Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

Niles was sitting at the kitchen table, head down, eyes distant, a freshly lit cigarette between his lips. There was a full ashtray on the table, a coffee cup, and a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label before him. Niles was dressed in a ragged white terry-cloth bathrobe. His long steel-gray hair, which he usually kept rubber-banded in a ponytail, fell loosely around his bloated face. The steeliness of his hair and the cigarette’s burning tip seemed to highlight the blooming gin blossoms on his nose. At the thump of Jesse’s footsteps, the old DJ turned his head toward the kitchen entrance, the distance vanishing from his eyes.

“It’s good to see you, man, but Christ, Jesse, you look like shit,” Niles said, a smile slowly working its way across his lips.

“I’ve got an excuse. No sleep. What’s yours?”

“I’ve got the same excuse.” The DJ’s rich voice was uncharacteristically brittle. “I don’t sleep much at all these days. So why are you here? Did that asshole White get his tape back?”

“Never going to happen.”

Niles acted confused. “The exchange hasn’t happened? I mean, once I authenticated the tape I thought it would go fast after that.”

“The exchange happened, all right,” Jesse said.

Niles did his best to keep looking confused. “I’m slow on the uptake this morning, man. Am I missing something?”

“We’ll get to that in a minute.”

“Whatever you say. How much did the tape go for?”

Jesse didn’t answer him directly. “Remember when you asked me why I was here?”

Roscoe Niles nodded.

“I’m here to arrest you.”

“Arrest me?” Niles tried to act surprised but sounded defeated. “For what, man?”

“Murder, for starters,” Jesse said, his voice calm.

Niles, hand shaking, poured scotch into his coffee cup and drank it down. Poured another. Drank it, too. “And who is it that I am supposed to have murdered?”

“Roger Bascom.”

86

Roscoe Niles spent the next five minutes denying he knew Roger Bascom. Jesse let him, sitting silently across the table as the DJ swore up and down he’d never met the man. He figured Roscoe had to get it out of his system and he hoped Roscoe would say something to make this easier.

“Phone records don’t lie,” Jesse said. He was bluffing because it would take a little time before they got the LUDs, but Roscoe didn’t know that. “And then there’s this.” Jesse tapped his cell phone screen, then handed it to the man across the table. “Scroll right to left. There’s also dashboard-camera footage of you. Tells an interesting story.”

Roscoe Niles’s whole body sagged as he handed the phone back to Jesse.

“Pretty damning evidence, Roscoe: you getting out of your car with the gun case, you holding the rifle, you walking up into the woods... The man who took those photos is the retired head of the state Homicide Bureau,” Jesse said. “So don’t bullshit me. Understand?”

Niles nodded.

“Explain it to me.”

“Nothing I say is going to change anything, is it?”

“Probably not legally, but it may help with the way I feel about you.”

“That means a lot to me, man.”

“Apparently not enough.”

“I’m sorry, Jesse. You have to believe me. I really am, but I was desperate. You see what my place looks like. I’m tapped out and deep into the guys on the street. I haven’t made any real money in years. There are so many mortgages on this dump that I’d have to live two hundred more years to pay them off. I sold everything I had in the world just to make my vig payments until this thing was over with.”

“I figured you had to be desperate, but there are a lot of desperate people in the world who don’t murder other people.”

“Bascom needed killing.” Niles lifted up the bottle, waved it at Jesse. “You want one?”

Jesse shook his head and watched his old friend fill his coffee mug with Red Label.

“To Diana.” Niles lifted his coffee mug to drink.

Jesse slapped the mug out of Niles’s hand. “Don’t you speak her name in front of me again.”

“Sorry, man.”

“Why didn’t you run, Roscoe? You had the money and you didn’t know I had someone on you. With six mill, you could have been anywhere by now.”

Niles laughed a coarse laugh like ripping fabric. “I wasn’t going anywhere without Bella.”

Jesse shook his head. “What was your cut going to be?”

“A mill.”

Jesse said, “You undersold yourself.”

“Story of my life. You have any idea of how much money, how many women I could have had when I was on the air in New York? But not me, no, sir, not Mr. Integrity.”

“You’re a saint.”

There was that laugh again. “Ain’t I, though?”

“Without you to authenticate the tape none of it would have worked. Why didn’t you ask for a bigger cut?”

“At the time, a mill seemed like a fortune to me.”

“But I bet Bella explained to you how it could all be for the two of you. Kill Bascom and cut White out. White couldn’t go to the cops.”

The slump went out of Niles’s body. “No, it was all my idea. Bella had nothing to do with it.”

“Yeah,” Jesse said, “I bet. Pure as the driven snow. Don’t be an idiot, Roscoe. You know she was probably sleeping with Bascom, too.”

Niles’s face turned bright red and he seemed ready to pounce.