Grey Lady

by Paul Kemprecos

  It would take some doing. Alex was living on Cape Cod with a bunch of druggies. He would have been scooped up in a police bust if I hadn’t saved him. I gave him a verbal spanking and sent him home. The close call scared him into civility.

  I stopped at a coffee shop in town and ordered fried eggs and ham that at Nantucket prices cost what I would have paid for dinner at a five-star restaurant on the mainland. The eggs were overdone, but what the heck, I was fortified when I strolled over to the ferry dock. The Volga had returned and was tied up in its usual place at the end of the dock. I was tempted to hook up with Tanya and ask her how Ivan was this morning, but decided that I had already pushed my luck the night before.

  I hadn’t seen Alex in a couple of years and was unprepared when the handsome young man in the tan cotton sports jacket stepped off the high-speed ferry and walked in my direction. I say handsome with a hint of self-interest because the cute, raisin-eyed little charmer I used to knock around as a kid looked a lot like a younger me. Same dark eyes and smart-ass grin. Same thick dark brown hair, only his didn’t have the gray specks in it.

  He gave me a big hug. “Cousin Soc. Wonderful to see you. You’re looking great!”

  “You learned the art of flattery well in law school, I see.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “Still cutting me down to size, Soc. I’m telling the truth. You look terrific.”

  I ruffled his hair for old times and suggested that we grab a cup of coffee at the restaurant on the dock. I asked him about his wife and kids. They were doing great, he said, and pulled some pictures out of his wallet. Little Aristotle was a handsome kid and his sister was beautiful. He beamed when I told him.

  We made small talk, and then I said, “My mother said you need help. She was doing the mysterious Cretan thing and was short on details.”

  “How’d she know I needed help?”

  “Cretan radar. Nothing in the family escapes her attention. What’s going on, cousin?”

  He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “You remember a guy named Chili?”

  I dug into the mists of my memory. “Yeah. Stocky guy with lots of X-rated tattoos. Twitchy cokehead you ran with before I dragged you away by the scruff of the neck.”

  He grimaced as if he had a stomach pain. “That’s him. Well, Chili is back. He’s been in jail since you met him. He’s out now. He contacted me a few weeks ago.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What’s the little sleazebag want from you?”

  “He’s picked up where he left off before he went to jail. He wants me to set up a laundering operation so he won’t get caught again.”

  “And you told him go to pound tar?”

  Alex leaned forward. He had that stomachache face again. “I told him I’d think about it. He wants an answer by the end of the week.” He saw me open my mouth and raised his hand in a stop gesture. “Before you jump down my throat, listen to what he said. He’ll spread the word about me being involved with drugs.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “I know that. But he says he’ll splice the old story onto more recent deals he knows about. Soc, if he does that I could lose my license to practice law. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. I could be disbarred. It’ll kill my family.”

  “Calm down, Alex. Let’s hash this thing out. Does anyone else know about this?”

  “No. He contacted me at my office. Used a phony name.”

  “Where is the little darling now?”

  He shook his head. “You won’t believe it. Nantucket. That’s why I jumped at the chance to see you when I learned you were here.”

  “Chili doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy you’d see at an island garden party.”

  “The island has a big drug problem. Just ask the cops. Oxycontin mostly. Hundreds of workers wait on tables, wash dishes or mow lawns. Think of all the nationalities. They come from all over the world. It’s the perfect set-up to move stuff in and out.”

  “Trouble in paradise,” I mused. “Okay. How can I help? Want me to talk to Chili again?”

  “I don’t know. He’s not just a punk like before. Prison has made him a hardened criminal. He’s a lot more dangerous. Don’t take this as an insult, but you’re, uh—”

  “Spit it out, Alex. Long in the tooth. Over the hill. One foot on a banana peel.”

  “Sorry, Soc. Didn’t mean it to come out like that, but you’ll have to admit that you’re a little older than last time.”

  “Only thing I’ll admit to is not running the hundred yard dash in less than ten seconds. Look, Alex, if it were all brawn, I’d have been dead a long time ago. Tell me what you know about Chili’s island operation.”

  Alex said Chili had bragged about his cover. He was working a kitchen job at a big hotel. It gave him cover and he could hire accomplices he’d met in prison. No one paid any attention to dishwashers and prep cooks or thought anything about people coming and going at all hours. Chili had smartened up since the old days. Spending time in a cell does wonders to focus the mind. I said I would scout out the situation and see what I could learn. I suggested that he stall Chili for a few days.

  “You’re a lawyer. You must be good at delay.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Soc. Thanks for everything. I knew I could count on you. How’s the fishing business going with your new boat?”

  “A little slow right now. I thought I’d use the time to work on a murder case.” I glanced at my watch. “I’ve got to catch a ferry to the mainland. Want to go back together?”

  He looked around. “I dunno. I haven’t been on Nantucket for years. Maybe I’ll walk around town and catch the next boat out.”

  I cuffed him lightly on the head the way I used to when he was a kid.

  “Okay. Just behave yourself.”

  He grinned like a kid I remembered. “Not a problem, Soc.”

  I hurried toward the ferry dock, intent on catching the boat before it left. Otherwise, I might have remembered something important. Alex and I looked like younger and older versions of ourselves, but we had more in common than physical resemblance. We were both human lightning rods for trouble.

  CHAPTER 18

  The city of New Bedford is about a one hour drive from the ferry terminal in Hyannis. The National Park Service has carved a historic district out of several square blocks of the old neighborhood that used to be the nerve center for the most efficient whale-killing machine on the planet. I parked the pick-up near a granite Greek revival building that houses the city’s whaling museum.

  The museum is on Johnnycake Hill, where Herman Melville once trod, absorbing atmosphere for Moby Dick. I walked past the Seaman’s Bethel and imagined Ishmael and Queequeg sitting in a pew, listening to Father Mappel sermonizing about Jonah and the whale, surrounded by marble wall tablets memorializing whalers killed by whales or lost at sea.

  Mandel’s antique shop was a couple of blocks beyond the Bethel in a refurbished mercantile building. A pleasant young woman who said she was Mandel’s assistant ushered me past showcases filled with relics of the city’s maritime trade and to an upstairs office. Mandel was sitting in front of a computer. He got up from behind his desk and came over to shake hands.

  The antiques dealer was a trim man who might have been in his seventies. He wore a dark brown suit and a yellow power tie. With his thick mane of white hair, prominent nose and narrow face, he reminded me of a bald eagle. He led the way to a sofa and chairs and told me to have a seat. His assistant brought us an antique porcelain teapot and cups.

  As he poured the tea, Mandel said, “You mentioned on the phone that you were a private investigator.”

  “That’s right. I formerly worked for the Boston police department.”

  “I hire investigators from time-to-time to do background checks on buyers and se
llers. In this business it’s a good thing to know with whom you’re dealing.”

  He mentioned the names of a couple of Boston cops who had acquired their PI license after retirement. I said that I knew them both from my Boston days and that he had chosen well.

  Mandel’s watchful black eyes studied me through round metal-rimmed glasses, studying me as if he were peering through a magnifying glass at an antique artifact.

  “Well, Mr. Socarides, how may I be of help?”

  “I’d like to hear what you know about the scrimshaw collection that Ab Coffin wanted the Nantucket museum to buy.”

  “Ah, a fascinating story.” He leaned back in his chair and tented his fingers. “I’ve known Ab for a long time. We attended the whaling museum’s annual scrimshaw weekends together. He was incredibly knowledgeable in what was comparatively a new field of academic inquiry.”

  “New? I thought scrimshaw went back a hundred or so years.”

  “That’s correct. But the study of scrimshaw only dates back to the 1960s. Our knowledge of the art form has advanced quickly, however. Unlike many antiques, scrimshaw has wonderful provenance. Most museum collections were donated by families that had whaler-scrimshaw artists in their family tree. Often you know not only who carved the scrimshaw but what ship and voyage the artist was on when he did it. Ab became excited whenever he encountered Coffin work. He was very proud of his ancestor.”

  “He had reason to be proud. I saw examples of Obed Coffin’s carvings in his Nantucket shop. He was a genius at what he did.”

  Mandel nodded in agreement. “I’d say that Coffin ranked with perhaps the greatest scrimshander of all time, a Plymouth man named N.S. Finney. Like Coffin, he’d served on whaling ships, but once he went ashore, he stayed there. Both men carved ivory commercially. Up to that point, scrimshaw was the product of bored whale men who had time on their hands. Whaling ships tended to be over-manned. You only needed a dozen or so crew to sail a ship, but more than twenty to thirty men to hunt whales and process the oil. The voyages were two to three years long. Contrary to what people think, many whalers were educated, so their art was sometimes quite sophisticated. Coffin took his art a step further than Finney.”

  “In what way?”

  “Both were copyists and didn’t do much in the way of original images. They carved a lot of commission work. But Coffin was more of a transitional artist than Finney. I’ll show you.”

  He got up and walked over to a bookshelf. He pulled down three loose-leaf notebooks which he opened and spread out on the table. The clear plastic pages held color photographs of scrimshaw specimens. “These are Finney pieces. As you can see, they had a precise photographic style.” He picked up another notebook. “These pieces were done by a much later artist in the more modern style. Around 1950. The lines are more fluid, and the images are three-dimensional. They are done from different angles rather than straight on. You can see that they are full of action and verve.”

  I picked up the notebook labeled: Coffin and leafed through the pages. “These look like a combination of both styles.”

  “Good eye, Mr. Socarides. Coffin bridged the art form between the traditional and the modern.”

  The carvings in the photos were romanticized images of men and women in fancy dress, portraits of male and female subjects, children and symbolic figures representing liberty and freedom. Mandel pointed to the little coffin carved in the base of each piece and said it was the artist’s signature.

  “Interesting,” I said. “There isn’t one piece here that has anything to do with whaling or the sea.”

  “You do have a good eye. That’s correct. Coffin made a few pieces with whaling scenes when he was on shipboard, but after his horrible ordeal he wanted nothing to do with the sea. Which was why I was skeptical about the pieces Ab wanted to acquire for the museum.”

  “What can you tell me about the collection?”

  “It’s quite the story. Last February a man named Gerhard Warner came into my office. Warner has a shop on the other side of Johnnycake Hill.” Mandel paused for emphasis. “He doesn’t have the best reputation.”

  “Why is that, Mr. Mandel?”

  “He’s been caught with specimens that have proved later to be stolen property. He’s a slippery individual and has always had a paper trail that exonerates him. Anyhow, he said he had a number of rare pieces of Coffin’s work having to do with his whaling days.”

  “Did he say where he got them?”

  “He said they were part of a collection of some sixty pieces of Coffin scrimshaw. Coffin was down on his luck and when he died, his estate was not probated. The pieces went off at auction to pay the bills and were scooped up by a collector, now deceased, whose family was trying to sell them.

  “As you correctly observed, Coffin stayed away from whaling themes. I told Warner it sounded like a cock-and-bull story and threw him out of my office without even looking at his catalog. The matter should have ended there.”

  “But it didn’t?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Ab and I were at a conference and I mentioned Warner’s visit to him in passing. He became extremely excited and wanted to follow up. I cautioned him about Warner’s reputation, but he didn’t care. He said that it wouldn’t hurt to check out the collection.”

  “And did he?”

  “He contacted Warner and actually saw the collection. He came to my shop raving about it. Particularly one piece.”

  “Did he describe the piece?”

  “No. Only that a lot of heads would explode if he could acquire it and that his namesake would jump out of his grave.”

  “That’s a strong reaction from a piece of carved whalebone. Did he give any details?”

  “He was very tight-lipped. He said only that he had offered to buy the piece, but Warner refused, saying his source wanted to sell the collection as a whole.”

  “Is that when Ab approached the trustees at the Nantucket whaling museum?”

  “Correct. He tried to persuade the board to approve the sale, but to no avail. The museum already has one of the biggest scrimshaw collections in the world and the board didn’t like the clouded background of the collection. One board member did some research that suggested the collection may have been stolen from its owner many years ago.”

  “From what I understand, Coffin thought he could change Daggett’s mind. How did he intend to do that?”

  “Simple. He was going to show him a special piece from the collection.”

  “I thought Warner wanted to sell the whole thing.”

  “He did, but Ab managed to borrow a piece. He had to pay Warner a substantial “viewing” fee. Supposedly as insurance. He took out an equity loan on his house and shop to do it. He had persuaded Warner that the deal would go through if he could use this one specimen as leverage.”

  “That fits with what I know. Coffin told Daggett he would show him something he that would change his mind. I read the police report. There was no mention of scrimshaw being found. It seems to have mysteriously disappeared.”

  “Too bad,” Mandel said. “It could prove important.”

  “That’s what I think. How would I get in touch with Warner?”

  “You could try his shop, but he’s rarely there.”

  He gave me directions and I thanked him for his time. I walked a block or so through the historical district and found Warner’s shop. The door was locked. I peeked through the windows, but the place was dark. Tucked in a corner of the window was an index card with the words By Appointment Only printed in ballpoint on it. There was also a telephone number.

  I jotted the number down in my notepad and went back to Mandel’s shop. He didn’t seem surprised to hear that the shop was closed. I asked if I could use a telephone to call the number. I got a recorded message and left my name and Nantucket number. I to
ld Mandel that I would let him know if anything turned up and he said he’d do the same with me.

  Before I left he said, “You’re the detective, Mr. Socarides. What do you think happened to this missing scrimshaw piece?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Mandel, but there is one thing I’m absolutely sure of.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The scrimshaw didn’t walk out of the museum on its own.”

  CHAPTER 19

  You can practically spit from one end of Woods Hole’s main drag to the other, but appearances can be deceiving. The quaint little village on Vineyard Sound is known around the world as a center for ocean science. The dock off Water Street is home to the ship that carried the submersible Alvin to its Titanic discovery. From the same dock, research vessels sail far and wide to probe the oceans around the globe. The dynamo driving this research is the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or WHOI for short. The locals simply call it “Whooey.” The institution is a magnet for government and research money and dozens of underwater tech labs have sprung up close to Woods Hole like pilot fish around a shark.

  I tracked down the Marine Autonomous Corporation on a back road a few miles from Woods Hole harbor. The black sign marking the lab was about a foot square and the white letters spelling out MAC were so small that I almost went past the entrance. I jammed on the brakes, backed up and drove down a hard clay driveway until I came to a No Trespassing sign. I wheeled the truck around in position for a quick getaway and pulled off to the side. I grabbed a pair of binoculars from the glove box, got out and crunched through the forest of scrub oak and stunted pitch pine. After walking a couple of hundred feet, I saw the glint of metal through the trees.

  The reflection was sunlight bouncing off coils of razor wire topping a chain link fence. A surveillance camera angled down from a post on one side of a closed gate. A red light glowed on the camera, indicating that it was on. There were other working cameras on the fence itself, all probably motion-activated, as would be the floodlights spaced along the perimeter.