Nantucket Grand (22 page)

“Is he still alive?”

“He died in a car crash at age forty-seven. He was just four years older than I am now. The worst part was he was walking to the train station, and he had his ticket in his pocket. Some friends drove by and offered him a lift. Half an hour later they were all dead.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah…and all kinds of mean stupid people live into their nineties, making everyone miserable.”

“That's so…not fair.”

“Yeah.”

I picked up his bike and we started back to my cruiser, rolling it beside us. When we got to the car, Tim said “I'm not hungry anymore.”

“You will be. Trust me.”

“Just be careful driving.”

“If I speed I'll write myself a ticket.” He laughed. “What?”

“Granma always says ‘don't beat yourself up.' But if you beat yourself up, it would be police brutality!”

“I could get in trouble for that.”

We flattened the backseats, jammed the bike inside and drove to town. By the time we got to Provisions, Tim had gotten his appetite back.

We took our sandwiches out onto the wharf—the ice cream shop had wooden benches set up on a deck overlooking the harbor. I could sense Tim's mood darkening again. Had I said something wrong? It was impossible to know. Maybe it had nothing to do with me. There were no rules for parenting, despite the noise of competing experts, who all disagreed with each other anyway.

Our pediatrician had just shrugged. “Make it up as you go along,” he said. “That's what everyone else does.”

***

I dropped Tim back at Miranda's and drove out toward 'Sconset. I felt inept and trapped and frustrated. The feeling had been growing since Dave Carmichael's first phone call, and my knee-jerk refusal of the job at the AG's office. It was impossible, I understood that—Miranda would never had let me move the kids to Boston, and I wasn't walking out on them.

That was my dad's move—ditching his family on Christmas Eve, leaving nothing behind but a present for my mother picked out by his new girlfriend.

There's a photograph of the two of us on one of his movie locations. They were shooting in Brooklyn and I'd been let out of school for the day to watch. I was my son's age in that picture. Dad was the age I am now. I'm looking up at him adoringly; he's smiling down on me. He was the King of Hollywood then—one of the kings, anyway, at the pinnacle of his success. I remember the story in
Time
magazine about the making of that film, and the pull quote from him about the unknown Italian bombshell who played the female lead: “She's a star because I say she's a star.”

That's where he was at that moment in his life. Where was I, now? Struggling to make ends meet, giving up on them ever overlapping even for a moment, running the cop shop in what Franny and my brother derided as a tiny backwater, my writing reduced to a hobby, living in an apartment so small I didn't even have separate bedrooms for the kids.

But my son had a father. That's what I told myself: not a super-star who blew into his life the way Elton John arrived in Las Vegas for lavish two week engagements, but a real father. My daughter was going to be one of the only women I'd ever met who didn't have some kind of screwed up relationship with her father—at least that was my goal, and I was working on it every day. I was proud of it. Those kids needed me. And I needed them.

I read a fashionable essay on fatherhood when Miranda was pregnant with Caroline. The man described a day at the playground with his wife and daughter. The little girl fell off the jungle-jim and ran past him screaming “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” He might as well have been a fireplug. It broke his heart. I knew even then, before my daughter was born, when she was just a blur on the ultrasound screen that I never wanted that to happen to me.

But here was the alternative: an endless set of self-extinguishing sacrifices for the sake of my children, the two of them presiding over the center of my life while my own ambitions and desires and needs were exiled to the outskirts, junked and forgotten. I could follow my ambitions and wreck their lives or stay put and wreck my own. There was no way out, no ingenious escape plan.

This was the trick where Houdini drowns.

Sacrifice is supposed to be noble. You're supposed to feel good about it, pure and strong and righteous. I felt bad and puny and resentful.

I shook my head hard, as if there was water in my ears. Something bad in there, a tinnitus of unseemly self-pity. Poor me—healthy white American male living on the richest island in the richest country in the world. Snap out of it!

I still had a job to do, an important one with actual rules and metrics and I was good at it, and I'd proved that fact over and over again.

Settle for that, pal, it's pretty good.

I turned the cruiser around and headed back to the station. Mark Toland was waiting for me.

***

Barnaby Toll had set him up in front of a video monitor and he was watching the blackmail footage when I arrived. Toland hit pause and stood to shake my hand. He was six-foot-two, exactly my height, but he had the lean, loose-jointed look of a long-distance runner. His clothes hung off him in a casual spill—UCLA tee-shirt under what looked like a thousand dollars' worth of gray Italian silk suit jacket, designer jeans, and black leather dress loafers with no socks. The tan and the pair of sunglasses stuck into the crew neck of his tee-shirt completed the
GQ
photo layout image of a young movie director.

His grip was uncomfortably firm, but his blue eyes shifted nervously over my shoulder to the open door. “Hey, is Haden Krakauer around today?”

“You want to see him?”

His laugh was caught somewhere between a cough and a sigh. “No, Chief. In fact he's the last person I want to see. This is a little nerve-wracking.”

“Is there a problem?”

“No, no—I don't know. Yeah, probably. It all happened a long time ago, but, I mean…time kind of folds up on itself when it comes to…”

“What are you talking about? What happened?”

“I'd rather not discuss it. If that's okay? And I'd really appreciate it if you didn't say anything to Haden.”

“Of course. Don't worry. And he's off-duty today, so…”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.” The tension went out of his shoulders and he glanced around the room. “Quite a place you've got here.”

“The locals call it Valhalla.”

“That makes you Odin then.”

I shrugged. “I don't really get the Norse gods. They didn't create the world. They just kibbitz.”

“Well Odin created writing—that makes him a good fit for you. He taught us puny humans to make runes.”

“You know about my writing?”

“The magic of Google, Chief. You're all over the Net. Mostly your silly couplets—‘I never thought I could love a herbivore/ but I never met a girl who was quite like her before.' Or what was that other one? Right—‘Young people think old age is/ a disease that's contagious.'”

“That's actually something my mother said to me a few years ago, rhyme and all. It irritated me at the time. She's always most annoying when she's most right.”

“Well, you were right today. This video's a fake.” He sat down and started the tape again. I pulled up a chair and sat beside him. “It's obviously an amateur job, too. Some local yokel, no offense.”

“How can you tell?”

“I'm no image forensics expert, but whoever did this left some big footprints. See her profile here? The blurred edge?” he paused the tape. “You can use video software to create that look, but it's all about mathematical formulas and algorithms. Any single frame looks off a little, not quite real. Because it isn't.” He started the film up again. “Look at the way she's moving on top of him. I know there's a lot of distraction in there, but study her shoulders and her hair. They tried to match the real motion and it didn't quite work. See that little jerk, it's like she got an electric shock, but nothing registers on her face. That's a dead giveaway. The girl in this video was fucking somebody else. Check it out—the shadows don't match up. A professional editor could have fixed that in post. The question is—who was she actually fucking? And who was really on top of this guy?”

I reached over to turn off the video, the way you'd turn away from a dislocated bone or a disfigured face.

“I know the girl they used for this,” I said.

It was Jill Phelan.

And I had a pretty good idea who the mystery woman was, also. I had a lot of questions for her to answer. But I had to find her first.

I walked Toland out to his car.

“So you're thinking of shooting a movie here?” I asked him.

“Not anymore.”

“Too expensive hauling all that equipment over?”

“Well, yeah, but that's not the reason. I was mostly just doing it to be near this woman, to try and—well, you know. It was pointless. I drove by her house and I saw her and her husband and their new baby and I thought to myself, ‘What the hell is wrong with you? You want to wreck that home? Not that you even could. You've spent one night with this woman in the last ten years. What kind of basis is that for anything?' I make movies, Chief. I make up stories. I live in my head. I have this idea about the woman and for all I know it has nothing to do with reality. Nothing!”

“But it was a good night.”

“Yeah. We'll always have Paris.”

I knew more about this story than I felt comfortable with. He was talking about Mike and Cindy Henderson. Her night with Mark Toland at the Sherry Netherland had been a bizarre footnote in the Lomax murder investigation, one piece in the jigsaw picture of an undocumented day that left Mike without an alibi for the killing.

Toland was about to drive away when he poked his head out of the car window “Chief?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know a high school student named Alana Trikilis?”

That stopped me. They had both been at the arson scene, but they had never spoken to each other, at least not at the police station, and I was surprised he knew her name.

“Yeah, actually I do. But I'm not exactly sure why you'd be—”

“I was looking through an old issue of the school paper while I was waiting for you today. I'll read anything. When I was a kid I used to memorize the ingredients lists on cereal boxes. I still don't understand how adding butylated hydroxtalene to the packaging material preserves freshness. Anyway…I saw a cartoon she drew in
Veritas,
right?—the high school newspaper?”

So that was how he knew her. My world was getting smaller by the minute. I nodded.

“It was a drawing of the school baseball team—the Whalers? They're standing in some kind of dinghy, being towed by an actual whale, and one kid's holding a bat like a harpoon. They all look scared shitless and the caption says ‘If Team Names Were True.'”

I nodded. “I saw that one. She's talented. She did a very good sketch of me once.”

“Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I need a storyboard artist. I wonder if she'd be interested.”

“I don't know. Give her a call. They're in the book. Her dad actually has a landline.”

He nodded and drove out of the parking lot. I was grateful to him. Andy Thayer's name wouldn't be dragged through the looming scandal, now. His innocence wasn't enough—it took the incompetence of his attackers to rescue his reputation from their scheme.

Taking his life? That was something else. A blade across the throat had always been foolproof, if you had the skills.

Chapter Twenty-six

In Memoriam, Oscar Graham

The day before Oscar Graham's funeral, Jonathan Pell and Louis Berman, his rumpled head-of-security, showed up in my office.

“I wanted to thank you for bringing the tragic events at the LoGran house to a swift conclusion,” Pell said. “Terrible business.”

“Lots of property damage,” I agreed.

“Excuse me?”

“That seems to be the main concern among your staff.”

“My staff keep their emotions to themselves.”

“Apparently.”

“I wouldn't want any of these…events…to taint the next ProACKtive fundraiser, or sully the reputation of the corporation.”

“Of course.”

“So thanks again for your good work.”

“You must be…I can't imagine—furious, baffled, sad, disgusted…by your man, Blount.”

“We never really know anyone I suppose, Chief.”

“You knew he was a convicted felon. You must have.”

“I believe in second chances.”

“He's not getting a third one.”

“Thank God. Now…there is something else. Another troubling issue. My stepdaughter, Daisy, has…well, she seems to have disappeared again. She was released from custody on one hundred thousand dollars bail after her hearing…apparently the judge decided she wasn't a flight risk. That was foolish. She walked out of the Town Building on broad Street ten minutes later—and disappeared.”

“Disappeared? I'm sorry, but—I mean…isn't she an adult?”

“Of course she is. She's thirty-two years old! Adults don't disappear? Is that what you're saying?”

“Well…of course they disappear, but not in the same way a child would. A child disappears, it's probably an abduction, or divorce-related incident. A teenager disappears, most of the time you're looking at a runaway situation. Adults don't have to check in with anyone and they usually don't. Personally, I agree with the judge. I'm sure she's still on-island. If I were you, I'd sit tight. You'll hear from her soon. Meanwhile, you could get in touch with her friends. She might be staying with one of them. Does she have any brothers or sisters? Cousins she might be close to?”

I could see his impatience seething. The air between us felt like heat rising off an open grill.

“I don't have time for this. I don't know Daisy's friends. She has no siblings and neither do I, so there are no cousins to pester. She was supposed to meet me two days ago. She never showed up. Her apartment looks like she meant to come back in a few minutes. There's a half-full coffee mug on the table! All her clothes are in the closet. They better be all her clothes, the closet is jammed with them. Her monogrammed suitcases are in there, too. In short, she didn't clean up, she didn't pack, and she stood up her stepfather. How does that look to you?”

I nodded, taking in the whole diatribe. “It doesn't look good, Mr. Pell.”

“No, it doesn't!”

“I'll talk to the State Police. But jumping bail is a serious crime, and Daisy knows that. Still, if you want to talk to one of my detectives, we can get a description to the Steamship Authority and the Hyannis bus station.”

“I've already talked to the State Police and they were not helpful. In fact they were useless. Worse than useless. That would be—rude and useless. I'm hoping you're right, that Daisy is level-headed enough to remain in the jurisdiction. But that doesn't leave out the possibility of foul play. I've set Mr. Berman the task of finding her. This is a courtesy call. I want to inform you of his activities. Nothing more.”

“It won't take long,” Berman smirked. “I'm good at my job.”

I ignored him. “Thanks for the heads-up, Mr. Pell. I'll coordinate with the State Police. We'll keep an eye out for her, too.”

“Good. Then I suppose we're done. I left my card at the front desk inside, if you need to get in touch with me.” He reached out to touch my shoulder. “Let me know if you hear anything, Chief. Anything at all. Daisy means everything to me.”

***

The Thayer family had scheduled Andrew's funeral for Saturday at the Unitarian Church on Orange Street—two days away. Tomorrow was Oscar Graham's memorial service. Too many deaths, too many questions. Supposedly, I had all the answers I needed: a sordid little criminal conspiracy had turned violent—the most ordinary circumstance imaginable in our sad, damaged world. But it didn't quite ring true to me. It covered all the facts, but just barely, the way a queen-size blanket covers a king-size bed, with nothing extra to tuck in, and no way to feel snug or comfortable.

The one person I hadn't spoken to since Andrew Thayer's death was Daisy DeHart. I had been hoping to conduct a gentle interrogation in the safety of the cop shop—and with a six-figure bail, I assumed I'd have time. But she had found the money somewhere. It obviously wasn't from her stepfather. She was probably hiding out with whoever had put up the cash, but the payment had been anonymous. I hoped that Andrew's funeral might flush her out of hiding, but as it turned out I saw her much sooner than that, and so did Berman.

She delivered a eulogy at Oscar Graham's memorial service.

Various zoning laws and noise regulations had made holding a traditional Jamaican “nine night” impossible on Nantucket—the bands would still be playing at two and three and four in the morning, and no one wants the police breaking up a funeral. Instead they set up a tent near the airport in a vacant lot owned by The New Life Ministries International, the Pentecostal church that Oscar's family belonged to. The ministry owned the land on Monohansett Road, though they held their normal services upstairs at the Methodist church in town.

It was still a wild afternoon, with hymns and a hot reggae band, and people talking in tongues. The minister translated. Everyone stood, when they weren't dancing.

“Thanks for coming,” Sylvester said to me, shaking my hand.

Millie hugged me. She was crying. “He was such a good boy. He was the best boy. He was a true spirit. He made everyone happy.”

“I know.”

“Why did he have to die?”

“I don't know.”

“He was too young. He had barely tasted life.”

“I'm sorry. He was a great kid.”

She pushed me away, held me tight at arm's length, staring at my face. “You loved him, didn't you?”

“I…it…yeah, I guess I did.”

“You're a good man, Chief Kennis.”

They moved off.

Billy Delavane edged through the crowd beside me. “Thanks for coming, Chief.”

I saw Jared Bromley and Alana Trikilis at the other side of the tent. They were the only other white faces in the crowd, no sign of Sam Wallace—until Daisy DeHart stepped out of the crowd and up onto the stage. She looked down into the crowd for a moment before she started to speak. The crowd looked back, gradually silencing itself. I joined them.

Her voice, a breathy contralto, had a little catch in it when she started speaking. “Before his fight with Sam Wallace last fall, Oscar Graham had been in trouble just once in his whole short life.” She smiled. “But it was a doozy. I think some of you know what I'm talking about. I was his guidance counselor, so I got to hear the whole story, and this seems like a pretty good time to share it with the rest of you. I saw the list of charges afterward. Let me see…speeding, erratic driving, operating a motor vehicle without a license, grand theft auto, and—to top it off—resisting arrest and felony assault on a police officer.

“Quite a night. It started at a party in Shimmo, when his friend Sam Wallace—that's right, the same Sam Wallace—and Oscar's newly ex-girlfriend Jill Phelan starting arguing. Jill left and Sam started drinking. The parents weren't home and there was a lot of liquor in the house. I guess Sam was planning to drink it all. Long before he could do that, he collapsed. Oscar had taken paramedic courses and unlike everyone else at the party, who were either too drunk themselves to care or else simply didn't understand what was happening, Oscar knew that Sam was not merely sick, he was in the early stages of alcohol toxemia. Another kid might have just called an ambulance, and left it at that, but Oscar knew that a slow response time might mean the difference between life and death for his friend—the friend who had just stolen his girlfriend, or anyway that's how the average sixteen-year-old boy would see it.

“So, Oscar grabbed the Land Rover keys off the pegboard in the front hall, praying the car had an automatic transmission—which it did—and got two other friends to help him haul Sam to the car. They shoveled him into the backseat and Oscar took off with Jared Bromley riding shotgun. Jared is here today. It's good to see him.

“So, that night he was bouncing down Shimmo Pond Road, no doubt ruining the car's suspension, crashing through those potholes, lucky he didn't get a flat. He skidded onto Polpis Road, crossing into the oncoming traffic. Lucky there wasn't any. But there was a police car driving into town. The cops hit the flashers and the chase was on. By the time they got to the rotary there was another cruiser blocking the street and Oscar jumped the Belgian block to get around it. Well, not quite all the way around it. He hit the police car bumper and spun it around as he skidded up Sparks Avenue. The other kids were screaming at him to stop, but Oscar knew that he couldn't even slow down, or his friend would die. He might have died anyway. Oscar didn't know. All he could do was hit the gas and pray.

“When they got to the hospital, the other kids dragged Sam into the emergency room while Oscar held off the police. He pushed several officers and threw one punch before he was shoved down on the parking lot and handcuffed. While they were taking him to jail, Dr. Lepore was pumping Sam's stomach, getting him on an intravenous drip and saving his life.”

Daisy took a breath and let the story settle on her audience like the blossoms from the cherry trees that paved the streets with pink petals in late May. “I don't have to tell you, no one pressed charges. Not the police—isn't that right, Chief Kennis? And certainly not Sam's family. In fact when Oscar got his license, the Wallaces bought him his first car. But he never got to drive it. That's because someone killed him. No one wants to say it? I'll say it! Oscar didn't just die. It was murder! And no one in this community should be able to sleep or eat or even think straight until whoever did it is arrested and tried and sent to jail for life. They said he drowned. He was a great swimmer—a surfer, isn't that right, Billy?”

Billy nodded as the crowd turned toward us.

Daisy kept going. “They say he overdosed on drugs but we all knew Oscar Graham never took drugs! Not even aspirin! Someone forced those drugs on him and dumped him the harbor and left him there to drown. You have to find out who that was, Chief Kennis. Or Oscar's ghost will haunt you forever.”

Every eye in the place was on me. I could feel the pressure of all that rage and grief. I could feel the hot surge of blood in my cheeks. But the case was solved. Blount had confessed. Of course, the news hadn't hit the papers yet—the new edition of
The
Inquirer and Mirror
wouldn't come out until Thursday, and as to the mainland papers and the networks—Dave Carmichael had imposed a gag order on all law enforcement personnel. I decided to make an exception for Daisy. She deserved to know the truth as soon as possible. If Blount's ever-expanding confession hadn't implicated her in the porn ring, she wouldn't have been in jail in the first place.

***

I caught up to Daisy as she was leaving the tent, two hours and a dozen more eulogies later. Like all good eulogies they took the form of anecdotes. Sylvester told the story of how Oscar had negotiated a small fee for every household chore he completed and then used the money to buy his father the fancy airless paint sprayer he had been coveting for years. Billy described Oscar teaching a kid to surf using his unique trick: plaster a big smile on your face while you're paddling for the wave. It seemed crazy but it worked—it relaxed you somehow, gave you a goofy feeling that canceled your nerves. Billy had started using it himself in big waves, on the heavy days that intimidated him.

“I learned a lot from that kid,” he said. “I still have a lot to learn from him. But now I never will.”

“Now I never will.” The words were ricocheting around in my head like a fly under a lampshade when I caught up to Daisy at the far end of the field, heading for her car.

“Hey—hello, excuse me—Daisy?”

She stopped and turned. The movement smacked the words out of my head and I thought again—that kind of beauty must be a bizarre kind of hardship, a social handicap as extreme as acne or a harelip. “It will be in the paper next week,” I said, “but I thought I should tell you now. Blount confessed to Oscar's murder. Along with everything else.”

“And you believed him?”

“He was…convincingly unrepentant.”

“So you're done.”

“We still have the trials to prepare for, but the AG feels confident that we can—”

“Jesus Christ. It's all happening exactly the way he said it would. He could have written it himself. Like one of those horrible PowerPoint presentations. Thing, thing, thing, each with its own little graph and pie chart.”

“Who could have? What are you talking about?”

She laughed, a strangled little bleat caught somewhere between a sneeze and a sob. “You have no idea what's going on! You're all so clueless. Strutting and preening, organizing victory parades with ticker tape, you should definitely get some ticker tape, you can buy it on eBay. And all the while he's laughing because he played you all so perfectly and everybody is taking the fall but him and he wins again like always. It makes me sick. I mean—actually sick. I think I'm going to puke.”

I stepped back, but she grabbed the side mirror of her dark green MINI Cooper and steadied herself.