It was too late to worry about that now. At the moment, he stood outside the town house between Lundquist and Healy, waiting to be buzzed in. Healy was exhausted, having spent the entire night sitting on the suspect’s house.
“The money?” Jesse asked.
Healy pointed at the garage door. “In there. The rifle, too. He came home, pulled into the garage, came out, locked the garage door behind him, and he’s been inside ever since.”
Jesse was beat, too. He’d caught a few minutes of shut-eye during the ride to Boston from Paradise with Lundquist. It was the only sleep he’d gotten since the night before. Lundquist was still upset at Jesse for not reporting the shooting incident in the nature preserve and for keeping him out of the loop when he brought Healy into a police matter.
“I had no choice, Brian. I had to use someone who had no official standing, someone I could trust who wasn’t on anybody’s radar screen. Nobody would be looking for Healy in their rearview mirrors.”
Lundquist was unmoved.
“He’ll get over it,” Healy had said to Jesse when Lundquist was taking a call. “He’s new in the job, so he’s touchy. But he’s good.”
At a distance, the town house seemed a lovely brick affair with granite steps, black wrought-iron rails, boot scrapers, and converted gaslights. But up close it was more a reflection of its owner: weary and abused, something that looked better viewed through the lens of the past. The windows needed replacing. The bricks were in desperate need of repointing. Pieces of the fence were rusted and missing like rotted-out teeth in a once-glorious smile.
When the buzzer sounded, Jesse turned to the others and said, “I’m going in alone. It’ll just be easier and I’ll be able to trip him up. If I need you, you’re certainly close enough.”
Healy was uneasy. “This guy tried to kill you twice.”
“If he wanted to kill me, I’d be dead. You saw the shot he made last night.”
Lundquist shrugged. “You want him, he’s yours... for now. He’ll wind up in Vermont eventually.”
Jesse stepped into the vestibule, the front door slamming shut behind him. The inside of Roscoe Niles’s town house was even shabbier than the exterior. The wooden floors were warped and split in several spots, and whatever varnish or wax had once protected them was worn away to a dull memory. The furniture, which ten years earlier might have been called comfortable, was now frayed and scratched, the cushions flat and lifeless. The endless shelves of record albums, CDs, and tapes that had once lined the walls of his den were now as empty as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboards, and his stereo equipment — tube amp, pre-amp, turntable, reel-to-reel, CD player, speakers — was gone.
There were rectangular ghosts on the walls of the hallways where framed posters and photos had hung, all signed to Roscoe Niles by megastars in the music industry. Jesse had always liked the photo of Roscoe holding David Bowie in his arms, big smiles on both their faces. The empty walls and shelves were eerily reminiscent of Niles’s office at the radio station
As Jesse walked into the kitchen, he questioned himself as he had since last night when it all became clear to him. Should I have seen it sooner? He had never been a man given to second-guessing his decisions. That had changed a few years back after Suit had been shot. But if he was being honest with himself, he had to confess that since Diana’s death, he’d spent a great many drunken hours doing nothing but questioning himself. It’s what had made him vulnerable to manipulation. The only thing he had been sure of since Diana’s murder was that he had been played for a fool by a man he considered a friend.
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.”