Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

“When our phones ring at the same time, what does it usually mean?”

“Trouble.”

“Give the police chief a cigar.”

“Details?”

“Molly said she thinks it’s a homicide. All I’ve got is an address.”

He didn’t exactly spring to his feet.

“You need help, Jesse?”

He laughed. It cost him to laugh. He winced in pain.

“I’m not going to lecture you, because I’m no one to talk and because I don’t know what it feels like to lose someone that close. It’s your life to piss away if that’s what you want, but I think you should give it a rest for a few days. End of speech. I’m going to put up that coffee now.”

Jesse popped the two tablets into his mouth, drank the water, and headed slowly up the stairs. As he did, he thought about what Tamara had said to him. Problem was he felt so vacant inside that he didn’t know what to fill the emptiness with. At least he understood what was at stake, empty or not. He’d landed in Paradise after screwing up in L.A., but where does a man land after he screws up in Paradise?

9

Jesse climbed into his Explorer, which was still parked in the Gray Gull’s lot, and waited for Tamara to drive away before checking himself out in his visor mirror. He supposed he looked about as good as anyone who felt like he did was going to look. He remembered what Tamara had said to him yesterday about his eyes. Only today it really was the Visine that had cleared the red out. He’d given his face a quick shave after his shower and splashed on some extra Paco Rabanne in the hope it might cover the stink of scotch in his sweat or at least distract people who got close to him. The coffee and Fiorinal had helped more than he expected they would, but not so much that he felt like doing anything more than sleeping for a week. Still he wasn’t going to get any sleep, not for a while, anyway. He started up the SUV and turned out of the lot.

The address was on Berkshire Street in the oldest part of Paradise, where the wealthier folks in town had lived before moving their fortunes and their families up to the big manor houses on the Bluffs. The homes in this part of town weren’t very big by today’s standards, certainly not as grand as the Victorian behemoths on the Bluffs, but many of them had water views and were within walking distance of the quaint small shops in town. You were also close enough to the bridge to Stiles Island that you could jog over and back, if running was your thing. Lately, Bostonians and New Yorkers armed with hedge-fund money and fantasies of a more rustic life had begun buying up the houses along Berkshire, Marblehead, Salem, and Salter Streets, a few of them converting the houses into B&Bs.

Twenty-one Berkshire faced Pilgrim Cove and had so far escaped the clutches of city transplants but wouldn’t much longer, given the FOR SALE sign out front. Nor had it escaped the ravages of time and the weather. The old two-story’s gray clapboards were in poor shape, chipped and flaking, some almost completely bare of paint and exposed to the elements. The steps up to the front door sagged in the middle. The windows were all single-pane affairs that probably rattled like mad in anything more than a stiff breeze.

Jesse wasn’t thinking about stiff breezes or real estate values when he turned off Marblehead onto Berkshire. Although he didn’t yet know who the victim was or the nature of the homicide, he was already at work on the case, running through scenarios, asking himself questions. Which other houses on the street had the best views of 21? If there was gunfire, would anyone else on the street have heard it? If the crime occurred during daylight, how might the killer or killers have exited the house without being seen? If the killer or killers had a vehicle, in which direction would they have fled? Like that. But when he approached the house, he stopped all the speculation and prepared himself to deal with what the crime scene presented. Experience had taught him that making prejudgments before getting to the scene could blind you to the evidence, and he couldn’t afford any more distractions than he was already dealing with.