“Fifty-three years.” White puffed out his chest, a wistful look in his eyes. “We were just two kids, Terry and me, bumming around Greenwich Village then, not even eighteen. We didn’t have two nickels to rub together, but we did gigs, had fun. I could sing a little, write a little, but Terry, Terry... He had the magic. He had the gift, the looks. Me... I had business sense and some family connections. One thing led to another and...”
Jesse said, “All very fascinating, Mr. White, but—”
“Stan, please.” His agitation was suddenly replaced by a winning smile and polite charm. “Please forgive my outburst. Old men get impatient.”
“No need to apologize, Stan, but what has all this to do with the Paradise Police Department?”
White said, “It’ll be all over the local media soon about Terry and the album, so we thought we should give you a heads-up is all.” White had leaned forward and whispered the words the album like he was giving Jesse top-secret information.
That got Jesse’s attention. “The album?”
White raised his palms, winked at Jesse, and said, “You’ll see. Terry might even sing a few songs from the album. That would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
Before Jesse could ask anything else, Bascom spoke up, “A month from tomorrow, Mr. White will be throwing a gala seventy-fifth birthday party for Mr. Jester at the Wickham estate on Stiles Island. There will be several celebrity guests in attendance. Some will be arriving by chartered yacht from New York City, but most will be coming by car through town. You will no doubt want to have your entire department on duty that weekend and alert your auxiliary as well. Mayor Walker has given Mr. White and Ms. Lawton her assurance that you will give us your full cooperation.”
Jesse bristled at that. Not only was Bascom condescending to dictate how Jesse should deploy his department, but they’d gone over his head, directly to the mayor. Beyond that, the last thing Jesse wanted to deal with in high summer in a seaside town like Paradise was a celebrity invasion. As an L.A. cop, he’d seen what nightmares star-studded events created even in a town that lived for them and was equipped to handle them. Jesse kept his cool, ignoring Bascom and talking directly to Bella Lawton.
“That makes you PR,” he said, nodding at Bella.
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.”
“Hump, I’m glad I cleared that up for you, but why’d you come up here in the first place?”
“The old gal.”
“What about her?”
“I don’t think she’s doing too good.”
King raced right past Hump, taking the steps two at a time, and barreled into the spindly-legged table at the base of the stairs. The collision knocked a white-and-blue-speckled ewer and basin off the table. The antique porcelain smashed onto the wide plank flooring and cracked into a hundred nasty-looking shards. He didn’t stop to check out the mess he’d made, hoping the job wouldn’t end up the same way. He turned down the hallway and headed for the rickety basement stairs. They creaked and moaned under his weight.