“This is police business,” Jesse said, “involving what you can see is a very serious assault. I need a few more minutes.”
“Well, then, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Call Mike Pearl while you’re away,” Jesse said.
The Marshport chief.
“He’ll tell you I’m the good guys,” Jesse said.
“Did you have any idea that Matt Loes was spoiling for a fight?” Jesse said to Scott Ford when she was gone.
“No. But it was like he’d already lost his shit before he even got there, started screaming at me that Jack would be alive if we hadn’t got into it at the party.”
“And it escalated from there.”
“He got right up in my face,” Ford said. “I told him he needed to back off. He said that maybe I should make him back off. It went like that.”
He tried to clear his throat, seemed unable to do that. His voice sounded rougher as he went, and was getting weaker.
“I know,” he said. “It sounds like the same dumb playground shit as with Jack and me.”
“Then Loes threw the first punch?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does if you want to press charges.”
“Once he got me on the ground I was afraid he was going to kill me,” Ford said.
“But you’re not going to press charges.”
“Fuck no.”
The only sound in the hospital room now was the sound of the kid’s forced breathing. He told Jesse that he didn’t know why Loes finally stopped swinging away, but he did, and left him there. Ford managed to get to his car and drive home. He collapsed right after he walked in the front door. His mother took one look at him and called 911.
Jesse waited.
“Is that all?” Ford said finally.
“Not quite.”
“Not pressing charges,” he said. “We’re clear on that, right?”
“Might not be up to you,” Jesse said.
“It’s not up to you and it’s not up to my dad,” Ford said. “Now please leave me alone.”
“What aren’t you telling me, Scott?” Jesse asked.
And just like that, the kid snapped, rising up out of the bed, the pain of doing that written on his face, reaching for the call button, breathing hard.
“Leave me the fuck alone!” he yelled at Jesse then.
The nurse came through the door. She told Jesse he needed to leave, right now, or she would call security, whether he was a policeman or not.
Jesse did.
Some bedside manner, he thought.
Nineteen
Jesse called Molly from the car and asked her how it was going with the other players. She said not one was answering a phone. He told her to forget about them for now, and go find Matt Loes and bring him in.
“What if he chooses not to, oh, I don’t know, ride along?” Molly said.
“Arrest him,” Jesse said.
Somehow Loes looked even bigger out of catcher’s equipment than he did in it. He had a butterfly bandage over his right eye. Jesse noticed that his right hand was about a size too big. But that was it for whatever damage Scott Ford had done to him.
“I did it,” Loes said as soon as he sat down.
“Aware,” Jesse said. “Looking to find out what this is all about.”
“You talk to Scott?”
Jesse nodded.
“Then you know what it was about,” he said. “Jack.”
“You’ve apparently decided it’s Scott’s fault that Jack ended up in the water that night?”
“Put it this way,” Loes said. “He didn’t do much to keep him out of it.”
The kid had dark skin. Jesse knew his mother, Rosa, who worked at City Hall, was of Mexican descent. Matt Loes looked like her. Same dark eyes, almost black. Big all over. Hands the size of oven mitts even without the swelling on his throwing hand. His Pirates Baseball T-shirt barely contained his upper chest especially.
This kid could take me in a fair fight, no problem.
“I’m wondering if there was more going on between you and Scott besides Jack,” Jesse said.
“There wasn’t,” Loes said.
“I saw the damage you did,” Jesse said. “Why don’t I believe you?”
Loes stared sullenly at him. High school baseball star, Jesse thought, giving me the perp stare.
“I don’t care whether you believe me or not,” Loes said.
Then he said, “I lost my head, okay? I should have walked away. After that, things got out of hand.”
“Not exactly breaking news, kid.”
“You gonna arrest me?”
“Not at the present time.”
“Even though I did it.”
“Even though.”
The kid stood up.
“You can leave when I say you can leave,” Jesse said. “Now sit your ass back down until I’m finished talking to you. Or I will throw you in a cell for my own amusement.”
Loes sat.
“Was there something going on with Jack that didn’t have anything at all to do with Ainsley Walsh?” Jesse said.
“I thought I was here to talk about me and Scott,” Loes said.
“I’m the chief,” Jesse said. “In here we talk about what I want to talk about.”
There was something in the kid’s eyes now. There and gone. But there. Jesse had surprised him. Or touched some kind of nerve. Or both.
Something, though.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“You sure?”
The sullen look was back. Jesse wondered if kids practiced it in the mirror.
“I’m done talking,” he said.
But made no move to get out of the chair.
“Tell me what I don’t know yet about your team that I’m going to find out,” Jesse said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Thinking that maybe you do.”
Loes shifted in the chair now, which looked small as a barstool underneath him.
“You told us you played ball.”
“So I did.”
“Then you know that what happens on a team stays with the team,” Matt Loes said.
“Until somebody on the team ends up dead,” Jesse said.
“None of this is going to bring Jack back.”
“You should have thought of that before you put Scott Ford in the hospital.”
“Like I said,” Loes said. “I got nothing more to say to you.”
Jesse said, “For now, anyway.”
“So we’re done for now?”
“Get lost,” Jesse said.
“Before I go,” Loes said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Ask away.”
“Can I get in trouble for telling you what I think?”
Jesse shook his head.
“Well, I think you don’t know shit,” Matt Loes said.
The kid left. Jesse let him. He took his glove out of the bottom drawer, and his ball, and began snapping the ball into the pocket of the glove. The glove and ball like his pacifiers sometimes. The sound of the ball in the glove was a signal, he knew, to everybody outside to leave him alone.
He was alone in the office for a long time. He would get with Molly and Suit in the morning, first thing, and come up with a game plan for how they were going to investigate two deaths at the same time.
Multitasking.
He was goddamn chief, after all.
He went home, reheated some of the five-alarm chili he’d cooked up for himself the night before, thought briefly, as he often did, how good an ice-cold beer would go with it, tried to make it through the Red Sox game on television, thought again how much he missed hearing the voice of Jerry Remy, who’d finally passed from cancer the year before.
He couldn’t make it past the fifth inning, eyes starting to close by then, and went to bed.
His cell awakened him. Few minutes after eleven, he saw.