him in the mirror.
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
“Just asking,” Jesse said.
Jenn leaned very close to the mirror as she worked on her face.
“When I get through,” she said, “I have something really interesting to show you. You know what B roll is?”
“Sure, second unit. No stars or anything, just the director and a camera guy getting background stuff.”
“Second unit,” Jenn said. “I forget you worked all those years in L.A.”
“Everybody in L.A. knows second unit,” Jesse said. “Hell I can even say mise-en-scène.”
“But can you define it?” Jenn said.
“Nope. I left L.A. before I learned that part.”
Jenn put her lip gloss on and leaned back a little and looked at herself in the mirror. Then she leaned very close and looked. Then back for one more medium-range look and turned toward him.
“Check this out,” Jenn said.
She put a cassette in the built-in VCR and pressed play. It was raw film, taken on board several yachts in Paradise Harbor. Jesse watched silently. There was no dialogue.
“I was looking at some of the B roll,” Jenn said. “Marty’s 1 8 7
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
great. She wants my input on everything. And I saw something that I thought would interest you.”
“You want to say what?”
“You’ll see,” Jenn said.
Jesse watched silently. The scenes jerked from one to another without transition.
“Yo!” Jesse said.
Jenn stopped the tape and rewound it, and played it again.
“Yo,” Jesse said.
“See him?” Jenn said.
“From the Florence Horvath sex tape,” Jesse said.
“Part of the fuck sandwich,” Jenn said. “The one on top, I think.”
“And you recognized him,” Jesse said.
“I did.”
“You must have been paying closer attention to that tape than I thought,” Jesse said.
“I’m naturally observant,” Jenn said. “You recognized him, too.”
“I’m supposed to,” Jesse said. “Was this a test?”
Jenn smiled. “I guess it was. I guess I would have kind of liked it if you’d missed him and I had to point him out.”
“Glad I passed,” Jesse said.
“Well,” Jenn said after a pause, “I guess I am, too.”
“Sign of love,” Jesse said.
“Yes.”
“You know where the tape was made?” Jesse said.
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S E A C H A N G E
“Everything’s labeled,” Jenn said. “So when we get in the editing room, we have some idea of what we’re doing.”
“Clever,” Jesse said. “And the location is?”
“Sea Cloud,” Jenn said. “Yesterday. Contact Thomas Ralston.”
“Yesterday,” Jesse said.
Jenn nodded.
“We always date everything,” Jenn said.
“The sonovabitch is still here,” Jesse said.
Jenn shrugged.
“I need a copy of that tape,” Jesse said.
“Take it,” Jenn said. “I had them dupe it for you.”
“Christ,” Jesse said. “Maybe you should be chief of police.”
“What,” Jenn said. “And give up show business?”
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40
H is name was Eric Jurgen. Suitcase Simpson and Arthur Angstrom went out to the Sea Cloud and got him.
“Thanks for coming in, Mr. Jurgen,” Jesse said.
“I try to obey the police,” Jurgen answered.
He spoke with a faint accent.
“Are you foreign born, Mr. Jurgen?” Jesse said.
“I am Austrian,” Jurgen said. “Is there a problem?”
“You are a crewman on the Sea Cloud, ” Jesse said.
“Yes sir.”
“Do you know Florence Horvath?”
S E A C H A N G E
Jurgen smiled. “Florence,” he said. “Yes. I am very sorry to hear that she died.”
“How did you know her?”
“She was with Mr. Darnell when I worked on the Lady Jane. ”
“With Mr. Darnell?”
“You know, like his girlfriend.”
“Didn’t Mr. Darnell have several girlfriends?” Jesse said.
Again Jurgen smiled.
“Yes sir,” Jurgen said. “Many. But Florence was . . . she was like the head girlfriend.”
“I have a copy of a videotape,” Jesse said, “which shows you and another man having simultaneous sex with Florence Horvath.”
“Oh,” Jurgen said. “Oh my. You have that tape.”
“I do,” Jesse said.
“Have I broken the law?” Jurgen said.
“No,” Jesse said. “I’d just like you to tell me a little about the tape, if you would.”
“I . . . I do not know what to tell you,” Jurgen said. “I have done that never before.”
“Had sex for the camera?”
“No, that either,” Jurgen said. “But I have never shared a woman. It is very embarrassing.”
“Who’s the other guy?”
“My brother.”
“His name is Jurgen, too?”
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“Yes. Konrad.”
“How’d the tape come about?”
“Florence wanted to make it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She was living on the boat. We were crew.
Everyone else was ashore.”
“Darnell there?”
“God, no. I could not do that in front of another man.”
“Except your brother.”
“That is different,” Jurgen said.
“Where were you moored?”
“Fort Lauderdale.”
“Who took the pictures,” Jesse said.
“Her sisters.”
“Florence Horvath’s sisters,” Jesse said.
“Yes.”
“Corliss and Claudia Plum.”
“I think so, I don’t really remember the names very well but that sounds as if it is correct.”
“And this was Florence’s idea.”
“The whole thing,” Jurgen said.
“She approached my brother and myself,” Jurgen said.
“We were embarrassed. But we are brothers. I could not do such a thing with a stranger.”
“How about the Plum sisters?”
“Oh, yes. We didn’t know them. But they were not, ah, actively involved, if you see what I mean. And besides, they were girls. I wouldn’t want another man watching.”
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They were quiet. Jurgen sat obediently, waiting for another question.
“Anyone enjoy this pig pile?” Jesse said.
“Well, it was . . . different,” Jurgen said. “If a man crews on this yacht circuit, he gets a lot of sex. It’s pretty routine after a while. This was . . .”
He rolled his right hand as he tried to think of the right word.
“It was unusual,” he said.
“How about Florence?”
“I guess she liked it,” Jurgen said. “She was quite interested in the filming, though.”
“And you did this because she asked you.”
“Yes. I liked Florence. Kon, my brother, and I both liked her.”
“She pay you?”
“No sir, absolutely not, sir. She did not pay us anything.”
“No offense,” Jesse said. “You have any idea how she died?”
“No sir.”
“Where’s your brother?”
“In the Caribbean, sir. On Mr. Damon’s boat.”
“Where’s Mr. Damon from?”
“Boat’s out of Miami, sir. I don’t know if Mr. Damon lives there.”
“First name?”
“Mr. Damon? I don’t know, sir.”
“And where do you live when you’re not on a boat?”
“Miami, sir. Kon and I have a condo.”
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Jesse pushed a pad of paper toward Jurgen.
“Write down the address,” Jesse said.
Jurgen did. Jesse took the pad back and looked at it.
“Gimme your driver’s license,” Jesse said.
Jurgen produced it and Jesse compared addresses. They were the same. Jesse gave the license back and grinned at Jurgen.
“Suspicious by nature,” Jesse said.
“That is fine, sir. I know you have a job to do.”
Jesse nodded.
“I’d like it if you didn’t talk about this conversation.”
“They will ask me, sir.”
“Tell them it was routine. I simply asked you if you’d observed anything unusual on board.”
“My God, sir . . .”
Jesse put up his hand.
“Just say you told me no.”
Jurgen smiled.
“If you say so, sir,” he said.
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41
J esse had a drink with Rita Fiore at the Seaport Hotel on the South Boston harbor-front.
“Thanks for coming out here through the Big fucking Dig,” Rita said. “But I’ve been in federal court most of the day and needed a double martini immediately after.”
“Glad to oblige,” Jesse said.
“You drinking Coke?”
“Yes.”
“On the wagon?”
“Eleven months,” Jesse said.
“Eek,” Rita said.
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
She drank some of her martini.
“That’s like the last time I saw you,” she said.
“I stopped shortly after.”
“Scared you sober, huh?”
Jesse smiled.
“There were other issues,” he said.
“Yeah. I know. Like the ex-wifey-do.”
“She would be one,” Jesse said.
“How you and she doing.”
Jesse held up crossed fingers.
“We’re living together at the moment.”
“Oh,” Rita said, “how nice for you.”
“Aw, come on,” Jesse said. “You and I weren’t going any -
where.”
“Maybe you weren’t,” Rita said.
“You were?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Rita said.
Jesse didn’t say anything. Rita wore her thick copper hair long. She was wearing a short skirt, and sitting sideways on the bar stool with her legs crossed. Jesse studied her for a moment. Rita watched him and raised her eyebrows.
“You would be a good idea,” Jesse said. “Anytime.”
“But not a keeper,” Rita said.
Jesse smiled and didn’t answer. Rita gestured to the bar -
tender for another martini. She turned back toward Jesse and smiled widely.
“Okay, so you’re not here to propose,” she said.
“I sent a couple of sisters to you awhile ago,” Jesse said.
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“The Plum twins,” Rita said.
“Anything work out?” Jesse said.
“Hey, you think just because you got my clothes off a cou -
ple of times, I’ll betray professional confidences?”
“I was hoping,” Jesse said.
“Actually they didn’t employ me. I have no obligations to them. They wanted help finding out who killed their sister.”
Jesse nodded.
“I sent them to a guy I know. But it didn’t work out.”
“They see him at all?”
“Yes,” Rita said. “But they didn’t tell him anything and when he asked them stuff they were evasive, so he told them to blow.”
“Excuse me?” Jesse said.
“In a manner of speaking,” Rita said.
“They say anything to you?” Jesse said.
“I think they were worried that you are a small-town doofus,” Rita said, “rather than a high-powered urban hotshot . . . like, say, me.”
“Anything else?”
“I’d say their combined intelligence is about that of a mud puddle.”
Jesse nodded.
“They told me they were staying at the Four Seasons,” he said.
“Yep. That’s what they told me.”
“Too bad they didn’t hook up with your guy.”
Rita shook her head.
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“He wouldn’t have told you anything. He’s a very hard case.”
“Just right for you,” Jesse said.
Rita shook her head slowly.
“Fat chance,” she said. “He’s in love with a shrink.”
“Probably handy to have one in house,” Jesse said.
“Certainly would cut down on the travel time,” Rita said.
“What’s your interest in the Plum girls?”
“They might be a little less innocent in all this than they claim.”
“But no smarter.”
“God, no,” Jesse said.
“Tell me,” Rita said.
Jesse drank some of his Coke.
“All of it?” he said.
“Keep you talking,” Rita said, “you may weaken.”
“Especially if you ply me with Coca-Cola,” Jesse said.
“Have another,” Rita said.
They both smiled. And Jesse told her what he knew about the death of Florence Horvath. When Rita listened, Jesse noticed, the sexual challenge left her face.
“Wow,” she said when Jesse was through.
“Yeah,” Jesse said.
“I’ve been a prosecutor,” Rita said, “and a defense attorney. I’ve been on one side or another of criminal law all my adult life.”
Jesse nodded.
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S E A C H A N G E
“I have also probably slept with more men than you’ve arrested.”
“And I’m a good cop,” Jesse said.
“And I’m shocked.”
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “It’s pretty bad.”
“It’s disgusting,” Rita said.
“But only some of it is illegal,” Jesse said.
“Enough of it,” Rita said. “These aren’t people society has abandoned. They didn’t grow up with no parents in some goddamned project someplace. They’re not victims of racism, or class contempt or poverty. They have no excuse for being trash.”
“True,” Jesse said.
“This is bothering the hell out of me,” Rita said. “And I’m not even involved.”
“I know,” Jesse said.
“Doesn’t it bother you? The obsession with sex, devoid of affection? The exploitation of young girls? The . . .” Rita waved her hands. “The lack of any feeling anywhere among any of these fucking automatons?”
“I have my own problems with it,” Jesse said. “But I try not to let it interfere with the work.”
Rita sat back a little on the bar stool and looked at Jesse and nodded slowly.
“And,” she said, “you haven’t had two martinis on an empty stomach.”
“Sadly, no,” Jesse said.
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42
J esse sat with the Plum twins on a bench in the Public Garden, across from the hotel, near the Swan Boats.
“Our room is such a mess,” Corliss said.
“The maid hasn’t cleaned up yet,” Claudia said.
“This is fine,” Jesse said. “Right here.”
“What would be a trip,” Corliss said, “would be to get high and take a ride on those boats.”
“At night,” Claudia said.
“You took the pictures of your sister and the two men,”
Jesse said.
“Whaa?” Corliss said.
S E A C H A N G E
“You took the threesome video of your sister.”
“We did not,” Claudia said.
“Not,” Corliss said.
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “Eric already told me, and Kon will say so as well.”
“How do you know Eric?” Corliss said.
“I’m the chief of police,” Jesse said. “I know everything.”
“You know Konrad?” Claudia said.
Jesse smiled.
“So what’s up with that?” he said.
Both of them giggled. Jesse wasn’t sure at what. Maybe that was a Plum family technique. When in doubt, giggle.
He waited. They looked at each other.
“Flo,” Corliss said. “Flo asked us to.”
“On Darnell’s boat,” Jesse said.
“Ohh, you know that,” Claudia said.
Jesse nodded. No one said anything. Full of adults and children, the Swan Boats elegantly pedaled their slow circuit of the pond.
“Flo wanted us to do it that way,” Corliss said.
They seemed to speak with instinctive deference to each other’s turn.
“Why?” Jesse said.
Again the girls looked at each other. “She wanted to jerk Harry’s chain,” Claudia said.
“Harry?”
“Harrison,” Corliss said.
“Darnell,” Jesse said.
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Both girls nodded.
“Because?”
“Because he dumped her,” Claudia said.
“She was his girlfriend?” Jesse said.
Both girls laughed.
“Aren’t you funny,” Corliss said.
“What was their relationship?” Jesse said.
“She was the one, you know,” Claudia said, “the one he kept.”
“And the other women?”
“Entertainment, you know?” Corliss said.
“Like fishing,” Claudia said, “or skeet, or bridge.”
“And Florence didn’t mind them?”
“Not as long as she had her place,” Corliss said.
“Which was?” Jesse said.
“Head nigger,” Claudia said.
Both girls giggled again.
“But Darnell reorganized?” Jesse said.
“He dumped her,” Corliss said. “For Blondie Martin.”
“And Florence took this video on his boat to make him jealous?” Jesse said.
“She would never do it with him,” Claudia said.
“Harrison was always after her to go with him and Tommy Ralston,” Corliss said.
“But she wouldn’t.”
“No. But when he dumped her . . .”
“She done it with a couple of former crew guys, and sent him the tape.”
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S E A C H A N G E
“To make him jealous.”
“Yeah.”
“Did it work?”
“He sent for her,” Corliss said. “Flew her up to Boston.”
“There’s no record of her flying to Boston,” Jesse said.
“He had his pilot fly her up in his private plane.”
“When?”
“Beginning of June,” Corliss said.
“She told us he was up here early for Race Week and she was going to join him.”
“What is the pilot’s name?” Jesse said.
The sisters looked at each other. They both shrugged.
“Larry,” Corliss said.
“Last name?”
They both shook their heads.
“Just Larry is all we ever knew,” Claudia said.
They watched the Swan Boats for a time. Some squirrels darted among the attendant pigeons, hoping for a peanut.
“So how come you didn’t tell me any of this before?” Jesse said.
Both sisters shrugged.
“I guess we thought you’d be mad,” Corliss said.
“Mad?”
“You know, about us sneaking on the boat and taking the pictures. We were afraid you’d say something to Willis and Betsy,” Claudia said.
“Your parents?”
“Yes.”
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“Why do you care?” Jesse said.
“They still got some control of our trust funds.”
“Of course,” Jesse said. “So why’d you come up here and see me?”
“We liked Flo. We felt bad about her.”
“And you wanted to know what I knew,” Jesse said. “For fear it might come out.”
“If someone hurt Flo,” Claudia said, “we wanted to know.
We wanted to help.”
“So you set up headquarters here,” Jesse said, glancing behind him at the hotel, “and began to ferret out the truth.”
“We’re having a pretty good time here,” Corliss said. “You ever do two guys and a woman?”
“No.”
“We like two women and a guy,” Claudia said, and pressed her breast against Jesse’s left shoulder.
It had no part in the investigation. The question wasn’t professional. But Jesse couldn’t help it.
“Ever think about love?” Jesse said.
The twins stared at him for a time and then giggled.
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43
Leaning their backsides against the trunk of her car, Kelly Cruz and Larry Barnes stood and talked and watched the private planes land and take off from Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport.
“You flew Florence Horvath up to Boston,” Kelly Cruz said, “in June.”
“Yeah, sure, I remember, last month.”
“That would be June,” Kelly Cruz said.
Barnes grinned at her. He had a thick black mustache and longish hair and big aviator glasses and a short-sleeved white shirt. And his big silver wristwatch looked complex. Neatly R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
across his right forearm just above the wrist was a tattoo that read bad news.
“Tell me about the trip,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Mr. Darnell called, said he wanted me to bring her up.
Told me she’d be in touch to arrange the schedule.”
“Darnell often do this?”
Barnes’s face didn’t change, but somehow Kelly Cruz knew he was amused.
“Often,” he said.
“With different women?”
“Often,” Barnes said.
“Anything unusual about this flight?”
“She required Cristal on ice instead of Krug.”
“What was Florence Horvath like?” Kelly Cruz said.
Barnes looked at her and she knew he was even more amused.
“How much of this is on the record,” Barnes said.
“Only the questions of fact. Did you take her? When? At whose request? Your opinions are between me and you.”
Barnes nodded.
“She was like about two hundred other bimbettes I’ve transported,” Barnes said. “Blond, stupid, sure she was sexy.
Asked me if I had ever done it at thirty thousand feet.”
Kelly Cruz nodded.
“And you left her in Boston,” she said.
“Private terminal. Carried her bags in for her. She was pretty well fried. Gave her to the limo driver. Got the plane serviced, refueled, came on home.”
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“Happen to know what limo company?”
Barnes shook his head.
“Nope. Just a limo guy with a sign,” he said.
“And you never went back to get her,” Kelly Cruz said.
“No. I usually didn’t. Most of the babes were one-way. I’d fly them someplace and Mr. Darnell would sail them home.”
“Know anybody named Thomas Ralston?”
“Fat guy, thinks he looks better than he does?”
“I don’t know,” Kelly Cruz said. “I’ve never seen him. I’m helping out some police up north.”
“What is this all about, anyway?” Barnes said.
Kelly Cruz smiled.
“So you know Thomas Ralston?”
“Yeah, sure, I think so. Mr. Ralston. He flies a lot with Mr.
Darnell.”
“Where?”
“Ports usually. Crew sails the boat somewhere and Darnell meets them there. I guess Ralston has the same deal. I never asked.”
“Did you fly either of them up to Boston?” Kelly Cruz said.
“Not this year.”
“Anyone fly with them?”
“Usual bevy of beauties,” Barnes said. “They get drunk.
Do some dope.”
“Sex?”
He shrugged and gestured.
“I stay up front,” he said. “But yeah, I’d say quite a lot.”
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“And you know this how?”
Barnes looked at her for a moment with the expressionless hint of humor that he projected.
“Ah, trace evidence,” he said.
“Thank you,” Kelly Cruz said, and closed her notebook.
“What’d they do up north?” Barnes said.
Kelly Cruz took a card out of her purse, and gave it to him.
“Florence Horvath died up there under unusual circumstances,” she said. “You think of anything interesting, call me.”
Barnes took the card.
“They think Darnell killed her?”
“I don’t know what their theory of the case is,” Kelly Cruz said. “I’m just asking questions for them.”
“Actually, I’m thinking of something sort of interesting right now,” he said.
“Not at thirty thousand feet,” Kelly Cruz said.
“’Course not,” Barnes said. “Who’s going to fly the plane?”
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44
J esse and Molly sat at the conference table in the squad room. The sound of shout-ing and loud bad singing came from the
four-cell jail wing.
“Hark,” Jesse said.
“Drunk and disorderly,” Molly said. “On Front Street.”
“Today?”
“Un-huh.”
Jesse looked at his watch.
“It’s ten in the morning,” he said.
“No time to waste,” Molly said.
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
Jesse nodded. Molly had a big yellow legal-sized pad of blue-lined paper in front of her.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we’ve got. We know Florence Horvath was alive when she came up here first week in June. We can probably pin that down exactly if we need to.”
Molly made a note. Jesse stood and walked the length of the squad room and looked out the back window at the Public Works garage behind the station.
“And we know she was dead when she washed ashore the beginning of Race Week.”
“July twelfth,” Molly said.
“ME says she’s been in the water at least a couple weeks, maybe longer,” Jesse said. “She was alive when she went in the water, but exact cause of death is uncertain due to the ratty condition of the body.”
“You have to say ratty?”
Jesse turned and walked back the length of the room.
“We know she came up here at Darnell’s request, and on his dime. We know she knew Thomas Ralston. We know Ralston and Darnell are connected and a lot tighter than either would admit. Everybody has lied about who they know.
We know that Florence made the sex video with the two guys who used to work on Darnell’s boat. We know her twin sisters took the video. They said she told them that it was to make Darnell jealous because he had dumped her in favor of Blondie Martin. We know, because we checked the harbor registry, that both Darnell’s boat and Ralston’s boat were here in early June.”
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S E A C H A N G E
Jesse turned and walked back toward the window.
“So where’s the video,” Molly said.
Jesse stopped.
“The video?”
“She must have sent it to him,” Molly said. “What happened to it?”
“Destroyed it,” Jesse said. “It was incriminating to have, and he didn’t know there were other copies. We know that there’s some kind of high-tech sex thing going on between Ralston and Darnell. And we know they have recruited local, and very young, talent.”
“This is probably not the only place,” Molly said.
“Probably not. We’ll see if Healy can help us with that.”
Jesse continued to look at the Public Works garage.
Along one side of the garage, snowplow blades were lined up, waiting for winter. They looked like the skeletal remains of extinct beasts in the hot summer sun.
“We know both Darnell and Ralston have committed statutory rape,” he said. “And we’re pretty sure we can convict them. Darnell for sure. We’ve got him on tape. Ralston too if the kid will hold up in court.”
“And none of this tells us if either or both of them murdered Florence Horvath,” Molly said.
“Sad but true,” Jesse said.
He turned and began the trip back up the room toward Molly.
“In fact,” Molly said, “we can’t really prove that she was murdered at all.”
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R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“She was murdered and Darnell was involved,” Jesse said.
“How about Ralston?”
“Yes,” Jesse said.
“Him, too?”
“Yes.”
“You’re so sure,” Molly said.
“I know them,” Jesse said. “I understand them. Darnell and Ralston killed her.”
“Together?”
“Don’t know.”
“But you know they did.”
“Yes,” Jesse said.
He was standing beside Molly. She looked up at him.
“Intuition?” she said.
“I’ve been a cop for a long time,” Jesse said.
“There’s something else,” Molly said.
She had turned in her chair and was facing Jesse, looking up at him as he stood in front of her.
“Maybe I’m a little bit like them,” Jesse said.
“The hell you are,” Molly said.
Jesse shrugged.
“I mean it,” Molly said. “You are in no way like either of those two scumbags.”
“Scumbags?” Jesse said. “Strong language for a Catholic girl.”
“Scumbags,” Molly said, “all of them. The men, the women, the damned victim. All of them. After I just talk about them, for God’s sake, I feel like I should take a long shower.”
2 1 2
S E A C H A N G E
“We do know more about them than anyone would want,”
Jesse said. “That’s how murder investigations sometimes go.
You accumulate evidence and accumulate evidence and a lot of it makes you want to puke and most of it doesn’t solve your case.”
“So how are you going to solve this one?”
“Same old way,” Jesse said. “Keep asking. Keep pushing.
Try to scare them. Maybe somebody will roll on somebody.
Maybe somebody will do something stupid.”
“Little hard to get somebody to roll on a murder rap by threatening them with stat rape,” Molly said.
“You might if you were willing to let one of them walk,”
Jesse said.
“Are you?”
“No,” Jesse said.
“Accomplice testimony doesn’t get you anything in court, anyway,” Molly said.
Jesse sat on the edge of the conference table near Molly.
“Doesn’t matter,” Jesse said. “I’m going to get them both.”
They were quiet. Molly doodled a frowning happy face on her yellow pad. Jesse sat on the table edge and let his feet swing.
“You and Jenn okay?” Molly said.
“Yes.”
“Living together is okay?”
“Yes.”
“So far.”
2 1 3
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“God, you’re cautious about this,” Molly said.
“I worry that I’ll do it again,” Jesse said.
“Do what?”
“Whatever drove her away last time.”
“Maybe she did something,” Molly said.
“I mean I know she did things, cheated on me and stuff, but what did I do to cause it.”
“Maybe nothing,” Molly said. “Maybe it was her fault.”
Jesse shook his head.
“Course,” Molly said. “If it’s her fault you got no control over it. Your fault, you do. You can be very careful.”
Jesse continued to look out the window.
After a time he said, “Thanks, Molly.”
And Molly left.
2 1 4
45
W hen I’m stuck,” Healy said, “I go over it.”
“All of it,” Jesse said.
“Start at page one of my notebook and
go page by page all the way through.”
It was Sunday. They were on his balcony looking at the harbor. Healy had a can of beer. Jesse was drinking Coke.
Jenn was in the production office looking at videotape. On the floor of the patio a thick-bodied, middle-aged Welsh corgi lay on his side, his eyes closed, his nose pointed at the ocean. Jesse had put a soup bowl full of water near him. The soup bowl was white with a blue line around the rim.
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“I know,” Jesse said.
“But you don’t want to,” Healy said.
“I don’t.”
“I’ll do it with you,” Healy said. “A second set of ears.”
“On a Sunday?”
“Sure.”
“It’ll take all day.”
“Not a problem,” Healy said.
“Something bad going on at your house?” Jesse said.
“My wife’s younger brother is visiting with his wife,”
Healy said. “They have young children.”
“You don’t care for young children.”
“Neither one of us,” Healy said. “But it’s her brother.”
“And the dog?”
“They annoy the hell out of Buck,” Healy said. “When he can, he bites them.”
“So it wasn’t all about helping me when you dropped by.”
“It was nothing about that,” Healy said. “Why don’t you get your notebook.”
Jesse went to his bedroom and got the notebook and brought it back.
“You want another beer?” he said.
“No,” Healy said. “I’m fine.”
Jesse always marveled at people who could nurse any drink. He had already finished his Coke.
“Okay,” he said. “She washes ashore near the town wharf. . . .”
2 1 6
S E A C H A N G E
And they went through it. Incident by incident. Interview by interview. Day by day.
“Cruz broad sounds pretty good,” Healy said at one point.
Jesse nodded.
“People don’t always work that hard to clear somebody else’s case,” Healy said.
“I think she’s kind of hooked into it,” Jesse said. “Talking to all the people.”
Healy nodded.
“Happens,” he said.
Jesse went on.
“I went aboard when everyone was at the clambake,” he read.
“With a warrant,” Healy said.
Jesse smiled, and didn’t say anything.
“Okay,” Healy said. “No warrant. I, of course, don’t know that and never thought to ask.”
“Absolutely,” Jesse said.
He went on. Healy listened. At one point Buck got up and drank water loudly from the blue-rimmed soup bowl.
When he was through he went back to where had been, turned around twice and reassumed his position, with his nose pointed seaward.
“The twins told their parents they were in Europe,” Jesse said. “But they were actually in Sag Harbor, New York, with some guy named Carlos Coca.”
“You check that?” Healy said.
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R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“No.”
“There’s a loose end,” Healy said.
“Here’s another one,” Jesse said. “They say they learned of their sister’s death from someone named Kimmy Young.”
“Haven’t checked her out, either,” Healy said.
“No.”
“Happens,” Healy said.
“Shouldn’t,” Jesse said.
Healy shrugged.
“Where’s Kimmy Young from?”
“Don’t know,” Jesse said. “I assume South Florida.”
“I’ll bet Kelly Cruz can find her,” Healy said.
Jesse nodded. He went back to the notes. It was late afternoon when they finished. Jesse had drunk four Cokes. Healy had nearly finished his beer.
“You don’t like to drink?” Jesse said when he picked up the can and found it not quite empty.
“I like to drink,” Healy said. “But I only like to drink a small amount.”
“Hard to imagine,” Jesse said.
“Never liked being drunk,” Healy said.
Jesse nodded. Jenn came in through the front door and walked to the balcony. Buck raised his head, looked at her carefully and put his head back down. Jenn saw Healy’s beer can. Jesse saw her eyes flick to him. She saw the Coca-Cola can.
“Captain Healy,” Jenn said with a big smile. “How nice to see you.”
Jenn was dressed in what she considered weekend leisure 2 1 8
S E A C H A N G E
wear. Yellow running shoes with pale green laces. Green cargo pants with a studded yellow belt. A yellow top, a choker of green beads around her neck and jade earrings.
“Nice to see you, too,” Healy said. “Nice to see you here.”
“I know,” Jenn said.
Jenn crouched on her heels beside the dog. The movement made the cargo pants very smooth along her thighs and butt.
Buck opened his black eyes and made a small movement with his miniscule tail.
“Is that a wag,” Jenn said.
“It is.”
“What’s his name?”
“Buck.”
“May I pat him?” she said.
“Sure,” Healy said. “He only bites kids.”
“Can’t blame him for that, can we?”
“Hell no,” Healy said. “Bite them myself if I wasn’t wor -
ried about my pension.”
2 1 9
46
K elly Cruz sat courtside at the Tennis Club with Mrs. Plum while Mr. Plum played
men’s doubles. Kelly Cruz had an iced tea.
Mrs. Plum was drinking gin and tonic.
“Your husband plays very well,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Yes,” she said. “Doubles.”
“Not a good singles player?” Kelly Cruz said.
“No. I don’t think he could take the stress of one-to-one confrontation. Inferior players used to beat him regularly.
He rarely plays singles anymore.”
“He’s more of a team player,” Kelly Cruz said, to be saying something.
S E A C H A N G E
Mrs. Plum didn’t comment.
“I’m sorry to bother you again,” Kelly Cruz said.
Mrs. Plum drank some gin and tonic. She shrugged.
“It’s not like my days are filled with important matters,”
she said.
Kelly Cruz smiled. She felt very bad for Mrs. Plum.
“Do you know anyone named Kimmy Young?”
“Kimmy Young,” Mrs. Plum said, and took another drink. “Kimmy Young. Yes, of course, she was in school with my twins. She used to come over sometimes. Pajama parties. CDs. Brownies. You know how teenagers are. Her mother was Miss Oklahoma when she was a girl. Married Randy Young, Young Financial Services. He’s done really wonderfully well.”
“Do you know where I might find her?”
“The Youngs moved to Sarasota, I think. They found life in Miami a little fast, I suspect.”
Kelly Cruz glanced around at the sea of tennis whites.
Mrs. Plum noticed.
“They’re somewhat younger than we are,” she said. “I suppose we’ve slowed our pace a bit.”
“Did the girls go to private school?”
“Oh yes.”
“Which one.”
“Vandersea,” Mrs. Plum said. “The Vandersea School.”
“Here in Miami?”
“Yes.”
2 2 1
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
Kelly Cruz wrote briefly in her notebook. Mrs. Plum flagged down a waiter and got another drink.
“Why are you asking about Kimmy?”
“Her name came up in that same case up north,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Kimmy was a nice girl,” Mrs. Plum said, watching her husband serve. “Smart.”
He had a nice hard serve, but Kelly Cruz noticed Mr.
Plum didn’t follow it in. She didn’t know much about tennis; maybe it was strategy.
“Know anyone named Carlos Coca?” Kelly Cruz said as she wrote.
“Heavens, no,” Mrs. Plum said.
Kelly Cruz nodded, and kept writing. The Plums probably wouldn’t know the Cocas.
“It must be exciting being a, ah, policewoman,” Mrs.
Plum said.
“Not too much excitement,” Kelly Cruz said. “Lots of asking questions and taking notes.”
“But it must give you some satisfaction. Solving crimes.
That must seem important.”
Kelly Cruz put the notebook into her purse beside her gun.
“It does,” she said. “Trouble is, then another crime comes along and you’re slogging along again.”
“This is the most important thing I’ll do today,” Mrs.
Plum said.
Kelly Cruz didn’t say anything.
2 2 2
S E A C H A N G E
“The money, you know. The money guts you. After a while all you have left to do is look nice, and drink.”
Kelly Cruz stood and put her hand out.
“Thank you very much,” she said.
Mrs. Plum shook her hand and smiled absently and began to look for the waiter.
2 2 3
47
J esse was on the phone with Carlos Coca in Sag Harbor.
“Who’d you say you were?” Coca said.
“Jesse Stone. I’m chief of police in Paradise, Massachusetts.”
“And why do I want to talk with you?” Coca said.
“So I won’t get a couple of big mean New York state troopers to come over and yank you out of your swimming pool,” Jesse said.
“I’m not in my pool.”
“Figure of speech,” Jesse said. “Tell me about Corliss and Claudia Plum.”
There was silence. Jesse waited.
S E A C H A N G E
“Dumb and dumber,” Coca said after awhile. “Yeah, they were here.”
“When.”
“Early in the summer. Memorial Day weekend, I think.
Kinda cool. Not good party weather.”
“How long did they stay?”
“Too long,” Coca said. “I kicked them out after about three days.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t fit in,” Coca said.
“How so?”
“They’re fucking crazy, awright? They were drunk by noon. Walked around topless. I got a lot of top-drawer people here. Christ, I got the president of a real estate development company. Big company. International. He’s sitting outside with his wife, having a cocktail before lunch. One of them, who the fuck knows which one, topless, thong bikini bottom, goes and sits in his lap. Takes a drink from his glass. Man!”
“Wasn’t she cold?” Jesse said.
“Who, Missy Hot Bottom? I don’t know. Why?”
“You said it was cool.”
“Well, hell,” Coca said. “I’m not even sure what weekend.
All my weekends are pretty lively. But I’m pretty sure nobody was swimming.”
“So the bikini was for effect.”
“Sure, those two assholes don’t do anything except for effect. For crissake, some of my important guests left because of them.”
2 2 5
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“And how do you know them?” Jesse said.
“Their sister.”
“Florence?”
“Yeah. Now there was a babe. She was even wilder than the twins, but she had a little class. You know? She never of-fended any of my guests. And she could hold her booze.”
“She brought her sisters to party with you?” Jesse said.
“Not this year, they came on their own, but yeah, they used to come with her. Hell, they were still jailbait when they started coming here. The jailbait twins.”
“They get along?”
“Sure. It was like Florence was showing them the ropes.
Like she was breaking them in.”
“Lot of sex at your parties?” Jesse said.
“Hey,” Coca said. “What about privacy here. I’m entitled to my privacy.”
“I don’t care if your guests had carnal knowledge of a vending machine,” Jesse said. “I’m only interested in my case. Anything you tell me is off the record.”
“Well, sure. There’s usually some sex at a big weekend party, you know? Why wouldn’t there be? I think it’s one reason Flo brought her sisters. Learn their way around, in a safe environment.”
“Safe environment?” Jesse said.
“Yeah. There’s always a good class of people at my parties.
Good place for young girls to, you know, grow up.”
“Even when they were jailbait?” Jesse said.
2 2 6
S E A C H A N G E
“Not with me,” Coca said. “But yeah. There’s guys like them young. It wasn’t like anyone’s first time.”
“Any idea where anyone might have lost her cherry?”
“Got me,” Coca said. “Flo told me they weren’t virgins.”
“Know where they were headed when you gave them the boot?” Jesse said.
“Nope. They packed up, and my driver took them into the city and dropped them.”
“Where?”
“He said he took them to the Peninsula Hotel.”
“And this would have been the beginning of June?”
“Yeah, sure, first week or so for sure.”
“And you haven’t heard from them since?”
“No. What’s this all about, anyway? What’d they do?”
“Just routine stuff, Mr. Coca, names came up in a case here.”
“Flo involved?”
“Indirectly,” Jesse said.
“Well, Flo had more class, but they’re all crazy. Whole goddamned family was crazy, Flo said.”
“Whole family?”
“Yeah. That’s what she used to say.”
“Any details?”
“No, just that they were all crazy. That the money had ruined them all.”
“You think she was including her parents?” Jesse said.
“She never said. All of them seemed kind of hung up on the old man.”
2 2 7
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“How so?” Jesse said.
“What am I, fucking Dr. Phil? They just talked about him a lot. Daddy this, Daddy that. Like he mattered.”
“Parents do,” Jesse said.
“Yeah. I’ve heard that.”
“Can you think of anything they said about Daddy?”
“You listen to those fucking twins for long, your brain fries,” Coca said. “You know what I’m saying? I worked my fucking ass off not to pay any attention to them. Mostly they fucking giggle.”
“So you can’t remember an example.”
“What’d I just say, for crissake.”
“That you can’t remember an example,” Jesse said.
“Thanks for your time, Mr. Coca. I may call back in a few days, see if anything has occurred to you.”
“I hope not,” Coca said.
After he had hung up the phone Jesse sat in his office and swiveled his chair aimlessly. Then he swiveled back and picked up the phone and called Kelly Cruz.
2 2 8
48
K elly Cruz sat in the small living room of Kimmy Young’s apartment in Coconut
Grove.
“How’d you find me?” Kimmy said.
“Vandersea alumnae office,” Kelly Cruz said.
“God,” Kimmy said. “They never lose you, do they? CIA ought to use them.”
Kelly Cruz smiled.
“Let me tell you why I’m here,” she said.
“Yes ma’am,” Kimmy said.
“My name is Kelly Cruz, I hope you’ll call me Kelly.”
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“I’m Kimmy.”
“Okay,” Kelly Cruz said. “We have that settled.”
Kimmy was blond, of course. Everyone is blond, except Detec -
tive Cruz. She was pretty but overweight, and she had a cheerful manner.
“You know Corliss and Claudia Plum,” Kelly Cruz said.
“I went to school with them.”
“And did you inform them of their sister’s death?”
“Flo?”
“Florence Horvath.”
“She’s dead?” Kimmy said.
“She is.”
“My God!” Kimmy said.
“I’m guessing that you didn’t inform them of Florence’s death.”
“God, no.”
“So how did they hear of it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them in years.”
“Really?”
“Years. Not since I was, like, fifteen.”
“And you are?”
“I’ll be twenty-one in August.”
“And are you in school?”
“I’m going into my senior year at U. Miami.”
“Your family lives in Sarasota?”
“Yes. That’s the last time I saw the Plums. Before we moved.”
“And that was in?”
2 3 0
S E A C H A N G E
“Ah . . . senior year at Vandersea. I was seventeen.”
“So you haven’t seen them since you were seventeen,”
Kelly Cruz said.
“No.”
“But you said fifteen.”
“Well, I didn’t see much of them for a while before then.”
“I understood that you were pretty good friends.”
“Not really.”
“I heard you used to sleep over sometimes. That seems like friends.”
“I only did it a couple of times.”
“When you were fifteen?”
“Yes.”
The room seemed very quiet. Kimmy didn’t look at Kelly Cruz. There was no longer any hint of cheerfulness. She suddenly seemed almost furtive. Kelly Cruz could feel a click inside, as if something had snapped into place, and a connection had been completed.
“What happened when you were fifteen?” Kelly Cruz said.
Kimmy looked at the floor and shook her head slowly.
“Something happened,” Kelly Cruz said.
Kimmy kept shaking her head. Kelly Cruz paid no atten -
tion. She knew she was right.
“Florence Horvath died under suspicious circumstances,”
Kelly Cruz said. “Up in a town outside of Boston. I’m helping out on this end of the investigation.”
Kimmy neither looked up nor stopped the slow movement of her head.
2 3 1
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“Before I came over here, I talked on the phone with the police chief up there. He said that maybe I should be alert for things involving Mr. Plum.”
Kimmy stopped shaking her head. Her shoulders hunched up as if to protect her neck. Kelly Cruz had seen abused children before. She knew at a level she didn’t understand that what happened had to do with sex.
“Did anything happen involving Mr. Plum?”
Kimmy stood and went to the bathroom and closed the door. Kelly Cruz heard the lock turn. She waited. Nothing happened. After a time she went to the bathroom door.
“Kimmy?” she said.
“Go away.”
“Can’t do that, Kimmy.”
“I won’t come out,” Kimmy said.
“Sooner or later you will,” Kelly Cruz said.
“I won’t talk about it.”
“You have to, Kimmy,” Kelly Cruz said. “You want to spend the rest of your life with the door locked?”
Kelly Cruz waited. Kimmy didn’t speak. The door didn’t open.
“Kimmy?” Kelly Cruz said. “Are you all right?”
Silence.
“Kimmy, I have to know you’re all right, and the only way I can know that is if you open the door and talk to me.”
Silence.
“I’m concerned for your welfare,” Kelly Cruz said. “Either 2 3 2
S E A C H A N G E
you come out now, or I kick the door in. I’m a cop, I know how to do that.”
Silence.
Kelly Cruz backed off two steps and drove her heel into the door next to the handle. She could hear the jam tear. The door slammed open and she went in. She didn’t see Kimmy.
She pulled the shower curtain aside. Kimmy was sitting in the tub with her knees up and her face pressed against them.
“Come on, Kimmy,” Kelly Cruz said. “Get up.”
Kimmy didn’t move. Kelly Cruz bent over and put her hands under Kimmy’s arms and tried to lift her.
“Up you go,” Kelly Cruz said.
Kimmy was dead weight.
Kelly Cruz felt her neck. The pulse was okay. She was breathing. No sign that she had tried to hurt herself. She was just inert. Kelly Cruz tried again to lift her and failed.
“Shit,” Kelly Cruz said.
She went to the living room and picked up the phone and called for help.
2 3 3
49
K immy Young never told the Plum girls about Florence Horvath’s death,” Kelly
Cruz said on the phone.
“So how’d they know?” Jesse said.
“I don’t know,” Kelly Cruz said. “But there’s more.”
“Okay.”
“Kimmy and the twins used to be pals, and Kimmy would go and spend the night and listen to records and giggle about boys.”
“Un-huh.”
“When I asked her more about that she freaked out. I had to get the paramedics. We took her to the hospital and the S E A C H A N G E
doctors got her tranqued enough to be calm but not asleep and I talked with her.”
Jesse felt hollow.
“Un-huh,” he said.
“With drugs, she could talk about it. One night while she was there the old man molested them, and tried to include her.”
“Shit,” Jesse said.
“My thought exactly.”
“She give you details?” Jesse said.
“Yes.”
Jesse waited. He could hear Kelly Cruz breathing.
“I hate this,” Kelly Cruz said.
“I don’t like it much, either,” Jesse said.
“They were all lying on a bed in the twins’ bedroom, sideways, across it, you know. Looking at some snapshots, and he came in wearing his bathrobe and closed the door and sat on the bed with them and began to pat Kimmy and his bathrobe fell open and exposed him and Kimmy was like, paralyzed.”
“How old?” Jesse said.
“Fifteen,” Kelly Cruz said. “And he said he always kissed his girls good night and because she was a guest he’d kiss her, and he kissed the daughters and then her, with his tongue. And she started to cry and he put his hand under her skirt and she said no and clamped her legs and started to cry and he said maybe he could show her how easy it was, and he proceeded with the twins.”
“Touching?” Jesse said.
2 3 5
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“Fucking,” Kelly Cruz said. “She wanted to run, she said, but she lived across town and she couldn’t get home without a ride. And the twins were telling her not to be a baby and . . .”
“He did it,” Jesse said.
“Yes.”
“In front of his daughters,” Jesse said.
“And when he got his rocks off, he got up and thanked her politely and left the room. She ran in and took a shower and got dressed, and called her father and he came and got her.
She told him that she’d had a fight with the twins.”
“How did the twins react to all of this?” Jesse said.
“Kimmy says that’s part of what made it so awful. They seemed to take it in stride—so he banged you. He bangs us, too.”
“She ever tell anyone?” Jesse said.
“No.”
“She know if he molested Florence?” Jesse said.
“She doesn’t know.”
“But it’s likely.”
“Very,” Kelly Cruz said.
“What happens to her now?”
“She’ll spend the night,” Kelly Cruz said. “Talk to a shrink tomorrow afternoon, and they’ll decide.”
“Notify her parents?”
“She doesn’t want them to know.”
“Maybe they should know anyway.”
2 3 6
S E A C H A N G E
“This part of the case is mine, Jesse,” Kelly Cruz said.
“And you are going to honor her wishes.”
“I am.”
Jesse was silent.
“I’ll stay on it, and I’ll keep you informed,” Kelly Cruz said. “But I’m going to protect this kid as much as I can.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” Jesse said.
“Thanks.”
Again they were both quiet.
“There’s something wrong with that man,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Mr. Plum?”
“Yes. You haven’t seen him. He’s disconnected. You think maybe it’s Alzheimer’s or something, but he socializes. He plays tennis. He’s not suffering dementia that I can see.
Drinks a ton. They both do.”
“Mr. and Mrs.?”
“Yes.”
“You think she knows?”
“Yes.”
“But doesn’t know what to do?”
“That’s my guess,” Kelly Cruz said. “She said to me the other day that they had been gutted by wealth. Her phrase, gutted. ”
“Money doesn’t ruin people,” Jesse said. “They ruin themselves. Money just helps them to spread the ruination around.”
“I never had money,” Kelly Cruz said.
2 3 7
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“Me either, but I’ve seen it in action.”
The soundless energy of the open phone line lingered be -
tween them as they sat silently for a long moment.
“You stay on it,” Jesse said.
“I will,” Kelly Cruz said.
“I thought it couldn’t get worse,” Jesse said.
“And now it has,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Big time,” Jesse said.
2 3 8
50
Y our problem,” Dix said, “is you’re scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of the relationship. You were burned
pretty badly, and now you are leery.”
“Once burned,” Jesse said.
“What’s your biggest fear in the relationship?”
“I’ll fuck up again, and lose her again.”
Dix smiled.
“And if she fucks up?” he said.
Jesse frowned.
“Molly said almost the same thing,” Jesse said. “For free.”
“What did Molly say?”
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“She said maybe the breakup was Jenn’s fault.”
Dix nodded.
“Was it?” Dix said.
“I guess in any breakup there’s two people at fault.”
“That sounds good,” Dix said. “Do you believe it? Vis-cerally?”
“No. I‘m pretty sure I drove her away.”
Dix nodded and leaned his head back and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. Then he looked at Jesse.
“You are co-opting the responsibility,” Dix said. “Bad things happen. If it’s your fault, then you can hope to prevent it in the future by not making the same mistake again. But if it is her fault, wholly, or partly, then you can’t prevent it. You have to depend on her, wholly, or partly, to prevent it.”
Jesse didn’t say anything for a time. Dix waited. Jesse nodded to himself. Dix was right.
“It’s about control,” he said.
“You could think of it that way.”
“And trust.”
“If warranted,” Dix said.
“And the sexualization stuff?” Jesse said. “That would be part of the control thing?”
Dix sighed.
“I think that’s a paper tiger,” Dix said. “I think you’ve clung to it as a way of keeping the responsibility. If you are ever-alert, and don’t sexualize the relationship, then you won’t lose her.”
“So why we been talking about it?”
2 4 0
S E A C H A N G E
“I think you will be able to better integrate her past sexual indiscretions into your life,” Dix said, “if you spend less time thinking about her in exclusively sexual terms. It might bring you some peace. But I doubt that it was the cause of the breakup, or would cause one now. What you describe is mostly a healthy libido.”
“It is?”
“Sure,” Dix said, “and your fears have been exacerbated by the case you’re working on in which control and loveless sexual objectification is rampant.”
“And that’s why the case matters so much.”
“Probably,” Dix said.
“So how do we fix this?”
“You stop being the way you are,” Dix said.
“Like that?”
“Sure, like that. You think this is voodoo? If you’re doing something self-destructive, sooner or later you have to decide to stop.”
“So what the hell do you do?” Jesse said.
“I help get you to where you can stop.”
“And you think I’m there?”
“Hell, yes,” Dix said. “You are a tough guy. You can do what you decide you have to do. You’ll either trust Jenn, or accept that you don’t, and see what that brings.”
Jesse nodded.
“So all you’ve done is get me ready,” he said.
Dix smiled at him.
“Readiness is all,” he said.
2 4 1
51
T wo uniformed state troopers, one of them female, brought the Plum sisters into
Jesse’s office. Molly followed them in.
“Captain says we should wait for instructions from you,”
the male trooper said.
“What’s your name?” Jesse said to the female trooper.
“Maura Quinlin.”
“Maura, stick around here. Your partner can go.”
“I’ll be in the cruiser,” the male trooper said.
He left.
“Sit,” Jesse said, “please.”
S E A C H A N G E
The sisters sat. Molly closed the office door and took a chair behind them. Trooper Quinlin sat beside her.
“Thanks for coming in,” Jesse said.
“It was kind of cool,” Corliss said.
“Riding in the police car and everything,” Claudia said.
Jesse nodded.
“And the state police guy is a real skunk,” Corliss said.
“That like being a real fox?” Jesse said.
“Sure,” Claudia said.
“People your age would probably call him a hunk,”
Corliss said.
Jesse nodded, looking at them. Corliss, it seemed to him, was usually the lead speaker. She’d say something and Claudia would follow up. He pointed at Corliss.
“Maura,” he said to the female trooper, “take Corliss into the squad room and sit with her.”
“What?” Corliss said.
“I have some heavy things to discuss,” Jesse said. “With your sister.”
“We always stay together,” Corliss said.
“It won’t be long,” Jesse said. “Maura?”
Trooper Quinlin stood and put a hand under Corliss’s right arm and helped her up.
“We always stay together,” Claudia said.
“Not this time,” Jesse said.
He nodded at Quinlin, who turned Corliss gently and walked her out of the office. Molly got up and closed the 2 4 3
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door behind them, and sat back down behind Claudia. Jesse looked at Claudia without speaking. Claudia smiled very brightly.
“We’re twins, you know, we don’t like to be separated,”
she said.
Jesse continued to look silently at Claudia.
“Did your father sexually molest you?” Jesse said.
Claudia stared at him. “What?”
“Did your father sexually molest you,” Jesse said.
Claudia looked around the room as if Corliss might suddenly appear and answer the question. Jesse waited. Claudia stopped looking around and looked at him and opened her mouth and said nothing. Jesse waited. Claudia looked over her shoulder at Molly. Molly smiled at her but didn’t speak.
“That’s terrible,” Claudia said finally.
“It is,” Jesse said. “Did he molest you together or separately?”
Claudia shook her head.
“Did he molest all three of you together?”
“Three?”
“Florence, you and Corliss.”
“Stop asking me that,” Claudia said.
She began to cry. Jesse sat quietly and watched her. Behind Claudia, Molly sat looking at her hands, which were clasped in her lap. After a time Jesse took a box of Kleenex from a desk drawer and put it in front of Claudia, on the edge of his desk, where she could reach it.
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S E A C H A N G E
“Let me define what I mean by molest,” Jesse said. “So there won’t be any confusion.”
Claudia took one of the Kleenex and dabbed at her eyes.
“Did he touch you in a sexual way? Did he penetrate you?”
Claudia bent forward double and put her hands over her ears and began to moan. Jesse watched her quietly.
“For God’s sake, Jesse,” Molly said. “Leave the poor child alone.”
“I need answers,” Jesse said.
“Well, there are other ways,” Molly said. “If you don’t stop traumatizing her, I’ll file a report with the selectmen.”
Jesse grunted. He stood without a word and went out of the office. As he closed the door behind him he saw Molly get up and put her arm around Claudia’s shoulder. Jesse smiled to himself. Then he went down into the squad room and closed the door.
Corliss and Maura Quinlin were sitting silently at the table. He sat down across from Corliss.
“Well,” he said, “the truth is out.”
“Excuse me?”
“About your father molesting you,” Jesse said.
“Oh . . . my . . . God,” Corliss said.
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T he report to the selectmen line was in-spired,” Jesse said to Molly.
“I thought so,” Molly said. “Made me
look like really good cop at the same time it made you look like really bad cop.”
“And cowardly,” Jesse said.
Molly smiled faintly.
“You did scoot,” Molly said, “as soon as you heard it.”
They were quiet. Outside Jesse’s window the early eve -
ning was starting to darken.
“I need a drink,” Molly said.
Jesse nodded. He reached into the file cabinet where he S E A C H A N G E
kept it and brought out the bottle of Bushmill’s. He poured some in a water glass and handed it to Molly.
“What are you going to tell your husband when you come staggering home with booze on your breath.”
“I’ll tell him I had to do some really pukey police work today,” Molly said. “And I’ll try not to stagger.”
Molly drank from the glass and swallowed and put her head back and closed her eyes. She took a long breath. Jesse went to the refrigerator in the squad room and got a Coke and brought it back. Molly was still breathing deeply, with her eyes closed.
“What I hated the most,” Molly said, “was the way they kept calling him Daddy and saying how he loved them.”
“A way to keep it from killing them,” Jesse said. “Thinking it’s just Daddy loving you.”
“How could anyone think that?”
“You think what you have to,” Jesse said.
Molly sipped her whiskey.
“I wonder if Florence still thought her daddy loved her?”
Jesse shrugged.
“And if Daddy loved them so much,” Molly said, “why did they have to bop everybody else they could find?”
“Looking for love?” Jesse said.
“That’s love?”
“The only definition they had,” Jesse said.
Molly sipped some whiskey.
“So,” Molly said, “why wasn’t Daddy enough?”
“Daddy was married,” Jesse said.
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“Jesus Christ,” Molly said. “Oedipus?”
Jesse shrugged.
“I’m just talking,” he said. “I don’t know enough about it.”
“The thought of sex with one of my children . . .” Molly shook her head. “I can’t even think about it. It makes me numb even to try.”
Jesse didn’t speak.
“We had to know,” Molly said.
Jesse nodded slowly. Molly drank again. The glass was empty. Jesse poured her a little more.
“But making them face it,” Molly said. “It was . . .” She looked for a word. “Nauseating.”
“We made them admit it,” Jesse said. “They’re a long way from facing it.”
“You know the worst part?” Molly said.
She was staring down into her glass, looking at the cara-mel surface of the whiskey.
“When we brought them back together,” Molly said.
“And the fucking truth was sitting here in the room like some kind of ugly fucking toad and we’re all staring at it, and they’re both crying and saying, ‘Don’t tell Daddy. Don’t tell Daddy.’”
Jesse nodded. Molly drank more of her whiskey.
“Daddy, for God’s sake,” Molly said. “Daddy.”
“Daddy already knows,” Jesse said.
“He doesn’t know we know,” Molly said.
“That’s true,” Jesse said.
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“Like they’ve been bad little girls, telling on Daddy, tattletales,” Molly said and drank. “Tattletales.”
Jesse didn’t speak. He had nothing to say in the face of Molly’s overpowering maternity. He listened.
“And what about them now?” Molly said. “Back in the hotel after the day they spent with us? What happens to them?”
“They don’t know anything they didn’t know before,”
Jesse said.
“So what do they do?”
“My guess?” Jesse said. “Do some coke. Do some booze.
Get laid. Giggle some.”
Molly stared at him.
“God.”
Jesse shrugged.
“That’s how they’ve coped until now,” he said.
“Jesse, these are twenty-year-old kids. They’re five years older than my daughter.”
“And they are depraved, stupid, careless, amoral people,”
Jesse said.
“They are victims.”
“That may be,” Jesse said. “But sympathizing with them is not my business. My business is catching the person who killed their sister.”
“So why did you have to dig up all this awfulness?” Molly said.
“It was there,” Jesse said. “I needed to know about it.”
Molly held out her glass.
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“One more,” she said. “Then I’ll go home and take a bath.”
Molly wasn’t a drinker. She was starting to slur her words.
Jesse poured her another drink. She took a sip and looked at him over the glass. Her eyes had a sort of softness about them, the way Jenn’s got if she drank too much.
“You are so nice,” Molly said. “So often. And then . . . you are such a cynical, hard bastard.”
“Nice guys finish last,” Jesse said.
“Somebody said that.”
“Leo Durocher.”
“You know you don’t believe it.”
“Hell,” Jesse said. “I’ve proved it.”
Molly didn’t say anything else. She sat quietly and finished her third drink. Jesse sipped his Coke.
When Molly’s drink was gone, Jesse said, “Come on, hon, I’ll drive you home.”
“I can drive myself,” she said.
“No,” Jesse said. “You can’t.”
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R ita Fiore’s office offered a long view of the South Shore.
“Ms. Fiore will be right with you,” the
secretary said and left.
Jesse looked at the South Shore for a short while until Rita came in wearing a red suit and sat behind her desk.
“Wow,” she said, “a coat and tie.”
“Trying to fit in,” Jesse said. “You talk to your private eye?”
“I did,” Rita said.
She took a notebook from her middle drawer and opened it and thumbed through some pages.
“He gave me what he had.”
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“Didn’t I run into him once?” Jesse said. “Working on something in Paradise?”
“I think so,” Rita said.
“Him and a terrifying black guy.”
“Terrifying is one description,” Rita said. “Toothsome would be another.”
Jesse smiled.
“What did he tell you?” he said.
Rita looked at her notes.
“They wanted to know if he could find a person and track his movements,” Rita paused and studied her notes a moment.
“I hate my handwriting,” she said. “And he said, ‘You want someone followed?’ and they said mostly they wanted to know where someone had been in the last few months. And he said that was possible, who did they have in mind?”
Rita looked up and smiled.
“Then they ran into a snag,” Rita said. “The girls didn’t want to tell him who.”
“Whose movements they wanted him to discover?”
“That’s right.”
She returned to her notes and studied them for a moment.
“He said that it would be difficult to trace someone’s movements if he didn’t know who they were, and, he told me, ‘They acted like they hadn’t thought of that.’ He told me, ‘They kept looking at each other and silently agree-ing that they couldn’t give the name.’ So he declined the employment offer . . . he claims, graciously.”
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“They give him any clue where he was supposed to look?”
Jesse said.
“Miami and Boston,” she said.
Rita looked at her notes.
“Miami or Boston,” she said, “or travel between.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jesse said.
Rita waited. Jesse didn’t say anything.
“I would guess,” Rita said after a time of silence, “that I have provided you a clue.”
“Yes,” Jesse said.
They were quiet again.
Then Rita said, “I would guess that you are not going to share it with me.”
“Also true,” Jesse said.
“Because?”
“Because you are the best criminal defense lawyer in the state,” Jesse said. “And you might end up defending someone I want convicted.”
“Are you suggesting I would take unfair advantage of our, ah, relationship?”
“Yes.”
Rita smiled.
“Well, of course,” she said. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to call Kelly Cruz,” Jesse said.
“Who’s Kelly Cruz?”
“Somebody I’m going to call,” Jesse said.
Jesse stood. Rita stared at him for a moment.
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“If I’d known you were like this,” she said, “I’d never have bopped your socks off.”
Jesse grinned at her.
“Yeah,” he said. “You would have.”
And they both began to laugh.
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B ack with the Plums, Kelly Cruz thought, as she sat on the same terrace, looking at the same blue-green water. Mr. and Mrs. Plum
were both tanned and immaculate in white. The drink trolley was set up on the terrace. It was late afternoon and the cocktail hour had begun. Probably been in effect for a while, Kelly Cruz thought. She declined alcohol, and accepted a 7-Up.
“Just a few follow-up questions,” Kelly Cruz said when they were all settled. “Have you been traveling at all in the last couple of months?”
“No, we haven’t,” Mr. Plum said pleasantly.
He smiled at Kelly Cruz. His eyes crinkled attractively when he smiled.
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“Say, since the end of May?”
“No, we haven’t,” Mr. Plum said, just as pleasantly.
“Mrs. Plum?” Kelly Cruz said.
“No,” she said. “I believe Willis drove up to Tallahassee, around the beginning of June, but I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“No, I didn’t, Mommy,” Mr. Plum said.
“You went up to visit the new store,” Mrs. Plum said.
Mrs. Plum looked at Kelly Cruz.
“Willis loves to get in the car and drive off by himself. He drives all over the country.”
“No,” Mr. Plum was kind but firm, “you’re confused.”
Mrs. Plum looked at her husband. He was serene in his certainty, sipping a gin and tonic today. Pacing himself, Kelly Cruz thought.
“Didn’t you open a new store in Tallahassee? Right after Memorial Day?”
Mr. Plum smiled fondly at his wife.
“Mommy, you’re getting old on me. I didn’t go anywhere in June.”
“You have a car,” Kelly Cruz said.
“My dear,” Mr. Plum said. “Of course we do.”
“Wow,” Kelly Cruz said. “I never think of cars at a place like this. Is there a parking garage?”
“Indeed,” Mr. Plum said. “And valet service all through the day and night.”
He seemed proud.
“I suppose you have assigned spaces?” Kelly Cruz said.
“Probably deeded.”
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She was aware as she chatted with Mr. Plum that Mrs.
Plum was staring at him. Mr. Plum looked at her indulgently.
“Of course,” he said kindly.
He rang a small bell, and the Cuban maid came in and brought the Plums another drink from the trolley. Kelly Cruz nursed her 7-Up. As he sipped his new drink, Mr.
Plum seemed to lose interest in Kelly Cruz. Instead he looked thoughtfully out from the patio at Biscayne Bay. Mrs.
Plum appeared not to look at anything.
“Well,” Kelly Cruz said. “So, no travel, I guess.”
Mr. Plum seemed not to hear her. Mrs. Plum shrugged and shook her head.
Kelly Cruz put her unfinished soft drink on the coffee table and stood.
“Well, thanks, sorry to bother you,” she said.
Mr. Plum continued to look at the bay. Mrs. Plum reached forward and rang the bell, and the Cuban maid came and showed Kelly Cruz to the door.
Kelly Cruz paused at the door and smiled at the maid, just a couple of palsy Cuban girls taking a moment to chat.
“Mi hermana,” Kelly Cruz said. “You remember when Mr.
Plum went up to Tallahassee a couple of months ago?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Mrs. Plum didn’t go with him, did she?” Kelly Cruz said.
“No ma’am.”
“Good,” Kelly Cruz said. “Thanks, Magdalena. The garage on the lower level?”
“Yes ma’am.”
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55
J esse was on the phone with Kelly Cruz.
“He’s so empty and sweet,” she said. “It’s like part of him is missing but he doesn’t mind and there’s no reason you should be upset about it.”
“Except for him being a pedophile.”
“Except for that,” Kelly Cruz said.
“And you think the wife knows,” Jesse said.
“She knows,” Kelly Cruz said. “I can’t promise you that she even knows she knows.”
“But she knows.”
“She knows,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Can you work on her?”
S E A C H A N G E
“Some. If I can catch her away from him. They are nearly always together, as far as I can tell.”
“Contentment,” Jesse said. “After years of marriage.”
“Except for him being a pedophile,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Except for that,” Jesse said.
“How about the maid?”
“See no evil, speak no evil.”
“Not even for a sister?”
“She doesn’t care if I’m of pure Cath-tilian heritage,”
Kelly Cruz said. “She’s got a good job and she won’t do anything to risk it. I had to trick her to say anything.”
“Any other servants?”
“Houseman and a cook. They are much less forthcoming than the maid.”
“So the servants are a dead end,” Jesse said.
“Complete,” Kelly Cruz said. “However, being a stubborn broad, I check out the parking garage. The attendant doesn’t remember whether Mister took his car out or not at the beginning of June. So I say, Is it there now? And he says it is and shows it to me. Actually I say this all in Spanish.”
“Muy simpatico,” Jesse said.
“Si,” Kelly Cruz said. “It’s an Escalade. Black. Loaded. I checked it out. It told me nothing. But I did see a small E-ZPass transponder inside the windshield.”
“New York,” Jesse said. “Our system works with it, too.”
“Lot of them do, along the East Coast,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Then I called the new Plum and Partridge store in Tallahassee, and yes, they opened the day after Memorial Day, and 2 5 9
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
no, Mr. Plum didn’t attend. No one at the store that I talked to even knows what he looks like. I gather he’s not a hands-on manager.”
“But you are convinced he went somewhere,” Jesse said.
“Yes. Mrs. Plum shut up once he made it clear he would deny it,” Kelly Cruz said. “But he wasn’t home the first few days in June.”
“So if I tracked down the hits on his E-ZPass transponder, maybe I’d learn something,” Jesse said.
“If he drove someplace where the system is in effect,”
Kelly Cruz said.
“And at worst I’d learn what I already know,” Jesse said.
“Which is?”
“Next to nada. ”
“Wow,” Kelly Cruz said. “You really do speak our language.”
“I used to work in L.A.,” Jesse said.
“Sorry to hear that,” Kelly Cruz said.
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56
Y our guest is already here,” Daisy Dyke told Jesse. “Hoo ha.”
“Hoo ha?” Jesse said.
“Wasn’t a married woman I might take a run at her m’self.”
“I think she’s on my side of the fence,” Jesse said.
“Never know till you try,” Daisy said. “You taking a run?”
“No. It’s business.”
Blondie Martin was at a table in the back of Daisy’s beside the bar, drinking Lillet on the rocks. Daisy held the chair out for Jesse and pushed it in as he sat.
“So,” Blondie said, when Daisy had left them. “How come you’re not grilling me in the back room of the station house.”
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“I was afraid you’d like it too much,” Jesse said.
“Especially with handcuffs,” Blondie said.
The waitress appeared. Jesse ordered iced tea. Blondie asked for another Lillet.
“No drinking on duty?” Blondie said.
“Or off,” Jesse said.
“You ever drink?”
“I did.”
“Are you an alcoholic?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “At the moment, I’m not drinking.”
The waitress brought their drinks, and took their order for lunch.
“So what do you want with me, Chief Yokel?” Blondie said. “You been watching me in the video?”
“I’ve worn it out,” Jesse said. “But today I’d like to talk about Darnell.”
“Harrison? Why talk about Harrison when we can talk about me?”
“This is a working lunch,” Jesse said. “What is Harrison’s attraction for women?”
“Money,” Blondie said.
“That what appeals to you?” Jesse said.
“Sure,” Blondie said.
“Anything else?”
“Well, I mean money can only buy you so much. Some of these freakos are scary. Harrison isn’t. He’s kinky, yes. But if you aren’t kinky in the same way, he doesn’t insist.”
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“Is he jealous?”
“Of what?” Blondie said.
“Any of his women being with other men?”
“Oh God, no,” Blondie said. “This is recreational, Jesse.
Nobody gets jealous or possessive or anything.”
She grinned at him and finished her first Lillet.
“We just all like to fuck,” she said.
Jesse smiled.
“Doesn’t make you a bad person,” Jesse said.
Blondie didn’t laugh.
“Actually, I am sort of a bad person,” she said. “I’m shallow and careless, pretty selfish. But I try to be honest.”
“That why you told me that Darnell was lying about the two crewmen in the video with Florence?”
“Oh hell, I don’t know,” Blondie said. “You looked pretty good on the boat. I thought it might be fun to see how good you were in bed.”
“So it was a seduction ploy,” Jesse said.
“Yeah,” Blondie said. “See what I mean? I ratted out Harrison, just because you looked like you might be hot.”
Jesse nodded. The waitress delivered lunch. A tongue sandwich on light rye for Jesse. Something called a California Salad for Blondie. Blondie ordered a bottle of Char-donnay.
“Was Florence Darnell’s favorite?”
“I don’t think so,” Blondie said.
“I was told she was and that he ditched her for you.”
Blondie Martin looked at Jesse with blank astonishment.
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R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“Ditched her? For me?”
Jesse nodded. Blondie stared.
“Harrison’s favorite,” Blondie said, “was whoever gave him his most recent BJ.”
“Well,” Jesse said. “It’s a standard.”
“The only way this whole deal works on the boat is that absolutely nobody aboard cares about anything but their own orgasm,” Blondie said.
“Including the high-school girls he recruits locally?” Jesse said.
“Sure. You think they’re out there looking for love?”
“Maybe,” Jesse said.
“Oh, fuck the shrink shit,” Blondie said. “They are out there to get laid.”
“Like you,” Jesse said.
“Like me,” Blondie said, “and have some laughs and a good time and maybe come away with a little jing.”
“So why did Florence send him the videotape?”
“She sent it?”
“Didn’t she?”
“I don’t know who sent it. I picked up our mail in town that day. There was no return address. When I gave it to Harrison he wondered who sent it.”
“Did you see it?”
“Sure, we watched it together. It was cool. Harrison especially got a kick out of it. Wanted to try it with me. But . . .”
Blondie shook her head.
“And he wasn’t upset by it?”
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S E A C H A N G E
“No, of course not. What’s to be upset about. He loved it.”
“So when did it arrive? Can you remember?”
“While Florence was off the boat.”
“Off the boat?”
“Yeah.”
“So when was the last time you saw her?” Jesse said.
“She came up with us on the boat from Florida.”
“This trip?”
“Yeah, sure,” Blondie said.
“And everybody on the boat saw her.”
“Sure.”
Blondie sipped her wine. She hadn’t, Jesse noticed, eaten much of her California Salad.
“And everyone lied about it,” Jesse said.
“Of course we lied,” Blondie said. “We didn’t want anybody snooping around into our lifestyle.”
“So how come you are talking to me now?” Jesse said.
Blondie shrugged.
“I like you. I want to impress you. I’m drinking. I feel like it.”
“So how did she die?” Jesse said. “You know that, too?”
“No. She went ashore for a few days. Said her daddy was in town. The tape arrived while she was gone. I remember Harrison being excited to watch it with her and asking when she’d be back.”
“And it was mailed from Miami,” Jesse said.
“I didn’t notice,” Blondie said. “But that’s what Harrison told me.”
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“So if she were really here with her daddy,” Jesse said, “she couldn’t have mailed it to him.”
“Somebody could have mailed it for her,” Blondie said.
She poured herself some wine.
“Why would she go to that trouble?” Jesse said.
“Haven’t got the foggiest,” Blondie said. “You’re the damn master detective.”
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “That would be me.”
He sat and looked at the second half of his sandwich.
Blondie drank some wine.
“Do you remember when she went ashore to see her father?” Jesse said.
“Nope.” Blondie said. “No idea really. You know, Florence wasn’t a big deal to me.”
Blondie picked up a small tangerine segment from her California Salad and ate it.
“How was she when she came back?” Jesse said.
Blondie drank some wine and swallowed, pursed her lips and looked at the corner of the room for a moment.
“I don’t think she came back,” Blondie said.
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E -ZPass transponder number you gave me,”
Healy said, “belonging to Willis Plum of
Miami?”
“Yeah.”
“Was used between June first and June fourth in Mary-land and Delaware and Jersey and New York, and in the Fast Lane entrances on the Mass Pike inbound at Sturbridge and at Brighton. It was used going the other way between June seventh and twelfth.”
“Why would he have an E-ZPass transponder, living in Miami?” Jesse said.
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“Lot of people who drive to New York a lot have them,”
Healy said. “Nice to zip past the tollbooth backups.”
“And our system works with theirs,” Jesse said.
“Convenient,” Healy said.
Jesse and Healy leaned on the iron railing at the edge of the pier above the float where the small boats docked. In the dark water along the edge of the wharf, an occasional dead fish floated, and orange peels, and indestructible bits of Styrofoam, scraps of seaweed, an occasional crab shell, one condom, and a red-and-white bobber that had come loose from a fishing line.
“Found her right there,” Jesse said. “Against the float.”
“With the other flotsam,” Healy said.
“Fancy word,” Jesse said.
“Yeah. Sometimes I read things.”
They were quiet, watching the slow water slap gently at the pier. Jesse raised his eyes and looked at the mouth of the harbor. He thought he could pick out the Lady Jane anchored there. He took in a big breath and let it out slowly.
“Maybe I should reformulate my theory of the case,” Jesse said.
“What would your new formulation be?” Healy said.
“That I don’t know what the fuck is going on and I don’t know who to believe and I have been chasing my own ass up to now.”
“You know this business,” Healy said. “You have to as-2 6 8
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sume everyone’s lying to you. But you have to act as if they weren’t.”
“The bastard was up here,” Jesse said.
“His car was up here,” Healy said.
“She went ashore to see him and never came back.”
“Blondie says.”
“Why would she lie,” Jesse said, “about this.”
Healy smiled.
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “She’d lie about the time of day if it seemed like a fun thing. Or she had an itch she felt like scratching.”
“Still,” Healy said. “He probably was here. He is probably a pedophile. He probably molested his daughters. He’s a lying bastard. What’s Cruz think of him.”
“She thinks there’s something really wrong with him.”
Healy smiled.
“I’ll bet she’s right,” he said.
“So why would he decide all of a sudden to drive up here and kill her?”
“If that’s what he decided,” Healy said.
“I know,” Jesse said. “I know. I can’t prove it yet. But let’s assume he killed her.”
“Okay,” Healy said.
“Why would he suddenly drive up here and kill her and drive home?”
“Maybe she told him it had to stop,” Healy said. “Her, the twin sisters, all of it.”
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“As far as I know she came up with Darnell from Miami, so she was around there before June. Maybe they had the falling out then.”
“And she left in a huff and came north with Darnell,”
Healy said.
“And he decided to follow her.”
“Why not kill her right there, during the falling-out moment?” Healy said.
“Maybe it was in front of the mother and he couldn’t do it then.”
“She knows, you think?” Healy said.
“Cruz says she does.”
“She know he killed their daughter, assuming he did?”
Healy said.
“I don’t know. It might be a nice piece of leverage to shake her loose.”
“Course, your original theory might actually be true,”
Healy said. “Darnell, or Ralston, or both.”
“Or they’ve just been lying every step of the way because they’re afraid of getting caught in the sex ring stuff.”
“Most of which is not illegal.”
“True,” Jesse said. “But it is not universally popular in the best yacht clubs.”
“Everybody has things to cover up in this thing,” Healy said.
“Most things,” Jesse said.
Healy grinned at him.
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“Ah, Laddy Buck,” Healy said. “The job is making you cynical.”
“Anyway, I’ve got them on the stat rape charge,” Jesse said.
“Nice to have a fallback position,” Healy said.
Jesse smiled for a moment.
“At least I can arrest somebody,” he said.
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W e’re going to have to talk to the Plum twins again,” Jesse said to Molly. “Can
you stay sober long enough to sit in?”
Molly blushed.
“Shut up,” she said.
“Let’s have a little respect here,” Jesse said.
“Shut up, Chief Stone,” Molly said.
Jesse nodded.
“Better,” he said. “Get Steve to cover the desk.”
“We doing good cop, bad cop again?”
“Play it by ear,” Jesse said. “But it doesn’t do any harm if they like you and fear me.”
S E A C H A N G E
“They bring a lawyer?” Molly said.
“Nope.”
“Wow,” Molly said. “They are dumb.”
“I’m counting on it,” Jesse said.
The twins sat beside each other in front of Jesse’s desk.
Molly sat as she had before, behind them, near the door.
“We want to stay together,” Corliss said.
Jesse looked at them without expression.
“Maybe I can get you adjoining cells at Framingham,”
Jesse said.
“Framingham?” Claudia said.
“Women’s Reformatory,” Molly said behind them.
They both turned toward her.
“Jail?” Corliss said.
“We might go to jail?” Claudia said.
“It happens,” Molly said. “If you don’t let us help you. It could happen.”
Jesse glared at Molly.
“What are we, the Salvation Army?” he said.
“Part of our job is to help people,” Molly said.
“I don’t want to help them,” Jesse said. “I want to put them in jail.”
Both girls turned back toward Jesse. He could see Molly behind them, while they weren’t looking, take a deep breath.
I know, Jesse thought, I know.
“You have lied to me,” Jesse said to the girls, “every time you could, since the first time I talked with you.”
“We didn’t do anything, like a crime,” Corliss said.
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Jesse let his chair tip forward. He stood and came around his desk and bent from the waist and put his face an inch away from Corliss’s face.
“I don’t like you,” he said. “I hate everything you are. So you keep sitting there lying to me, it makes me happy. It makes it easier and easier for me to put your degenerate asses in jail for ten years.”
“Leave her alone,” Claudia said.
Jesse shifted his face a half inch toward her.
“Both of you,” he said.
“We’re not lying,” Corliss said. “We haven’t even said anything.”
“You don’t know that your father was up here in June,”
Jesse said.
Both of them said “Ohmigod” at the same time.
“You didn’t feel like you should tell me that, huh?” Jesse said.
“Jesse,” Molly said. “They’re kids.”
Jesse raised his eyes and stared at Molly.
“I’m getting sick of the bleeding heart, missy,” he said.
“You don’t like how I question suspects, you can leave right now.”
“I can’t leave them in here alone with you, for God’s sake,”
Molly said.
“Then button it up,” Jesse said.
“If I have to go to the selectmen, I will,” Molly said.
“Fuck the selectmen. I nail these two degenerates, they’ll give me a raise.”
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“Did Daddy kill Florence?” Corliss said.
Jesse was still for a moment. The anger left his face. Then he straightened and rested his butt against the edge of his desk, and folded his arms. His voice was gentle when he spoke.
“You think?” he said.
“We were afraid of it,” Claudia said. “It’s why we came here and why we wanted to get a private detective.”
“To whom you wouldn’t reveal a name.”
“We got too scared,” Corliss said.
“Of Daddy?” Jesse said.
“Yes,” Claudia said.
“If he found out,” Corliss said.
Jesse nodded.
“Let’s run over that videotape you made of your sister and the two guys,” Jesse said.
“It was for Daddy,” Claudia said.
Jesse could hear Molly exhale. He nodded softly.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
He went around the desk and sat down.
“She hated Daddy,” Corliss said. “She said this was her kissing him off.”
“And she sent him the tape?”
“A duplicate,” Claudia said. “She had a bunch of duplicates made. I think she was going to keep sending them to him, you know? Every month? Drive him crazy?”
They both spoke rapidly, the words flowing out as if through the widening crack in a dam.
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“So how did a copy end up on Harrison Darnell’s boat?”
Jesse said.
“We talked about that,” Corliss said. “Me and Claud. We thought maybe Florence brought a copy to show him. Harrison liked stuff like that.”
“I think it was mailed from Miami,” Jesse said.
“That’s the other thing we thought,” Claudia said.
“Which was?” Jesse said.
“Maybe Daddy sent it,” Corliss said.
“Why would he do that?”
“Daddy’s odd sometimes,” Claudia said.
“We thought maybe he sent it to Harrison to embarrass Flo,” Corliss said.
“He didn’t know that it wouldn’t?” Jesse said.
“I think he thought Flo had a nice upper-class wealthy beau,” Claudia said.
“He thought we did, too,” Corliss said.
“What were you afraid Daddy would do if he found out you had hired a private detective to investigate him?” Jesse said.
“We thought he’d kill us,” Claudia said.
She looked at Corliss. They both nodded.
“Who told you about your sister’s death?” Jesse said.
“Mom,” Corliss said.
“So why did you tell me Kimmy Young told you?”
“Kimmy?” Claudia said.
“We told you Kimmy?” Corliss said.
“Yep.”
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“God, why would we do that?” Claudia said.
“That was what sort of tore the cover off,” Jesse said.
“We were scared,” Corliss said. “I guess we just said a name.”
“We were afraid if we told you Mom, that would sort of lead you to Daddy,” Claudia said.
“Because you didn’t want to get him in any trouble,” Jesse said.
“Yes,” Corliss said.
“We love him,” Claudia said.
“And he loves us,” Corliss said.
“And you were afraid he might kill you,” Jesse said.
“Daddy gets so mad sometimes,” Claudia said.
They looked at each other again and nodded.
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K elly Cruz met Jesse at the gate in the Miami airport. She had a short black haircut and a wide mouth and nice posture. Her
ass was, in fact, perky. She was wearing white heels and white slacks and a blue linen jacket and holding a handmade sign that said stone. Jesse was glad that she was good-looking. They shook hands and he followed her outside where they got into a maroon Crown Victoria parked under a no-parking sign in front of the terminal. Kelly Cruz got into the front beside the driver. Jesse got in back.
“Jesse Stone,” Kelly Cruz said. “Raymond Ortiz.”
The driver turned and said hello.
S E A C H A N G E
“Raymond works Homicide,” she said. “Here in Miami.”
“Nice to have an official presence,” Jesse said. “In case we want to arrest somebody.”
“That’s me,” Ortiz said. “Official presence.”
“How you want to handle this?” Kelly Cruz said as they headed east from the airport on the Dolphin Expressway.
“My usual approach,” Jesse said, “is to blunder in and shake the sack and see what falls out.”
“Works for me,” Ortiz said.
“It’s your case,” Kelly Cruz said.
“But you know the people,” Jesse said. “Got a suggestion?”
“The wife’s ready to pop,” Kelly Cruz said. “The old man is buried so deep inside somewhere that I got no clue on him.”
“And the help’s nowhere,” Jesse said.
Kelly Cruz shook her head.
“Nowhere,” she said. “Working for the Yankee dollar. Got no other interest.”
“You’re Cuban,” Jesse said.
“My mother is,” Kelly Cruz said.
“And Raymond.”
“Si,” Raymond said in a parody Latino accent.
“And that doesn’t help.”
“Not a bit,” Kelly Cruz said. “About as much as you being a gringo will help with the Plums.”
“Gringo?” Jesse said.
“I’m trying to sound authentic,” Kelly Cruz said. “I was you I’d go for the mother, and how the pervert killed her daughter.”
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Jesse nodded. Kelly Cruz glanced at her watch.
“Eleven-fifty,” she said. “They’ll be drinking by the time we get there.”
“Good or bad?” Jesse said.
“Doesn’t seem to have much effect,” Kelly Cruz said.
“We’re expected,” Jesse said.
“We are, if they remember,” Kelly Cruz said.
The valet service knew a cop when they saw one. Nobody offered to take the Crown Vic, and nobody objected when Ortiz parked it right in front of the main entrance and got out. In the lobby, Ortiz showed his badge to the concierge.
She called upstairs, and when they got out of the elevator at the penthouse, the maid was waiting for them at the front door of the Plums’ vast condo. She led them through the un-ruffled living room to the terrace where the drink trolley had been wheeled into place, and a small buffet was set up.
Mrs. Plum, in a frothy ankle-length turquoise dress, was reclining on a chaise. Mr. Plum, wearing a white shirt and white linen slacks, sat erect in his chair near her head. Both were drinking Manhattans. Jesse stared at the father. You son of a bitch.
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O rtiz’s only duty was to add jurisdictional presence where Jesse and Kelly Cruz had
none. They declined to eat. Ortiz accepted a large plateful of assorted tea sandwiches and ate them quietly, leaning his hips against the railing of the terrace, and sipping mango iced tea from a glass he balanced on the top rail. Kelly Cruz sat opposite the Plums in a white satin chair with no arms. Jesse remained standing.
“Chief of police,” Willis Plum said. “That’s quite an achievement.”
Jesse ignored him.
“Mrs. Plum,” he said. “A while ago you told Detective R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
Cruz your husband had taken a trip at the beginning of June, and it appeared that you were mistaken.”
“I often am,” Mrs. Plum said, in a tone that didn’t mean it.
“Good news,” Jesse said. “You were right. He didn’t go to Tallahassee. But he was in the Boston area the first week in June.”
She looked quickly at her husband.
“I knew I was right,” she said.
Mr. Plum shook his head.
“He’s wrong, Mommy,” Plum said gently, “just like you were.”
“He has an E-ZPass transponder on his car,” Jesse said.
“It’s compatible with the Fast Lane system in Massachusetts.
He was driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike the first week in June.”
“Transponder,” she said.
“The car goes through the no-toll lane and is electroni-cally recorded. Toll is charged to your credit card.”
“The thing on the windshield,” Mrs. Plum said.
“It is useful almost everywhere north of Washington,” Mr.
Plum said. “I drive often to New York. It is a great time-saver.”
Jesse showed no sign that Mr. Plum had spoken.
“So when you thought he was off to Tallahassee to open the new store,” Jesse said to Mrs. Plum, “he was, in fact, driving up to Boston to see Florence.”
Mr. Plum spoke in the same gentle voice.
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“What he’s saying is wrong, Mommy.”
She stared at him for a moment. He sat very erect, his ankles together. He drank his Manhattan carefully and patted his lips with a napkin. Jesse thought he looked prim.
“Mommy,” Mr. Plum said.
“Do you have any theory, Mrs. Plum,” Jesse said, “why he went up there?”
“No,” she said.
“Do you have any theory on why he pretends he didn’t?”
“I never went, Mommy.”
Mrs. Plum didn’t look at her husband. She kept her gaze fixed on Jesse.
“No,” Mrs. Plum said. “I don’t.”
The room was silent. The sky was very blue above the terrace. The bay beyond the terrace looked clean and bright.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Plum said.
Mrs. Plum stared at Jesse. Jesse walked over to the railing and leaned on it beside Ortiz. Mr. Plum poured himself a Manhattan from a silver shaker beaded with moisture. He offered the shaker to Mrs. Plum who shook her head. She sipped from her still-sufficient glass.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Plum said.
Ortiz ate his sandwiches. Kelly Cruz sat with her legs crossed, her hands clasped over her right knee. Jesse waited.
No one spoke. Slowly Mrs. Plum shifted her gaze from Jesse to her husband. He smiled at her.
He said, “It’s going to be all right, Mommy.”
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She continued to look at him. He sat calmly with his Manhattan delicately held with thumb and forefinger. His face was toward her, but he didn’t appear to be looking at anything.
“You are a monstrous pig of a man,” Mrs. Plum said to him.
Her voice was calm and the tone was simply the assertion of an obvious fact.
“Mommy,” he said, “please. Not in front of guests.”
“You killed her,” Mrs. Plum said. “Didn’t you.”
“Mommy,” he said again in his pleasant detached way,
“please let’s mind our manners.”
“She sent you the tape and you went into a jealous frenzy and drove up there and killed her.”
“Tape?” Mr. Plum said.
“You think I don’t know about the tape? You think I didn’t recognize her handwriting when it came? You think I didn’t find it in your study while you were out? You think I didn’t play it? You think I don’t know about you?”
Her voice went slowly, almost ploddingly, up the scale until she was almost screaming.
“That tape was private,” Mr. Plum said.
“Private?” Mrs. Plum’s voice was down into calm again.
“That is my daughter.”
“And mine,” Mr. Plum said. He seemed still to be looking at nothing. “It was private between me and my daughter.”
“Whom you have been fucking since she was thirteen,”
Mrs. Plum said.
Mr. Plum suddenly looked at her.
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“Mommy,” he said firmly, “don’t be crude.”
She stared at him and then looked at Jesse and Ortiz, then at Kelly Cruz.
“He’s been doing it since they were little girls,” she said to Kelly Cruz. “All three of them. We never talked about it.
Maybe he thought I didn’t know, but I knew.”
“And did nothing?” Kelly Cruz said.
“He had money and we were well situated,” Mrs. Plum said. “He made no demands on me. It was easier to drink.”
“Not for the girls,” Kelly Cruz said.
“I loved those girls,” Mr. Plum said. “And they loved me.”
“And you destroyed them,” Mrs. Plum said. “And now you’ve killed Florence.”
“Betsy,” Mr. Plum said. “Please. Can’t this wait until our guests have departed?”
Mrs. Plum finished her Manhattan. With no apparent thought, Mr. Plum refilled her glass. She began to cry silently.
“See him,” she gasped. “See him? That’s what he’s like.
He’s like a reptile. He doesn’t hear. He doesn’t feel. He has no body warmth.”
Kelly Cruz nodded.
“I am not a reptile, Betsy,” Plum said. “I am a man with the feelings and impulses of my gender.”
“And you killed Florence,” Mrs. Plum said.
Her voice was beginning to soar again.
“You killed Florence because you were jealous that she was having sex with other people.”
“The tape was insulting,” Mr. Plum said.
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“And you killed her.”
“She betrayed me, Betsy.”
“And you killed her,” Mrs. Plum said. “Say it. Say you killed her. Say something for once in your weird reptilian existence, say something true. Say . . . you . . . killed . . . her!”
“You can’t know,” Mr. Plum said. “None of you can know how I loved those girls.”
“Which is . . . why you . . . killed her?”
Mrs. Plum struggled to speak.
“You . . . loved her so . . . much . . . you killed her?”
“I killed her to keep her from becoming worse than she had become,” Mr. Plum said. “I really had no choice.”
He picked up the silver shaker, found that it was empty, put it down and rang the little bell for the maid.
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K elly Cruz turned her drink slowly on the bar in front of her. She was drinking Jack Daniels on the rocks.
“So what about Darnell and Ralston?” she said to Jesse.
They were sitting at the bar in Jesse’s hotel. Jesse was drinking a Virgin Mary. Kelly Cruz had on a black dress with spaghetti straps and a skirt that stopped above her knees. She had a nice tan. A small black purse lay on the bar beside her drink.
“We busted them yesterday, for statutory rape.”
“Will it hold in court?”
“We got Darnell on videotape.”
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“Righteous tape?”
“Absolutely.”
“How about Ralston?”
“If our witness holds,” Jesse said.
“She might not?”
Jesse shrugged.
“She’s a kid,” he said.
“Think they’ll do time?”
“Not my area,” Jesse said.
“What do you think?” Kelly Cruz said. “Cop to cop.”
Jesse smiled.
“I don’t think about that,” he said. “Too many variables.
How good is their lawyer? How good is the prosecutor? Will their sexual history be admitted? Will they plead out?”
“Probably,” Kelly Cruz said.
Jesse nodded.
“No jail time,” Kelly Cruz said.
Jesse shrugged.
“I arrest, they prosecute,” he said.
Kelly Cruz looked at Jesse’s Virgin Mary.
“Drinking problem?” she said.
“Yes.”
“How long you been sober?”
“I haven’t had a drink going onto a year,” Jesse said.
“Miss it?”
“Yes.”
“My husband was a drunk,” Kelly Cruz said.
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“You divorced?”
Kelly Cruz nodded.
“Know where he is now?”
“No,” Kelly Cruz said.
“How are the kids?”
“Good,” she said. “Two boys. We live with my parents.
My father’s a good father for all of us.”
Jesse finished his Virgin Mary and gestured for another one.
“No wonder you got a problem,” Kelly Cruz said. “You’ll drink a lot of anything.”
“Vitamin C,” Jesse said as the bartender set the new drink in front of him.
“Why do you suppose Willis Plum sent the videotape of his daughter to Darnell?”
Jesse shook his head.
“He’s way past anything I understand,” Jesse said.
“Maybe he thought it would embarrass her,” Kelly Cruz said.
Jesse nodded.
“Maybe he was sending it to her, you know, dismissing it by returning it,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Blondie Martin says it was addressed to Darnell.”
“Maybe he did it because he’s a whack job,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Not such a whack job that he flew up there and left a paper trail with the airlines,” Jesse said.
Kelly Cruz drank some bourbon.
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“You going home tomorrow?” Kelly Cruz said.
“Yeah. Paperwork’s done. I’m supposed to take him back with me.”
“Got anyone waiting?” Kelly Cruz said.
“My ex-wife,” Jesse said.
“You have an ex-wife waiting for you?”
“We’re trying to rework things,” Jesse said.
“How’s that going?”
“So far,” Jesse said, “so good.”
“Plum girls are home, staying with their mother,” Kelly Cruz said.
“Good,” Jesse said.
“Think anything good will happen to them?” Kelly Cruz said.
“Probably not,” Jesse said.
“Father’s gone,” Kelly Cruz said. “They’re with their mother.”
“Who is not a real lot better than their father,” Jesse said.
“No,” Kelly Cruz said.
“You did a hell of a job on this,” Jesse said.
“I know.”
“A lot of it on your own time, I suspect.”
“Some,” Kelly Cruz said. “On the other hand, I met a nice marina manager, and a very fine private pilot.”
“Good,” Jesse said. “I’m glad you profited from the experience.”
Kelly Cruz finished her drink and stood.
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“Got a date with the pilot,” she said. “It’s his turn. The marina manager has already profited from the experience.”
Jesse stood. He left his Virgin Mary half consumed on the bar.
“Thanks, Kell,” he said. “You’re a hell of a cop.”
She turned toward him and gave him a light kiss on the mouth.
“You’re pretty good at the job yourself,” she said. “Good luck with the ex-wife.”
“And you with the pilot,” Jesse said.
Kelly Cruz stiffened her upper lip over her teeth and did an imitation of somebody. Bogart, Jesse thought. Maybe.
“Ain’t a matter of luck, blue eyes,” she said, and picked up her purse.
With her left hand she patted his cheek. He put his hand over hers for a moment. She was wearing a really nice perfume. They stood for a moment like that, then she took her hand away and he stood and watched her walk out of the bar.
If there’s luck involved, it’ll be the pilot’s.
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I t was cool and rainy in Paradise. The boats were gone. The harbor was back to its normal maritime clutter. Jenn had made a meatloaf, and baked two potatoes. Jesse had tossed a salad. They sat now at the small table in the kitchen and ate supper together. Jenn opened a bottle of Riesling.
“Aren’t you supposed to have red wine with meatloaf ?”
Jesse said.
“I think with meatloaf you can have what you want,” Jenn said.
“That’s one of the good things about meatloaf,” Jesse said.
“Another being that I know how to make it,” Jenn said.
S E A C H A N G E
The apartment was quiet. Through the open door to the balcony they could hear the rain fall.
“I think we’re doing good,” Jenn said after a time.
“Yes.”
“How are you?” Jenn said.
“Good.”
“And that hideous case is over,” Jenn said.
“For me,” Jesse said.
Jenn nodded.
“Do you actually know what happened?”
“Sort of,” Jesse said.
“One thing I wondered ever since you told me,” Jenn said.
“Why did the twins tell you it was what’s her name? Kimmy something?”
“Kimmy Young,” Jesse said.
“If they had made up a name, or told the truth, you might never have figured it out.”
“That’s right,” Jesse said.
“You think at some level they did it on purpose?”
“Probably.”
“Because they wanted you to figure it out?”
“Probably.”
“And stop it,” Jenn said.
“Which I did,” Jesse said.
“Do you know how Florence died?”
“Sort of,” Jesse said.
Jenn waited.
“For whatever reason, after all this time,” Jesse said, “Flor-2 9 3
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ence decided to stop being Daddy’s girl. They had some kind of confrontation about it. The old man never quite says. And she went off and made the video with her sisters and sent it to him.”
“Some kind of perverted kiss-off,” Jenn said.
“I guess,” Jesse said. “He sent it on to Darnell. Plum never quite told me why. Then, he says, he drove up here to recon-cile. They always liked sailing, the mother says. So Florence rented a boat, packed a picnic, and they went off for a ro-mantic sail, during which time they argued, and he threw her in the water, and sailed off.”
“And he didn’t know where she’d gotten the boat so he just put it the first place he saw.”
“Probably,” Jesse said.
“God, it’s like a lovers’ quarrel,” Jenn said.
“Except he was careful to give himself a cover story and drive all the way so there’d be no record of him with the airlines.”
Jenn put her fork down and looked at Jesse for a long silent moment.
“Which means he planned to do it before he left,” Jenn said.
“Un-huh.”
“My God,” Jenn said.
Jesse didn’t say anything.
“The other daughters?”
“Home with Mom,” Jesse said.
“You think they’ll get over this?”
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“No.”
Jenn poured herself some wine.
“So he’s destroyed all his children,” Jenn said.
“And his wife let him,” Jesse said.
“How could she deny so much,” Jenn said.
“She needed to, I guess.”
Jenn took a sip of her wine.
“Have you talked with Dix about this?”
“Indirectly,” Jesse said.
“You’ve talked to him about how this affected you.”
“Yes.”
“Want to tell me?”
“It was so much about sex and so little about love,” Jesse said. “And I was already worried that with you I’m too much about sex anyway.”
Jenn listened without comment. Jesse went on.
“Dix says that it’s a kind of, what did he call it, amulet, I’ve created. If what I do can cause us to break up again, then the control is with me, because I can change. If it’s things you do . . .” Jesse shrugged.
“I guess you need to trust me a little more,” Jenn said.
“Even if my track record isn’t so good.”
“It’s about both of us,” Jesse said. “Maybe I need to trust us both.”
Jenn smiled and sipped some wine.
Jesse watched her. “It’s been a year,” he said.
“I know.”
“I think I’ll try a glass of wine,” Jesse said.
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“Like that?” Jenn said.
Jesse nodded.
“Maybe two,” he said.
“You think you should?” Jenn said. “You think you can?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Then I’ll stop again,” Jesse said. “I’ve proved I can do that.”
“Have you talked to Dix about this?” Jenn said.
“Indirectly,” Jesse said.
Jenn looked at Jesse’s wineglass and grinned suddenly. He liked it when she grinned.
“You sure you want to waste it on wine?” Jenn said. “I could make you a scotch and soda.”
“I want to eat supper with you and drink two glasses of wine,” Jesse said.
“Maybe two,” Jenn said.
They looked at each other. Both of them nodded.
Jenn poured some wine into his glass, careful to make it a full glass, not to skimp as if she didn’t trust him.
“And,” Jenn said, “you should know that being too sexual with me is a great deal better than not being sexual enough.”
Jesse smiled.
“I’ll drink to that,” he said.