“Yeah that’ll make a difference. See how many other guys from the force are there.”
“You ever been?”
“I never even been inside the Yacht Club, except once when some lady got drunk and stasxl to strip right in front of all the guests, and I had to go over there and drag her OUt.”
“Drunk and disorderly?”
“Yeah, that was the charge. Pretty good-looking babe, too,” Molly said. “By the time I got her in the cell she had taken off every stitch. I gave her my coat but she wouldn’t wear it. Kept saying she was free and was going to live free, or something like that. She was pretty drunk.
·
Anyway all of my fellow officers were really worried about her and kept checking on her regularly to make sure she didn’t hun herself or escape or anything.“
Jesse smiled.
“She still in town,” he said.
“Oh’s‘ure. President of the
little theater group, parentteachers group, art association, you name it.”
“She ever talk to you?”
“Pretends she doesn’t know me,”
Molly said.
“Maybe she doesn’t,” Jesse said.
“Dunks don’t always, you know.”
“I’m Irish,” Molly said.
“I know about drunks.”
“She still drink a lot?”
“I guess so. I don’t move in her circles, but sh hasn’t required the cops again.”
“Kind of a status-conscious town, you
think?” Jesse said.
“Oh yeah. Funny thing is that’s where all the prejudice is. The WASPs and the rich Jews get along fine. Neither one of them Wants anything to do socially with working
“Maybe you’re generalizing a
little,” Jesse said.
“Oh yeah, whatever that means, I’m
probably doing it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t wish I was
going to the Yacht
Club. I’m just looking forward to your
reaction.“
“Maybe I won’t have one,” Jesse
said.
Molly smiled, still leaning on the dooamb.
“I know what you’re like,
Jesse,” she said and pushed herself erect.
“You’ll have one. But you won’t show
it.”
With that Molly walked away, leng the door swing shut behind her. That was also something she did. Molly was a great one for exit lines.
Jesse looked back out the window and sat for a while longer.
Then he stood and carried Lou Burke’s personnel folder back to his upright file and put it away. Then he went back to his desk and dialed up Charlie Buck in Wyoming.
out to form the eastern shore of Paradise Harbor on its Inner shoreline, while it kept the open ocean at bay with its outer.
There were two roads on the Neck. One along the outer shoreline, and one along the inner. They joined at Plumtree Point, where the lighthouse stood. The Yacht Club was off the inner coast road on the Neck, down a narrow drive thickly arched with trees and into a broad parking area be’side some outdoor tennis courts behind a huge, haphazard, white clapboard two-story building. Jesse was amused that when you approached this tabernacle of Paradise high culture, you came at it from the rear. The Yacht Club faced the ocean, cantilevered out over the rust-colored boulders and bedrock that the sea had unearthed over time, its vast picture windows beaded with sea spray.
Jesse was amused also at the understated arrogance of the membership, naming it simply The Yacht Club, as if
