Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

“Negotiation?” She perked up. “Why didn’t you say so? What do you want?”

“I have some pretty nasty suspicions about you, but I don’t want you, Bella.”

“Too bad,” she said, standing and coming close to him. “I certainly want you. Even if it wasn’t part of the deal, I would have wanted you, Jesse. You intrigue me. Men or women, they don’t usually turn me down.”

“What would Roscoe have said to that?”

She laughed a particularly cruel laugh. “That fat, limp old drunk? Talk about living in the past. He’s lucky there are drugs for his condition. I thought I’d gotten past having to force myself to be with the likes of him. The Teacher! I taught him some things, all right.”

“But you had the prospect of six million reasons to force yourself to be with him.”

“I’m not saying another word until you put something on the table other than props I may or may not know anything about.”

“By the way, Bella,” Jesse said, “that fat, limp old drunk was ready to roll over on you for a cup of coffee, so don’t give yourself too much credit.” Jesse lied to get under her skin. It worked.

“What are you offering me?”

He explained that given her involvement in extortion, fraud, conspiracy, and other assorted crimes, there was no way she could avoid at least a little time in prison, but that depending on what she gave him, he could probably get her time limited to a few years in minimum security.

“You’d be out in eighteen months and we’d make sure you didn’t get passed around. You say no to me, Bella, and I walk right out of here to Roscoe’s cell and make him an offer. Going once. Going twice.”

“Sold, damn it. Sold. What do you need from me?”

“The whole thing, from start to finish: details, names, dates.” He pulled a legal pad out of the table drawer, pulled a pen out of his pocket, and placed them in front of her. “Everything, Bella. You leave anything out and it’s no deal. I’ve already got Roscoe cold. Bascom’s dead, but I want Stan White and Evan Updike.”

She laughed that cruel laugh again.

Jesse asked, “I say something funny?”

“I can give you Stan, but Updike’s going to be an issue.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s dead. Stan killed him twenty years ago.”

90

Bella’s statement was like a detailed roadmap of the entire conspiracy. She literally knew where the body was buried. In this case, Evan Updike’s. Jesse put in a call to the New York State Police and gave them a location near Saratoga Springs where they might find the buried remains of a white male, approximately thirty-five years of age, and five feet eight inches tall. Three hours later Jesse got a call back. The trooper on the other end said, “He’s there, Chief Stone, right where you said he’d be.”

Bella only fudged one part of her statement, but Jesse expected that she would. People have a hard time implicating themselves in murder. According to her, it had been Roscoe’s idea to kill Bascom and to keep the money. “I attempted several times to talk him out of it and thought I had convinced him not to do it. Only after he went through with it and took the money did he call me to tell me what he had done. I told him I wanted nothing to do with him after that.” Jesse had read that section of her statement aloud to make certain Roscoe Niles got an earful.

Stan White was sitting alone by the pool, a bottle of vodka at his side and a .38 Smith & Wesson in his lap. When he heard Jesse’s footsteps, he raised the .38 and pressed the muzzle into the bag of flesh that hung beneath his jaw.

“I’ve been expecting you, Jesse,” White said.

“I can see that. Can we talk?”

“Sure, as long as you don’t come any closer to me than right there, we can talk until the cows come home or until The Hangman’s Sonnet comes out on iTunes.” White laughed, but tears rolled down his cheeks. “They say you can’t laugh and cry at the same time. Shows you what ‘they’ know, huh?”

“I’ve never been a big fan of ‘they’ myself.”

“I knew it was going to shit when I couldn’t get hold of anybody today. It’s horrible to be alone in the world. That’s why I did all this, to stop Terry from being alone. I could have just abandoned him to the state a long time ago, but I owed everything I ever had to Terry. I couldn’t abandon him.”

“Tell me about it.”

Stan laughed a joyless laugh. “We really meant to make the album. We really did, but Terry had a complete breakdown before we got started. Meanwhile, the label had already paid us an enormous advance. So I tried stringing it out until Terry got better, but he never got better.” White grabbed the bottle with his free hand and took a slug. As he did, Jesse inched closer. “Where was I? Oh, so I thought up a scheme to keep the money.”