Night Passage (21 page)

They were talking about Jesse.

“The thing is,” Jenn said, “that I feel so much more than I used to feel when I talk to him. I feel stronger. It’s like, sometimes I imagine the skin of a valley girl laying shriveled on the floor, and a kind of new pink me standing up, a little damp, kind of scared, but genuine. Is that too fanciful?”

Dr. St. Claire made one of her little head movements which managed to encourage Jenn while remaining non-committal.

“I know I haven’t been here long enough to be what I’m going to be. But when I talk to Jesse I know he’s in trouble, and I know he’s a little scared. Jesse is never scared.”

“Or never shows it,” Dr. St. Claire said.

“He’s really very brave,” Jenn said.

Dr. St. Claire nodded.

“And the funny thing is, when he sounds a little scared, I feel a lot braver. You know. I feel like I could help him.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m glad he’s not so damned perfect, you know? That he can be scared?”

“Perhaps you don’t need to be quite so much less than he,” Dr. St. Claire said.

“What do you mean?”

“You have learned to get what you want by submitting to men. They had power. You, as I believe you said once, knew how to ‘bat your eyes’ when you needed something.”

“And now I don’t?”

“Now you may need to less,” Dr. St. Claire said. “I don’t think you are all the way yet.”

The room was very plain. The walls were beige. The rug was gray with a pink undertone. The only thing to look at other than Dr. St. Claire was her framed diplomas. Her medical degree was from UCLA. There was some kind of psychoanalytic certificate too, and other things behind her that Jenn had never turned around to look at.

“But I am taking care of myself.”

“Yes,” Dr. St. Claire said.

“You mean more than earning my own money.”

“Yes.”

“You mean this too, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So I’m starting to take better care of myself, and that means I can take better care of Jesse.”

“Or whoever,” Dr. St. Claire said.

Jenn sat back a little in her chair and thought about that.

“Often,” Dr. St. Claire said, “circumstances of heightened intensity can accelerate things.”

“Like rising to the occasion,” Jenn said.

“Yes,” Dr. St. Claire said. “Very much like that.”

After work on a Tuesday evening, Jesse bought a large sandwich with everything on it at a shop called the Italian Submarine near the town wharf, and brought it home for supper. He would have two drinks. One before the sandwich and one with it. He was on his first drink when Abby called him.

“I’m ready to forgive you,” Abby said.

“That’s good.”

“I wish you trusted me, but you don’t. Maybe you can’t. But I find that I’m missing you and decided that not seeing you was punishing me as much as you and so I want to see you.”

“Okay.”

“Control yourself,” Abby said. “I hate it when you get giddy with excitement.”

“You want to go with me to the Halloween dance at the Yacht Club?” Jesse said.

“Well, yes,” Abby said. “I mean I want to go with you, but I wish it didn’t have to be to the Yacht Club dance.”

“Sort of part of my job,” Jesse said.

“I know. Chief of police and all that,” Abby said. “Actually I guess I’m supposed to go too, being town counsel.”

“Want to come here first for a drink?” Jesse said.

“Yes. What time?”

“Say seven, we don’t want to get to the ball too early.”

“I guess,” Abby said.

They were quiet for a moment. Jesse sipped his drink. He suspected that Abby was sipping hers.

“How have you been?” Abby said.

“Good.”

“Any progress on who killed that young woman?”

“Some,” Jesse said. “I know who did it, but I need evidence.”

“You know who did it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well who … I guess you can’t say, can you? Have you heard from your ex lately?”

“Yeah.”

“She hasn’t let you go, has she?” Abby said.

“I hear from Jenn pretty regularly.”

“Have you let her go, Jesse?”

“No, I don’t suppose I have, altogether.”

“So where does that leave me?”

“Where you’ve always been, Ab. You’re a really wonderful woman. But I am not really finished with my first marriage yet.”

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t put all your eggs in this basket, Ab.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry it’s that way,” Jesse said.

“Hell,” Abby said, “let’s play it as it lays. The worst we can do is have a hell of a good time for a while.”

“I don’t know how it will turn out, Ab.”

“Me either, but let’s start with the Halloween dance, and a drink beforehand.”

“And maybe we won’t have to stay long,” Jesse said.

“And have the rest of the night to kill,” Abby said.

“We’ll think of something,” Jesse said.

“I already have,” Abby said.

The morning of the Halloween dance Jesse got a Federal Express envelope from Charlie Buck in the Campbell County, Wyoming, Sheriff’s Department. Inside was a letter and a list of names.

“We have a cooperative witness in custody,” Buck wrote, “who says that Tom Carson was killed by a man sent by a militia group back east. Since Carson was from Massachusetts, we got a list of everybody who flew from Boston to Denver a week on either side of the crime. See if you recognize any names. The witness may be selling us a plea. Or the killer may have flown from New York, or drove out in a 1958 Rambler. But it makes sense to start with Boston-Denver.”

There followed a list of names, three columns, eighteen pages. On the twelfth page was Lou Burke’s name. Jesse stared at it for a long time, then he reorganized the list and put it in a manila folder along with Buck’s letter and locked the folder in the file cabinet in his office. He took Lou Burke’s personnel file out and brought it back to his desk and looked at it. Lou had been a twenty-year man in the Navy, before he retired and joined the police. Jesse ran his eyes down the list of Lou’s military occupation specialties until he found the one he remembered.

1970–1972 Underwater demolition specialist

Jesse’s fingers tapped softly on the desk as he read the personnel sheet.

1970–1972 Underwater demolition specialist

Holding the file in his lap, he swiveled his chair so he could stare out the window, past the driveway where the fire trucks parked, and look at the full strut of the Massachusetts fall. Jesse was never one for nature’s grandeur, and he wouldn’t get in a bus and ride very far to look at the leaves either. But since it was there it was nice to look at. Nothing like it in L.A. He watched the bright leaves for quite a while holding Lou Burke’s personnel file facedown in his lap.

He was still sitting when Molly Crane came in from the dispatch desk, and stood in the doorway, leaning on the jamb. She often did that, didn’t really come in, didn’t really stay out, just lingered in the doorway to talk.

“You thinking?” she said. “Or daydreaming.”

“Looking at the leaves,” Jesse said.

“I’m on break,” Molly said.

Jesse nodded.

“You going to that dance at the Yacht Club?” Molly said.

“Yeah. You?”

Molly laughed.

“Are you kidding? The police department dispatcher?”

“You’re a full-time police officer too,” Jesse said.

“Yeah, that’ll make a difference. See how many other guys from the force are there.”

“You ever been?”

“I never even been inside the Yacht Club, except once when some lady got drunk and started to strip right in front of all the guests, and I had to go over there and drag her out.”

“Drunk and disorderly?”

“Yeah, that was the charge. Pretty good-looking babe, too,” Molly said. “By the time I got her in the cell she had taken off every stitch. I gave her my coat but she wouldn’t wear it. Kept saying she was free and was going to live free, or something like that. She was pretty drunk. Anyway all of my fellow officers were really worried about her and kept checking on her regularly to make sure she didn’t hurt herself or escape or anything.”

Jesse smiled.

“She still in town?” he said.

“Oh sure. President of the little theater group, parent-teachers group, art association, you name it.”

“She ever talk to you?”

“Pretends she doesn’t know me,” Molly said.

“Maybe she doesn’t,” Jesse said. “Drunks don’t always, you know.”

“I’m Irish,” Molly said. “I know about drunks.”

“She still drink a lot?”

“I guess so. I don’t move in her circles, but she hasn’t required the cops again.”

“Kind of a status-conscious town, you think?” Jesse said.

“Oh yeah. Funny thing is that’s where all the prejudice is. The WASPs and the rich Jews get along fine. Neither one of them wants anything to do socially with working types.”

“Maybe you’re generalizing a little,” Jesse said.

“Oh yeah, whatever that means, I’m probably doing it. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t wish I was going to the Yacht Club. I’m just looking forward to your reaction.”

“Maybe I won’t have one,” Jesse said.

Molly smiled, still leaning on the doorjamb.

“I know what you’re like, Jesse,” she said and pushed herself erect. “You’ll have one. But you won’t show it.”

With that Molly walked away, letting the door swing shut behind her. That was also something she did. Molly was a great one for exit lines.

Jesse looked back out the window and sat for a while longer. Then he stood and carried Lou Burke’s personnel folder back to his upright file and put it away. Then he went back to his desk and dialed up Charlie Buck in Wyoming.

Paradise Neck was a narrow jut of land that angled out to form the eastern shore of Paradise Harbor on its inner shoreline, while it kept the open ocean at bay with its outer. There were two roads on the Neck. One along the outer shoreline and one along the inner. They joined at Plumtree Point, where the lighthouse stood. The Yacht Club was off the inner coast road on the Neck, down a narrow drive thickly arched with trees and into a broad parking area beside some outdoor tennis courts behind a huge, haphazard, white clapboard two-story building. Jesse was amused that when you approached this tabernacle of Paradise high culture, you came at it from the rear. The Yacht Club faced the ocean, cantilevered out over the rust-colored boulders and bedrock that the sea had unearthed over time, its vast picture windows beaded with sea spray. Jesse was amused also at the understated arrogance of the membership, naming it simply The Yacht Club, as if there were no other. At night, coming from the leaf-thick tunnel into the brightly lit lot was rather like coming on stage. He parked nose in to one of the green composition tennis courts and got out and opened the door for Abby. She looked very elegant in black tuxedo trousers and a white blouse that looked somewhat like a boiled shirt. At her throat was a string of pearls. Jesse wore a dark suit.

In the ballroom, walled with windows, apparently floating over the harbor, the guests were generally in formal dress accented by Halloween-themed accessories. Several women sported satin half masks trimmed with rhinestones. Hasty Hathaway was wearing a black-and-orange bow tie with his tux. The bow tie had orange lights in it that flashed on and off. A four-piece orchestra in one corner was playing music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. At the far end of the room a bar was open, and along the wall opposite the water view a buffet table was laid with orange and black paper, covered with food, and anchored at each end by a large carved jack-o’-lantern.

“Hasty is drawing a crowd with his bow tie,” Abby said in Jesse’s ear as they pushed toward the bar. “It’s his party trademark. At Christmas he has one with red and green lights.”

“He’s a sporty guy,” Jesse said.

He got Abby a martini and himself a scotch and soda at the bar. They came in the same-sized clear plastic glasses. Abby sipped hers and made a face. Jesse needed to be careful with the scotch. This was not a good place for the Chief of Police to get drunk. Abby drank again.

“Got to get some of this in quick so that the rest of it won’t taste so awful.”

Jesse smiled. He started to drink his scotch and thought better of it. Take your time, he said to himself. Sip now and then. Nurse a couple of drinks. You don’t have to stay here forever. They edged over to the buffet table: potato chips; a boiled ham; salted peanuts; cream cheese and bologna roll-ups; pretzel sticks; potato salad; a large molded salad made of lime Jell-O and cabbage; pigs in a blanket; goldfish crackers; small meatballs in a sauce made from red currant jelly; a salad made with green beans, wax beans, and red kidney beans in oil-and-vinegar dressing; a platter of sliced American processed cheese food, two colors, yellow and white; some Ritz crackers; some salami chunks; a bowl of caramel corn; and a large bowl of something Jesse didn’t recognize. He asked Abby.

“That’s called nuts and bolts,” Abby said.

“Yeah, but what is it?”

“Cereal.”

“Cereal?”

“Yeah, Cheerios, Wheat Chex, bite-sized shredded wheat, stuff like that, sprayed with oil and salted and baked in the oven. Then you add pretzel sticks, maybe some peanuts if you’re at the cutting edge. Some people sprinkle on garlic salt, some people put on some Kraft grated Parmesan cheese. Toss lightly and serve.”

“Oh,” Jesse said.

“One year they had a Crock-Pot of blushing bunny,” Abby said.

“Which is?”

“Kind of a Welsh rabbit. Campbell’s cheese soup and Campbell’s tomato soup mixed equally and served over toast.”

“It’s gotta be Campbell’s?”

“Yes. WASPs are very brand-name loyal.”

Abby’s glass was empty. He stood near the end of the buffet table trying not to hear the music while she went for a refill. He looked at the buffet table and smiled. I hope I don’t get hungry, he thought. He took another drink. Carefully.

“You’re all alone, you poor dear,” Cissy Hathaway said.

Her speech was slow and careful, the way people speak when they’re drunk and trying not to show it. She had on more makeup than usual and behind the makeup Jesse could see that her cheeks were very red. She wore a long-sleeved formal gown, cream-colored with a red-and-green floral pattern and a high neck. The dress was very tight. Her high-heeled shoes were the same green as the leaves in the floral pattern.