Robert Parker: Death in Paradise

Inside, Dr. Summers stood and put out her hand. She was a slender woman with a young face and silver hair. Jesse wondered if she was older than she looked, or if her silver hair was premature. He decided she was young, and the hair made her look distinguished. If she were older she'd color her hair to look younger.

"Jesse Stone," he said.

"Sit down, Mr. Stone," she said. "You're with the Paradise Police?"

"Yes."

"And it's something…" She looked distressed. "About a murder?"

He noticed she wore no wedding ring. It meant less than it once might have, Jesse knew. A lot of married women, especially married professional women, no longer wore wedding bands.

"Yes," Jesse said. "Last week we found the body of a young woman who'd been dead for several weeks, in a lake in Paradise."

"How awful."

"Especially for her," Jesse said. "She had been shot in the head."

"Someone killed her?"

"Yes. On a chain around her neck was a Swampscott High School ring, class of two thousand."

Jesse took the ring out and placed it on the desk in front of Dr. Summers. Dr. Summers was wearing a black linen suit and a crimson shirt. As she shifted in her chair to look at the ring, Jesse saw that the suit fit her very well. She was wearing a nice perfume, too.

"My God," she said.

Jesse nodded.

"Is there a way to know whose ring this is?" Jesse said.

"From the size," Dr. Summers said, "I assume it was a young man."

"And a member of the class of two thousand."

"Yes."

"Any way to know which one?"

"We graduated a hundred and thirteen young men in June," Dr. Summers said.

She crossed her legs. Jesse noticed that her legs looked good.

"Do you have any young women from the school that are missing?"

"None that I know of. It is, of course, summer. I'd have no way to know once school ended."

"And the victim doesn't have to be from your school," Jesse said. "Does every graduating senior get a ring automatically?"

"No. They have to be ordered. And some students don't bother."

"To show you they don't like the school," Jesse said.

"I imagine so," Dr. Summers said. "They are often among the more disaffected."

"Not a bad thing," Jesse said.

"Disaffection? No, not at all. Were you disaffected, Chief Stone?"

"You bet," Jesse said. "Do you have a record of the orders?"

"No. We order from a company called C. C. Benjamin, in Boston. Did you attend college?"

"No," Jesse said. "I went from high school to a minor-league baseball team."

"Really? Did you ever play major-league baseball?"

"No. I was a shortstop. Got as far as Albuquerque and tore up my shoulder."

"The one you throw with?"

"Yes."

"That would be a bad injury for a shortstop."

"Fatal," Jesse said. "You follow baseball, Dr. Summers?"

"Lilly," she said. "Yes, very closely."

"Did your husband play?"

She smiled at him. "There is no husband, Chief Stone."

Jesse smiled back at her.

"Jesse," he said.

They looked at each other silently for a moment, and just as he realized suddenly that she was good-looking, he understood suddenly that she was sexual. Her eyes. The way she moved. The way she held herself.

"How will you identify her?" Lilly said.

"We'll ask everyone who ordered a class ring to account for theirs."

"And if they can't?"

"It narrows the list. Then we ask around as to which of these guys had a girlfriend, and what was her name, and see if she's missing."

"Labor intensive," Lilly said.

"It is," Jesse said.

"Is it usually this laborious?" Lilly said.

"No, usually you got a pretty good idea that it was the husband, or Uncle Harry or whatever, and you set out to prove it. Murder is fairly unusual anyway, especially in a town like Paradise. Most of it is drunk driving and lost dogs and kids smoking dope in the town cemetery. But here we don't even know who the victim was yet."

"And there's no missing-person's report that would be her?"

"No."

"Isn't that unusual?"

"Yes."

Lilly crossed her legs the other way. Jesse waited.

"How did you go from shortstop to policeman, Jesse?"

"My father was a cop," Jesse said. "In Tucson. When I couldn't play ball anymore, it seemed like the other thing I might know how to do."

"And how did you end up in Paradise?"

"I was a cop in L.A. I got fired for being a drunk. And my marriage broke up. And I figured I'd try to start over as far from L.A. as I could."

"Are you still drinking?"

"Mostly not," Jesse said.

"Was that why your marriage broke up?"

"No," Jesse said. "It didn't help the marriage, and the marriage didn't help it. But there were other things."

"There always are, aren't there."

"You've been divorced?"

"Twice."

"Are you seeing anyone?"

"No."

Jesse was quiet for a time, sitting motionless in the straight-backed high school chair.

"Well," he said finally. "Hello."

They had lost 8 to 5. The field lights had been turned off and they were in the parking lot drinking beer in the semidarkness.

"I was a month out of high school," Jesse said. "And we were playing in Danville."

It was Jesse's turn to buy the beer. It was in a green plastic cooler, buried in ice, in the back of Jesse's Explorer. The rear door of the Explorer was up. Jesse's glove was in the back of the truck, too, and the bases, and a green canvas bag with bat handles sticking out.

"Had a third baseman, an old guy, twenty-eight probably, ancient to be playing at that level. He was a career minor leaguer, and knew it, and played I think because he sort of didn't know what else to do."

The winning team was across the parking lot gathered around their beer cooler like hunters at a campfire. There was no hostility, but there wasn't much interchange. After a game you clustered with your team.

"Anyway, in the first inning there's two outs, nobody on and their three hitter pops up a goddamned rainmaker to the left side. We were playing in a damn cow pasture and the lights were set too low and the sucker went up out of sight."

The smell of the lake was with them in the slow-deepening purple of the evening, and a few early explorers had arrived in advance of the inevitable insect swarm that would, as it always did, eventually force them to give it up and go back to the ordinary light of their homes.

"I'm looking up trying to find it when it comes back into the light, and the third baseman says, 'You got it, kid.' And everybody trots off the field while I'm weaving around out there looking for the ball."

Everyone listened to Jesse quietly. They were men to whom such stories mattered. Men who would know why the story was funny. Men who could imagine the scared kid alone in the middle of the diamond looking up into the night for his first professional pop-up.

"You catch it?" someone said.

The younger guys listened most closely. Kids who would fall asleep in class, listening to Jesse talk about life in the minors, as if he were Socrates.

"Barely," Jesse said.

Everyone laughed. They were happy with the story. They all knew that the better you were, the more you talked about your failures. Jesse was clearly the best player in the league, maybe good enough to have played in the majors if he hadn't got hurt.

"You win the game?" someone asked.

"Don't know. But I went two for four."

Everyone laughed again. Jesse had been there. They could laugh with him at the pretense that players cared only about winning. You played ball, you knew better.

Jesse finished his beer. One more wouldn't hurt. It was Lite beer anyway. You could drink a lot of Lite beer before you got drunk enough to show it. He plunged his hand into the ice-filled cooler and rummaged out another can. It had a round solid feel to it, cold in his hand.