They sat in Simpson’s cruiser outside the Salt Air Doughnut Shop behind the supermarket in the town’s only shopping center, and ate some donuts and drank coffee.
“You married, Suit.9” Jesse said.
“Not yet,” Simpson said.
“I’m still playing the field, you know?”
“Plenty of time,‘”-Jesse said.
“What’s your real name?”
“Luther. My mother teaches Sunday.school, she’s a very religious person, named me after some famous religious guy.”
“Un huh.”
“Gym teacher started calling me Suitcase when! was in the fourth grade, and it stuck.”
“Better than Luther,” Jesse said.
“Yeah, I guess so. I never did know why he called me Suitcase.”
“After the ballplayer, don’t you
think?”
“Ballplayer.”
“Harry Simpson,” Jesse said.
“Cleveland, KC, the Yankees.‘’
“Never heard of him,” Simpson said.
“Why’d they call him
‘Suitcase’?”
“Big feet, I suppose.”
Simpson ate half a donut.
“I never knew why he called me that,”
Simpson said,
“and I didn’t want to seem stupid, so I never dared ask.”
“So how come you asked me?” Jesse said.
Simpson paused and frowned for a time, which he did, Jesse knew, when he was trying to think.
“I dnnno,” he said finally, “you
don’t seem like you think things about people.”
“It’s a good way for a cop to
be,” Jesse said.
“Not thinking things about people?”
“Something like that,” Jesse said.
Simpson frowned again and drank some coffee. They were quiet watching the junior high school kids, ill at ease and full of pretense, cutting through the parking 1o to hang out in front of the shopping center.
“Man,” Simpson said finally,
“you can really shoot.”
sitting on his tiny deck overlooking the harbor with his chair tilted back, balancing with one foot on the deck rail.
“I need to talk,” she said when he
answered.
“Okay,” Jesse said.
He added some ice‘-to his glass and poured more scotch over it. He took the drink and the portable handset back out onto the deck, and sat down again, and hunched the handset between his shoulder and neck, and drank some scotch.
“I’m through with Elliott,”
Jennifer said.
“Un huh.”
“Are you glad?”
Jesse took another drink. Across the harbor, the lights on Paradise Neck seemed untethered in the thick night.
“I’m trying to get to a place where what you do doesn’t make me glad or sad,” Jesse said.
“You’re drinking, aren’t you,
Jesse,” Jennifer said. “I can hear it in your voice.”
