Trouble in Paradise (2 page)

“You want me to get couple more people down here for traffic?” he said.

Pat blew his whistle and vigorously gestured a Buick station wagon to proceed past Jesse’s car.

“You bet,” he said to Jesse.

“We need somebody down the other end, and maybe another guy up there.” He nodded toward the traffic trying to inch past the fire captain’s car that jutted out into LaSalle Street.

“I’ll call Molly,” Jesse said and drove down to the fire scene.

There were half a dozen fire trucks. Both of the Paradise trucks and four from neighboring departments. Jesse parked among them and got out. Arleigh Baker, the fire captain, was standing on the front lawn. Technically, as director of Public Safety, Jesse was the fire chief too. But since Jesse knew little about fighting fires, and Arleigh knew a lot, Arleigh ran the fire department. He was short and fat and looked slightly Napoleonic in his helmet, boots, and raincoat.

“Looking good, Arleigh,” Jesse said.

“I look like a goddamned asshole in this outfit,” Arleigh said.

Jesse smiled, and looked at the still smoking remnant of the house. Its superstructure was still standing. There was a hole in the roof, and all the windows were out. Part of the front wall had burned away. Inside was black with ash and crisscrossed with charred timber.

“Suspicious origin?” Jesse said.

“Take a look,” Arleigh said and started for the front door.

The fire had been at its most intense in the living room, to the right as Jesse entered the front door. Most of the floor was gone, and part of the back wall had burned through to the kitchen behind it. On the left-hand wall, where the fire hadn’t bitten, the word FAGGOTS was spray painted in large black letters.

“Watch your step,” Arleigh said.

Jesse was wearing sneakers. The floor was still warm in places and there were pieces of lath lying about bristling with thin shanked nails. Jesse stepped carefully through the debris. In his boots, Arleigh paid it no heed.

Up the stairwell it said FAGGOTS, and in two of the upstairs rooms, where the damage was largely smoke staining, the word was curlicued repetitively on the walls.

“Not an inventive bastard,” Jesse said.

“We’ll have the state fire marshal in here later on,” Arleigh said.

“Give us something more definitive. But it looks to me that the fire started right in the middle of the living room floor. That’s unusual, unless somebody just dumped a can of gasoline on the rug and let her rip.”

He was red-faced and sweating inside his heavy coat.

“And if it was set, it’s logical to assume that the people who wrote FAGGOTS did the setting.”

“People? Plural?”

“Yeah,” Jesse said.

“At least two people did the graffiti.”

“How the hell can you tell?” Arleigh said.

“Work South Central L.A. for a while,” Jesse said, “get to see a lot of taggers. You know who lives here?”

“No.”

“We’ll ask around,” Jesse said.

FOUR

“This is not encouraging,” Macklin said
as he slowed the Mercedes. The traffic was at a dead stop ahead on LaSalle Street.

“We want to take that right.”

“There’s a cop directing traffic,” Faye said.

“He’s not letting anyone down there.”

“Fire,” Macklin said.

“See the fire chief car sticking out into the road? That’s what’s causing the whole thing.” He shook his head.

“Firemen and cops,” he said.

“Park any friggin‘ place they feel like it. Don’t give a goddamn how bad they screw up the traffic.”

Macklin had spent time in the tanning salon at Faye’s complex so he had a prosperous tan. He was wearing a gray Palm Beach suit and a blue oxford shirt with a button-down collar. He had on a yellow silk tie and a yellow pocket silk. The 9-mm pistol was in the I glove compartment.

“How hard would it have been,” he said, “for the asshole to have [pulled up onto the grass?”

Faye smiled. She had on a subdued tan suit, with a long jacket I and short skirt, and her hair was up and gathered in a French twist I at the back. The car inched forward.

“It’s a house fire,” Faye said.

“I can see the trucks down the side I street.”

“And they can’t fight it without fucking up the traffic all the way back to Lynn?” Macklin said.

“I think it’s out,” Faye said.

“It’s like the law don’t apply to them, you know? Like there’s one law for us and no law at all for them,” Macklin said.

Faye turned and looked at him. She smiled widely.

“There’s a law for us?” she said.

“Jimmy, you’re a crook. You don’t pay any attention to the law at all.”

Macklin inched past the cop directing traffic and squeezed past the fire captain’s car and picked up speed. His shoulders were shaking with silent laughter.

“Oh yeah,” he said.

They turned right past the movie theater and drove along Ocean Avenue to Preston Road past Geary Street, which was still closed off, to the causeway and out onto Paradise Neck. The neck was thick with trees and big lawns, the big old shingle houses back from the narrow road and barely visible. They went past the yacht club, a rambling white building that faced the harbor, and around lighthouse point and pulled onto the elegant little bridge that arched the narrow stretch of angry surf to Stiles Island. On the island end was a guard shack. Macklin stopped and lowered his window. A tallish, gray-haired man in glasses came out wearing a blue blazer and carrying a clipboard. A blue plastic name tag on his blazer said STILES ISLAND SECURITY and under that his name, J. T. McGonigle.

“Hi,” Macklin said, “we have an appointment with Mrs. Campbell.”

“Your name, sir?”

“I know this sounds corny,” Macklin said, “but it’s Smith.”

The guard consulted his clipboard.

“Mr. and Mrs.?”

“Yep.”

“Right over there, sir. Please park in the designated space.”

“Thank you.”

As they drove through the gate, the guard copied down the license plate number. Past the guard shack, to the right, was a small building done in weathered shingles with colonial blue shutters. A discreet sign beside the door said STILES ISLAND REALTY in gold letters on a dark blue background. A Lexus sedan was parked next to the building, and two spaces beside it were marked VISITORS.

“Stiles Island is too classy to have customers,” Macklin said.

“What are our first names?” Faye said.

“I’ll be Harry,” Macklin said.

“You got a favorite?”

“How about one of those really jerky names that WASP women have, like Muffy or Choo Choo?”

“Jesus ” Macklin said, “I can’t go around calling you fucking Muffy.”

“Rocky?” Faye said.

“Rocky?” Macklin said.

Faye nodded. Macklin nodded and put out his clenched fist.

Faye tapped it lightly with hers.

“Way to go, Rocky,” he said.

They got out of the car.

“Where we from?” Faye said.

“I’ll think of someplace,” Macklin said.

“You know how I hate to plan stuff.”

The real estate office was furnished with colonial furniture and nautical prints. Mrs. Campbell was a tall woman with platinum hair, a lot of makeup, and a good figure. She was a little long in the tooth, Macklin thought, but she’d probably be a pretty good lay.

“I’m Harry Smith,” Macklin said.

“My wife, Rocky.”

“Where you folks from?” Mrs. Campbell said.

She was wearing a blue pantsuit and a white man-tailored shirt, open at the throat.

“Concord,” Macklin said.

“And you’re interested in property on Stiles Island?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Macklin said.

“Well, we have a couple of homes for sale, and of course, we can arrange for you to build if you wish.”

“What do you think, hon?” Macklin said.

“I think the first thing we should do is tour the island,” Faye said.

“We’re not just purchasing a piece of property, you know. We are buying into a community.”

“Good point,” Mrs. Campbell said.

“Why don’t I drive you around and acquaint you with the place, and we can talk as we go.

Will you be financing this purchase yourself?”

“It’ll be cash,” Macklin said.

“And are you more interested in building or buying something already built?”

“We’re open on that,” Faye said.

“Aren’t we, Harry?”

“Sure are, Rocky.”

Mrs. Campbell went around her desk to get her purse. Macklin noticed that the pantsuit fit snugly over her butt. And there was something in the way she walked. Fucks like a weasel, Macklin thought. He didn’t know exactly how he knew that. Maybe the way she stood or the way she walked or the sense of how conscious she was of her body. Maybe it was magic. But he was rarely wrong about such things. He filed the information.

FIVE

The two men who owned the home on Geary Street
sat together in Jesse’s office.

One was a tall slim man with a shaved head and a dark tan. He wore gold rimmed aviator sunglasses. His companion was stockier, with a blond crew cut and a clipped moustache. Both men were older than Jesse. Forty-two, forty-three, Jesse speculated. The taller man’s name was Alex Canton.

“We were in Provincetown for a few days when it happened,” Canton said.

“One of the neighbors called us. We came right back.”

“The fire was set,” Jesse said.

“We assumed it was from the graffiti, and the way the floor burned. But the state Fire Marshal’s Office makes it definite. A combustible liquid, probably gasoline, was poured over the rug in the living room and ignited.”

“We know who did it,” Canton said.

“Howard and I are both sure of it.”

Jesse glanced at the notes on his yellow legal pad. Howard’s last name was Brown.

“Who?” Jesse said.

“Alex, we can’t really prove it,” Brown said.

“We know it was them,” Canton said.

“Who?” Jesse said.

“The fucking Hopkins kids,” Canton said.

“Full names?”

“Earl,” Canton said, “I think is the older one. And Robbie.”

“Ages?”

“Oh, maybe fifteen and fourteen, in there. Neither one of them drives a car yet.”

“Had trouble with them before?” Jesse said.

He knew the answer before he asked the question. Of course they’d had trouble. Two openly gay men in an openly heterosexual environment with a lot of affluent teenage kids hanging around with nothing to do. Let’s go down and harass the queers.

“Nothing big, they’d make remarks when they went by the house,” Brown said.

“Such as?”

“Oh, some kind of rhyme about Mister Brown goes down. Stuff like that. I been gay a long time. I’ve heard worse.”

“Anything else?”

Brown and Canton looked at each other as they thought about it.

“No,” Canton said.

“Mr. Brown?”

“No, uh-uh.”

“So how do you know they set the fire?”

Canton looked at Brown.

“You say, Howard.”

“I was standing in the driveway, looking at what’s left, and they came riding by on bicycles. Both the Hopkins boys and their friend. I don’t know his real name, kids call him Snapper. They all had I these big smirks on, and they sort of slow down and start riding their bicycles in big circles in the street. Then the older one, Earl, starts riding no hands and he says to me, ”Hey Mr. Brown,“ and I looked, and he made a gesture of lighting and throwing a match. And all three of them are smirking.”

Brown shook his head.

“I wanted to kill the little punks.”

He shook his head again. Sadness and anger about equal, Jesse thought.

“But of course, I didn’t say a word. I just got in my car and drove off,” Brown said.

“They ever threaten you?” Jesse said.

“Not until this,” Canton said.

Brown shook his head.

“Well, we’ll talk with them,” Jesse said.

“Talk. The little bastards burned our house down and you’ll talk with them?”

“It’s a cop euphemism,” Jesse said.

“I’ll have them in. We’ll question them.”

“You can’t arrest them?” Brown said.

“Not on what you’ve given me.”

“They practically admitted they did it,” Brown said.

“Or maybe they just took pleasure in reminding you someone did it,” Jesse said.

“If you’d been there and seen the look on their faces, all three of them,” Brown said.

“But I wasn’t,” Jesse said.

“And the DA wasn’t. I can’t get them indicted on what you’ve said.”

“So they’ll get away with it,” Canton said, like a man confirming a long-held assumption.

“Maybe not,” Jesse said.

“We’re kind of resourceful.”

“Well,” Canton said.

“I tell you one thing right now. I’m getting a gun. I’m not going to let the yahoos win.”

“See Molly at the desk,” Jesse said.

“She processes the gun stuff.”

“You’ll approve it?”

“You have the constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” Jesse said.

“Christ,” Canton said, “I never thought I’d need to.”

“Hopkins family got money?” Jesse said.

“I think so,” Brown said.

“Why?”

“Turns out the kid did it, you might have a civil suit against the family, or your insurance company might.”

“My God, I never thought of it,” Canton said.

“Should we talk :o our claims adjuster about it?”

“Might be wise to talk first with a lawyer,” Jesse said.

“You recommend anyone?”

“There’s a woman in town,” Jesse said.

“Abby Taylor. Used to be town counsel. She can either help you or send you to somebody.”

“But what if you can’t prove they did it?” Canton said.

“You can still sue,” Jesse said.

“Civil cases have different rules.”

“Could you write that lawyer’s name down?” Brown said.

Jesse wrote Abby’s name on a sheet of yellow paper, along with her phone number, which he knew quite well. Brown took the paper and folded it over and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

“So that’s going to be it?” Canton said.

“Is what going to be it?” Jesse said.