Death In Paradise (17 page)

"So why are you waiting to arrest Garner?"

"I'm not sure. I guess I don't want to stir things up until I know what I'm stirring."

"It's still about Billie Bishop, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Do you have a theory?"

Jesse drank a little Coke. It had caffeine in it. It tasted like it should give him a pleasant jolt. There was none.

"Alan Garner is almost certainly recruiting runaway girls to prostitution. He doesn't seem like your standard street pimp. He treats them nice, doesn't come on to them, puts them up in a cheap apartment, and rents them out on a call basis. Maybe to a specialized market."

"Men who like very young girls."

"Yes. Alan works for a mobster named Gino Fish. Gino is an acquaintance of Norman Shaw, the novelist Shaw lives in Paradise."

"Do you think that Garner recruited Billie Bishop?"

"Maybe."

"For this Fish person?"

"Yes."

"Do you think that Gino Fish is supplying adolescent girls to Norman Shaw?" Lilly said.

"I have no idea. I've met Mrs. Shaw and she would certainly be sufficient for me."

"You know that has nothing to do with it," Lilly said.

"I know."

"Do you think he might have sent Billie Bishop to Norman Shaw, which is how she ended up in Paradise?"

"In the lake," Jesse said.

"Yes. Do you think?"

"What I think," Jesse said, "is that I'm not going to jostle any of them, until I've got enough to get them all."

"Do you know who they all are?" Lilly said.

"Not yet."

 

 

"I had a thought," Jesse said to Suitcase Simpson.

"Excellent," Simpson said.

"Wise guys don't make sergeant," Jesse said. "What I was thinking was that if Norman Shaw was banging kids like Billie, where would he do it?"

"His house?"

"You think Mrs. Shaw would have a problem with that?"

"Oh, yeah."

"So if he's doing it, it must be someplace else."

"You really think he's involved?"

"No. I really think he isn't," Jesse said. "But I don't know he isn't. I want to know. It's where the chain of connection stops."

"Billie Bishop to Alan Garner to Gino Fish to Shaw," Simpson said.

"Sort of."

"Not much of a chain," Simpson said.

"Everybody's a critic," Jesse said. "If you had a teenaged beauty you wanted to score, where would you go?"

"Not my high school," Simpson said.

Jesse smiled.

"I guess I'd take her to a motel," Simpson said.

Jesse nodded. "You want to learn several things," he said. "You want to learn if a guy named Norman Shaw has registered there, in, say, the last six months, whatever they got for records."

"Would he use his real name?" Simpson said.

"Probably not," Jesse said. "So he couldn't use a credit card. Try to find who registered and paid cash."

"Hotels keep records like that?" Simpson said.

"Some do. Some don't," Jesse said. "Sometimes you can be lucky. You'll get a clerk who remembers."

"Shaw's pretty recognizable," Simpson said. "Even if he gave a false name and paid cash."

"So what would you do about that?" Jesse said. "If you were him?"

"Disguise?"

Jesse smiled.

"Ask if they remember a guy with a fake nose and glasses," he said.

"Really?"

"Suit, I'm kidding you. Be easier if he had the girl register."

"And if he was real careful," Simpson said, "he'd have her register at one of those places where you can park right in front of the door and go in your room once you got a key."

"Maybe you should start with that kind of motel, close to Paradise, and then circle out. Get a picture of Shaw. And take one of Billie. Show both of them."

"You're pulling me off shift again?"

"Special assignment," Jesse said.

"Guys are getting kind of annoyed," Simpson said, "covering for me."

"Un-huh."

"We don't even know if Shaw's got anything to do with it," Simpson said.

"That's true."

"There's a thousand motels around here."

"Un-huh."

"Jeez, on those TV real-life cop shows they don't do this. They got all kinds of guys with microscopes and computers figuring shit out."

"We're a small department," Jesse said. "We can't afford smart people."

"This could be a total waste of time," Simpson said.

"Ah," Jesse said, "you are beginning to understand the intricacies of police work."

 

 

"You wanted to drink," Dix said.

"Yes."

"But you didn't."

"No."

"Why'd you want to?"

Jesse shrugged. It never occurred to him to ask why he wanted a drink. Wanting a drink was part of existence. It didn't have a why.

"Did you want one at 2:35 that afternoon?"

"I'm not that far gone," Jesse said.

"I'll take that to mean no," Dix said. "So why did you want one at seven o'clock that evening?"

"What difference does it make?" Jesse said.

"None," Dix said, "to me."

They were silent.

"It was, you know, you used to be a drinker," Jesse said. "It was the end of the day and the harbor was quiet, and we were sitting together on the deck, and later we'd have sex. I mean it was all ahead of us."

"The romance of booze," Dix said.

Jesse thought about that. "Miller time," he said.

"Soft light touching on crystal stemware, bright liquid, clean white shirt, shimmering gown, alto sax, here's looking at you, kid."

"You think that makes me drink?"

"No. But it helps make you want to."

"But I didn't give in this time."

"No," Dix said. "You didn't."

"Kind of late," Jesse said.

Dix waited.

"Now I'm saying no," Jesse said. "Now that it's cost me my job and my marriage."

"But you have a new job," Dix said.

"Marriage is gone."

"You think that's your fault?"

"Sure," Jesse said. "She couldn't be expected to stay with a drunk."

"You don't think she should share the blame?"

"Sure," Jesse said. "I know. In every breakup there's fault on both sides, blah, blah."

"But this one was all yours," Dix said.

"Pretty much," Jesse said.

"You don't think the fact that she was sleeping with other men might have contributed?"

Jesse didn't answer.

"Maybe you couldn't be expected to stay with an adulteress."

"What are you saying?"

"If you take the responsibility for it, then it's in your hands."

"If I broke it, maybe I can fix it," Jesse said.

"And if you didn't break it, maybe you can't," Dix said. "And you have to face the scary fact that you can't control how this will work out."

Jesse sat for a long time without speaking.

"So what's this got to do with me not drinking when I wanted to the other night?"

"What we're doing here," Dix said, "is a little like what you did when you were working homicide in L.A. There are incidents, we're not sure of how these incidents connect, but we register them, notice sequence, think about them."

"Maybe because I don't love Lilly, I can spare some energy to control my drinking, instead of controlling myself when I'm with Jenn."

"Maybe," Dix said.

"And maybe I need to think about not drinking so I can stop being a drunk."

"Instead of?"

"Instead of not drinking so I can be with Jenn."

Dix nodded.

"Sometimes we clear a case," Dix said.

 

 

"He used the girl to register," Simpson said.

"If it was him."

"Whoever it was," Simpson said.

"Anybody see him?"

"No."

"Where?"

"The Boundary Suites, on Route One."

"The No Tell Motel," Jesse said. "Have Peter Perkins do a crime scene workup on the room."

"It's a motel room," Simpson said. "There'll be a kajillion prints in there."

"See what you can find," Jesse said. "You get a positive ID on the girl?"

"She registered as Elinor Bishop."

"Anybody recognize her picture?"

"No."

"Tell Perkins when he goes up there, use his own car," Jesse said. "No need to make the motel look bad."

"I still think it's a waste of time, Jesse."

"Of course it is," Jesse said, "that's one of the things cops do. We waste a lot of time."

Simpson left the office. Jesse stood and went to the coffeemaker and poured himself another cup. He added a lot of sugar and brought the cup back to his desk. There was a picture of Billie Bishop taped to the corner of his desk calendar. He nodded at it.

"We're getting there," he said.

He drank some coffee while he looked at her picture. The chances of Perkins finding anything they could use in a busy motel room a month after Billie's last visit were nearly nonexistent. Which would leave him with what he had now. He knew some facts. Billie had left Gino Fish's business phone number with the shelter. Alan Garner worked for Gino. Alan Garner pimped young runaways he picked up from the shelter. Billie was a young runaway who had stayed at the shelter. She turned up dead in Paradise. Norman Shaw lived in Paradise. Norman Shaw knew Gino Fish. Put all of that together, give it to a skilled prosecutor, who'll take it to the grand jury, and there will be no chance of an indictment. He could bust Garner and try to turn him, but the chances that Garner would testify against Gino were very slim. And it would send everybody else scurrying underground. If Shaw was in fact being supplied with very young girls, it probably would happen again.
We know that
, Jesse thought,
maybe we can turn him
. What about Joni Shaw? Could she be married to a pedophile and not know it? Did pedophiles have active adult sex lives? Joni was a lot younger than Shaw. Was she the first wife? If she wasn't, what had ended the previous marriage?

He got up and walked to the front desk where Molly was reading an issue of
Martha Stewart Living
.

"You ever read Norman Shaw's books?" Jesse said.

"Sure. I got every one," Molly said. "He's great."

Jesse nodded, but not as if he believed her.

"How many are there?"

"Ten, I think. At least in paperback."

"You got them at home?" he said.

"Sure."

"I'll take the desk," Jesse said. "Go home and get them."

"All ten?"

"Yeah."

Molly stared at him for a moment. But she didn't say anything. Jesse was Jesse. She dog-eared
Martha Stewart
, put it down, got up, and went.

While she was gone, Jesse took a call about a missing bicycle, and a call reporting a rabid skunk and could someone come over and shoot it. Jesse took down the missing-bicycle information and left it on the desk for Molly. He called John Maguire on the radio and told him to go shoot the skunk.

"Make sure there's no bubble gum wrappers in the shotgun barrel," he said.

"Hey," Maguire said, "I'm a law-enforcement professional."

"Yes you are," Jesse said. "Go enforce that skunk."

Molly came back into the police station with a plastic supermarket bag filled with paperback books. Jesse turned the desk over to her and took the books into his office. His coffee was gone. He poured some more. Added a lot of sugar. The less booze he drank, the more coffee he drank. Jittery was better than drunk. He sat down and pulled one of Shaw's books out of the grocery bag. The title
Outcast
was embossed in raised gold letters on the front cover. On the back cover was a picture of Norman Shaw. He looked a lot younger in the picture than he had with his forehead resting on his grilled scrod the last time Jesse had seen him. Jesse glanced through the text. The book was 456 pages long. Jesse wasn't sure he had read a total of 456 pages in his life. In the front of the book were three pages of quotes from newspaper reviews, all of them favorable, another page listing Shaw's other books and a dedication page. The dedication in
Outcast
was "To Joni, who rescued me in time." Jesse looked for a date. The book had been published the year before. Jesse looked through the front matter in the other books. The previous book was dedicated "To Arlene: Toward the sunset—together." The publication dates were four years apart. Three books previous had been dedicated "To Cheryl: Till the End of Time." Jesse read a few pages of
Outcast
. He didn't like it. He put the books away and finished his coffee and got up and walked across the street to the Paradise Public Library.

He liked the library. It was one of those nineteenth-century brick-and-brownstone buildings that could just as easily have been a fire station or a jail. The research librarian smiled at him as he went by the desk. She didn't seem like a librarian. She had a good body. She wore tight clothes. And she always looked at him as if they were sharing a private joke.

He sat at a table and looked up Norman Shaw in
Who's Who
. He had been born in Bronxville, NY, August 26, 1945 s. Samuel G and Andrea (Vogal) L; m. Cheryl Anne Masters, June 5, 1975 (div. 1979); m. Arlene Marie Greene, April 21, 1980 (div. 1985); m. Felicia Jane Feinman, Oct. 16, 1989 (div. 1996); m. Joan Harriet Roth, May 21, 1999.

No book for Felicia? Or a dedication to his lawyer?

Jesse copied the Shaw entry and took it back with him across the street to his office. He handed the sheet to Molly.

"Do your phone magic," he said. "See if you can come up with one or more of the ex-wives."

"In between times," Molly said. "When I'm not running the department."

"That would be good," Jesse said.

 

 

"Are you still seeing Dix?" Jenn asked.

They were on the footbridge over Storrow Drive, near the Hatch shell, walking toward the river.

"I am," Jesse said.

"And?"

Jesse shrugged.

"And I'm talking with him."

"Do you feel you're making progress?" Jenn said.