Nantucket Sawbuck (28 page)

The slant-parking in the school's access lane was all taken. I parked my cruiser against the curb in the tow-away zone.

It struck me as I walked inside and out of the wind that Kathleen Lomax might enjoy my speech; it wasn't going to be the usual propaganda. For one thing, I didn't think Not Doing Drugs was a particularly positive or useful focus for a kid's life. Steely-eyed drug haters had at least one thing in common with the stoners they reviled: drugs were their number one priority. I thought drugs should be marginalized, treated as a peripheral annoyance. That's what I told the seventh graders. I told them that weed would make them forgetful and stupid. It would give them the munchies and make them gain weight. You see a fat, pimply kid who can't keep a train of thought going for more than two sentences? Probably a stoner. Yeah, he's cool—but only to other stoners. The problem is, they're also fascinated with wallpaper patterns and the endless lame solos on bootleg Grateful Dead concert albums.

I got a few laughs, told a few self-deprecating anecdotes—I had smoked enough weed in college to know it was a depressing waste of time—and got out. The teachers looked at me strangely but at least a few of the kids were receptive. The perils of addiction, lung cancer, and brain damage may have meant nothing to them. Pimples, they could understand.

I was walking to my car, buttoning up my coat against the cold, when Alana Trikilis skidded up to me on the icy sidewalk. She must have been waiting behind the front doors of the high school. She had run the twenty-yard distance, out of breath and carrying a flat, wrapped package in her hand.

“I want to give you this,” she said. “It's a present, I made it myself, like we always do at Christmas. I mean, in my family. We never buy presents. We have to make them. It's kind of stupid, but I wanted you to have this. Unwrap it.”

She handed me the package.

“This is very nice.” I tore off the paper and saw it was a framed pencil sketch of me. I seemed very serious in the drawing, looking back over my shoulder at something I didn't like. The drawing was good, slashed out in a matter of seconds, with very few lines, like a Duchamp sketch I had seen at the Museum of Modern Art years before. Its casual vitality had impressed me far more than all the urinals, hat racks, and nudes descending staircases put together.

“It's just a thank you,” Alana was saying. “For being so kind to Rick Folger. He's not a bad person. He's a good friend of Mason's—and mine…and—I don't want to see him just kind of sucked under by a bunch of creeps, you know?”

“You don't have to worry. Rick will be fine.”

She smiled faintly. “I hope so.”

I stared at the drawing. “This is extraordinary. You have to get out of here. I know that sounds bad. But you have to go someplace where people can appreciate this.”

She looked away. “I'm working on it.”

“Good.”

She glanced around nervously. “I'm not really supposed to even be here today. I'm not allowed ‘on school grounds.' I got suspended for doing a stupid drawing, but that's a long story and anyway…I just—I heard you were going to be here and I wanted to give you this.”

“Could I ask you where you did it?”

“At the VFW Hall. At the auction. Osona's auction? Two weeks ago.”

“Oh, right, of course.”

“You were only there for a few minutes. You were really upset about something.”

I hefted the picture gently. “I can tell.”

“Well, anyway—thanks again. Bye.”

She darted away, almost slipping as she turned, running lightly back toward Surfside Road, half skating over the patches of ice. She crossed the street and then I was alone at the edge of the big pavilion.

I looked at the drawing in my hands, thinking about the auction. I remembered being upset, but the face in the picture was angry and determined—a man with a mission. It didn't matter, though. It was over, we had resolved the problem, Fiona'
s
explanation made sense. I had the pen she'd bought me that day in my pocket. I always carried it, though it was impractical for everyday use. I touched it now, through my coat.

After a while, I climbed into the car and put the picture on the passenger seat. I needed to get back to the station, but I found myself driving out to the ocean. I kept thinking about the auction and the glimpse it had given me of Fiona's hidden life. She and Parrish had been bidding on a Thomas Donovan porringer. That explained the bidding war. But they still lost out to Preston Lomax. You could never win, playing the I-get-what-I-want entitlement game with someone like that. He was too willful, too relentless and too rich.

The thought struck me—I felt it in my chest, as if I'd run over a rabbit in the road. I pulled over onto the dead grass between the bike path and the street.

Where was the porringer? Where was it?

It hadn't been listed in the insurance inventory, but that made sense. That list had to have been compiled before the auction. But I didn't recall it on the stolen property sheet for the robbery, either. Nothing had been reported stolen but some big pieces of furniture. I'd double check it but I was pretty sure. Was the porringer in the Sun Island locker? I hadn't seen it, but I hadn't been looking for it, either.

I did a U-turn and headed out to the storage facility.

A sparse, icy snow had started falling. I put on the windshield wipers. I took a quick right onto the boulevard and drove the back roads through the sprawling tree-screened subdivisions west of the airport. There was never much traffic on Lover's Lane or Skyline Drive and for some reason I wanted to be seen by as few people as possible.

Sun Island Storage was off Nobadeer Farm Road, a bleak airport tributary far from Nobadeer beach, with no farm in sight anywhere. Instead there was a scattering of commerce: an automobile repair shop, a car parts store, retail warehouses, and contractor's offices, a lot of new construction and raw shingles. Sun Island itself was a big building with loading bays and offices, standing above a fenced plot of the prefab storage spaces. I found the alley between rows three and four, parked and got out.

It was colder here and the lines of corrugated steel bunkers channeled the wind. Ed Delavane's space was open, sealed with a strip of yellow police tape. I ducked under it into the musty jumble of old furniture. I found the light switch and fluorescents cut the gloom. The piles of antiques were daunting, like the improvised barricades that blocked the streets of Paris during the French Revolution. I spent two hours sorting through the chairs and desks and highboys and end tables, the chests of drawers and footstools and headboards. I found paintings and bookends and lightship baskets and sets of antique silver in brass-bound boxes. I found Tiffany lamps, ivory-topped canes, commemorative teacups, candlesticks, and wood-trimmed telescopes.

But no porringer.

I leaned against a dresser with a hinged mirror. It started to tip over. For a second I thought the whole teetering jagged mass was going to collapse in an avalanche of cherry wood and rusting casters. There were some ominous creaking noises, but after a few seconds it stabilized. The storage space smelled like old houses and the icy snow beyond the big bay door made it feel almost cozy. I stood quietly, thinking back, trying to remember if Lomax had actually bought the porringer. I had been angry that afternoon. The details of some stranger's bidding transaction wouldn't necessarily have registered on me. Someone else could have made the highest offer. That would be the simple answer, and simple answers were often the right ones. I needed to check Osona's records. I glanced at my watch. It was a little before two in the afternoon, and Osona's office was just down the street.

Five minutes later, I was upstairs in the auctioneer's office, going through the receipts. It didn't take long. I knew the date. And Osona remembered the sale; he rarely forgot one. A copy of the invoice was stapled to the sheet:

Item
#224. hammered silver porringer, circa 1840. Some tarnishing, small dent in the handle. Makers mark on bottom. Sold to Preston Lomax, 89 Eel Point Road. Final sale price, $5,000, plus twenty percent tax, total of $6,000.

Osona was leaning over my shoulder. “Anything else I
can do for you, Chief?”

I almost asked for a copy, but thought better of it. There would be time enough for that later, if it turned out to be necessary.

“No, I'm fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

“If you think of anything, just let me know. I'm always glad to help.”

“I appreciate that.”

We shook hands and I left. The office was overheated; it was good to get outside. I stood by my cruiser for a few seconds, feeling the icy speckle of snow on my face. I was thinking about the re­arranged silver cupboard in the Lomax foyer. Someone with a good eye and a light touch had pulled off that piece of work. There was an obvious suspect. Fiona's crew had been cleaning the day before the party, I recalled from the depositions.

She was home when I got there.

“Is everything all right, Henry?” she said when she saw my face.

“I'm not sure,” I said, walking past her. “Give me a second.”

She was cooking something good; the house smelled of braised meat and red wine. The porringer was still on the living room end-table, though no one was using it for an ash tray this afternoon. The handle was dented, just as the bill of sale specified. Fiona came up behind me. I felt her hand moving up and down my back. She did it to relax me, but I needed to stay tense now. I pulled in a tight breath.

“What is it, Henry?”

“Tell me what happened. I need to know the truth.”

“What happened?”

I turned. “Fiona. Don't do this. You stole the porringer from Lomax. I need you to tell me exactly how and when you did that.”

“Are you going to arrest me?”

“No. I don't know. Probably not. It depends. First, tell me what happened. What did you do? And when did you do it?”

“Not why?”

“I know why.” I picked up the porringer and turned it over. The tiny TD mark was sunk into the bottom of the bowl. I lifted it a little. “Thomas Donovan.”

She smiled. “Himself.”

“So?”

“So, I took it on the last day we were cleaning the house.”

“You didn't think anyone would notice?”

“I was going to replace it with another one, nowhere nearly as valuable. And I didn't think anyone would see the difference, no.”

“So why didn't you do it?”

“It was foolish. I was procrastinating. I couldn't decide which one to part with. I finally did decide, though. There was one Nathan Parrish gave me, a lathe-turned bowl from much later. I knew we were coming in on Monday to clean up after the weekend. And with everyone hung-over from the party, I assumed I was safe. I would have been, too. It was a quick switch and they're a great lot of ignorant swine.”

I took a breath and set the porringer down on the table. “I'll tell you what,” I said. “When are you supposed to be cleaning the Lomax house next?”

“Mrs. Lomax wants me in there before Christmas. I think they're putting the house up for sale and the real estate people want it looking perfect.”

“All right. Put the porringer back when you're there, and we'll just forget about it.”

“Does it matter which porringer?”

“Yes, it matters.”

“And why would that be?”

“Because I'll be checking on it. And I know what to look for.”

“You're a bastard, aren't you?”

“No, Fiona. I'm a cop.”

“And cops are all the same.”

“Only criminals think that.”

“In Ireland everyone's a criminal then. Because everyone feels just the same way I do.”

“Right. The Ireland card. Most people hate cops here, too. But there's nothing holy and virtuous about it. It's not a religious war. They're just cheaters and liars who don't like to get caught.”

We stared at each other.

“Take care of this, Fiona. I have to go.”

The snow had tapered to the occasional flake, spinning on the wind, as I walked to the car. Growing up in California I had always assumed that snow came in big blizzard slabs of city-paralyzing white. Snow only made it into the
L.A. Times
when buses were slewed across New York City streets and people were using cross-country skis to get to work. This stuff annoyed me. It was indecisive weather. I was feeling stymied and defeated. A whiteout would give me an excuse to stay home.

Maybe it was time to admit I was on the wrong track. Viewed from that angle, things were great. We had closed the case—Ed Delavane was going back to jail. My girlfriend had sticky fingers, but she seemed to have learned her lesson. Even Rick Folger was on the right track, and with Jesse Coleman gone, any hint of corruption in my cop shop was scrubbed clean.

I might as well face facts. This was a time to celebrate, not brood.

But I couldn't help brooding. Miranda would say it was my natural state. Her biggest complaint about me had always been “You think too much.” She might have been right, but the fact remained—I was still missing something. It was right in front of me, like the arrow shaped by the space between letters in the FedEx logo.

I was just looking at it wrong. I decided to go home and read through the crime binder one more time, from page one. The kids were with their mother tonight, they were leaving for Tortola tomorrow morning early. I didn't expect to hear from Fiona and all my really good friends lived three thousand miles away, so barring some police emergency, I could pretty much count on having a night to myself.

I finished out the day, picked up some drunken noodles with shrimp from Thai House, settled in at home with the food and a beer, watched the news on TV. I even found myself looking at a few minutes of insipid celebrity gossip in the purgatorial half-hour before primetime began. I hadn't watched any of those programs since my divorce. Miranda had always loved them, though she called them her ‘dumb shows.' I was startled to realize that I had absolutely no interest in the famous people on screen. Someone was pregnant, someone was in rehab, someone had gotten into a fight. It might as well have been the court report section of some Midwestern newspaper. I turned off the TV and silence settled on the house. The snow was coming down heavily outside, and it seemed to make things quieter. I brewed a pot of coffee, cleared the dining room table, set out the crime binder and all the photographs from Helen Sandler's benefit party.