Robert Parker - Death in Paradise

"I always thought writers were alone a lot," Jesse said.

He had in fact never thought that, but he needed to keep Shaw talking. Jesse was pretty sure that Shaw would not stop with one vodka.

"When I write, I write," Shaw said. "When I party, I party. What is it you're after, Stone?"

Jesse smiled his friendliest smile, but it didn't help anything, because Shaw wasn't looking at him. He was still looking around the dining room. Jesse wondered if he was desperate to be recognized, or if maybe it was a posture, designed to show Jesse how little importance Shaw attached to him.

"No idea," Jesse said. "I'm hoping I'll know it when I see it."

Shaw nodded without paying much attention and gestured at the waitress. Without further instructions she brought him another vodka. Jesse smiled to himself. Boozers were predictable, Jesse thought, and don't I know it. When the drink came, Shaw picked it up and stood.

"Excuse me a minute," he said. "Got to say hello to an old friend."

Standing, he took a swallow of the vodka and then carried the glass with him to a table of four well-groomed women having lunch. He stood with a hand on the back of a chair, bending over the table, holding his drink in the other hand. He said something. The women laughed. Jesse waited. Shaw had as much swagger, Jesse thought, as a guy with a potbelly, skinny legs, and a silly haircut could achieve. The women laughed again. Shaw laughed with them. Then he kissed one of them on her perfect blond head and came back to Jesse's table. As he walked past the waitress, he murmured to her. Shaw sat back down across from Jesse and looked out at the harbor.

"I've fucked all four of those broads at one time or another," Shaw said.

"Isn't that nice for you," Jesse said. "When's the last time you saw Gino Fish?"

The waitress appeared with a new vodka for Shaw. It was a double. Shaw took a large swallow.

Shaw leaned back in his chair again and seemed somehow to expand. For the first time since they had been seated, Shaw looked straight at Jesse.

"Actually, Gino and I are talking about doing a book together."

Under the pink-toned sun color on his face, the broken blood vessels made a darker red web on the skin above his cheekbones.

Jesse said, "Un-huh."

"About the gangster life," Shaw said. "Disaffection, opposition, freedom, violence."

"Un-huh."

Shaw drank some more.

"This country started in rebellion against established laws," Shaw said.

Jesse nodded.

"And Gino Fish, in himself, is almost entirely outside any established norms."

"Un-huh."

Shaw grinned suddenly, almost genuinely, at Jesse.

"Sort of a queer Godfather ," he said.

"How do you collaborate?"

"Gino and I get together, couple times a week," Shaw said.

Despite the fact that he was clearly drunk, Shaw was focused as he talked about his writing, in a way he had not been before that.

"And talk?"

"Yeah. Gino likes to talk about himself."

Lunch arrived.

"When the book gets written," Jesse said, "do you share the royalties?"

"Everybody thinks it's royalties," Shaw said. "It ain't. It's the advance, stupid. You know?"

Jesse ate some clam chowder. Shaw paid no attention to his scrod. His speech had thickened noticeably. He'd been at the bar when Jesse arrived. He'd had three, one of them a double, since Jesse had arrived. The conversation wasn't going to last too much longer.

"So he gets half the advance?"

"Naw, it's all mine," Shaw said. "Gino jus' wants a book about him. He…"

Shaw stopped talking for a moment and looked at Jesse as if he were having trouble remembering who Jesse was. Then he put his head down and rested it on top of his scrod and went to sleep.

Suitcase Simpson came into Jesse's office trying not to look self-important.

"Got the info from the phone company," he said to Jesse. "That phone number used to belong to a guy named Alan Garner. No longer in service."

"Got an address?"

"Yeah. In Brighton, but he moved last year."

"I know where he is," Jesse said.

Simpson stared at him.

"How you know that?" he said.

"I'm chief of police," Jesse said.

"Oh," Simpson said. "Yeah. I forgot. You going to talk with this guy?"

Jesse shook his head.

"We'll watch him," Jesse said.

"We?"

"You ever do any surveillance?"

"Jesse. I'm a cop in Paradise, Mass.," Simpson said. "What the hell am I going to surveil?"

"Go put on some civvies," Jesse said. "Time you learned."

Driving into Boston from the north, there was a choice between the tunnel under the harbor and the bridge over the Mystic River. The tunnel was a little shorter, from Paradise, but on the Boston end you came up out of the tunnel into the boiling confusion of the largest urban renewal project in the country. Jesse took the bridge.

As they arched down toward the Charlestown end they could look down at the merge of the river and the gray sprawl of the harbor to their left. Below them was the old Charlestown Navy Yard, now mostly condominiums. Straight ahead the individuated buildings coalesced into skyline.

Tremont Street was so hot that the asphalt was soft. They parked on a hydrant and Simpson got out and bought a cup of coffee and a large Coke at a convenience store while Jesse stayed in the car looking at Development Associates of Boston. When he got in the car, he handed Jesse the Coke.

"My mother always used to tell me to drink hot stuff in hot weather," Simpson said. "Because being hot inside would make you feel cooler outside."

Jesse was silent.

"You think that makes any sense?" Simpson said.

"Sure."

"You think it's true?"

"No."

Simpson nodded and settled back with his coffee. Jesse knew he still half believed it. He was only about ten years older than Suitcase, but he felt like his father.

"Who we looking at here?" Simpson said.

"Alan Garner works for Gino Fish. Gino Fish is the guy whose phone number Billie Bishop left when she departed the shelter."

Simpson was sweating. His face was red. Jesse could see him thinking.

"And two other girls left his phone number at the same shelter," he said.

Jesse nodded. Suit wasn't stupid, but his mind had to move slowly over the surface of information before he possessed it. Jesse gave him time.

After a time Simpson said, "Well, that would be a really big coincidence."

"Really big," Jesse said.

"So why not go in and confront him with it?"

"And he says, I don't know anything about it, and what do we say?"

Suitcase drank some more coffee.

"I think it works," he said.

"Drinking hot stuff?"

"Yeah."

"Your mother tell you to run cold water over the inside of your wrist to cool your blood?"

Simpson was surprised.

"Yeah."

Jesse smiled.

"We could try to find those other girls," Simpson said. "See what they could tell us."

"One's named Mary," Jesse said. "The other one is Jane. Or so they told Sister."

"No last names?"

"Nope."

"You know where they came from, we could check Missing Persons…"

"I don't know where they came from. I doubt that the names are real."

"But they left a real phone number."

"Kids need to hang on to something," Jesse said.

"I don't know what you mean."

"However fucked up," Jesse said, "kids don't want to just disappear."

"They need to feel connected?"

"To something," Jesse said.

Simpson took another sip of coffee. The sweat ran down his face in front of each ear.

"Careful," Jesse said. "You don't want to get a chill."

"I don't know what we're looking for here," Simpson said.

"Me, either," Jesse said.

"So how we going to know when we see it?"