The Bitterest Pill

Twenty-eight

Patti wasn’t listening to him. Stood up, went into the living room, and came back with an open bottle of Grey Goose. She didn’t bother with a glass, taking a big swallow from the bottle. These days, this kind of punishment drinking was hard for Jesse to witness. He had been where she was.

He sat patiently and watched as Patti took another swallow. As painful as it was for him to watch, he knew better than most how futile it would be for him to try to stop her. He remembered how he’d taken any attempt to stop him from drinking as a kind of personal challenge. He saw it so clearly now and had been utterly blind to it when he was still actively drinking. He imagined Patti would see it the same way.

“Chris Grimm,” he said, when he thought Patti could refocus.

That got her attention. “What about him?”

“You know him?”

“Of him,” she said.

Jesse stayed silent. He wanted to hear where Patti took this and he didn’t want to lead her in one direction or the other. As silence usually did, it got to Patti, and drunk as she was, she needed little prompting to fill in the quiet.

“I came home from shopping one day at the beginning of the school year and went to change the sheets in Heather’s room. It was pretty obvious she’d been sleeping with someone. I also found a condom wrapper on the floor under the bed. I’m not a prude, Jesse. I never thought a girl as pretty as Heather wouldn’t be sexually active. I mean, I was at her age, but when I asked her about it, she was oddly honest. She told me she had slept with a kid named Chris Grimm and that she had kind of always liked him even though he was sort of a loner. I figured that his name would come up again and they might become girlfriend and boyfriend, but...” Patti made a face and shrugged. “Heather never mentioned him again.”

“Is that it? When I was here the other day and mentioned his name, you denied knowing about him.”

Patti bowed her head. “I love my husband, Jesse, but he can be hard to deal with. I don’t know, I think he didn’t see Heather for who she was. His upbringing was old-fashioned, and I think he still suffered from the whole Madonna/whore thing. He wouldn’t have been able to accept the idea of Heather having casual sex. And the drugs... he would have totally lost it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why did you bring this Chris kid up?” Patti said, her body language hardening, her eyes focused and intense. “Did he have something to do with—”

“I don’t know. All I can tell you is that he was outside the funeral home and at the cemetery. It’s pretty clear he felt something for Heather, too. More than that, I can’t say.”

Jesse stood up to go. He figured he had gotten all the information he was going to get from Patti, but he reminded her to call him if she remembered anything or thought of anything else that might help him.

Patti tried to stand to show Jesse to the door, but he put a hand on her shoulder to hold her down in her seat. He knelt beside her.

“Patti, I’m an alcoholic. I’m sure that’s not a surprise to you.”

She smiled at him.

“Yeah,” he said, “I thought you knew. I’m not going to preach to you. I hated it when people did it to me.”

She was impatient. “But?”

“But whatever answers you’re looking for, they’re not in there.” Jesse pointed at the bottle of vodka on the table.

“That it?” she asked, grabbing the bottle in defiance, just as he would have done a year ago.

“That’s it.” He stood. “You ever just want to talk, you call me.”

With that, he left.

Outside the house, he headed straight to the car. He used to be good at separating himself from the victims’ families, from their grief and anger, their guilt and recriminations. It had been one of the great benefits of his self-containment, but it was tough to separate himself from the torture Patti Mackey was inflicting on herself. He had been there, right there in the wake of Diana’s murder. It was all so painfully familiar. Patti Mackey seemed about ready to take the dive off the high board into the deep end of the bottle and, unlike him, she wouldn’t even have Ozzie Smith for company.

He drove away from the house and headed back to Chris Grimm’s address. Maybe he would catch the kid’s less-than-charming mother at home alone, without his even-less-charming stepfather. And if he really got lucky, he’d catch the kid there unsuspecting, though Jesse never counted on luck. He took it when it came his way. All cops did. Luck had solved more cases than law enforcement types would ever admit, but relying on it was just plain dumb. Jesse was a lot of things. Dumb wasn’t one of them.