Nantucket Grand (21 page)

“It's like Vince Lombardi liked to say—we didn't lose the game, we just ran out of time.”

“But he did lose. And so did you.”

“And the police chief wonders why I'm confessing. Hey, I was screwed when you found the knife, anyway. They can't put me away for two life sentences. I did what I did. Maybe I want to take the credit. That's the problem with setting someone up. No one ever knows about it. Like putting a word into the language—like ‘nonogamy.' That's your dad's word, right? From
The Virgins of West Fourth Street.
Great movie. The horny married dude who bangs his wife's sister? He's the one who came up with it, right? Your dad was funny as hell. And he was right. We needed a word for that. For…” He closed his eyes, setting the words in place, getting them right: “Being sexually faithful to a woman who's not fucking you.” He laughed “Perfect. And yet—twenty years later, no one thinks of David Kennis! Or even the movie. They just use the word. Nonogamy. Your dad's anonymous. See? That's the price you pay.”

I found the analogy insulting. Bizarrely accurate but insulting. What the hell—my dad would have been amused. And the ability to construct meaningful analogies was a sign of high intelligence, just as much as the one he chose was a sign of severe social pathology. Smart and crazy. I preferred Blount as a dumb bully. But that was his mask. The cunning predator in front of me was the real foe I had to deal with.

“So, Macy wanted out. But I don't believe Andy Thayer was involved with your little games.”

“He was involved with Daisy.”

“Like everyone else.”

“No, no, no. Lattimer had a crush on her, yeah. I used that. And Macy was in love, for sure. But he was nothing to her. Something bad she stepped in. She scraped him off the bottom of her shoe and moved on. I fucked her from time to time but that was it. Thayer was the real deal. He got her to quit—the movie racket, the drugs, everything. He was going to the cops. We burned his house to scare him off, but it didn't work. So boom. Dead men tell no tales. Unless you go to one of those mediums—John Edward, guys like that. Then you find out why dead men tell no tales. They're fucking boring. What's new, dead guy? Nothing, you fucking moron. I'm dead.”

“You killed him and you joke about it.”

“Yeah, Chief. Nothing's sacred.”

“Two men are dead. A third was looking at spending the last years of his life in jail for a crime he didn't commit.”

“You're forgetting the kid.”

Of course. “Oscar Graham figured everything out. He knew what you did to Jill.”

“So I did the same thing to him. It kept those other kids in line.”

“And now you get to take the credit.”

“Along with everything else.”

I felt a quick rush of fear. We should have handcuffed Blount. What did he have to lose by killing me right here and now? This was sloppy police work. I couldn't leave. I didn't want to put my back to him. Maybe I was getting paranoid.

Best to keep him talking. “You must be a very persuasive guy, Doug. Toby Keller, right. You got him to fake the invoices for your truck. He's in a lot of trouble now.”

“Well, that's what you get for fixing cars while you're high on oxycodone. He was one of my best customers, Chief. But I always told him—save it for after work.”

“He thought you were his pal.”

“Big mistake.”

“He's not too bright. But you are. You're a pretty smart guy, Doug.”

“Sure. Like with Macy—leaving that iPod mini at the scene, loaded with Lattimer's music. That was a shrewd move.”

“But it wasn't his music. African pop? Johnny Clegg and Savuka? Mahotella Queens?”

“You found the records in his library.”

“Because you planted them there!”

He grinned. “Now it can be told.”

“That poor old guy. Just because he let some young girl flirt with him.”

“That's the price of nonogamy, Chief.”

“At his age.”

“At any age. Just wait.”

Time to move on. I still had problems with his story. “You're quite the tough guy.”

“So?”

“Does anything scare you, Doug?”

“I don't think about it.”

“Anyone?”

“Like who?”

“Like Liam Phelan.”

He just stared at me.

“You called 911. Why bring the cops to that house at that moment unless you were afraid for your life?”

“I panicked.”

“I don't think so.”

“Then why?”

“How did you even know he was coming? You can't see the road from the cottage.”

“I heard his car.”

“Over the air conditioning?”

“I have excellent hearing. Doctors call it 20-20 audition.”

“There was a call on your phone from an anonymous number less than a minute before you called the cops. I think you were following orders. You were set up to go down for these killings, and you accepted that. You've been in jail before. From what I can tell, you carved out quite the little nice life for yourself there. But someone must have something big on you, Doug. Something huge. Something that ensures your loyalty and your gratitude and your fear. You're like a serf or a samurai, ready to take the knife for your master. But who's your master? That's what I need to know.”

“You're reaching, Chief. I flipped out when I heard Phelan's car. That's all. No one was going to check out the big house and the chances of anyone noticing a knife hilt behind a bush were just about zero. This was pretty much a domestic disturbance call. Two friends duking it out. I wasn't sure I could take him and no one likes a beat down. Especially a bully, and I'm a bully, right? All us bullies are gutless assholes when the chips are down. Everyone knows that. So I panicked, like I said. Guess I'm just a big pussy, Chief.”

“That's your story?”

“That's the truth. Sad to say.”

“It's also exactly what you'd say if I was right.”

He grinned. “So it is. For all the good it does you.”

“So when I get a warrant and confiscate Chick Crosby's computer I'll find all the films and e-mails I need to convict everyone.”

“Including a little Oscar-bait short subject we were using to blackmail Andy Thayer.”

“Or lure him out here so you could kill him.”

A shrug. “That, too. He said he was willing to negotiate but I didn't believe him. That boy was on a mission from God. Or Cupid, if Roman gods count.”

I stood up and walked to the door. The moment of danger had passed. Blount had pulled into himself like a turtle.

I turned back to him. “I'm surprised you didn't try to make a deal before you told me all this.”

“Right—you get me off on multiple homicides because I rat out drug dealers and amateur porn artists? They never even tried to sell those movies. They never posted them online. It was for their private fun. Nah—they're the small fish, Chief. It's just the opposite—you let one of them off the hook for turning State's evidence against me. That's how it really works.”

“And which one of them would do that? Who actually knew what you were up to?”

“You mean—who's giving me my orders?”

“Exactly. Someone knew.”

“Nobody wanted to know. Would you?”

“Was it McAllister? Chick Crosby? Charlie Forrest?”

“Pick a card, any card. It's your trick, Chief.”

“Yes it is. We're done here. I'm asking for an expedited trial. I want you in jail by Labor Day. And don't bother asking for a change of venue. You won't get it.”

***

It went quickly after that. The State Police got a warrant and raided Chick Crosby's house. It turned out he had cultivated a side business selling the videos. There were buyers in California and Utah, Alabama, and Texas. That made it an FBI matter with charges ranging, in order of severity, from interstate transportation, shipment, selling, or possession with intent to sell visual depictions of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct (first offense, five years) to possession of visual depictions of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct (first offense, five years), possession of visual depictions of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct (no mandatory minimum) to simple possession of the material (no mandatory minimum) to the best one of all: child exploitation enterprise. That once carries a twenty-year mandatory sentence, and the whole sleazy group was going down for it, whether they knew anything about the sales or not.

McAllister and Nolan were arrested together, playing tennis at the Yacht Club, Forrest was dragged out of a Land Bank executive conference and stuffed into a police car on Broad Street, in full view of all the tourists waiting for lunch at The Brotherhood of Thieves. And Toby Keller, the garage mechanic who had faked the invoices that gave Blount's truck its alibi, was grabbed out from under a Range Rover in his own repair shop. We found Daisy hiding out in Andrew Thayer's house on Union Street.

It was huge. The arrests turned into a national story. Lonnie was interviewed on all the cable outlets. There was even a segment on
48 Hours.

I got some calls from the media but I turned them down. I also got an angry call from Dan Taylor, speaking for the Selectmen, accusing me of wrecking the summer season.

My favorite line from him: “Couldn't this wait until Labor Day?”

I thought of the British Petroleum CEO after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, pouting: “I want my life back.” Dan wasn't in that league but he was playing the same ball game—a Little League brat, running the small-town bases.

Dave Carmichael called me, too, the day after his big press conference on the case, still pushing for me to take the chief investigator job with his office in Boston.

“The offer is still open,” he said.

“Dave—”

“And I'm saying that despite all your crazy crackpot liberal bullshit.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Lonnie's taking the credit for this case, but I know who really broke it.”

“We got lucky.”

“Take a collar once in a while, Henry. I have a nickname for you around here—crew neck. Get it? Because you
never take the collar
.”

“Nice one.”

“What I'm saying—if you're going to give the credit to someone else, it oughtta be me, not that ass hat Lonnie Fraker. No offense. He's a nice guy, but come on.”

“I'd love to do it, Dave. But I can't.”

“I'll bump the pay twenty percent. That just about doubles what they're paying you on the sandbar.”

“That's very generous, but—”

“Plus—Boston.”

“You're killing me here.”

“A staff of six.”

“Jesus.”

“Corner office on Ashford Street. Expense account. Never pay for lunch again.”

I took a breath. “You and Marsha never had kids.”

“Thank God.”

“Well, if you ever get married again—”

“Never gonna happen. They say gays are going to destroy marriage. I wish they would. Put the institution out of its misery.”

“I'm just saying…if you had kids, you'd understand.”

“No, that's the difference between us. If I had kids
they'd
understand! They'd get it that their dad had a career and they'd be on the sidelines cheering.”

“Spoken like a bitter childless middle-aged divorced workaholic.”

“Which I am, and proud of it! Think about this job a little more, Henry, okay? I have a position to fill and I have to fill it soon.”

It was a tempting offer. My kids needed their father in their lives and half an hour later, I had the perfect case in point for the attorney general—but no time to present it.

Chapter Twenty-five

Special Effects

I was sitting with Alana Trikilis when Lonnie Fraker called. She had taken down Ms. DeHart's license plate number and traced it. The car was owned by the LoGran corporation.

“Her real name is Daisy Pell!” Alana blurted. She's Jonathan Pell's daughter!”

“His stepdaughter, actually.”

She slumped down in her chair. “You knew this already.”

“Sorry.”

“I'm going to keep working this,”

“I know. But Alana…I have to ask—who ran the license plate for you?”

“I shouldn't say.”

“Then just nod. Bob Coffin. Alana?”

She nodded.

“I have to punish him, you know.”

She nodded again. “He knew that. He knew you'd find out.”

“True love. You know my dad said something about true love I've always remembered. He said, ‘They say all the world loves a lover, but I dispute that. My son is in love, my daughter is in love, my cook is in love, my secretary is in love, two of my friends just fell in love, and they all stand under my window at night baying about it. So I can tell with great assurance that all the world does not love a lover. All the world is bored to tears by a lover.' He was a cynical old prick but he knew what he was talking about.”

“Are you going to fire Bob?”

“No. I'll put him on janitor duty for a few months. And revoke his computer privileges.”

That was when the phone rang.

“I have something you need to see.” Lonnie Fraker, with no preamble. “It's the video of Andrew Thayer—the one they were using to blackmail him. There's something hinky about it.”

I loved it that Lonnie still used the word hinky. “How do you mean?”

“I'm not sure. The FBI thinks it may have been doctored, but Thayer's dead and they have bigger fish to fry. They don't care about Andy's reputation. But we do. I made a copy. I'm sending it over. Check your e-mail.”

Lonnie could always surprise me. Sure, he was a smug, careless, marginally competent glory-hound; but he was a decent guy, too—and not a spineless one. It couldn't have been easy to get that video away from the FBI. They hoard evidence like Billy Delavane's father hoarded fifty-year-old checkbooks and rusty fishhooks.

“Thanks, man,” I said. “I'll take a look at it.”

But I didn't get a chance to, not that day. I ushered Alana out and opened up my e-mail. First up—a message from the filmmaker Mark Toland, telling me he was on-island if I wanted to talk about the photographs he sent me, or just pick his brains about the crime scene, and I was about to call him—who better to look at the Andrew Thayer video?—when I got an hysterical call from my ex-wife.

“Tim has run away!” she moaned.

“Wait—what? Slow down. What happened?”

“He's gone! He took his bike and he's gone.”

“So…he's riding his bike on a summer day unsupervised. You wanted to live in a place where that was okay. I'm not sure what you—”

“We had a fight. He said he hated me!”

“He's twelve, what do you expect?”

“He wanted to talk about your father—how he died, and my grandparents…and Todd Macy, he's still upset about that…and the poor kid who fell through the roof last winter, and Oscar Graham and Andy Thayer and Jill Phelan…and I don't know. He had a dream where all the dead people were hanging around the Boys and Girls Club. He asked if I was dying, like he thought I was sick or something, and he wanted to know about police fatalities as if you were going to be shot on the job, and…and I—it was morbid and creepy and—and sick, Henry! I told him it was sick and he screamed at me and took off, and he could be anywhere right now.”

“It's a small island, Miranda.”

“He could be killed the way he was riding! He wasn't looking where he was going. He wasn't even on the bike path!”

“Now you're sounding morbid.”

“We have to find him!”

“Does he have his phone with him?”

“You think he's talking on the phone while he's riding? Or texting? Oh, my God, I've told him a million times—”

“No, no—but I installed a GPS app so we could find the kids' phones if they ever lost them. I can use it to find Tim just as easily, if he has the phone with him.”

“He always has the phone with him. He's surgically attached to that stupid phone!”

She was the one who had insisted they have top-of-the-line smartphones. I preferred landlines. But this wasn't the best moment to bring up that disagreement.

“I'll find him,” I said.

“Good because this is on you.”

“What?”

“We came here so we could raise our children away from fear and violence but you carry it with you everywhere you go. It's like body odor.”

“That's bullshit.”

“Just look at the last few years—Tim's formative years! You were beaten up by that horrible thug in the sandpit, the one who killed Preston Lomax!”

“I remember. Ed Delavane is in prison now, Miranda. He's no threat to anyone.”

“But he put you in the hospital, Henry! Then the fireworks last year—”

“I stopped that lunatic from bombing the pops concert!”

“And he practically killed you in the process! And you dragged Tim into the next fight. Goading him on to fight with that horrible bully. I begged you to stay out of it. But no, you had to prove something to Timmy, you had to prove you were a man! And when the horrible bully's horrible father attacked you, your own son had to come to the rescue! Your own son! You needed a ten-year-old boy to save you.”

“He and a few other people.”

“How do you think that made him feel?”

“He was proud of himself. He was proud of me. We were proud of each other.”

“And now he's brooding about death! No twelve-year-old boy should be brooding about death.”

“I did.”

“Great, so it's in the genes. You've got him both ways, nature and nurture. This is so fucked up. He could be dead himself now while we sit around talking about it.”

“I'll find him, I told you that.”

“You better,” she said, and disconnected. She would have preferred to hang up on me, I'm sure, like in the good old days of primitive technology, when you could slam an actual phone down on its cradle for dramatic effect. Miranda had always been fond of dramatic effect.

But maybe she was right. I tried to shield the kids from the darker aspects of my job but I hadn't been doing so well lately. It wasn't a problem for Caroline—she sailed through life's complications and difficulties like a yacht through kelp. Tim was the swimmer thrashing in the wake behind her, tangled up in the seaweed.

***

The GPS app located Tim at the site of the Thayer cottage arson. He had spent time there with Debbie Gibson before Caroline swept in and appropriated her. Tim was a year younger than the girls. Which had proved socially calamitous during the school year. Girls their age liked older boys. Carrie and Debbie were in high school now, which made the gap even wider. A lot of Tim's happiest memories had gone up in smoke two weeks ago. No wonder the world seemed unstable to him now.

I pulled into the dirt driveway. Tim turned around at the engine note of my cruiser, then resumed his study of the ruins. A scorched chimney stood out of the ashes and rubble amid the lingering stink of burned carpet and plastic.

I walked up and stood beside him. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You okay? Your mom was worried.”

“She always worries. She's a ‘watch out-sayer,' like Granma says. I bet Granma wasn't like that.”

“No, she'd let us do pretty much anything. Climb rocks in Central Park, ride our bikes to school on the city streets…even ride the subway!”

“Granma's sick, isn't she?”

I tried to catch his eye, but he was looking down studying the incinerated skeleton of a sleeper couch. “Granma has Parkinson's Disease, but she was diagnosed when she was seventy, so it moves more slowly. She's got a lot of good years left.”

“But she could die tomorrow.”

“We could all die tomorrow.”

“Like the dinosaurs, when that meteor hit.”

“Or we could do it to ourselves. We have plenty of bombs.”

“Plus global warming.”

“Right. Who needs a stupid meteor?”

He gave me a quick look and a wan smile; no laugh.

“I don't want to die.”

“Me neither.”

“I don't want you to die or Mom to die or Carrie, or…anyone. Except maybe Jake Sauter. Just kidding.”

“Immortality would be weird, though. Think about it. Whole clusters of friends and family would keep dying while you stayed young. You'd start to think of other people the way we think about pets. You know—they're a tragedy waiting to happen, don't get too attached. Plus it would be hard remembering everything, once you'd lived for three or four hundred years. I have trouble with what I did on my birthday fifteen years ago. Where was I on June fifth, 1735? Forget about it.”

He brightened a little. “Like they say on police shows.” He put on a gruff interrogator's voice—“Where were you on the night of June fifth?”

I liked his tough-guy-interrogator voice. “I have no alibi for any time during the Austrian Succession.”

“But what if everybody lived forever?”

“I don't know…It would be pretty crowded by now.”

“Yeah.” He kicked at the ashes. Something that had been the leg of a table crumbled. “Why would someone burn this place down?”

“I don't know.”

“It was so nice.”

“Yeah, I know you guys liked it.”

“Debbie really liked it a lot.”

“I know.”

“Maybe people are just bad.”

“Some of them.”

“Most of them, I think. Like whoever killed Mr. Macy.”

“Your grandfather used to say ninety percent of everything is bad. Finding the other ten percent—that's the secret of life.”

“I guess.”

“Look, there's plenty of good people. It's just…the bad people make more noise. They get in the newspaper. They burn stuff down. You don't get in the newspaper for building this cottage, or spending time here and enjoying it. That's not news. Can you see the headline? LOCAL COTTAGE REMAINS INTACT WHILE CHILDREN INSIDE ENJOY ANOTHER UNEVENTFUL SUMMER AFTERNOON.”

He laughed. “Details at eleven!”

“I'm sure everyone would tune in for that one.”

He looked up at me, serious again. “You're going to catch whoever did this. Aren't you?”

“It doesn't bother you that I have to deal with this awful stuff all the time?”

“I think it's cool.”

“Well, thank you.”

His next question took me by surprise. “Do we go somewhere when we die?”

“I don't know. I hope so.”

“Debbie says we do. She's Catholic.”

“She may be right. Most people in the world agree with her.”

“But you don't.”

“We'll all find out, eventually.”

“Are you sick too?”

“No! I just meant—it's…who else is sick?”

“Granma Flo and Granny Mary. And Carl at school has MS. And, I don't know. Lots of people. They were all fine until they got sick and then bang. You could get sick, too.”

“I'll try not to.”

“You better.”

I could hear the echo of his mother's voice in that mock threat. Nature and nurture. I tipped my head and touched two fingers to my forehead. “Okay, boss.”

Another silence slipped between us: birds, distant cars, wind shuffling the leaves. Finally: “If everyone just dies and there's no Heaven or anything, what's the point? Why bother doing anything?”

I felt like we'd arrived at the heart of the matter. And I felt a quick flush of relief. This had nothing to do with my profession. This was just the basic material of being human. “Well,” I said, “you have to figure that one out for yourself. For me it's just…I feel like it's a privilege to be here on this gorgeous planet for a while. Breathe that air. It's so soft and pure, you can taste the ocean on it. Look around, it's beautiful out here. You get to enjoy it.”

“I guess.”

“Would you skip a ride at Disney World, just because it ended?”

“No.”

“So take the ride. It beats standing on the line. It's like Warren Zevon said—”

“Who's Warren Zevon?”

“Okay, my bad. You need hear some Warren Zevon. He was a singer-songwriter. He died of cancer and instead of getting all these awful treatments and losing his hair and being miserable, he decided to walk away from the doctors and do what he loved doing. In his case that meant…recording an album. So he made one last record, and then he died. It's a pretty good record, too.”

“So what did he say?”

‘“Enjoy every sandwich.' That was his deathbed advice. Speaking of which, I'm hungry and Provisions is open. Want to get one of those sandwiches Warren was talking about? We'll throw the bike in the car.”

“Okay, but that doesn't change anything. We're still going to die and Debbie still dumped me and Mom's still mad.”

“And you haven't even started your summer reading yet! And one of the books is
The Pearl.
You're going to have to get through that book, somehow. Assuming you survive to the ninth grade.”

“You're supposed to be cheering me up.”

“Sorry.”

“I hate everything.”

“Yeah, it's a crappy deal. So…I'm having the Sicilian tuna, what about you?”

“Turkey Terrific. And that iced tea they make with the mint.”

I ruffled his hair. “Kid, you're turning into a regular existentialist—Camus style.”

“Who was that?”

“A philosopher who thought a lot about this stuff. But he had fun, and he noticed things. He loved life, despite the crappy deal. In his notebooks one day he wrote, hold on let me get this right, because I really love this quote…“In the evening, the gentleness of the world on the bay. There are days when the world lies and days when it tells the truth. It is telling the truth this evening—with what sad and insistent beauty.”