Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

She smiled her electric-white smile. “Very good, Jesse. Yes, I’ll be handling all the traditional, digital, and social media for the gala. And with all due respect to Roger’s understated assessment of the attendees, we anticipate several megastars from across the artistic spectrum to be there. We’re still waiting on Jay Z and Beyoncé, Clooney, and Jagger’s people to give us a firm yes. But those are only some of the A-listers we’re looking at.”

Had he not been so desperately craving a drink at that moment, Jesse might have chided Bella for giving herself away. He had always been good at seeing the truth beneath the bullshit. It was one of the qualities that made him a great cop. What Bella had really said was that the response to the invitations wasn’t what they had hoped for and they were going to put on a full-court press. Press being the operative word.

“Okay, thank you for notifying me,” Jesse said. “I’ll be in touch. If you don’t mind, I’ve got to get ready for this wedding.”

Bascom just stood and left. White, confused by Jesse’s terse dismissal, hesitated for a beat or two, then followed Bascom toward the office door. Only Bella lingered.

White called to her, “Bella, are you coming?”

“Go on, Stan. I’ll be out in a second.” She waited for White to leave before turning back to Jesse. “I guess I overplayed my hand there with the A-list-megastar routine. How did you know?”

“I worked LAPD for a long time and my ex-wife was an actress. Not many PR ploys I haven’t seen.”

“Sorry, Jesse, I meant no disrespect.”

“I can take it.”

She leaned across his desk. “I just bet you can.”

A loud few seconds of silence followed as they both let Bella’s comment hang there between them. She placed a business card on the desk, took a pen out of her bag, and wrote something on the back of the card.

“Listen, Jesse, I might have oversold it, but we really are expecting a crowd and there will be some marquee names among them. So please don’t totally discount what we’ve said. That’s my cell number on the back of the card. Call me... anytime.”

When she left, Jesse picked up the card, but he was too preoccupied to care. Instead, he pulled out his side drawer and looked for the bottle he knew wasn’t there. It was only another few hours, he told himself, and then went back to pounding the ball into his glove.

3

He’d already pulled the dresser drawers out one at a time, running his latex-gloved hands through the old lady’s clothes. He’d turned the drawers over, searching for a hidden key, a note with instructions, or an envelope. Something. Anything. Now he moved on to her bedroom closet, gagging at the lavender, lilac, orange peel, and clove stench of the big potpourri sachet on the shelf. It wasn’t just the potpourri getting to him. It was the way the mildew and camphor mixed and clashed with each other. Maybe it wasn’t that at all. Since coming into her bedroom, he hadn’t been able to escape the memories of his own grandma. Memories of how she used to powder herself up and pile on the clownish face paint over her sagging chicken skin, how she sprayed on sickly-sweet old-lady perfume to cover up the telltale scent of her own decay. He couldn’t escape the feeling that she was watching him, judging him, especially when he touched the old lady’s underthings. That really gave him the creeps.

After patting down her dresses, her coats, and inspecting each of her shoes, he grabbed a chair. He stood on it and began to remove things from the shelf: hat boxes, cardboard boxes, photo albums, letters bound together with faded red ribbon. This was more like it. He tossed each item onto the bed, gladly leaving the white satin sachet bag behind. As he stepped off the chair, there was a knock at the bedroom door. Heart thumping, he froze, one foot still on the chair seat, the other on the floor. He laughed at himself for reacting. The cops wouldn’t have knocked, and unless the old biddy had Houdini skills, she was still tied up in the basement.

“What is it, Hump?”

A linebacker-sized man in his forties with a face pitted like a bad country road stepped into the bedroom. Six-foot-three and two-forty, going soft around the middle, he looked like he’d forgotten to take his shoulder pads off after practice.

“King,” he said. “Why are you dumping out the old girl’s panties and stuff on the bed?”

King shook his head at his ex-cellmate. There was a reason everyone who knew him called him Hump. Hump was a good guy and somebody you wanted on your side in a prison fight, but he wasn’t the brightest gem in the jewelry box.

“Yeah, Hump. The thing we’re looking for can be hidden anywhere. Don’t pass nothing up. Look under lamps, ashtrays, under the phone. Come on, we went over all this already, right? It’s worth ten grand to us.”

“But why are you dumping—”

“Because I’m looking for a key, a safe combination, a note with numbers on it... like that. The man didn’t say we would definitely find it here, only that it might be here.”

“Okay, King. I got it.”