“I don’t know, Jenn, I mean thank
you for what you said, but it’s like wrestling with smoke in the dark.”
They were quiet again at. each end of the wire.
“You seem a little different,
Jenn,” Jesse said after a time.
“You think so?”
“Yeah. You getting any help?”
“Yes.”
“Shrink?”
“Yes.”
“A real one, not some guy does full body rolfing?”
“No. It’s a woman. She might be
tougher than you, Jesse.”
“Nobody’s that tough,”
Jesse said and heard her laugh and felt excited as he always had when he made her laugh.
“Yes,” Jenn said,
“that’s the Jesse I know.”
“It helps to talk with you, Jenn.”
Again they were quiet.
“I guess I better hang up,” Jesse
said.
“Okay,” Jenn said. “Be
very careful.”
“Yes.”
“I’m here, Jesse.”
“I know. It helps, Jenn.”
They hung up and Jesse stared a long time at his half-empty glass with the excitement pulsating in the pit of his stomach. He stood finally and picked it up and emptied it into the sink. Then he went into the bedroom and opened his bureau drawer and took out a picture of Jenn and set it upright on the top of the bureau.
partment rescue van parked in a semicircle on Indian Hill.
Lou Burke’s car, a six-year-old Buick
sedan, was parked, doors open, against the safety barrier at the verge of the mst-colored granite cliffs which dropped two hundred feet straight down to the surf. The car’s ignition was on, the gas tank was empty, and the battery was dead. Jesse popped the hood and put his hand on the engine block. It was cold.
He walked to the barrier and looked down to where the dark shape tossed and wallowed in surf, caught among the rocks.
“Do we know if it’s
Lou?” Jesse said.
“Not yet,” Peter Perkins sgid.
“No way down the cliffs from here. Suitcase is coming around with the police boat and a couple of divers, but it’ll take him a while.”
Jesse nodded and walked back to the Buick. On the steering wheel, attached with a piece of gray duct tape, was a typewritten note:
Jesse,
I can’t stand it any more, suspected of murder, suspended.
It’s on you, Jesse.
Lou Burke
“Bag the note,” Jesse said.
Peter Perkins picked up the note by one corner and put it carefully into a transparent plastic envelope.
“You think Lou killed himself,
Jesse?” Perkins said.
“Don’t know,” Jesse
said.
“There’s Suitcase,”
Perkins said.
