Grey Lady

by Paul Kemprecos

  “Thanks,” I said. “Do you think any of this explains why he’s up at the house sailing the imaginary Pequod?”

  “I don’t know. What I do know is that he is a gentle, introspective man, who would be the last person in the world to hurt another human being.”

  I looked around. “You said the place was trashed.”

  She nodded. “The books were thrown everywhere. The old mattress was ripped open. Stove tipped over. It took a little to clean it up. Nothing was taken as far as I could see.”

  “They left the harpoon?” I said.

  “Probably figured it was a replica and not worth stealing.”

  We walked back to the house and parted ways. I went to my apartment where I sat down at the kitchen table and fanned out the folders. I opened the folder neatly labeled Nantucket Police and read through the report. It was written in Baroque type of cop talk that must go back to Cro-Magnon times when Sergeant Ogg reported how the victim met a sudden death at the hands of Gronk the Neanderthal.

  I cut through the clouds of vague phrases like, “Ascertaining that the individual was deceased,” and learned that a worried telephone call from Lisa had led to the discovery of Mr. Coffin.

  Lisa had come home late from a conservation meeting to find that her grandfather was not home. Since he was an early-to-bed person, she became worried. His night vision had been going and the winding island roads can be treacherous. She knew he had a meeting scheduled with Coffin at the museum. She called Coffin’s house. When there was no answer, she called the police and asked them to check on the museum, which was near the station.

  Lights were on in the museum and Coffin’s car was parked outside. Her grandfather’s car was nowhere to be seen. The police called in a trustee who had a key to the museum. They found Coffin’s body in the main room. The cops searched for Daggett, but they didn’t find him until an early morning bird watcher encountered the old man wandering around the Serengeti. There was a diagram in the file showing where he had been found in relation to Milestone Road.

  Daggett was dazed, and bleeding from a head wound. He was taken to Nantucket Cottage Hospital for treatment. The police tried to interview him, but he had slipped into his Ahab nether world. That was the end of the Nantucket police’s involvement. In Massachusetts, homicide cases are handled by a State Police team working with local investigators. I read through some newspaper clips which told me nothing that wasn’t in the police files.

  I went out onto the deck. The sunlight sparkled on the surface of the ocean that the fog had obscured the night before. The Big Blue had been there all the time. Right in front of me. Maybe there were other things that were right in front of me. I left the apartment and went to the main house. Rosen must have taken a long run because the place was empty. I walked down to Daggett’s quarters and knocked on the door.

  “Avast! Who goest there?”

  “Tis Starbuck,” I said, trying to insert some pirate gravel in my voice. “Request to see the captain, sir.”

  “Aye, tis my first mate. Enter.”

  I opened the door and stepped into Daggett’s living quarters. Daggett was sitting hatless at his desk, his back to the window. He looked up, cracked his mouth in a crooked smile and beckoned me over. Spread out on the desktop were yellowed sea charts and old logbooks. A set of parallel bars lay at his elbow.

  “Good morning, Captain,” I said.

  He nodded, and then motioned for me to come and stand behind the desk, next to his chair. The charts were covered in pencil markings. Some lines had been erased and the charts were covered with scraps of eraser rubber.

  “Doest thou see it?” he said. His voice was calm with none of the animation I had seen on my first visit.

  “See what, Captain?”

  He placed his finger on a chart and followed a line. “Here be the currents whereby the whale’s food drifts over thousands of miles.” He took the parallel bars and drew a line that intersected with the ocean current. “And here be the vein the cursed white whale follows to the spermaceti’s feeding ground.” He drew a circle where the lines crossed. “This is where we meet again, thou with harpoon in thy hand, and I with vengeance in my heart.”

  “Moby Dick?”

  He turned and looked at me with furrowed brow. “Aye,” he said in almost a whisper. “The white whale.”

  “How long will it take to find him?”

  The manic grin. “Three days hence. Make sure thy harpoon and thy lance are sharp enough to cut a slice from the breeze.”

  “Aye, Captain. I’ll do that. Off to gather my tools.”

  He bent his head over the charts. I moved quietly toward the door and stepped out into the hallway. I leaned against the wall and chewed over our brief but telling exchange. The police said Daggett had killed Coffin in an insane rage, thinking that he was Moby Dick. Rosen more or less backed this up. But from what I had heard, Daggett was still searching for the white whale, so he could not have killed the imaginary Moby because he hadn’t caught up with it.

  And if my theory was right, it raised another question. If Gramps didn’t do Coffin in, who did?

  CHAPTER 11

  After leaving Daggett, I went back to my apartment. I went through the police reports again, but nothing caught my eye. I shoved the folders aside, got up and stuck my Red Sox ball cap on my head. I was thinking about my encounter with Chernko. Time to do a recon. I went to the Daggett house. There was no one in the kitchen to see me take the keys to Daggett’s boat from its wall hook. I drove into Nantucket town, parked the MG near Lisa’s law office and headed toward the marina. I was walking past an outdoor restaurant when I heard a voice call out.

  “Hey, feeshermenz.”

  Chernko’s lady companion of the night before was sitting alone at a table on the patio. I stopped and said, “Good morning.”

  “Where you goink?”

  “I was on my way to the Volga to see if I could find you.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  “Never denied it. Are you expecting anyone?”

  She managed a lazy half-smile. “Heva seet.”

  “Thanks for the invite,” I said, settling into a chair.

  Tanya was wearing her oversized sunglasses and a green shift that set off her hair color. Moving with a feline languor, she lifted a glass of what looked like prosecco to her lips and took a sip. She stared off into space like someone in the throes of terminal ennui. Finally, she acknowledged my presence.

  “Why do you look for Tanya?”

  “I liked talking to you at the party last night. Too bad you had to go off with one of Ivan’s associates.”

  She pursed her lips, puzzled. I held one hand high, one low. She frowned and pointed to the higher hand. “That one is Sergei. The other is Piter. Yes. They go everywhere with him. What was feeshermenz doing at the reechie-reech party?”

  “Ramsey invited me. I came with a friend of his.”

  “The pretty lady with the hair like this?” She crossed her arms and patted her shoulders to simulate Lisa’s shoulder-length hair.

  “That’s right. The pretty lady.”

  “She likes you?”

  “I think so. But it’s not like that. She’s a lawyer. I’m helping her find out things. And you and Ivan? He likes you?”

  “He likes pretty things. I meet him in New York. He asked me to go on boat cruise.” She shrugged. “He’ll get tired of Tanya some day and find other pretty theeng.”

  “Then he’s a fool.”

  She threw her head back and laughed. Then she removed her sunglasses and gazed at me with her jade eyes. “No, he’s not a fool. He has big money. Do you have money, Mr. Feeshermenz?”

  “Not much.”

  “Too bed. You are very nice.”

  “You’re nice too, Tanya.
Do you get off the boat very much?”

  She slipped the sunglasses back on. “Sometimes he goes off on Volga. All night. I stay at Jared Coffin house and he tells me to go shopping.”

  “Where does he go in the boat?”

  She shrugged, then rose from her seat and said, “I hev to go, for manicure, Sookareedees.”

  “I hope our paths will cross again.”

  A thoughtful expression crossed her face. “Ivan is going out in his boat tomorrow. I am on island for the night.”

  “When does he leave?”

  “Always the same time, near sunset. Then Tanya is free. Maybe feeshermenz is free, too.”

  She sauntered off with a relaxed, loose-limbed walk. I watched her until she mingled with the tourists starting to crowd the streets. I pondered her words. Sometimes he goes off on Volga.

  I could feel the weight of the boat keys in my pocket. A vague plan began to form in my mind. The downside was that I would miss an encounter with a beautiful young Bulgarian woman. The upside was that I might learn where Ivan went on his sojourns. The more I knew about Ivan’s business, the better for me.

  Leaving the restaurant, I walked over to the marina. Daggett’s boat, the Pequod II, was a Pursuit model around twenty-five-feet long. I climbed aboard the boat and checked to see that the gas tank was full. I started the twin Evinrude 250 horsepower engines. The four-stroke motors purred like tigers. Everything was shipshape and ready to go. I cast off the dock lines, eased the boat out of its slip, steered past the Volga and toward the harbor. When I was out of the no-wake zone, I gunned the throttle. The hull rose at a sharp angle and planed smoothly over one-foot waves.

  Just outside the harbor, I encountered gray tendrils of fog snaking in from Nantucket Sound. The sun was trying to burn off the fog, but its futile attempts only served to give the wooly mists an unhealthy yellowish pallor.

  I rounded the boat in a banking turn and headed back into the harbor, where I reduced the boat’s speed and wove my way through the pack of power and sailboats anchored in the basin to the east of the yacht dock. I cut the engines to an idle. The boat rocked in the gentle swells. From my vantage point, I would be able to see any boat leaving the harbor.

  I headed back to the boat slip, tied up and did a survey to make sure the Pequod II was ready for a quick departure. Leaving the marina, I walked along Water Street to the whaling museum and bought an admission ticket. I went directly to the room with the whaleboat and the whale skeleton and stopped in front of the portrait wall opposite the whaling tool display.

  The oil painting of Prudence Whetherell was one of a dozen or so portraits of whaling captains and their wives that hung in the big room. Using my best Bogart impression, I growled, “Okay, Prudence. You saw the whole thing, don’t deny it. Confess.”

  Prudence stared back at me with a blank expression. I stepped in front of another portrait. If the eyes of the resolute man in the painting had been human, they would have seen Coffin’s murder. I tried again, appealing to Captain Sperling’s civic side, but he kept his lips sealed.

  A couple of visitors overheard me talking to the portrait and hurriedly dragged their kids out of the room. I turned away from the silent witnesses and leaned against the whaleboat. I tried to imagine the night of the murder. Daggett calls a meeting with Coffin to talk about buying the scrimshaw collection. In one scenario, Daggett gets there ahead of his victim, pulls the boarding knife off the wall and ambushes Coffin from the front.

  Try again. Both men get there at the same time; their chat turns into an argument, Daggett yanks the knife down and stabs Coffin, who presumably resists his instincts to run and stands there to be killed. Unable to face the enormity of his crime, Daggett drives to the Serengeti where a blow on the head from an unknown source transforms him into a fictional character from Melville.

  Why couldn’t I be working on a good old-fashioned straightforward murder? One guy kills another. Gun. Knife. Beer bottle. Bam. That’s it. I juggled the different scenarios until my head was spinning. I wandered around the museum and went up to the scrimshaw room. I stared at the whalebone carvings. A question nagged at me again. If the museum collection was so extensive that only a few pieces could be displayed, why did Coffin want to add to it?

  I went back to the front desk on the ground level and borrowed a telephone book. Coffin and Company was listed under the antiques section. I asked the receptionist for directions. A few minutes later, I turned onto an alley and walked until I came to a buff-colored, two-story clapboard house that had a small porch with a double stairway. Hanging over the porch was a small black wooden sign carved in the shape of a sperm whale. Painted on the sign in gilt letters were the words: Coffin and Company Antiques.

  I climbed a stairway, opened the door and stepped into a dimly-lit space. Glass counters ran down both sides. Ship paintings decorated the walls. The musty-smelling shop was twice as long as it was wide and jammed with enough merchandise to fill a WalMart. I imagined a giant foot shoving all the stuff into the small space.

  At the far end of the shop, a middle-aged woman sat at a wooden desk, watching a miniature TV screen. When you’re about to ask a stranger a question, it never hurts to have an ice-breaker. On the wall behind her was a painting of a whaling ship sailing in a puddle of moonlight, and above the oil was a Red Sox pennant. She had on a Red Sox cap pulled over her short sandy hair. I tapped the visor of my blue-and-red cap.

  “What’s the score?” I said.

  She turned and put a finger to her lips. “Shhhhhh.”

  Red Sox fans consider their baseball team as a metaphor for life, with all its ups and downs. Ever since Babe Ruth was traded off, triggering the decades-old curse, the erratic and sometimes incomprehensible behavior of the Olde Town Team has made its followers more superstitious than most. The Sox were winning, but to acknowledge such would be bad luck. It was best to ignore them or they would take a dive.

  I nodded knowingly. Close call. If she had answered my question, the shortstop would have flubbed the catch. She turned down the volume on the TV.

  “Sorry,” she said. “My name is Pat Greely. How can I help you?”

  I told her my name and said that I was a private investigator hired by the Daggett family to look into his case.

  With her round face, eyes and wire-rimmed glasses, Pat resembled a friendly owl. She enhanced that resemblance when she blinked a number of times and said, “Good. Henry Daggett could never have done what they’re saying he did. Not in a thousand years.”

  “You seem pretty sure about that.”

  “I am absolutely sure. He and Ab were friends, for godsakes.”

  “I’ve heard that they argued a lot.”

  “Pshaw! Sure, they were two cranky old guys who were too strong-minded for their own good. That was all for show.”

  “You seem to know them pretty well.”

  “Ab gave me a job here after my husband died. Not big pay, but steady. Henry came by a lot. The two men would talk for hours about island history. Just like any old friends. Sometimes they agreed, and sometimes they didn’t. Ab griped about Mr. Daggett, but it was always with a twinkle in his eye.”

  “Did they talk about the scrimshaw collection for the museum?”

  “I’ll have to admit that was a doozy. They came as close to breaking up as I’ve ever seen them.”

  “I’ve seen some pretty good scrimshaw,” I said, “But it’s hard to understand why old friends would go head to head over a collection of carved ivory.”

  She grinned. “There’s scrimshaw and then there is Coffin scrimshaw.”

  Pat got up and unlocked a glass cabinet. She removed three sperm whale teeth and lined them up on a square of green felt under a magnifying glass on a stand. “Scrimshaw varies in quality, from primitive craft work, to downright masterpieces in ivory. Obed Coffin was a ge
nius. See if you can pick out his piece from the others.”

  The scene etched into the whale teeth was basically the same on all three, showing a whaleboat closing in on a sperm whale. The harpooner stood in the bow with a harpoon raised above his head. But one tooth stood out. The image was flawless. The shading of the sea and foam were done in a fine detail. Where the other images were stiff, this image had life and flow to it. I moved the tooth aside.

  “This one, far and above.”

  “Congratulations. You picked the Coffin piece.”

  “It wasn’t difficult. Coffin was a true artist.”

  “He had the luxury of working in this shop rather than on the deck of a whaling ship. But I don’t think it would have made any great difference. The art that flowed from his fingers stemmed from his own painful past.”

  “The Moshup incident?”

  “That’s right. It scarred Ab’s ancestor and ruined him personally and financially. He poured himself into his art to ease the pain of his awful experience, and sold scrimshaw to put food on the table.”

  “I heard that Mr. Coffin was collaborating on a book about his great-grandfather. He apparently had new evidence that would shed light on the Moshup case.”

  “Yeah,” she said with a sigh. “He told me that, too, but he didn’t go into detail. When I asked him about it, he said he had put the book project off. That his first priority was persuading the museum to buy his ancestor’s scrimshaw.”

  “I can see where that might be a hard sell. The museum already has an extensive collection.”

  “That wasn’t the problem. Daggett was open to buying the collection, and even money wasn’t an issue. It was the source of the collection that bothered him.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Mr. Daggett was worried about the dealer. He was afraid that it might be stolen property and wanted it authenticated so that there would be no question whatsoever. He was adamant about that.”