Robert B. Parker's Debt to Pay (4 page)

T
he rain hadn't let up since it had begun, and it was causing a fair bit of flooding in low-lying sections of Paradise. For the first time in weeks there was some buzz at headquarters about something other than flat tires. Of course there wasn't much the police could do about floods except reroute traffic away from dangerous areas, but that didn't stop people from calling 911. The phone was ringing so often that Jesse was forced to help Alisha handle the calls. It was good experience for her, a way for her to listen to how Jesse dealt with folks panicked by rising waters or angry that their sewers hadn't been cleaned since the fall.

When the phones stopped, Jesse turned to look at his new hire to see how she was holding up. He was pleased to see she didn't look the worse for wear. The stress of dealing with people during heightened states of emotion could be withering for even the most experienced cops. It could be fatal to a rookie's career. Jesse had seen it in L.A., rookies melting down under the pressure of the moment. Some losing their cool, blowing up at citizens. Others reduced to tears. While others still just walked away. Takes a special kind of person to be a cop. It's not about the gun and the badge. What it is about is hard to
define, hard to quantify, but whatever it is, Alisha seemed to have plenty of it.

“You hear that, Jesse?” she asked. She had taken to heart his admonition against calling him Chief.

“Hear what?”

“Rain stopped. Phones stopped ringing.”

“Funny how that works. They'll start ringing again soon.”

She asked, “You want some coffee?”

“No. Thanks.”

He watched her as she made her way to the new coffeemaker. It was one of those one-cup-at-a-time machines with individual plastic containers. Jesse liked the coffee, but not much else about the machine. It wasn't that he missed day-old coffee grown thick and black at the bottom of the pot. No sane human being missed that. It was that he remembered a thousand conversations he'd had over the years, here and in L.A., beginning with complaints about bad coffee. Alisha Davis would never have that experience. He wondered if she would be better for it. There was a lot to like about technology, but Jesse saw the other side of it, too. Technology eroded shared experience, and that wasn't good for his cops.

He'd taken a big risk by hiring Alisha ahead of other candidates, men and women alike. Most of them with law-enforcement backgrounds. Then there was the fact that Alisha was African American. There wasn't much overt racism in Paradise, at least not since Jesse had cleared Hasty Hathaway and his militia types out of town soon after he took the job as chief. But Alisha's hiring had caused a stir. He had seen the looks she got when they went out on patrol together. Two selectmen had approached Jesse when he submitted her for the town's approval. They'd tied themselves up in knots as they'd tried to talk around what they really meant.

“Weren't there safer hires?”

“Weren't there more experienced candidates?”

“Isn't she too young?”

“Won't her youth be a problem with . . . you know, some of our . . . You understand.”

Jesse understood, all right. Some codes were more easily broken than others. Good thing the mayor, a woman, had his back on Alisha or there might have been some real trouble. In the end, it didn't hurt that Alisha was attractive. Black or white, man or woman, good looks were an asset. It was unfair, but Jesse had stopped tilting at that windmill a long time ago. What was right and what was just, he'd fight for those, but unfairness was someone else's battle.

Just as Alisha got back to the front desk with her coffee, the phones started up again. They both took calls.

“Yes, Mrs. Hammond, the power company knows about it,” Jesse said, his voice calm and reassuring. “I alerted them early this morning. They have a crew already working on it. The cable company, too.”

Almost before he put the phone back in its cradle, it rang again, but Alisha grabbed Jesse's arm before he could pick up.

“I'll take that one, Jesse. I'm on with Captain Healy from the state police and he says it's urgent. I'll put him on hold and you can take it inside.”

Jesse patted the rookie on her shoulder and headed into his office. He sat down at his desk and grabbed the phone.

“What's up, Healy?”

“Something come across my desk a half-hour ago I think you'll be interested in.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Gino Fish is dead,” Healy said matter-of-factly. “I had no use for the man, myself, but I know you two were friends.”

Jesse ignored that last part. “How?”

“Bullet through his brain.”

“Mob hit?”

“My first thought, too,” Healy said. “So I called my liaison over there at the Boston PD. Their working theory is murder-suicide. Looks like it happened Friday afternoon. His pretty-boy receptionist's dead also. Twenty-three-year-old white male named Drew Kaiser. Looks like Fish stabbed Kaiser twice, once through the heart and once almost clean through his neck. Fish posed the body postmortem, laid Kaiser's head on a pillow and crossed his hands on top of his chest. After that he went into his office and blew his brains out with a .38 he kept in his drawer.”

“Gunshot definitely self-inflicted?” Jesse asked, disbelieving.

“No doubt about it. Anyways, I just thought you'd like to know.”

“Thanks, Healy.”

Jesse hung up the phone, but before he could gather his thoughts, Alisha appeared at his door.

“What's up?”

“There's a man on the line for you. He says his name is Vinnie Morris and that you'll want to speak to him.”

Vinnie Morris had never been more right about anything in his life.

V
innie Morris and Jesse Stone shared the kind of grudging mutual respect hardened combatants had for each other. Their relationship, if that's what you could call it, went back to Jesse's first months on the job. Vinnie had been Gino Fish's right hand back then. And a very dangerous right hand he had been, too. He had remained by Fish's side for many years, but had recently split off to run his own crew out of a bowling alley off the Concord Turnpike. Through the years, Jesse, Gino, and Vinnie had occasionally found common causes, working together toward a mutually beneficial end. Jesse would get his man. Gino and Vinnie might gain territory or profit financially. Cops have to be pragmatists because you don't get intel about bad guys from the church choirmaster.

Now they sat next to each other at Dennis's Place, a bar in Southie where Vinnie was a silent partner. The place was as local as local could get and no one in the neighborhood called it by its name. When they set up the meeting, Jesse had wondered why they were going to meet at a bar and not at the bowling alley. Vinnie said he had his reasons, and Jesse understood that Vinnie wasn't the type of man to explain himself beyond that.

The front door of the bar was temporarily closed and Morris's men made sure they weren't disturbed. At any other time it might have seemed unusual that neither man was drinking anything stronger than club soda, but the circumstances surrounding Gino Fish's death made the meeting unique. Jesse and Vinnie didn't look directly at each other, staring instead at the big mirror behind the bar. As Vinnie had requested, Jesse was dressed like a civilian: jeans, running shoes, blue golf shirt, a Dodgers cap in place of his usual PPD cap. Vinnie was dressed casually, which, for him, meant a beige Armani suit of some featherweight material, a white silk T-shirt, and canvas-topped shoes.

Each studied the other's expression. Vinnie had the unreadable blank face of a dangerous man. It kept people off guard because you never knew what he was thinking. Yet with a simple curl or drop of one corner of his mouth, he could say more than most men giving an annual report. He sat in his familiar pose: arms folded across his chest, heels of his shoes hooked on the bottom rung of the barstool.

He spoke first. “I don't like it.”

“In general?”

“Gino meant a lot to me. Taught me everything. I had the skills, but all the skills in the world aren't worth a thing if you don't know how or when to use them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I know you're not a talker, Stone, but give me something more than ‘uh-huh.'”

“You've never been much for talking yourself, Vinnie. First you've got to tell me what you don't like.”

“How about the Boston PD, for starters?”

Jesse laughed a quiet laugh. “That narrows things down.” But
Jesse sensed what Vinnie was talking about. “They were rough on Fish's memory, huh?”

“When they had me in this afternoon to ask if I knew what was going on with Gino, they were calling him queer and faggot and a hundred other things. It was all I could do not to pop one of them guys. Gino was what he was and who he was. No need to disrespect him in death. Cowards. None of those cops would have dared insult him to his face when he was alive. He made it pretty far up the ladder and he stayed there for a long time. Longer than most.”

“I get that,” Jesse said. “What else?”

“The whole murder-suicide thing. I don't buy it.”

“Listen, Vinnie, after you called me, I spoke to a guy I know at the BPD. There's no doubt Gino killed himself. It wasn't a setup.”

All Vinnie Morris did was shake his head.
Denial.
Jesse knew all about denial. Alcoholics are expert at it. So are the friends and family of murderers and suicide victims.

Vinnie turned to one of his guys and wiggled his finger. “Give me the pictures.”

A big man came over to his boss and handed him a beige folder. Vinnie opened the folder and spread crime scene photos out on the bar. They were pretty gruesome, especially since the bodies hadn't been discovered for a few days. But both Vinnie and Jesse had seen their share of violence and bloodshed. Both had seen bodies in all states of disrepair. Even so, Jesse could tell it was difficult for Vinnie to stare at the bloody photos of his old boss. Jesse opened his mouth to ask about how Morris had come to possess these photos and then thought better of it. Men like Vinnie also had sources inside the police department.

“Look here, Stone,” Vinnie said, pointing to the red spatter on the wall high above Fish's desk. “He killed himself standing up. I
don't like it. And why kill this kid? He was new. Wasn't there a week. You knew Gino. He liked young, pretty men. Since you know him, how many different receptionists you seen outside his old and new offices? Five? Ten?”

“Probably closer to ten.”

“Gino never got too attached to these guys. It was a vanity thing for him. I was by there last week and Gino confided in me that as good-looking as this guy was, he might have to fire him. The guy couldn't even alphabetize.”

“One of the first things I learned as a homicide detective was that you can only think you know someone else, but you really can't know someone deep down. We tell ourselves otherwise, because how else could we live in a world with other people? The second thing I learned was that people lie even when they don't have to, and they lie to people they don't have to lie to.”

Vinnie Morris kept shaking his head.

“Look, Vinnie, Gino was getting older. He already lost you. My source inside the BPD tells me Gino's position in the hierarchy was slipping. Maybe he fell in love with this guy. Or maybe he just lost it.”

“Gino did violence when he had to, but not for himself and not for a long time. He wasn't a knife man. And look at that pillow under the kid's head. It's all filthy. Gino would never have anything like that in his home or office. Where did it come from? Out of thin air? I'm telling you, Stone, there's something all wrong about this. Something else is going on here.”

Now it was Jesse shaking his head. “You're grabbing at straws. Listen to yourself, Vinnie. You're talking about dirty pillows, but there's no doubt Gino killed himself and his prints are all over the knife. The cops tell me the dead man's blood is all over Gino's hand.
I'm sorry. I liked Gino in spite of my better judgment and he always kept his word to me.”

“How about you keeping your word to him?”

“How's that?” Jesse asked, his voice and expression hardening.

“Gino told me you owed him a big favor. That you agreed if he stuck his neck out for you with that Mr. Peepers thing a while back, you would do anything he asked. Anything.”

“That's right, Vinnie. I did.”

“Well, now I'm asking for him. I'm collecting his favor. You look into this. You owe him that much, no?”

Jesse thought about it and then offered his right hand to Morris. “Okay, but if I don't find what you're hoping for, that's it.”

Vinnie Morris took Jesse's hand. “Deal.”

D
iana was surprised to find Jesse waiting in his Explorer downstairs from her apartment. She rapped her knuckles against his car window to get his attention.

“Spying on me, Stone?” she said, unable to keep a straight face. “If you are, I can see that surveillance isn't your strong suit.”

“Business in town. Thought I'd surprise you.”

“Mission accomplished. Come on up.”

When Jesse got out of his old SUV, Diana threaded her arms around him, holding him tight to her. The gun on her hip beneath her blazer dug into Jesse's side. He didn't seem to care. When he was with her, he was happy in a way he couldn't put into words. He'd once told Diana that she freed him from his own head. And that was as close as he'd come to explaining her effect on him. He'd since given up trying. Jenn always had the opposite effect on him. Her insecurities were contagious and had a way of focusing Jesse's attention on the things that had gone wrong between them and in his own life even before they'd met.

“Business?” she asked, pushing back from him to find her keys.

“Gino Fish.”

“What about him?”

“Murdered his receptionist and then put one through his brain.”

Diana, who knew a little something about the workings of the Boston mob from her FBI days and who had heard Jesse's stories of Gino and Vinnie, made a face. “Doesn't sound like the kind of thing a man like Gino Fish would do.”

“That's what Vinnie Morris said.”

He could tell she was going to keep the conversation going, so he held his palm up to stop her. “Let's continue this upstairs.”

“When we get upstairs, I won't feel like talking anymore.”

He smiled. “I was hoping you'd say that.”

Ninety minutes later, Jesse was sitting at the kitchen table while Diana worked on a spinach, pancetta, and cheddar omelet.

“Okay, Jesse, to continue that discussion we were having downstairs . . .”

He played dumb. “What discussion was that?”

“Gino Fish. You said Vinnie Morris doesn't believe Gino would commit suicide.”

“He doesn't buy either part of it: the murder or the suicide.”

“What about you?” she asked.

He didn't answer right away. While he believed everything he said to Vinnie Morris about how one person can never really know another person and about how the Boston PD was sure they had the scenario right, Jesse also had his doubts. It wasn't as if he hadn't known Gino Fish for many years. He agreed with Vinnie that this wasn't the type of scenario he would have ever envisioned Gino being a part of. It was too operatic for a man like Fish. But Jesse believed just as strongly that a good cop followed the evidence.

“The evidence,
all
the evidence, points to murder-suicide. The receptionist was stabbed through the heart and posed in an affectionate manner afterward. And there's no doubt Gino killed himself.”

She put a dish up to the edge of the pan, slid half the omelet onto the plate, and then, with a flick of her wrist, flopped the other half atop the omelet already on the plate. It formed a perfect half-moon, wilted spinach leaves and orange cheese oozing out the sides. The steam rising off the omelet smelled of the crisp, savory Italian bacon. Diana cut the omelet in two and used a spatula to place Jesse's portion on another plate beside a small mixed green salad. Diana was a woman possessed of many skills. Chief among them was her keen power of observation.

“I didn't ask you what the evidence pointed to,” she said, sitting down across from Jesse. “I asked you what you thought.”

“I have my doubts.”

“Are you going to leave it, Jesse?”

He ignored the question and took a mouthful of the omelet. “This is great. Is there anything you can't do?”

“The cha-cha. I'm hopeless at it. Oh, and I can't forget an unanswered question.”

He smiled. She did that to him a lot.

“No, I'm not going to leave it. I owed Gino a last favor and Vinnie called in the marker.”

She screwed up her face. “But you owed the favor to Gino, not Vinnie.”

“Not the way these guys operate. My debt didn't die with Gino. Truth is, I would have looked into it whether Vinnie called in the marker or not.”

She dropped it, and he was happy to let her. They ate the rest of
their omelet and salads in silence. When they were done, Jesse cleaned up.

“I called Jenn,” he said, scraping off the dishes into the garbage. “I told her I wasn't coming.”

“And . . .”

“And nothing. I wished her luck and success and said it would be odd for both of us if I was there. Then I got off the phone. Even spoke to her fiancé, Hale. Sounded like a nice man.”

Diana stood up, came around the table, kissed Jesse's neck, and threw her arms around him.