“Marriage is gone.”
“You think that’s your fault?”
“Sure,” Jesse said. “She couldn’t be expected to stay with a drunk.”
“You don’t think she should share the blame?”
“Sure,” Jesse said. “I know. In every breakup there’s fault on both sides, blah, blah.”
“But this one was all yours,” Dix said.
“Pretty much,” Jesse said.
“You don’t think the fact that she was sleeping with other men might have contributed?”
Jesse didn’t answer.
“Maybe you couldn’t be expected to stay with an adulteress.”
“What are you saying?”
“If you take the responsibility for it, then it’s in your hands.”
“If I broke it, maybe I can fix it,” Jesse said.
“And if you didn’t break it, maybe you can’t,” Dix said. “And you have to face the scary fact that you can’t control how this will work out.”
Jesse sat for a long time without speaking.
“So what’s this got to do with me not drinking when I wanted to the other night?”
“What we’re doing here,” Dix said, “is a little like what you did when you were working homicide in L.A. There are incidents, we’re not sure of how these incidents connect, but we register them, notice sequence, think about them.”
“Maybe because I don’t love Lilly, I can spare some energy to control my drinking, instead of controlling myself when I’m with Jenn.”
“Maybe,” Dix said.
“And maybe I need to think about not drinking so I can stop being a drunk.”
“Instead of?”
“Instead of not drinking so I can be with Jenn.”
Dix nodded.
“Sometimes we clear a case,” Dix said.
Chapter Fifty-two
“He used the girl to register,” Simpson said.
“If it was him.”
“Whoever it was,” Simpson said.
“Anybody see him?”
“No.”
“Where?”
“The Boundary Suites, on Route One.”
“The No Tell Motel,” Jesse said. “Have Peter Perkins do a crime scene workup on the room.”
“It’s a motel room,” Simpson said. “There’ll be a kajillion prints in there.”
“See what you can find,” Jesse said. “You get a positive ID on the girl?”
“She registered as Elinor Bishop.”
“Anybody recognize her picture?”
“No.”
“Tell Perkins when he goes up there, use his own car,” Jesse said. “No need to make the motel look bad.”
“I still think it’s a waste of time, Jesse.”
“Of course it is,” Jesse said, “that’s one of the things cops do. We waste a lot of time.”
Simpson left the office. Jesse stood and went to the coffeemaker and poured himself another cup. He added a lot of sugar and brought the cup back to his desk. There was a picture of Billie Bishop taped to the corner of his desk calendar. He nodded at it.
“We’re getting there,” he said.
He drank some coffee while he looked at her picture. The chances of Perkins finding anything they could use in a busy motel room a month after Billie’s last visit were nearly nonexistent. Which would leave him with what he had now. He knew some facts. Billie had left Gino Fish’s business phone number with the shelter. Alan Garner worked for Gino. Alan Garner pimped young runaways he picked up from the shelter. Billie was a young runaway who had
