Nantucket Grand (19 page)

“Well, he snores a little.”

“Shit.”

“Sorry.”

“So now what do we do?”

“You release Mason and apologize to his father. You might think about sweetening that with a case of Duckhorn cabernet. Then we both get back to finding out who murdered Oscar Graham—and why.”

Lonnie nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

“Protect and serve.”

“Huh?”

“It's the LAPD motto. Kind of says it all.”

“Yeah.”

Lonnie set out to trace the drugs that killed Oscar. I decided to snoop around Straight Wharf, where the boy had been working. But neither of us got very far with our inquiries because Andrew Thayer's body was found the next morning in the foyer of the LoGran corporate retreat on Eel Point, facedown on a thirty-thousand-dollar carpet with his throat cut.

Chapter Twenty-two

Wrong Place,Wrong Time

At seven-thirty in the morning on the day when he was arrested for murder, Mike Henderson was looking down at his sleeping baby, thinking, “I've been demoted.”

It was all right, though, because everyone else had been demoted, too. A baby changed all the family rankings, and there was nothing you could do about it. He was no longer the primary love of Cindy's life, and he no longer had any priority access to her body. Someone else was pawing her and sucking on her nipples. The sheer amount of physical contact with the baby both satisfied and exhausted her. She had the opposite of skin hunger now; skin saturation, perhaps. Offering to touch her was like offering dessert to the winner of a pie-eating contest. For the most part, Mike didn't even care. He was exhausted, himself. And the baby had shifted Cindy in his mind, somehow. She had become the mother of his child, the other half of a team with a daunting project to accomplish. The fact that she was his wife, the love between them, was just fuel, the gasoline in this extraordinary car with its unknowable destination. It was a vital fluid but you never really noticed it until the needle was on empty.

His parents and his in-laws had been demoted, too. They were no longer the center of a nuclear family, however scattered and distracted their grown children might be. Now there was another nuclear family, and they were peripheral to it. They were grandparents, to be used for babysitting when they were nearby, granted holiday visitation rights otherwise. Cindy was closer to her mother now, they shared some vital secret knowledge. But it also isolated them. Cindy's mother had done a lot of things wrong, made a lot of unnecessary mistakes. Cindy's childhood had changed. It was no longer a melodrama full of regrets. It was a cautionary tale.

But it wasn't just their marriage and their families or even their personal histories that had tilted into the unrecognizable. Their friends had been transformed, too. The ones without children seemed to fade away; the ones with children were allies, soldiers in the same platoon, swept into the same incomprehensible battle, talking about bottles and diapers, rashes and fevers, competing for the first smile or the first squeeze of a finger. Ordinary conversation had been demoted. The old topics like films, books, town gossip, politics, national news—in fact anything but the all-consuming pulse of this new life they had brought into the world—had been relegated to the status of background noise, like the hiss of tires on a rainy street.

Mike leaned down into the crib and stroked the baby's head, thinking, so much upset you caused, so much disruption, everyone and everything downgraded.

“Wait till the next baby comes, kid” he whispered to her. “Then it's gonna be your turn.”

He leaned down, kissed her forehead, and went downstairs for a cup of coffee. He left it half-finished. He was in a hurry this morning.

He sighed as he started his truck. This was the kind of day that made him question all his life choices. Somehow, at age thirty-four, he had gotten himself into a profession that put him at the mercy of an endless series of exigent women. The husbands never cared about the painting projects. Sometimes he thought they bought the houses (often a second, third, or even a fourth dwelling) for the sole purpose of giving their wives a way to manage the suffocating burden of their endless free time. The women treated the matter of fabric choice and paint color, window treatments and bathroom fixtures with a gravity and teeth-gritting attention to detail more appropriate to nuclear arms treaties or mainframe computer repair. Mike generally found the combination of blithe self-importance and needling perfectionism exhausting, but he had never come up against anyone quite like Sue Ann Pelzer.

Sue Ann controlled all the maintenance work at Pell's LoGran corporate estate and unlike most of the “Miss Ladies” (as Cindy called them) Mike had to deal with, she really knew what she was looking at. He had been refinishing one of the bedroom floors the year before when he looked up and saw Sue Ann perched on the threshold.

“Is that hundred and twenty-grit sandpaper on that machine?” she had asked, squinting into the dust, subtle as a woodpecker. “Because I wouldn't want you to stop at hundred-grit and this floor doesn't look smooth enough for one-twenty yet.”

Of course he'd been planning to stop at hundred-grit, firmly convinced that no one could tell the difference. But Sue Ann Pelzer could tell the difference. And she always did.

This morning was going to be particularly awful because Mike had marred the brown copper downspouts with latex paint when he was finish-coating the corner boards. Naturally, Sue Ann had noticed, but he assured her he could clean them off easily.

“Like it never happened” he had chirped.

She stared him down. “Let's hope so.”

Of course, he couldn't clean them. Sanding the paint off would ruin the patina of the copper, water had no effect, even with a little soft scrub and a kitchen scrubbie. He had nursed high hopes for the scrubbie. Sometimes fingernails were sharp enough to scrape uncured paint, but soft enough to spare the surface you were scraping.

Not this time.

He bought a variety of latex paint-removing products with names like “Goo-be-Gone” and “Oops.” How about one called “You really fucked it up this time, dumb ass”? He'd have bought that one in a hot second but it probably wouldn't have worked. None of the other ones did. Had the latex bonded with the copper? He had no idea. He wasn't a chemical engineer. If he were smart he'd have found a real job by now.

This morning he was making his final attempt. If he couldn't remove the white paint, he might be able to cover it up. He had bought pints of brown and black metal enamel, a plastic bucket, thinner, and a stir-stick. All he had to do was mix up a color match for the copper and then paint out the white latex.

He parked on Eel Point Road and walked up the driveway. This was a stealth mission, but he couldn't help pausing as the imposing front of the mansion loomed into view. He had history with this house. He had been briefly accused of killing the former owner; he had caught the man's wife in flagrante with a kid on his paint crew, and committed adultery himself in one of the big upstairs bedrooms.

It was an oversized, ugly, ill-omened pile, bristling with every ostentatious architectural flourish Grady Malone could scavenge from the Nantucket new money catalog: the giant fan windows, the extra dormers, the absurd cupola and ornate widow's walk, overlooking the endless trimmed hedges and the massive Tora Bora-like stone walls that snaked around the steeply pitched property, cutting it into stepped terraces.

The place felt fake and faintly sinister, like a gangster in the witness protection program, duly acting the part of volunteer fireman and church deacon, eating his tomato sauce out of a jar. Mike wasn't fooled. Bad things happened on this tainted patch of ground and they always would. Maybe it was a Wampanoag burial site. Tanya Kriel had told him the place had “bad vibes” and he could feel them now, literal vibrations, like an alarm going off, beyond the human wavelength. Dogs would flee this place, tails between their legs.

And yet he had taken the offer to stay on as the property's house painter. Cindy couldn't believe he was willing to work here, but he had to work and painters rarely got to pick and choose their customers. He was happy for the extra money, or at least he had been until his first run-in with Sue Ann Pelzer.

He sighed and continued trudging up the hill, his shoes crunching on the crushed-shell driveway. He saw no one as he rounded the corner of the house and started for the back deck. Landscapers would normally have taken over the grounds by this time of day, at this time of year, but the grass looked recently mowed, shaved tight into straight lines of darker and lighter green like a baseball field.

Mike retrieved his stepladder from behind the guest cottage, set out his pots of paint in the mild summery air, and got to work.

Half an hour later he was done.

He allowed himself a moment of giddy laughter as he packed up and put the ladder away. The job was perfect. He had always been good at matching colors, but this was his masterpiece. Even if Sue Ann figured out what he'd done, she would have to bow down at the perfection of his work. He even thought for one leaping second of selling his little mixture to other painters—another million-dollar idea, like the heated screwdriver tip for melting paint in screwheads and the miniature windshield wipers to clear the fog off goggles. Of course, you almost never saw slotted screws anymore, and goggles misted up from the inside. This idea was equally foolish—merely a way to advertise his own ineptitude. Better to keep it as a proprietary cleanup technique. “No trick, no trade,” as his first boss had loved to say.

Even better: don't make the mess in the first place.

Still, walking back to the car he was feeling happy and accomplished, the hero of his own mundane action movie—
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Drips
,
Raiders of the Lost House Keys
. Losing house keys—the painter's worst nightmare, the inexcusable negligence that made owners and contractors and real estate people look at you like some demented organ grinder's monkey who needed a choke collar and a short leash. Well, he hadn't lost a set of keys in years, and he'd never made a painting mistake he couldn't fix.

Today was a perfect example of that.

His only actual mistake was not heeding the initial sense of foreboding the LoGran mansion had given him. But there was no way he could have known the truth: he was walking away from a house with a dead body sprawled in the front hallway in full view of any passing eyewitness, his hands covered and his tee-shirt stained with a brown liquid that looked alarmingly like dried blood.

Chapter Twenty-three

The Arrest

The 911 call from the LoGran corporate retreat came at ten forty-five in the morning. Kyle Donnelly and two uniforms answered it. I trailed them by five minutes. I had been heading out to Wauwinet on the Polpis Road when I picked up the call. Sylvester Graham was working on a new trophy house out there and I had some follow-up questions for him. They'd have to wait. I skidded into a U-turn, hit the flashers, and gunned it back to town.

Live-in caretaker Douglas Blount made the call. Apparently ship's engineer Liam Phelan had the guest cottage on the property under siege. The dispatcher could hear him trying to break down the door. He was shouting too. She couldn't make out what he was saying over the phone, but Phelan had clearly worked himself up into a murderous rage, and given the quality of new construction on the island these days Blount's front door wasn't likely to hold up for the six minutes Kyle needed to get there.

Blount and Phelan—two big men with anger management problems. I wouldn't have put my money on either one of them to win the fight, but they'd each be sure to collect their share of bodily damage and felony assault charges before they called it a draw. The problem was that the law would come down squarely on Blount's side. Liam was caught on tape for criminal trespass, breaking-and-entering, and the “assault” side of assault-and-battery. That charge may sound redundant, but verbal threats constitute assault in the state of Massachusetts. Battery comes when you follow through, and Liam was about to cross that line also.

I hit the steering wheel, swerving around a pair of tourists on mopeds. I knew what had driven Liam to this idiotic attack. It confirmed what I already suspected: Blount had given Liam's daughter the drugs she ODed on. I didn't know what evidence he'd managed to dig up, but by withholding it from the police all he'd managed to do was make Blount into the victim and get himself thrown in jail.

Vigilantes—a hundred years of books and movies and TV shows had turned them into romantic heroes. In fact they were misguided and emotion-driven, reckless and inept. They invariably did damage—and when they were as crazed with rage and grief as Liam Phelan, they didn't care. Liam just wanted to hit someone. That he'd probably made the right choice of who to hit this time wasn't going to do any of us much good.

Passing Sanford Farm on Madaket Road, I saw the LoGran F-150 and hit my flashers. We stopped side by side, taking up both lanes as we talked—a long-standing Nantucket tradition. Sue Ann Pelzer was behind the wheel, wearing jeans, a suede jacket, and a beret. She had a pair of binoculars on the seat beside her.

“What's going on?” I said.

“I just saw my first prothonotary warbler! Got my lucky jacket on. It sure worked for me today!”

It was a beautiful brown suede. “Just don't wear it in the rain.”

“I've never been caught yet! And it never fails—the prothonotary warblers have usually migrated by now. Long gone! But this one was just strutting around Madaket Harbor under Millie's Bridge. The top feathers are the sweetest cornflower blue. I was thinking—that would be perfect camouflage when you're flying! No one could see you against the sky”

“So, wait—you've been in Madaket?”

“I saw your assistant chief out there. It's a great day for birding.”

“Doug Blount just made a 911 call from the cottage.”

“What? Why?”

“Liam Phelan is breaking the door down.”

“Oh my God. Is Doug all right?”

“Just follow me.”

I stamped on the gas, checked the rearview mirror, and saw her making a three-point turn behind me. A line of cars waited patiently for her to finish. In August they'd be honking like a New Jersey tailgate party in a Brooklyn traffic jam. But June was still mellow.

At the LoGran house, Kyle Donnelly had the situation under control. Two officers, Ned Hollis and Jerry Cone, stood at either side of the cottage front door; Kyle was inside with Doug Blount. I told Ned to keep Sue Ann outside and took a quick walk around the perimeter. I heard Sue Ann's car pull up, heard the door slam and her shoes crunching on the crushed-shell driveway—the swift decisive stride of a woman taking charge. For now she was Kyle's problem. I kept moving, checking the windows, the shingles, the lawn, the hedge, and the mulch behind it. I couldn't have told you what I was looking for, but that left me open to whatever I might happen to notice.

Like for instance: the hilt of a hunting knife.

The blade was buried in the mulch against the foundation. I stood still, staring at it. It looked carelessly out of place—like finding my ex-wife's Maui Jim sunglasses in the salad crisper.

It was confusing. This had nothing to do with Liam Phelan. If he had brought a knife, and I doubted he would—he was more the bare-knuckled brawler type—the blade would be lodged somewhere inside Doug Blount by now.

I pulled on a pair of latex gloves, eased through the hedge, and pulled the knife out of the ground. Dirt caked the blood on the curved steel. Someone had used this weapon recently. I hefted it. It was surprisingly heavy, superbly balanced, designed for gutting and skinning big animals—a deer-hunter's tool. But the blood on it was human—I'd seen enough of it, and smelled enough of it to know the difference.

I set the blade on top of the hedge and walked back to the front of the cottage.

Sue Ann had cornered Kyle Donnelly. “If there's a problem here I have to deal with it! Every single thing that happens on the property is my responsibility. If someone is hurt in there, if anything's broken, or—”

“Sue Ann.” She turned. “I need you to let me into the main house.”

“Is there a problem?”

“I don't know. But, yeah, probably.”

We walked across the lawn and along the side of the mansion, skirting the low stone walls, following the path of granite flags to the big front door. Cars passed along Eel Point Road.

The birds chirping in the trees sounded random and purposeful at once, like an orchestra tuning up. It was a gorgeous late spring day, but it felt wrong to me, more like dusk in November. I took a deep lungful of the mild air while Sue Ann worked the key. I had a feeling I was going to need it.

The smell hit us as soon as we stepped inside, that coppery, rotten meat stink of death. There's nothing worse, and you never get used to it. The physical recoil burst in my stomach and bulged up my throat. I gagged back the vomit and glanced at over at Sue Ann. She seemed perfectly composed, calmly studying the splayed body, the head floating in a pool of coagulating blood.

“Well, this carpet is ruined,” she said.

I understood the need to banter, to shrug it off, to distance yourself. I've heard the worst dirtiest jokes of my life, standing over dead bodies at crime scenes.

“And forget the floorboards under it,” I said. “You can't get rid of blood.” We stared at the corpse. “Do you know him?”

She shook her head. “I think I've seen him around. He was a friend of Doug's.”

It was Andrew Thayer. I had spoken to him only a few days before, patted his dog, checked out the computer screens he used to plan his investments. Death was always so abrupt, so implausible. We carry our futures around with us, as much a part of us as the sound of our voices or the smell of our sweat. Every living moment implies the next, like mapping one vector in the trajectory of a bullet. Life is movement in space and time. No bullet drops out of the air midflight, but that would seem no less bizarre and dissonant than Andrew Thayer's future collapsing like this, into the black hole of his extinguished mind and spirit. There was nothing left of him now, nothing left of all his decisions and appointments, his plans and his dreams, but this generic human shell, bleeding out from the carotid artery.

It made me sick, it made me frightened, and most of all it made me mad. Someone had done this. Someone had drawn a knife across another man's neck, watched the lifeblood gushing and left him to die. It made me want to kill in turn, to hunt this monster down and let him feel the rough justice of a blade against his own throat. But I couldn't give into that rage. I was no vigilante. Two wrongs never made a right. They made a catastrophe, they made a holocaust, they made a war.

My job was to find this creature. That's all—just find him.

The law would take care of the rest. I unclenched my fists, took a shallow breath through my mouth, and led Sue Ann back outside. The fresh air felt like splash of cool water on my face. A plane droned by overhead. A family of deer bounded across the lawn and crashed into the brush. Life continued. Andrew's departure scarcely registered. When the rug was replaced and the new floorboards installed, the only residue of him would be fading photographs and the flickers of memory along the fragile synapses of his family and friends. It wasn't enough. It seemed pale, pointless, and paltry, an illegible scrawl, a collection of junk in a hoarder's garage.

I turned away from the house. “No one goes inside until the crime scene unit gets here.”

Sue Ann nodded.“Okay.”

“What was Andrew doing here?”

“I have no idea.”

“Had he been arguing with Blount?”

“Doug argues with everyone. So yeah, probably.”

“Stick around. I'll need to talk to you later.”

I called Lonnie Fraker to fill him in on the situation.

“It's turning into some kind of fucking Fallujah over here,” he said. “What the hell's going on?”

“Something bad.”

I put the phone in my pocket and sprinted back to the cottage.

***

Inside, the place was a shambles. Two cheap chairs lay splintered on the floor among drifts of broken glass, and wood shards from the battered front door. The boys had been brawling, all right. Blount had an angry-looking black eye starting to bloom; Phelan's jaw was puffy and blood seeped from a cut on his forehead. Kyle had both of them handcuffed.

I spoke to Kyle, tipping my head toward Blount. “Take him to the station, read him his rights and stick him in a holding cell. I'll take care of Phelan.”

They hustled Blount from the house and Sue Ann followed them. The morning's carnage seemed to register for her only in terms of work hours and money spent. There'd be a lot more of both after this new fracas.

When we were alone, Phelan stepped toward me. “Chief—”

I put a hand up, palm out. “Don't say a word until I read you your rights.”

“What are you talking about! My rights? You can't arrest me! I did nothing wrong. I'm the one who—”

“You broke down that door and you landed at least one good punch, Liam. That's criminal trespass, destruction of property, breaking-and-entering, and at least one count of felony assault. If I don't arrest you, I become your accomplice and we both go to jail. You have the right to remain silent—”

“I have the right to a lawyer and you'll appoint one for me if I can't afford it. Probably that strutting useless boozer Timmy Congdon. Am I right?”

“If you choose not to seek counsel, anything you say—”

“Can be used against me. Of course it can. And how about Douglas Blount? Can what I say be used against him, Mr. Police Chief?”

“Eventually. Possibly. But first—”

“He sold my daughter drugs! He tried to force her to shame herself on film. Maybe he succeeded. I don't even know. But I do know this. When she tried to get away from him he gave her the bad load that almost killed her. Might still kill her. Now my Jilly is lying in the ICU ward at Mass General because of that miserable piece of shite and you tell me I'm going to jail? I'll fucking kill the whole lot of you before I let him get away with that.”

“No one's killing anyone, Liam.” Except for whoever slashed Andrew Thayer's throat with that hunting knife. But Liam didn't know about Andrew's murder yet, and I needed to compartmentalize. “I need to know why you're so certain it was Doug Blount.”

“I investigated. I talked to people. Like
you're
supposed to do.”

I let that one pass. “Who, in particular?”

“There's a girl, Alana Trikilis—”

“I talked to her, Liam.”

“Then why didn't you do anything?”

“Police need evidence. There's no point in arresting a suspect if I can't make it stick.”

“But you arrested him just now! I broke into his house and you arrested him.”

“That's a different matter. It's—unrelated.” I thought of Jane Stiles, and her literary theory of the connections between cases. Or was it a small-town theory? Either way, it occurred to me that she might be right. But that was none of Liam's business. I had other questions for him. “Alana and Jill were pretty good friends,” I said. “I'm surprised it took you so long to track her down.”

“I've been in Bermuda, with the
Nantucket Grand
.”

“That's Pell's boat?”

“It's his ship, Chief. A boat is something you put on a ship.”

“His ship, then.”

“She needed a lot of work this winter. A new starboard engine, new water coolant filters. We overhauled the electronics and the GPS system. Dry docked her for a paint job. It never ends.”

“And you had to oversee it all?”

“I'm chief engineer.”

“It must have been hard, though. Being down there with Jill up here in the hospital.”

“I had a lot of time to think.”

“And brood.”

“If you like. I had to fly back to Hamilton Harbor after I brought the
Grand
back here. Arrangements for the winter mooring. And they're building a teak-paneled screening room for the lower deck which had to be inspected before it was taken apart for transport. Good thing I showed up. The carpets were the wrong color, there were no dimmers for the recessed lighting, the finish was supposed to be satin not gloss. Worst of all, the seats were all an inch too narrow, with no lumbar support. Total cock-up. So it's back to the drawing board. And no one gets another penny until Jonathan Pell is satisfied.”