(5/10) Sea Change Read online

  “So what’s your secret?”

  Jesse grinned.

  “Usually it’s backup.”

  “And this time?”

  “Well, Suit was there, but the guy was out of control and the place was crowded…”

  “And he gave you attitude,” Jenn said.

  “He did. So if you’re going to go, do it quick. You gotta get a guy like Radford right away or you’re going to have to shoot him.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I hit him in the balls with Suit’s stick.”

  “Ouch,” Jenn said. “And that was it?”

  “Essentially it was,” Jesse said.

  “I was talking to the bartender before you arrived,” Jenn said.

  “Doc,” Jesse said.

  “Yes, he said you didn’t press charges.”

  Jesse drank some iced tea, and grinned at her as he put the glass down.

  “This morning when he was sober with a deadly hangover, we gave him the choice: district court or clean the squad car.”

  “Clean the squad car?”

  “He puked in it.”

  “Oh yuck,” Jenn said. “So much for dinner.”

  “Don’t kid me, you’re about as queasy as a buzzard.”

  “But much cuter,” Jenn said. “Did he do it?”

  “He did,” Jesse said. “And we let him walk.”

  “With his hangover,” Jenn said.

  “Awful one, as far as I could tell.”

  “You would know about those,” Jenn said.

  “I would.”

  They ate their lobster salad for a time. It was mediocre. Jesse always thought the food at the Gray Gull was mediocre, but it was a handy place, and friendly, and had a great view of the harbor on a summer night sitting on the deck. Jesse didn’t care much what he ate anyway.

  When they finished supper they walked along the waterfront for a stretch. The street were full of people, many of them drunk, some of them raucous. Jesse seemed not to notice them.

  “I brought my stuff,” Jenn said.

  “For an overnight?”

  “Yes,” Jenn said. “I’m not on air until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “You bring it in the house?”

  “Yes, I unpacked in the bedroom.”

  “That sounds promising,” Jesse said.

  “It is promising, but I need to walk off my supper first.”

  “You never were a love-on-a-full-stomach girl,” Jesse said.

  “I like things just right,” Jenn said.

  “Sure,” Jesse said.

  Away from the wharf the street life grew sparse. No more bars and restaurants, simply the old houses pressed up against the sidewalks. There were narrow streets, and brick sidewalks, bird’s-eye glass windows, weathered siding, and widow’s walks and weathervanes. It was dark and there weren’t many streetlights. Away from the Race Week crowds, the old town was dim and European. Jenn took Jesse’s hand as they walked.

  “This time,” Jenn said, “things might be just right.”

  “Maybe,” Jesse said. “If we’re careful.”

  The street-side windows were lighted in many of the homes, and people sat, watching television, or reading something, or talking with someone, or drinking alone, behind the drawn curtains only inches away from Jesse and Jenn as they walked.

  “How long since you’ve had a drink, Jesse?”

  “Ten months and thirteen days,” Jesse said.

  “Miss it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe, in time, you’ll get to where you can have a drink occasionally,” Jenn said. “You know, socially.”

  “Maybe,” Jesse said.

  “Maybe in awhile you and I can be more than, you know, one day at a time.”

  “Maybe,” Jesse said.

  In this neighborhood fewer lights were on. The streets seemed darker. Their footsteps were very clear in the silent sea-smelling air.

  “You’ve slept with a lot of women, since we got divorced,” Jenn said.

  Jesse smiled in the darkness.

  “No such thing as too many,” he said.

  “There certainly is,” Jenn said, “and you know it.”

  “I do know it.”

  “There’s been a lot of men,” Jenn said. “For me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Jesse shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  “Not until I understand it more.”

  Jenn nodded.

  “Do you still talk to Dix?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you talk about that?”

  “Sometimes,” Jesse said. “The women in my life bother you?”

  “Not very much,” Jenn said. “Mostly I don’t think about them.”

  In their walk they had made a slow loop along the waterfront, up into the town, and back around down to the waterfront again to Jesse’s condominium. They stopped at Jesse’s front steps.

  “Well,” Jenn said. “You are the man in my life now.”

  “Yes,” Jesse said.

  “You want to neck on the porch for a while?” Jenn said. “Or go right on in and get serious?”

  Jesse put his arms around her.

  “No hurry,” he said.

  “I love that in a man,” Jenn whispered, and put her face up and kissed him.

  3

  The body moved gently, facedown, against the town dock, in the dark faintly oily water, among the broken crab shells, dead fish and fragments of Styrofoam which seemed to survive all adversity. It tossed easily on the small rounded swells of a powerboat wake. The seagulls were interested in the body, and below Jesse could see the shimmer of small fish.

  Simpson said, “A woman, I think, wearing a dress.”

  “Not proof positive, but we’ll assume,” Jesse said.

  They looked at her as she eddied in the seaweed, and the body turned slightly so that the feet swung toward shore.

  “Gotta get her out,” Jesse said.

  “She been in awhile,” Simpson said. “You can see the bloat from here.”

  “Get a tarp,” Jesse said, “and you and Arthur and Peter Perkins get her up on the dock and put the tarp over her. Don’t want the sailors all puking before the race.”

  “What about the cops?” Simpson said.

  “Try not to,” Jesse said. “Bad for the department image.”

  Jesse had seen enough floaters, and he had no need to see another one. Nor smell one. He looked at the small racing boats forming up and heading out to the harbor mouth where they would race off Stiles Island. Out by the end of Stiles Island he could see whitecaps. Be some bumpy races today. Behind him the coroner’s wagon arrived and the ME’s people got out a gurney and wheeled it down the ramp to the dock. One of them, a woman, squatted on her heels over the body and pulled back the canvas. Jesse saw all three of his cops look away. He smiled. The ME woman didn’t seem bothered, holding up the tarp, inspecting the body. When she was through she put the tarp back and jerked her thumb toward the wagon and they got the body on the gurney, and wheeled it up to the truck. A small crowd, mostly teenaged kids, watched the process. Occasionally one of them would giggle nervously.

  “Anything interesting,” Jesse said to the woman.

  “Need to get her on the table,” she said. “She’s too big a mess to tell much here.”

  “ID?” Jesse said.

  “Not yet.”

  “She in the water long?”

  “Yes,” the woman said. “Looks like the crabs been at her.”

  “Crabs?”

  “Un-huh.”

  “Means she was on the bottom,” Jesse said.

  “Or at the water’s edge.”

  Jesse nodded. “Anything else?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “We’ll know more after we get her into the shop,” she said.r />
  “Mind if I send my evidence specialist along with you?” Jesse said.

  “Hell no,” the woman smiled, “we’ll show him some stuff.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Peter Perkins said.

  Simpson watched the van pull away. He was very fair, with a round face and pink cheeks. Now there was no pink.

  “You see something like that,” Simpson said, “chewed up, full of bloat, and stinking, makes you wonder about life and death, you know?”

  Jesse nodded.

  “I mean,” Simpson said, “it’s hard to imagine something like that going to heaven.”

  “The body don’t go, anyway,” Arthur said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  The three men didn’t say anything.

  “You ever think about stuff like that, Jesse?” Simpson said.

  Jesse nodded.

  “So whaddya think?”

  Jesse smiled.

  “I think I don’t know,” he said.

  “That’s it?” Simpson said.

  “Yeah,” Jesse said. “I don’t know doesn’t mean there’s no afterlife. Doesn’t mean there is. Means, I don’t know.”

  “That enough for you, Jesse?”

  “Kind of has to be. Universe is too big and complicated for me to understand.”

  “That’s where faith comes in,” Arthur said.

  “If it can,” Jesse said.

  “Can for me,” Arthur said.

  Jesse nodded.

  “Whatever works,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find out who our floater was.”

  4

  Jesse was leaning on the front desk in Paradise Police Headquarters reading the ME’s report on the floater. Molly was working the phones. It was only 8:40 in the morning and the phones were quiet.

  “You think she came off one of the yachts?” Molly said.

  Jesse smiled. Molly always looked too small for the gun belt. In fact there wasn’t all that much that Molly was too small for. She was dark-haired and cute, full of curiosity and absolute resolve.

  “Only if they got here before Race Week,” Jesse said. “ME says she’s been in the water awhile.”

  “Any signs of trauma?”

  “Nope, but it’s pretty hard to tell. Crab, ah, markings indicate she was probably on the bottom, which might suggest she was weighted, and decomposition, tidal movement, whatever, pulled her loose and sent her up. Or she could just have been in shallow water.”

  “Could be lobster markings,” Molly said.

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Jesse said. “Next time I’m ordering dinner at the Gray Gull.”

  He heard himself say Gray Gull the way locals did, as if it were one word, with the stress on gray, not gull. I been here awhile, Jesse thought. I’m beginning to be local.

  “It couldn’t be gulls?” Molly said.

  “No.”

  “How do they know?”

  “They know,” Jesse said. “There’s evidence of blunt trauma on her body, but nothing that couldn’t have come from being rolled against rocks by the surf.”

  “Oh. Well if she did come off a yacht, it’s strange no one has reported her missing.”

  “No one seems to have reported her missing, yacht or no yacht,” Jesse said.

  “We got five missing persons in the Northeast that could be her,” Molly said. “Except none of the dental IDs match.”

  Jesse wore blue jeans and sneakers and a short-sleeved white police chief shirt, with the badge pinned to the shirt pocket. He carried the snub-nosed .38 that he’d brought with him from L.A. The issue gun, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, she knew, was in the right-hand bottom drawer of his desk. His hair was cut short. He was tanned, and, Molly always noticed this about him, while he wasn’t a particularly big man he seemed very strong, as if his center were muscular.

  The phone rang and Molly took it and said, “Yes ma’am. We’ll have someone check right on it.” She wrote nothing down, and when she hung up she took no further action.

  “Mrs. Billups?” Jesse said.

  Molly nodded.

  “Says there’s a man she doesn’t recognize walking past her house. He looks sinister.”

  “How many is that so far this month?”

  “Four,” Molly said.

  “And this year?”

  “Oh God,” Molly said, “infinity.”

  “Mrs. Billups hasn’t got much else to occupy her,” Jesse said. “Who’s on patrol?”

  “Suit.”

  “Have him drive slowly past her house,” Jesse said.

  “There’s nothing there, Jesse.”

  “I know, and you know. But Mrs. Billups doesn’t know.”

  “You are awful tenderhearted,” Molly said, “for a guy who banged Carl Radborn in the balls with a stick.”

  “She’ll peek out the window when she sees the patrol car,” Jesse said. “Have Suit give her a little wave. Maybe a thumbs-up.”

  Molly shook her head in slow disapproval, but she turned as she did so, and called Simpson on the radio.

  “Go do another Mrs. Billups drive-by,” she said.

  “Oh shit, Molly, that old biddy sees things every day.”

  Jesse leaned into the microphone.

  He said, “Serve and protect, Suit.”

  There was silence for a minute, then Simpson said, “Aye, aye, skipper.”

  Jesse went into the squad room in back and got two coffees and brought one in for Molly.

  “If you’re missing from a town or a city, people might not notice right away,” Jesse said. “But a yacht?”

  “So she’s probably not off one of the yachts.”

  “Or, if she is, people don’t wish it known,” Jesse said.

  “Which would mean that someone murdered her.”

  “Or that someone doesn’t want anyone to know she was on the yacht.”

  Molly nodded.

  “Like somebody else’s wife,” she said.

  “Or a hooker, or a juror in a pending civil trial, or something neither of us can think of.”

  “There’s nothing neither of us can think of,” Molly said.

  “Except who the floater is.”

  “ME can’t give you anything?”

  “Sure they can,” Jesse said.

  He looked at the ME’s initial report.

  “Floater was about thirty-five. Alive she was about five-seven, probably weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. Brown eyes, natural brunette. She was wearing an expensive dress and silk underwear when she died. She had been drinking. She showed traces of cocaine, and she was a smoker. Her breasts had been enhanced. She was alive when she went in the water. She was not a virgin.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Just running down the list, Moll,” Jesse said. “She had never had children.”

  “We could start checking with plastic surgeons,” Molly said. “See if any enhancement patients are missing.”

  “If it were done by a plastic surgeon,” Jesse said. “Any MD can do this kind of surgery.”

  “But most intelligent people wouldn’t go to an allergist or somebody,” Molly said. “Would you?”

  “For breast enhancement?” Jesse said.

  “You know what I mean,” Molly said.

  Another call came in. Molly answered and listened and wrote down an address.

  “Okay, Mr. Bradley,” she said. “I’ll have an officer there in a few minutes. Call back if there’s any problem. And stay away from the animal.”

  “Rabid animal?” Jesse said.

  “Skunk. Guy working on a roof up on Sterling Circle says it’s staggering and walking in circles in the street. He was on his cell phone.”

  “Suit should have saved Mrs. Billups by now. Have him go up and shoot the skunk.”

  “What if it’s not really rabid?” Molly said.

  “Family can sue us.”

  Molly called Simpson. When she was through she turned back to Jesse.

  “Do people like urologists really do plastic surgery?”
/>   “They may legally do so,” Jesse said. “Some people don’t know one doctor from another. In the white coat they all look the same.”

  “A woman wearing silk underwear would know,” Molly said.

  Jesse grinned.

  “Depends who bought the underwear,” he said.

  “Still, odds are it would be a plastic surgeon. I can make some calls.”

  “Sure,” Jesse said. “If we’re lucky, maybe she did them around here.”

  “Of course,” Molly said. “She could have driven here from Grand Junction, Colorado, and parked on the Neck someplace and jumped in.”

  “Except we haven’t found any abandoned vehicles,” Jesse said.

  “Or someone was with her and threw her in and drove away.”

  “Or she’s a space alien,” Jesse said.

  “Or, just shut up,” Molly said.

  “I am the chief law enforcement officer of Paradise, Massachusetts,” Jesse said. “And your chief. Surely you can be more respectful than that.”

  “Of course,” Molly said. “I’m sorry…shut up, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are they all through with her?” Molly said.

  “The coroner? No, this is a preliminary report. They’re still poking around.”

  “Ick,” Molly said.

  “Cops don’t say ‘ick.’”

  Molly laughed and leaned over the desk and kissed Jesse on the forehead.

  “Do cops do that?” Molly said.

  “Oh yeah,” Jesse said, “most of them.”

  The phone rang again and Molly answered, “Paradise Police,” while Jesse took the coroner’s report back to his office.

  5

  Dix always looked so clean, Jesse thought. His white shirts were always brilliant white. His head gleamed as if he had just shaved it, and his face glistened with aftershave.

  “Jenn asked me the other day if it bothered me about her being with other men.”

  Dix nodded. He sat with his elbows on the arms of his chair, his hands clasped chest high. They were big square competent hands.

  “I said it did.”

  “You wanna talk about that?” Dix said.

  “Yes.”

  “Whaddya want to say?”

  “I, well, I mean I hate it,” Jesse said. “But that doesn’t seem too weird.”

  “Hate it that she was with other men?”