Robert Parker - Night Passage

“Can you tell me?” Jesse said.

Cissy took a last drag on her cigarette and dropped it into the sink, turned on the water, flicked the disposal switch, and watched the butt disappear. Then she shut off the disposal, turned off the water, and turned from the sink. The high color had left her face. Her eyes seemed larger than Jesse remembered.

“I am going to have to tell you things that mortify me,” she said. “I will. But you have to promise not to be judgmental.”

“I won’t be judgmental, Cissy.”

“No, I think you won’t. It’s why I think I can tell you.”

Jesse nodded gently and waited. Cissy stood at the sink and folded her arms.

“You have to help me, Jesse,” she said. “You have to help me say these things.”

Jesse stood and walked over to the sink and put one arm around Cissy’s shoulders. She stiffened but she didn’t move.

“I was a cop,” Jesse said, “in the second-largest city in the country. I have heard stuff you can’t even imagine. I have seen stuff you don’t even know exists.”

She nodded slowly, her arms still folded, his arm still around her shoulder.

“You’re human, Cissy. Humans do things that they’re ashamed of. They get in trouble. They need help. I don’t want to get too dramatic here, but that’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to help you when you get in trouble.”

Cissy nodded again. Then they were both quiet, Cissy hugging herself, Jesse’s arm around her shoulder.

“I have been married to Hasty for twenty-seven years,” Cissy said softly. “I don’t know if I love him, sometimes I don’t even know if I like him, but we’ve been together so long.”

She fumbled another cigarette out of the package and lit it.

“I think Hasty likes sex. I know I do. But somehow we don’t seem to like it with each other. When we have sex it’s... technically correct, I guess. But it is not much else and we don’t have it very often. I feel very stiff and cold and awkward having sex with Hasty.”

She smoked for a time, watching the exhaled smoke drift toward the ceiling.

“The longer we have been together, the odder Hasty has become. He was an important young man from a good family when I first met him. All this business with Freedom’s Horsemen...”

She shook her head.

“It occupies him more and more every year. I needed sex. And, I guess there is something very wrong with me, some of the kind of sex I needed.”

“No reason, right now, to decide if there’s something wrong with what you needed,” Jesse said.

“I know. I tell myself that. I took a series of lovers. Some of them were nice normal men who were happy to do nice normal things with me.”

She took in some smoke and blew it out.

“I actually met Jo Jo through Hasty. He came to the house one day. He and Hasty talked business in the den and I brought them some beer. The way Jo Jo looked at me. It was like he knew. I could feel his look go right through my clothes. Right through everything I pretended to be. I knew he saw me. And I let him know I knew.”

She was still standing stiffly, but she had allowed her head to rest lightly against Jesse’s shoulder.

“He wasn’t the first man, but he was the worst one,” Cissy said. “And the worse he was, the worse I was.”

She stopped talking and seemed to be thinking about her badness.

“The pictures?” Jesse said.

“They were my idea. I... liked being that way and I liked to see myself that way.”

“There are more pictures?”

“Many.”

“And he has them?”

“Yes.”

“Probably been better,” Jesse said, “if you kept them.”

“Maybe I half wanted him to tell,” she said.

“Maybe.”

She half turned and dropped her cigarette in the sink and repeated the process of washing it down the disposal. Then she settled back against Jesse’s shoulder.

“So why did he go public now?” Jesse said.

“I think he’s mad at Hasty,” she said.

“About what?”

“They had some kind of a business deal that went badly. Hasty blamed Jo Jo.”

“What kind of business deal?”

“I don’t know.”

Cissy turned in against Jesse and put her face into his chest. It was hard to hear her voice, muffled as it was against him. He could feel her trembling and he patted her shoulder a little. Over her shoulder he looked at his watch. Whatever was coming was coming slow. Finally she spoke again, her voice muffled against his chest.

“Jo Jo killed Tammy Portugal.”

There, Jesse thought. Cissy kept her face buried in his jacket. She was hanging on to him as if she might blow away if she let go.

“He used to tell me how he did it.”

“How he killed Tammy?”

“Yes.”

She began to sob against him. Big paroxysmal sobs, her body heaving. She said something he couldn’t understand.

“What did you say?”

She shook her head.

“No, you’ve come this far,” Jesse said, “and we’re still okay. You can say it. I can hear it.”

“I liked hearing about it,” she said, gasping the words out between sobs. “And he knew I wouldn’t tell anyone because then I’d have to tell how I knew.”

Jesse was silent for a moment, patting her shoulder gently. He had hold, finally, of the grotesque animal he’d been hunting. And he would have to pull it, snarling and vicious, slowly out of its hole. He didn’t know yet how big an animal it was going to be.

“I’m going to have to ask you to testify,” Jesse said.

She nodded her head against him, her body shaking. He held her. The sobbing went on for a long time. He patted her gently. He could hear the occasional car go ordinarily by on Main Street. Somewhere he could hear a dog bark.

“You were brave to tell me,” Jesse said.

She nodded against him.

“I had to tell you,” she said. “I couldn’t have those pictures all over town.”

“The next brave thing you are going to have to do is get psychiatric help. Good help. An honest-to-God shrink.”

“I’m sick,” she said into his chest, “I know I am.”

“You can get well,” Jesse said. “You know a shrink?”

She shook her head.

“Your family doctor, can refer you,” Jesse said. “This is too hard to do alone. You need to save yourself.”

“My God,” she said. “Jo Jo will kill me.”

“Jo Jo will be in jail,” Jesse said.

Jesse took Peter Perkins and Anthony DeAngelo with him to arrest Jo Jo. Both men carried shotguns. He didn’t know if he could trust them either, but it was time to find out. He didn’t want to have to kill Jo Jo; a show of force usually made an arrest go smoother. They waited in the parking lot in the back of the gym where Jo Jo trained and took him, shotguns leveled, without incident when he came out to his car. They brought him handcuffed to the station. Molly at the front desk watched in silence as they led him past her and locked him up in one of the holding cells in the back. DeAngelo and Perkins left. Jesse went back out front.

“I’ll cover the desk,” Jesse said to Molly. “You can go home.”

“You sure you don’t mind being alone with him?” Molly said.

“Be fine,” Jesse said and smiled at Molly. “Give us a chance to really get to know each other.”

“Won’t that be swell,” Molly said and got her things and left. Jesse watched her go down the front steps of the station, then he went to his office, got a tape recorder, walked slowly back to the cell area. He pulled up a chair, plugged in the tape recorder, and talked with Jo Jo through the bars.

“That thing on?” Jo Jo said.

“Not yet,” Jesse said.

He held the recorder so that Jo Jo could see that it wasn’t.