“No, usually you got a pretty good idea that it was the husband, or Uncle Harry or whatever, and you set out to prove it. Murder is fairly unusual anyway, especially in a town like Paradise. Most of it is drunk driving and lost dogs and kids smoking dope in the town cemetery. But here we don’t even know who the victim was yet.”
“And there’s no missing-person’s report that would be her?”
“No.”
“Isn’t that unusual?”
“Yes.”
Lilly crossed her legs the other way. Jesse waited.
“How did you go from shortstop to policeman, Jesse?”
“My father was a cop,” Jesse said. “In Tucson. When I couldn’t play ball anymore, it seemed like the other thing I might know how to do.”
“And how did you end up in Paradise?”
“I was a cop in L.A. I got fired for being a drunk. And my marriage broke up. And I figured I’d try to start over as far from L.A. as I could.”
“Are you still drinking?”
“Mostly not,” Jesse said.
“Was that why your marriage broke up?”
“No,” Jesse said. “It didn’t help the marriage, and the marriage didn’t help it. But there were other things.”
“There always are, aren’t there.”
“You’ve been divorced?”
“Twice.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“No.”
Jesse was quiet for a time, sitting motionless in the straight-backed high school chair.
“Well,” he said finally. “Hello.”
Chapter Eleven
They had lost 8 to 5. The field lights had been turned off and they were in the parking lot drinking beer in the semidarkness.
“I was a month out of high school,” Jesse said. “And we were playing in Danville.”
It was Jesse’s turn to buy the beer. It was in a green plastic cooler, buried in ice, in the back of Jesse’s Explorer. The rear door of the Explorer was up. Jesse’s glove was in the back of the truck, too, and the bases, and a green canvas bag with bat handles sticking out.
“Had a third baseman, an old guy, twenty-eight probably, ancient to be playing at that level. He was a career minor leaguer, and knew it, and played I think because he sort of didn’t know what else to do.”
The winning team was across the parking lot gathered around their beer cooler like hunters at a campfire. There was no hostility, but there wasn’t much interchange. After a game you clustered with your team.
“Anyway, in the first inning there’s two outs, nobody on and their three hitter pops up a goddamned rainmaker to the left side. We were playing in a damn cow pasture and the lights were set too low and the sucker went up out of sight.”
The smell of the lake was with them in the slow-deepening purple of the evening, and a few early explorers had arrived in advance of the inevitable insect swarm that would, as it always did, eventually force them to give it up and go back to the ordinary light of their homes.
“I’m looking up trying to find it when it comes back into the light, and the third baseman says, ‘You got it, kid.’ And everybody trots off the field while I’m weaving around out there looking for the ball.”
Everyone listened to Jesse quietly. They were men to whom such stories mattered. Men who would know why the story was funny. Men who could imagine the scared kid alone in the middle of the diamond looking up into the night for his first professional pop-up.
“You catch it?” someone said.
The younger guys listened most closely. Kids who would fall asleep in class, listening to Jesse talk about life in the minors, as if he were Socrates.
“Barely,” Jesse said.
Everyone laughed. They were happy with the story. They all knew that the better you were, the more you talked about your failures. Jesse was clearly the best player in the league, maybe good enough to have played in the majors if he hadn’t got hurt.
“You win the game?” someone asked.
“Don’t know. But I went two for four.”
Everyone laughed again. Jesse had been there. They could laugh with him at the pretense that players cared only about winning. You played ball, you knew better.
