Robert B. Parker's Fallout, page 15
“My friend Charlie gets his head caved in,” Jesse said. “Marin’s roommate gets thrown off a cliff. It turns out Marin used to bounce people around for you. Or worse. I’m just trying to understand if there might be a connection.”
“Go try to understand someplace else,” Roarke said, “and not come down here from your precious little town and insult me in front of business associates.”
“From what I hear,” he said, “insulting you might not be even possible.”
“That supposed to be an insult?”
“Kind of.”
“Beat it before you make more trouble for yourself than you already have with this bullshit fishing expedition of yours.”
“Not quite yet,” Jesse said.
The muscle guy took a couple steps in their direction. Roarke held up a hand.
“Before my friend died,” Jesse said, “he had taken a sudden interest in cryptocurrency. And I have recently heard you described as the crypto king of Boston. So stay with me here: I’ve got a guy who’s called the crypto king and a guy who used to work for him disappearing from my precious little town. That’s why I don’t see this as making trouble for myself. Or you. Just solid police work.”
“Your problems, not mine,” Roarke said.
Roarke shifted slightly in his chair and looked back at Richie now.
“Make sure to tell your father there could be consequences for a breach of respect like this,” Roarke said.
“Respect for whom?” Richie said. “Or from whom, that might be a better way of looking at it?”
No one said anything then. The muscle guy didn’t move. Roarke stood up again. Definitely a big boy. He came around the table. He and Jesse were close enough Jesse could smell the gin. Even Jesse had never liked the taste of gin.
“You made a mistake coming here with nothing tonight,” Roarke said. “So now I’m telling you not to make a bigger one and bother me ever again.”
“Yikes,” Jesse said.
“I’m old school, Stone,” Roarke said in a quiet voice.
“I always wonder what that actually means,” Jesse said.
Roarke smiled. “Maybe it means that it would be a terrible tragedy if one dead cop turned out to be just a start.”
Jesse let Roarke have the last word and walked out first. Richie followed. He drove Richie back to where he’d parked at Tony and Elaine’s, and thanked him for the ride-along.
“I really didn’t do anything,” Richie said.
“You did a lot you didn’t have to do with no skin in the game,” Jesse said. “I owe you one.”
“You poked a bear tonight,” Richie said. “I think even my father is afraid of this guy, even though he’d die before admitting that to me. And I’ve never known Desmond to be afraid of anyone.”
“Did it occur to you that Roarke’s response wasn’t proportional to me showing up here?”
“Just watch your back,” Richie said. “And maybe not just yours. That’s coming from the son of an old-school guy.”
They shook hands.
“You want me to tell Sunny you said hello,” Richie said.
“Your call,” Jesse said.
He was already thinking about making a call of his own, and did, as soon as he was on 93 heading north. He had a bad feeling about Liam Roarke.
Molly occasionally accused him of not being in touch with his feelings.
Not tonight.
FORTY-FIVE
Nellie slid in next to Hal Fortin. Molly sat across from him. “Mind if we join you, Coach?” she said.
“Yes, I do mind,” Fortin said, “not that it seems to matter.”
“Bitches,” Nellie said, sadly shaking her head. “What can you do about them?”
“You’re both out of line,” Fortin said.
“Are you going to make us run some laps?” Nellie said.
“I’m expecting someone,” Fortin said.
“No worries, this won’t take long,” Molly said.
Fortin was stuck and knew it, unless he decided to shove Nellie out of the booth, or climb over the table to escape.
Nellie had her chin in her left hand, and was smiling at the coach of the Paradise High baseball team.
“I’ve got nothing to say to you,” Fortin said to Molly. When he turned just enough to look directly at Nellie he said, “And I never had anything to say to you.”
“But you hid it so, so well,” Nellie said.
A waitress came over, ready to take a drink order.
“I’ll have a Sam Adams in a bottle,” Fortin said. “The ladies are just leaving.”
The waitress looked at Nellie and then Molly, somewhat uncertainly, then turned and walked away.
“We are leaving,” Molly said. “Just not this second.”
“You can’t just accost somebody like this in a public place,” Fortin said.
Molly grinned. “Want to call a cop?”
Fortin’s face was starting to redden. “What the hell do you want?”
“Well, for starters,” Molly said, “Chief Stone and I continue to be of the belief that we are not getting your full cooperation regarding the death of Jack Carlisle. So I have embraced this opportunity to ask you myself why that might be.”
The waitress came back with Fortin’s beer, and placed it in front of him. He ignored it, and her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fortin said.
“From the start you have gone out of your way to tell your players not to cooperate with our investigation,” Molly said. “I find that odd.”
“I would, too, if I’d done it. But I haven’t.”
“Coach,” Nellie said, admonishing him. “We all know better than that.”
“It is also our belief,” Molly said, “that you are either hiding something about Jack or hiding something about your team. Frankly, nothing else makes sense.”
“In your opinion,” Fortin said.
“What promise to Jack or about Jack are your players keeping?” Nellie asked.
“News to me if they are.”
“Is it?” Molly said.
“You calling me a liar?” Hal Fortin said.
“You tell me,” Molly said.
Before Fortin could answer her, Nellie said, “I know you’ve heard this before, Hal, but we are eventually going to find out if you are hiding something. And when we do, it is probably going to burn your ass when I put it in the newspaper.”
“All I am trying to do at the moment is try to win a state tournament for these kids, without the kid who might have been the best ballplayer his age in the whole goddamn Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
“I saw you slap one of those kids,” Molly said. She grinned again. “I thought there weren’t supposed to be any black eyes in team.”
“Clever,” Fortin said.
“Still thinking there might have been more to that slap than you’ve indicated,” Molly said.
“I told you already,” he said. “I lost my head for a second. Everybody’s been under a lot of pressure lately, including me.”
Now he drank some of his beer.
“What do you think happened to Jack?” Molly said.
Nellie was giving her room.
“I was under the impression that it’s the police’s job to find out,” Fortin said. “Now, for the last time, will the two of you please leave me alone? My dinner guest is here.”
Molly’s back was to the front door. She turned now in the booth to see that Hillary More had just walked into the Gull.
But she wasn’t there for long.
As soon as she saw who was sitting with Hal Fortin she turned and left.
FORTY-SIX
In Jesse’s office the next morning Molly told Jesse about Hillary More being Hal Fortin’s dinner date. Just then, the woman herself showed up, unannounced.
“What are the odds?” Molly said, then promptly excused herself, grabbing a donut out of the mixed Dunkin’ box Jesse had brought for everybody before she left.
Hillary More was clearly dressed for work. Black pantsuit, white shirt underneath. Black leather sneakers with white soles. More and more, Jesse noticed that both men and women were wearing sneakers to work, not that he really gave a shit.
“We need to talk,” Hillary said in what passed for a greeting, taking one of the visitor chairs.
“I agree,” Jesse said. “You first.”
“You were out of line yesterday,” she said.
“Par for the course with me, some would say.”
“You know I like you, Jesse. You do know that, right?”
Jesse resisted the impulse to tell her that if there were life on Mars, they knew that Hillary More liked him.
“I thought that went without saying” is what he did say.
“But what I do not like, not even a little bit, is you showing up at my house and trying to intimidate my son.”
“Not my intent,” he said. “Also not what I did.”
He opened the box of donuts. “Help yourself, by the way.”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“Not when the subject is Dunkin’ Donuts,” he said.
“No, thank you.”
“Your loss. I got extra Boston Kremes.”
Hillary gave an exasperated shake of her head. “Kevin felt as if you treated him like some sort of suspect.”
Jesse sipped some of the large coffee he’d brought with him, first of the day until he made some of his own.
“Hillary,” he said, “we’re going to have this conversation, the two of us, just this one time and never have it again. I’m going to give you a pass, just this one time, on your showing up in my office and trying to tell me how to do my job. Because I also like you, and I’ve clearly annoyed you. But I had legitimate questions to ask your son about Jack Carlisle. I asked them. I left. No harm, no foul.”
“Says you.”
“He paid a visit to Jack’s room after Jack’s death. Maybe you knew that, maybe you didn’t, not my concern, or my problem. I wanted to know what he was doing there. I asked. He told me. End of story, at least for now.”
“It’s Kevin’s feeling that you didn’t believe him.”
“Also not my problem. But I am sorry if he felt that way.”
“Are you?”
This wasn’t flirtatious Hillary now. This was the boss lady, in high gear. If not on fire, getting there.
“You could have given me the courtesy of a heads-up,” she said.
“And granted you the consideration we haven’t granted to other parents in the course of this investigation?”
He pointed at the donut box again. “Are you sure you don’t want one before the rest of my staff attacks what’s left in that box like a pack of hungry dogs? Donuts always take the edge right off for me.”
“Perhaps another time,” she said. “Will you at least assure me that you’re done upsetting my son?”
“No, I won’t make that assurance,” Jesse said. “And by the way? He’s a man now, Hillary, not a boy. I am genuinely sorry if I did upset him. And you. And if you have to apologize to his father for me, apologize to him.”
“His father died a long time ago.”
That stopped him.
“I’m sorry for that, too.”
She pulled up the sleeve of her jacket, checked her Apple Watch.
“I need to get to work,” she said.
“Work can wait for a few more minutes.”
“I have a meeting.”
“Meeting can wait,” Jesse said. “We’re not done talking.”
“I am.”
“I will be,” he said, “when you explain to me why you neglected to mention that Steve Marin, wherever he is, happens to be a Mobbed-up ex-con.”
“Because he’s not.”
“Bet you the whole box of donuts that he is,” Jesse said.
FORTY-SEVEN
Jesse told Hillary More what Healy had learned from his friends at Organized Crime Control in Boston. And about his own visit to see Liam Roarke the previous evening, and the pleasantries they’d exchanged at the Capital Grille.
“You have to believe me when I tell you I had no idea,” Hillary More said.
“When he filled out his job application and interviewed with HR, or however you do it, it never came up?”
“He was forthcoming about having been in juvenile detention,” Hillary said. “But he was a kid. You’re making it sound as if he’s Al Capone. Now I have to apologize for not knowing all the players in the Boston Mob.”
“I tend to look at aggravated assault as a grown-up-type thing,” Jesse said.
“I talked to him about that part of his past myself,” she said. “I just looked at him as having been disabled in a different way. Sam Waterfield actually recommended him. It turns out they’d met each other when they were both in foster care.”
“Now one of them is dead and the other one has disappeared.”
Jesse told her about what Molly and Suit had found at the apartment in Marshport.
“I’m told that no one has yet been able to reach him by phone,” she said.
“Have you tried to locate the phone?”
She sighed forcefully enough to rattle Jesse’s window shades.
“Jesse,” she said, stepping on his name pretty hard. “I’m genuinely concerned about where Steve might be, or what might have happened to him. But as I’ve pointed out before, and despite everything that is happening in our town, I am in the business of selling chocolate. I market our brand. As we speak, I have smart young people figuring out the best way, and best timing, to perhaps take More Chocolate public. Early stages, but we’re having those conversations. That’s what my meeting is about this morning, one for which I am now late. This is my area of expertise, or so I’ve been told, not finding missing persons.”
She checked her watch again, either looking at the time or for messages.
“Any thoughts about where he might run to, if he still has the ability to do that?”
“Are you saying you think something might have happened to him, too? If he’s dead, why would he have cleared out his part of the apartment?”
“He could have tried to run,” Jesse said, “and then been caught by whomever killed Sam Waterfield.”
She slumped back in her chair and stared at the ceiling.
“This is a nightmare. All I’ve been trying to do is give people a chance who might not otherwise get one.”
“Has there been any kind of trouble with Marin since you hired him?”
She shook her head. “Model employee, same as Sam.”
“So no indication that the trouble in his life might have followed him to Paradise.”
“None. Far as I can tell, he kept to himself, the same as Sam did. I told you already that the only reason I found out that they even shared that apartment was by accident.”
Jesse sipped his coffee. Almost cold by now. Still better than none.
“And Marin never mentioned that he’d been in Liam Roarke’s crew?”
“Again: The name would have meant nothing to me even if he’d mentioned it. I was just going off my first impression, and him telling me that I’d never be sorry that I gave him a chance.”
She crossed her legs, clasped her hands around the top knee, stared at him. “Don’t you think people can change, Jesse? You did.”
“I didn’t change,” he said. “I just stopped drinking, at least so far today.”
“And you would like to drop that particular subject.”
“If I wanted to talk more about it,” he said, “I’d find an AA meeting. Or go see my shrink.”
She smiled.
“I hear you,” she said. “And now am I dismissed?”
“Go to your own meeting.”
“I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot this morning.”
“Friends are allowed to have disagreements.”
“I really do want us to be friends.”
“I feel the same way.”
He wasn’t sure about that. But there was no point in saying otherwise.
She started to get up.
“One more thing,” Jesse said.
She smiled again. “You sound like an old Columbo.”
“Now there was a damned cop,” Jesse said, “even if he was a made-up one.”
“One more question for me?”
“More like an observation,” he said. “I was surprised to hear that you were seeing Hal Fortin.”
She put out her hands. She had beautiful hands. Went with the rest of her. “Whoa there, Chief,” she said. “Not seeing. Was about to have dinner with. Big difference.”
“But Molly said you just up and left when you saw her and Nellie sitting with him.”
She shrugged. “I realized I didn’t want to have the conversation he wanted to have, about Kevin maybe coming back to the baseball team. He was Jack’s backup, you know that, right? Anyway, I told him that he needed to talk to Kevin about it, not me. And by then it had been a very long day.” She sighed again. “Like this one is already shaping up to be.”
Jesse came around the desk then and told her he’d walk her out. Before he could open the door, she turned suddenly and was quite close to him.
“I’m scared, Jesse,” she said. “What the hell is going on around here?”
“Planning to find that out.”
“You have a lot of belief in yourself, Chief.”
“I’ve always found out what needed finding out in the past.”
“You think we’ve already been through the worst of this?” she said.
“Sure,” he said.
“You sure about that?”
“Could be wishful thinking,” Jesse said.
FORTY-EIGHT
Jesse invited Nellie to dinner at his place. He said he’d cook. She insisted that she wanted to cook, in one of her occasional bursts of domesticity. Sunny would have them, too. Nellie just had them less frequently. When she did want to prepare dinner for the two of them, Jesse would reluctantly agree, and just hope she didn’t try to punch above her weight in the kitchen.
