Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries)

  SUMMER COOL

  Al Sarrantonio

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2011 / Al Sarrantonio

  Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Partial cover image courtesy of:

  http://lazybonesstudios.deviantart.com/

  LICENSE NOTES

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  Haydn of Mars – Book I of the Masters of Mars Trilogy

  House Haunted

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  1

  Paine ignored the ringing phone.

  The chilled frost on his iced tea glass hadn't had time to melt and put a water stain on the redwood bench on which it rested. His web-backed lounger was finally at the right position for reading the fat political novel that lay unopened next to the iced tea. If he wished, he could put on the sunglasses that rested on top of the book, and gaze out from the shade of his tree through the early afternoon glare across the small lake to see if any largemouth bass were jumping at flies from under their lily pads. His fishing pole lay within reach, fixed with the Jitterbug lure that had netted him nine fish in two days—eight of them the previous evening alone as the sun settled leisurely into the coolness of the trees, and the bass, warmed after a day of ninety-degree heat, had decided to jump at anything that moved on the water.

  Behind him, the tape deck had auto-reversed, and the second side of the Keith Jarrett recording was beginning, carrying Paine back into the improvisational piano fugue the first side had begun.

  The telephone continued to ring.

  "Screw it," Paine said out loud, settling back into the perfect curve of the lounge chair, his hand falling to lift the glass of iced tea to his mouth.

  There were only a few people who might call him, and none of them would do it. They knew why he was here and they knew he didn't want to be disturbed. They knew how hard he had worked the past year, especially the past month, in the middle of the hottest summer in thirty-four years, and they knew how much he wanted to be alone, to fish and read and listen to music during the day, and go out to the big white dome holding the twelve-inch telescope at night, the one his dad and brother and he had built so long ago, and look at the stars and believe that, in their cool serenity, their cold majesty, their distance from small problems, human concerns, the cares of any one life, they could continue to heal him. Whoever might call him would know what it meant for him to be here, and would not call him. It must be a wrong number.

  The ringing continued.

  He pushed the sunglasses aside and lifted the book, fingering the cover without opening it.

  "Shit," he said.

  He could let it ring until whoever it was got tired and hung up. But the carefully constructed mood he had worked on all morning was broken, Jarrett's delicate piano subsumed by sharp phone sounds, the iced tea beginning to stain the redwood, the mosquitoes in the hot of the day beginning to drift off the lake to hover like annoying darts around him. He put the book down, no longer wanting to start it.

  Somewhere inside him, anger stirred.

  The phone rang, and now he wanted to get up and answer it and find out which aluminum siding salesman was calling, or what water softener company, or which wrong number. He would find out, politely asking who he was speaking to and where they were located, and then he would get in his car and take a ride over there, and punch the caller out.

  But that would mean getting out of the chair, which still cradled him, and it would mean walking out of the shade of the tree into the burning sun to get to the house. There was still a remnant of his anticipated afternoon left, and as he looked at Gore Vidal's picture on the back of his book he felt a renewed longing to open it and lose himself in it. There were three other books back in the house to read, another week of fishing and sleep and no television and no world.

  He should have pulled the phone out of the wall the first night he got up here.

  "Shit," he said again, getting up from his lounge chair and making the short, hot walk to the house. Sweat immediately beaded the back of his neck at the slight exertion.

  He grabbed the phone from its cradle and said, "Jack Paine."

  "Thank God."

  It was someone he knew. But he could not place the voice—it sounded familiar but the near hysteria in it didn't. "Who—"

  "Jack, it's Terry Petty!"

  There was still no recognition. He knew the name but the voice did not connect to it. There was a gap between expectation and reality: The mailman seen out of uniform in the grocery store will trigger recognition but no identification.

  Terry Petty. . . His brain filled the gap, made the connection, a second before she spoke again in his silence.

  Terry Petty. Bobby's wife.

  "Terry, what's wrong?"

  "I . . . a lot."

  He had never heard her like this, and that was where the gap had been; she had always been someone who was there and solid, a cop's wife, a mother of two with her head screwed on straight.

  "One of the kids?"

  She fought a small battle with herself and a measure of calm won. "It's Bobby."

  An image flashed through Paine's head—Bob Petty on the ground, a shotgun wound leaking his life onto the sidewalk, into the gutter somewhere, running footsteps away from him.

  "What happened, Terry?"

  "He's not dead." She had read his voice, and the way she had said it scared him more because it told him that this was something worse than that.

  "Come on, Terry, say it."

  "He. . . he's gone."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He's disappeared, Jack. He went out last night and he didn't come back."

  "Terry" Paine said delicately, "do you think maybe he went on a bender or something, had a couple of drinks too many and slept it off in the back of some bar? It wouldn't be the first—"

  "Goddamn it, Jack!"

  He was quiet. In the background he heard a child's voice, and Terry paused, trying not to sob, telling one of her daughters to go away. Paine heard the daughter, Melissa it sounded like, fourteen years old, protest and tell Terry she was worried about her. Terry screamed at her to get out and the girl, sobbing, retreated.

  "Listen to me, Jack," she said, calmer. "He was acting edgy after he got home last night, but it wasn't anything he wanted to talk about. At nine-thirty he said he was going out to get some ice cream for the kids. About eleven I started to get worried. I called the deli he would have gone to. They never saw him. So I called Coleman and told
him what happened. He said the same thing you did, but said they'd keep their eyes open for him. You know what I was thinking, a robbery, he pulls out his revolver, something like that. I was worried, Jack. I made sure the kids were in bed and then I lay down on the couch to wait. I fell asleep. When I woke up the phone was ringing. It was four in the morning. When I picked it up—" She hesitated, fighting herself again.

  "Come on, Terry."

  "It was Bobby, Jack. I've never heard him talk to me like that before. Never. He started cursing at me. Then he told me he'd been with another woman. He sounded drunk, so I tried to calm him down. But he just kept going into me, Jack. How bad a mother I was, what a rotten life he'd had with me. Things he'd never said before, even when we had our worst fights. It was him talking, Jack, but I can't believe it was him. He said he was sick of being a cop, sick of me and the kids and everything else. He said he was with this other woman and that he was going away. He said. . ." She sobbed, and then regained herself. "He said if I ever came near him he'd kill me and the kids! My God, Jack, he loves the girls! He'd never hurt them. I know Bobby, I know everything about him and know he wouldn't really mean those things—he told me he never loved me, Jack! God, what am I going to do?"

  She wept, and as this strong woman tried to bring herself under control for him Paine thought about how well he too knew Bob Petty.

  "Meet me at my office in an hour," he said.

  Paine turned off the tape deck on his way through the house to the car.

  Outside under the sun, the frost on the iced tea was gone. The tea began to get warm. The book went unread, and the fish weren't caught, and Paine's empty lounge chair listened to his car as it took him away from all hope of rest.

  2

  Yonkers gets as hot as the next place in the summer. But this summer was hotter than most. Con Edison was running at three brownouts a week, and there had already been one blackout that had threatened to turn into an East Coast disaster, saved at the last minute, so the power authority had claimed, by its nuclear turbine up the Hudson River near Peekskill named Big Alice. None of the papers had believed it, and very few of the people who read papers, and two days later, when Big Alice shut itself down, not to be reactivated until Christmas by Con Edison estimates, well, everybody turned on their air conditioners and prayed.

  Paine had prayed, and his air conditioner had gone out instead of the power, and the hotbox his landlord tried to tell him was an office suite was a hotbox and nothing more. Two fans blew humid top-story air at each other, and in between them Paine sweated, and though Terry Petty sweated she was unaware of the weather.

  She had been waiting for him outside his office. She had calmed down. She was more like the Terry he knew: petite, quiet in dress and manner, a cop's wife, which meant that the surface was deceptive. Underneath the quiet exterior, behind the green eyes, she was a rock; she had raised two girls and one husband, most times with calm, with fire when needed. She was a woman Paine had often openly admired, and Petty had never contradicted Paine's compliments—and Petty had never kept his mouth shut about anything he felt.

  "I'm sorry for the way I acted on the phone, Jack," she said. "And I'm sorry I dragged you away from your vacation—"

  "We've known each other too long for bullshit, Terry," he said, gently. He had begun by playing with a pencil on his desk, quickly graduating to the letter opener. Nearly a week's worth of unopened mail, what he could see of it bills, was stacked roughly on the edge of the desk where he had thrown it after gathering it up from the inside of the letter slot. "I think the best thing is to go at this straight, just like Bobby would." Paine pushed himself back in his chair, continuing to finger the letter opener. "I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but I think that maybe you're being a hysterical wife."

  Her face reddened, as he knew it would. She had more Irish blood in her than Petty, and when riled she could be more of a marine than her ex-marine husband ever could.

  "Bullshit, Jack. Do you think I would have bothered you for something stupid?"

  Paine continued to play devil's advocate. "I still think he's gone undercover for some reason."

  She was growing angrier. "I thought of that. It was possible, the thing he was working on. We had a code worked out between us, if that ever happened. He would always be able to tell me if he was undercover, or couldn't talk. He even used it once."

  "What was the code?"

  "He'd talk about the girls, and say, 'I think we should have one birthday party for the two of them.' Their birthdays are six months apart."

  "You're sure he didn't use it this time?"

  "He didn't use it. He said horrible things about the girls."

  Paine took a long breath. "I'm sorry, Terry, but I've got to ask you these things. Were you having any marital trouble?"

  "Do you think he might have been seeing another woman?" She hesitated in silence. "I thought of that, he said he was with one."

  "Is it possible?"

  She took a long breath, as if resigning herself to the conclusion she had come to. "It's possible."

  He hated pushing her. "Has there ever been anything like that?"

  Again she hesitated. Paine thought she might be measuring the line where friendship ended and enmity began. Paine was about to say gently that maybe she should get someone else to help her when she nodded. "Once. A long time ago."

  "How long?"

  "Eight years ago. Just around the time we moved to Yonkers from the Bronx. It was somebody he met on a case he was working on."

  "How long did it last?"

  "Four months. He told me about it when it was over."

  She looked up at Paine. There was a kind of pleading in her face. "He cried when he told me about it, Jack. He said it had happened and he'd felt guilty through the whole thing and he never wanted to feel guilty again. He said he'd never stopped loving me; it was just after Mary was born and everything had changed in the house with the baby, and we weren't. . ." she bit her lip, not wanting to say anymore to him. "We weren't doing it, Jack. I was tired from the baby, it was a hard birth, the doctor said I had to rest—dammit, Jack, that's not what this is! "

  He stared at her levelly until the flush receded from her face and then he asked, softly and evenly, "Is that what you believe, or is it what you want to believe?"

  Her eyes were just as steady on his. "It's what I believe, Jack. I don't think he'd do that to his family."

  Paine had been jabbing himself in the palm with the letter opener. He put it down on the desk next to the bills. "For what it's worth, I don't think he'd do that to you, either. But unfortunately what I believe and what you believe doesn't mean anything. If it makes you feel any better, Bobby told me all about that affair of his; we got drunk one night and he spilled it out. Nobody in the department knew about it. It sounded like it tore him up inside. But the thing I'm getting at is that sometimes people have things inside them they don't let anybody see—not their wives, not their friends. If I had to put money on it I'd put it all on Bobby not being one of those people. But I've got to be honest with you, Terry I might lose my money. Because it's just a fact that most people who disappear do it because they want to."

  A little bit of her crumbled inside. He saw it happen, and he wanted very badly to go back and say it another way, so that she would stay whole. But he knew that no matter how he said it, the same thing would happen, because she had had a world built around her, and all the blocks had suddenly been yanked out of the foundation, and there was no way that world was going to look the same after the rest of the building fell into place.

  "Did you talk to Coleman today?" Paine said. He spoke without force, afraid that if his voice were any louder her building might collapse completely.

  "I called him this morning. He told me that Bobby had called and told him to go to hell."

  "Has Bobby called anyone else?"

  "Nobody else at the station. None of his other friends. We were supposed to go down to the Bronx on Saturday for a barbecue
a few of his old NYPD buddies put together, but he didn't call any of them. I tried his brother in Albany, too, and Jerry hadn't heard from him."

  Paine asked her to give him some telephone numbers, and she was busy for a few minutes digging them out of her purse and writing them down. Paine sat back and let hot air move over him. He thought fleetingly of the lake upstate; the bass would be starting to jump in another hour and, from the blue look of the skies, it would have been a clear if hot night for the telescope—he had wanted to look at the Veil nebula in the constellation Cygnus, and there was a double star, two stars orbiting each other that appeared a beautiful contrast of orange and green in the eyepiece, which he wanted to find in Boötes.

  Terry slid the paper with the phone numbers across to him. She seemed about to say something, and then turned instead to straightening the contents of her purse. Paine waited for her.

  She finished with the purse and looked up at him. "I have to talk to you about payment," she said.

  Paine almost laughed. "Terry. . ."

  "I won't make a discussion out of it. I'll pay your usual rates."

  "We can talk about that later."

  "We'll talk about it now, Jack. I insist. I called you because you're a friend, and because you know Bobby so well, but also because you're good. Bobby always said that.

  There was something else, something she didn't want to get to, something that looked to make her more embarrassed and less in control than anything they had talked about.

  "Terry, what is it."

  Her eyes flared in anger. And yet, through her building rage, she remained mute.

  "Terry—"

  "Dammit, Jack, he took the money! All of it! He emptied the savings account, the checking account, he cashed the CDs and savings bonds." Her fury crested and she brought her fist down impotently on the edge of Paine's desk. She stifled a sob. She looked up at him, her pleading look returning. "He emptied the girls'college funds, for God's sake! Oh, Jesus, he's gone. . . ."