3
When he left the beach, Jesse called Marcy Campbell on his cell
phone.
“I’m up early fighting crime,”
Jesse said. “Got time for
breakfast?”
“It’s seven-thirty in the
morning,” Marcy said. “What if I’d
been asleep?”
“You’d be dreaming of me. When’s
your first
appointment.”
“I’m showing a house on Paradise Neck at eleven,” Marcy
said.
“I’ll come by for you.”
“I’m just out of the shower,”
Marcy said. “I’m not even
dressed.”
“Good,” Jesse said.
“I’ll hurry.”
Sitting across from Jesse in the Indigo Apple Cafe at 8:15, Marcy was completely put together. Her platinum hair was perfectly in place. Her makeup was flawless.
“You got ready pretty fast,” Jesse said.
“Crime busters float my boat,” Marcy said.
“What are you doing
so early.”
“Found a body on the beach,” Jesse said.
“Town beach?”
“Yes. He’d been shot twice.”
“My God,” Marcy said. “Who was
it.”
“Don’t know yet,” Jesse said.
“ME is looking at him
now.”
“Do you get help on major crimes like that?”
“If we need it,” Jesse said.
“Oh dear,” Marcy said.
“I’ve stepped on a
prickle.”
“We’re a pretty good little operation here,” Jesse said.
“Admittedly we don’t have all the resources of a big department.
State cops help us out on that.”
“And you don’t like it when that
happens.”
“I like to run my own show,” Jesse said.
“When I
can.”
The Indigo Apple had a lot of etched glass and blue curtains.
For breakfast it specialized in omelets with regional names.
Italian omelets with tomato sauce, Mexican omelets with cheese and peppers, Swedish omelets with sour cream and mushrooms. Jesse chose a Mexican omelet. Marcy ordered wheat toast.
“Speaking of which, how is the drinking?”
“Good,” Jesse said.
He didn’t like to talk about his drinking, even to Marcy.
“And the love life?” Marcy said.
“Besides you?”
“Besides me.”
“Various,” Jesse said.
“Well, doesn’t that make me feel
special,” Marcy
said.
“Oh God, don’t you get the vapors on me,” Jesse
said.
“No.” Marcy smiled. “I
won’t. We’re not lovers. We’re pals who fuck.”
“What are pals for,” Jesse said.
“It’s why we get along.”
“Because we don’t love each
other?”
“It helps,” Marcy said.
“How’s the ex-wife?”
“Jenn,” Jesse said.
“Jenn.”
Jesse leaned back a little and looked past Marcy through the etched glass front window of the cafe at people going by on the street, starting the day.
“Jenn,” he said again. “Well
… she doesn’t seem to be in
love with that anchorman anymore.”
“Was she ever?”
“Probably not.”
Marcy ate some toast and drank some coffee.
“She’s going out with some guy from
Harvard,” Jesse
said.
“A professor?”
The waitress stopped by the table and refilled their coffee cups.
“No, some sort of dean, I think.”
“Climbing the intellectual ladder,” Marcy said.
Jesse shrugged.
“You’ve been divorced like five
years,” Marcy
said.
“Four years and eleven days.”
Marcy stirred her coffee. “I’m older than you are,” Marcy
said.
“Which gives you the right to offer me advice,” Jesse
said.
“Yes. It’s a rule.”
“And you advise me,” Jesse said,
“to forget about
Jenn.”
“I do,” Marcy said.
Jesse cut off a corner of his omelet and ate it and drank some coffee and patted his lips with his napkin.
“Is there anyone advising you otherwise?”
Marcy
said.
“No.”
“If you resolved this thing with Jenn,”
Marcy said, “maybe you
could put the drinking issue away too, and just be a really good police chief.”
“I’ve never been drunk on the
job,” Jesse said.
“You’ve never been drunk on the job
here,” Marcy
said.
“Good point,” Jesse said softly.
“It got you fired in LA,” Marcy said.
“After you broke up with
Jenn in LA. And you came here to start over.”
Jesse nodded.
Marcy said, “So?”
“So?”
“So Jenn followed you here and you still struggle with booze,”
Marcy said. “Maybe there’s a connection.”
Jesse ate some more of his omelet.
“You think anyone in Mexico ever ate an omelet like this?” he
said.
“Are you suggesting I shut up?”
Jesse smiled at her and drank some coffee from the big white porcelain mug like the ones they had used in diners when he was a kid, in Tucson.
Jesse shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Your advice is
good. It’s just not good for
me.”
“Because?”
“I will not give up on Jenn until she gives up on me,” Jesse
said.
“Isn’t that giving her a license to do whatever she wants to and
hang on to you?”
“Yes,” Jesse said. “It
is.”
Marcy stared at him.
“How does it make you feel that she’s sleeping with other men?”
Marcy said.
“We’re divorced,” Jesse said.
“She’s got every
right.”
“Un-huh,” Marcy said. “But how
does it make you
feel?”
“It makes me want to puke,” Jesse said.
“It makes me want to
kill any man she’s with.”
“But you don’t.”
“Nope.”
“Because it’s against the law?”
“Because it won’t take me where I want to go,” Jesse
said.
“I don’t mean this in any negative
way,” Marcy said. “You are
maybe the simplest person I ever met.”
“I know what I want,” Jesse said.
“And you keep your eye on the prize,”
Marcy said.
“I do,” Jesse said.
4
BobValenti came into Jesse’s office and sat down. He was
overweight with a thick black beard, wearing a blue windbreaker across the back of which was written Paradise Animal Control.
“How you doing, Skipper?” he said.
Valenti was a part-time dog officer and he thought he was a cop.
Jesse found him annoying, but he was a pretty good dog officer. In the fifteen years he’d been a cop, dating back to Los Angeles,
South Central, Jesse had never heard a commander called Skipper.
“We’re pretty informal here,
Bob,” Jesse said. “You can call me
Jesse.”
“Sure, Jess, just being respectful.”
“And I appreciate it, Bob,” Jesse said.
“What’s
up?”
“Picked up a dog this morning,” Valenti said, “a vizsla -
medium-sized Hungarian pointer, reddish gold in color
…”
“I know what a vizsla is,” Jesse said.
“Anyway, neighbors said he’s been hanging around outside a house
in the neighborhood for a couple days.”
Jesse nodded. Jesse noticed that the sun coming in through the window behind him glinted on some gray hairs in Valenti’s beard.
“Not like it used to be,” Valenti said.
“Dogs running loose they
could be lost for days before anybody notices. Now, with the leash laws, people notice any dog that’s loose.”
Jesse said, “Um-hmm.”
“So I go down,” Valenti said,
“and he’s there, hanging around
this house on Pleasant Street that’s been condo-ed. And he’s got