Trouble in Paradise

Seven

As he had taken to doing when his day ended at five, Jesse stopped by the bar at the Gray Gull. He would have two drinks, talk with the bartender or a few of the regulars, and then go home for supper. It worked better than having a drink at home. It was sociable, and it was easier to stop after two in public. Being chief of police carried with it certain obligations, and Jesse was pretty sure that not getting drunk in public was one of them.

“Black label and soda, Doc,” Jesse said to the bartender. He made a measuring gesture with his hands. “Tall glass.”

The bartender made the drink and set it before Jesse and went down to the service corner of the bar to get a waitress order. He mixed up two pink drinks, one of them up, the other on the rocks, and set them out with the slip tucked between the glasses. Then he came back down the bar to talk with Jesse.

“You been fighting crime all day?” Doc said.

“Serve and protect,” Jesse said. “What are those pink things?”

“Cosmopolitans,” Doc said. “Sort of a summer martini.”

“They look tasty,” Jesse said.

“They’re pretty good,” Doc said. “You want to try one? On me?”

The young waitress came and put the two drinks on a tray and went out onto the deck with them. Jesse noticed that her cutoff jeans were snug.

“No thanks, Doc. Scotch is fine.”

Jesse nursed his drink. The bar was only half full. It was midweek, and the after-work crowd hadn’t drifted in yet in force. Jesse liked quiet bars. He liked them best in the middle of the afternoon, air-conditioned and nearly empty, where everything was desultory and you could play old Carl Perkins stuff on the juke box and watch people as they came in out of the outside brightness and paused for their eyes to adjust. He liked the lucent way the bottles looked, arranged along the back of a good bar with the mirror reflecting the light from behind them. It was a little too late to be perfect, but it was still a good place to be. For two drinks.

In the bar mirror, he saw Abby Taylor come into the bar with a tall man in a seersucker suit. Jesse smiled. Only here, Jesse thought. Until a year ago, he’d never seen a seersucker suit. They got a table behind him and sat. Abby saw him then and said something to the man and got up and walked over. She was wearing an olive suit with a short skirt.

“Jesse,” she said. “How are you?”

They shook hands, and she put her cheek out. Jesse kissed it lightly.

“Fine,” Jesse said. “You look great.”

Behind her Jesse could see the guy in the seersucker suit order drinks from a waitress. He was nearly bald, with what remained of his hair cut short.

“Thanks, you too. How are you and Jenn getting on?”

Jesse shrugged. “She came back because I was in trouble. Now I’m not in trouble. She hasn’t been around much. Suit tells me he saw her doing the weather on Channel Three.”

“So you’re not together?”

“God no,” Jesse said.

“But you’re not fully apart,” Abby said. “Are you?”

“I guess not,” Jesse said. “That the new boyfriend?”

“Chip? Maybe. We’ve been dating for a while.”

“Chip?” Jesse said.

“I know, but he’s really nice. He knows about us. Want to meet him?”

“No,” Jesse said.

The young waitress with the tight cutoffs came out of the kitchen with a basket of clams and walked past them toward the deck. Jesse watched her. Abby smiled.

“Good to see you’ve not lost all interest,” Abby said.

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Jesse said.

“Well...” Abby paused a moment, thinking of what to say. “I hope you and Jenn work it out, whatever way is best for you.”

“When we got divorced I thought we had,” Jesse said.

“One would have thought that,” Abby said and patted his hand lightly where it rested on the bar. “Take care of yourself.”

“You too,” Jesse said.

He watched her as she walked back to sit down with Chip. Chip looked over at him and nodded in a friendly way. Fuck you, Chip.

“Better hit me again, Doc,” Jesse said.

The second drink tasted better than the first. Jesse held it up so that the light shown through it. The ice cubes were crystalline. The drink was golden with scotch and quick with carbonation.

“You know a family in town named Hopkins?”

“Yeah. He’s some kind of financial consultant, I think.”

“Kids?”

“They got a couple,” Doc said. “Kids are real assholes.”

“Lot of that going around,” Jesse said.

“Yeah, all fifteen-year-old kids are probably assholes,” Doc said. “But these kids are worse. You know I got a lobster boat.”

Jesse nodded.

“I caught them one day stealing lobsters out of my boat while I was in the wharf office for a minute.”

“Maybe they were having a clam bake,” Jesse said.

“They weren’t taking them. They weren’t even throwing them back. They were stealing them and throwing them up onto the deck of some guy’s Chris-Craft.”

“So the lobsters die and the guy’s boat gets messed up and you lose money and all they get out of it is the pleasure of being pricks,” Jesse said.

“Jesse, you’re wasting your time as a cop. You should be a child psychologist,” Doc said. “I wanted to drown the little fuckers.”

“But you didn’t.”

Doc shrugged. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled above his elbows and his sun-darkened forearms were those of a man who’d done a lot of heavy physical labor in his life.

“They’re too old to scare, too young to kick the shit out of. I chased them off, climbed on the Chris-Craft, and got my lobsters back.”

“Say anything to the parents?”

“No.”

Doc moved down the bar and drew two pints of Harp. He put them on the bar, picked up the tab, rang it up and put it back in front of the drinkers. Then he moved back to Jesse.

“How come you’re asking?” he said.

“Just making conversation,” Jesse said.

Doc squinted at Jesse and shrugged. “Yeah, you’re a big conversation maker,” he said.

“I try,” Jesse said.

He got up from the bar and went to a pay phone and called the station.

“Anthony? Jesse. You know those Hopkins kids, torched the house on Geary Street? Well, I want a cruiser to park outside their house for a half hour every shift, starting tonight. No, don’t say anything, don’t do anything. Just park outside the house a half hour every shift. That’s right. I want to make them nervous.”