“I know. Anything about prostitution?”
“Nothing specific. Just says he’s the alleged boss of all criminal activity in Downtown and Back Bay.”
“Well,” Jesse said and gestured with the printout. “I’ll take this. You print out the rest and put it on my desk.”
“Print out all of it?”
“Yep.”
“There’s 5,145 entries for Gino Fish.”
“Most of them are for fish markets, or tropical fish collectors, or sportsmen or other guys named Fish, or Papa Gino’s pizza,” Jesse said. “Internet’s not too selective.”
“Don’t I know it,” Simpson said.
“So just print out the ones about Gino Fish, and don’t duplicate.”
“I hate the Internet,” Simpson said.
“Information highway,” Jesse said.
“Mostly bullshit highway,” Simpson said.
“No one ever said crimebusting was pretty,” Jesse said.
Chapter Thirty-three
When she opened the front door Joni Shaw said, “Oh, oh, the fuzz.”
“May I come in?”
“Are you planning to search the place?” Joni Shaw said.
“No, I just want to talk.”
She smiled widely at him and stepped away from the door.
The entry hall of Norman Shaw’s big house was twenty feet wide with a curved staircase to the second floor. At the turn a full-length window was full of sunlight. To the right of the front door there was an umbrella stand made from the lower part of an elephant’s leg, and a dark wine-colored Persian rug lay across the width of the hall at the foot of the stairs.
“Let’s sit in the atrium,” Joni Shaw said.
She led Jesse through a room lined with bookshelves and scattered with heavy nineteenth-century furniture, into a glass atrium where the ocean was visible a hundred yards below, tossing spray toward the house as it broke on the rocks. Jesse sat on the end of a green leather chaise.
“Coffee?” Joni Shaw said. “A drink?”
“Coffee would be nice,” Jesse said.
“That will make it a social call,” Joni Shaw said.
“Sure,” Jesse said.
Joni Shaw was dressed in black shorts and a white silk tee shirt that stopped short of her waist so that her stomach showed. An Asian woman brought coffee. Jesse added cream and sugar and drank some.
“Is your husband at home?” Jesse said.
“Oh, damn,” she said. “I thought you’d come calling on me.”
Jesse smiled and didn’t say anything.
“Norman is working,” Joni Shaw said. “He works every morning in his study with the door locked.”
“Here in the house,” Jesse said.
“Yes. But it might as well be on Mars,” Joni Shaw said. “He is simply not here when he’s working.”
“Well, maybe you can help me,” Jesse said.
“I hope so,” Joni Shaw said.
Jesse noticed that everything she said seemed to imply something more.
“Do you know a man named Gino Fish?”
“The gangster?”
“Un-huh.”
“Sure.”
“Talk about him a little,” Jesse said.
“Why do you ask?”
“His name has come up in a case I’m working on,” Jesse said.
“Oh my, are we suspects?”
