Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

“Look, Jesse, the Yarmouth PD isn’t exactly the FBI or the Boston PD, and I suppose it was even less of a force back in the mid-seventies when I worked the case, but Jester wouldn’t even talk to us. It was all Stan White, the manager. White said there were no copies of the poem because Jester wouldn’t let copies be made, so we had nothing to go on there. And no one other than White and Jester had seen it.”

Jesse asked about the tape.

“Yeah, we had the box the tape was stored in. Here!” Flint reached into the file and produced several faded color photos of an empty plastic box. “The prints on the box were Jester’s, White’s, and Evan Updike’s.”

“The engineer. That’s who I’m interested in,” Jesse said.

“What an asshole. I liked him for it. We all did.”

“But?”

“But there was no hard evidence against him. All of their prints were all over the damned studio. No one saw him take it. We executed warrants on his room and on his car. We even kept him under surveillance until he left Cape Cod. We knew exactly what we were looking for, too.”

Flint pulled out another faded photo. This one was black-and-white. It was a shot of Terry Jester, a much younger Stan White, and a man Jesse assumed was Evan Updike, holding a reel of tape toward the camera. The top side of the reel faced the camera. On one of the wide metal spokes of the reel was a piece of masking tape and on the masking tape was written THE HANGMAN’S SONNET MASTER in black marker. White and Updike were smiling, but Jester’s expression was flat and distant.

“That Updike there?”

“Yup,” Flint said. “A nasty piece of work, that one. Must’ve been a hell of an engineer for people to put up with the bastard.”

“Seems he had that effect on everyone. I never met the man and I don’t like him.”

“So, Jesse, do you really think this is it? Is the tape going to resurface after all these years?”

Jesse explained the details, about where Curnutt’s body had been found, about Updike being Maude Cain’s nephew, about how he’d rented a room from her in the period of time after the tape went missing, and about Roscoe Niles receiving the original poem at the station.

“I’d appreciate a call if and when the tape’s recovered. This damned case has kept me up nights on and off for forty years. Be nice to know for sure before I kick.”

“It’s a promise,” Jesse said, shaking Flint’s hand.

Flint pushed the accordion file toward Jesse. “Here, take this. Been nothing but a damned albatross to me all these years. Hope it ain’t one for you, son.”

Jesse hoped so, too.

72

Hump knew it was late when he cracked his lids open, but he was still tired and fell back into that nether space between waking and sleep. Trapped inside since he’d come to Boston, moving only at night from place to place, he’d had very little option but to eat and watch TV in the shithole apartments of the men who’d been willing to put him up for the night. Overeating made him lazy and fat and he found that all he wanted to do was to escape into sleep. That morning it was especially bad because he was stressed and up against it.

He was running out of time and options. He was already taking stupid chances by staying with the last two guys he’d asked to put him up for a night. He had iffy relationships with both of them. Two days ago it was someone he knew as a kid but not exactly a friend and not a person he had a whole lot of faith in. Still, it had worked out. He’d thrown the guy two hundred bucks and asked him to forget he’d ever been there. Yesterday he’d taken a much bigger risk, staying at Milo Byrnes’s dump. Milo was a full-on tweaker, the kind of guy who’d steal anything from anyone and worry about consequences and the swag’s worth afterward. That’s how he’d ended up inside with Hump and King in the first place.

Hump was quickly falling out of the in-between world and back into sleep, his body relaxing as he fell. Somewhere in his head he thought he was at the beginning of an unpleasant dream. It was a dream of noises and odors, of a squeaking door hinge, creaking floorboards, the gentle rustling of fabric against fabric. It stank of old sweat and smoke. It didn’t take long for Hump to decipher that the stench and the noises were coming not from dreamland but from Milo Byrnes rifling through his stuff.

If Hump had been fully awake, there’d be no contest between a skinny, decayed weasel like Milo Byrnes and himself. Hump had been horrified at the sight of Byrnes when he’d come through his apartment door the night before. The guy’s skin was a sickly yellow, his teeth were rotting out of his head, and he looked like a walking skeleton. Hump opened his eyes just enough to get a sense of what was happening, but he was facing a wall, his back to Byrnes. Hump had his nine in bed with him and his cash was in a bag taped to the inside of his left thigh. The ring, though, was in one of his bundled-up socks. He couldn’t let a skel like Byrnes get to it.

Hump rolled around, tossing the moth-eaten sheet off him, raising the nine-millimeter toward Byrnes.