Death in Rough Water

by Francine Mathews

  Jackie Alcantrara was given to sudden rage, Merry knew. Jackie was the most obvious suspect. He disliked Del, and she had all but accused him (to the Folgers, and how many other people?) of having arranged Joe Duarte’s death. Merry had told Jackie outright that Del was requesting a murder investigation. Suppose he had stopped by the house on Milk Street last night, hoping to talk things over—tried to strike a deal with Del, the Praia for her silence, perhaps—thinking that he could buy her off. It would be like Jackie’s limited intelligence. If he could be satisf ied with a boat, no ques­tions asked, why couldn’t she?

  But Del f lew into a rage, brandished the harpoon, and when Jackie tried to disarm her, was killed in the skirmish. With Del lying in a pool of blood on the f loor, Jackie panicked and ran out the door. The neigh­bors might even remember him.

  “Meredith!”

  “Up here, Ralph.”

  “You’re wanted on the telephone.”

  She thought of asking him to take a message, but it might be Matt Bailey, the most obvious of her fellow detectives to be assigned Del’s case; and much as she despised Bailey and chafed at the notion of his handling a murder investigation, it would not do to ignore him. She rolled off the bed and headed for the phone in her father’s room.

  “Merry.”

  “Peter,” she said. She looked about her wildly, the receiver to her ear, as though in search of protective cover. “Did you f ind a dry shirt?”

  He laughed, and the carefree sound felt like a blow to the solar plexus. “I do own more than one.”

  A pause.

  “You still there?” he said.

  “I don’t feel much like talking.”

  “I called to see if you felt like coming over for dinner tonight. You needn’t speak, just eat.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t eat?”

  “Well—actually, I’m starving,” she said, surprised.

  “Life reasserting itself, Merry. It’s not something to f ight.”

  “But you are, Peter,” she said, and bit the words back too late.

  “I thought I might be,” he said, his voice grown very quiet. “That’s not what I intended when I came looking for you this morning.”

  “I know. You wanted to help. But you can’t help me right now, Peter, you can only make things worse.”

  “Because I make you happy.”

  “Because you make me guilty.”

  “Same thing. Merry—”

  “Don’t argue this one, okay? It’s how I feel.”

  The terrible stillness of a phone line burdened with too much to say. He cleared his throat.

  “Look,” he said. “You need to do something positive. Sitting around helpless for two weeks will only make you crazy.”

  “And you think dinner at your house is something positive?”

  “No,” he said patiently, “but I think f inding Del’s murderer might be.”

  She hesitated, confused. “What are you saying, Peter? That I ignore my dad, run roughshod over the department, and light out on a personal vendetta?”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me.”

  Chapter 15

  Merry slipped out the back door in the 6:00 a.m. silence of Friday morning, her Sperrys in one hand and her car keys in the other. She felt like a teenager or an errant spouse, but Sara Duarte was still asleep upstairs, and she didn’t want noise to set off a baby alarm that would rouse the household. She needed to get to the station before her father was even showered.

  She had tossed and turned all night, debating Peter’s words. “Your knowledge of Del could be vital to f inding her killer, and you’ll feel in the long run like you’ve helped,” he said. “Once you’ve got the infor­mation, you can hand it to the guy running the investigation, and nobody’ll be the wiser.”

  The idea was compelling. But she would need to be back on duty to make it work. The station meant access to evidence—Clarence’s forensics—and a plausible reason for tooling around the island asking questions. She would tell John Folger the arson case was a necessary distraction from Del’s death, and that she’d defer the vacation he’d offered until she was better equipped to enjoy it.

  But f irst she wanted to see that evidence.

  Y

  Matt Bailey couldn’t type, never carried a laptop, and took all his notes longhand. Yesterday’s paperwork still sat on his desk in the darkened off ice he shared with another detective. Merry outranked him, and had a private room—one more reason he resented her. His f irst and foremost grievance was her refusal to go out with him.

  Merry set her enormous purse on the f loor next to Bailey’s desk, f ished around in its depths for her half-glasses, and switched on the lamp. A spotlight fell on Del’s wide-eyed face. They’d printed the pictures quickly.

  She shifted the papers and found the crime scene chief’s summary.

  It was written in Clarence’s dry manner. Del’s injuries were noted sparingly, pending the state crime lab’s autopsy f indings. Merry recog­nized the signif icance of the defensive cuts on the right forearm, Del had not been taken completely by surprise. She paged quickly to the end of the report, where Clarence described the blood retrieved from Del’s f loor—and noted two different samples, A positive and O.

  Merry f lipped back to the top and began reading in a more organized fashion. Clarence’s sketch of Del’s living room, with the position of the body carefully triangulated and a notation of the blood pattern on the f loor, she gave only cursory attention. She knew the living room well, and Del’s image was seared in her memory. It was the rest of the house that interested her.

  Clare had dusted the doorknob for f ingerprints and come up with nothing. When he sprayed the weathered wooden shaft of the harpoon with ninhydrin, however, he hit pay dirt. The killer thought to wipe the doorknob but didn’t know unpainted wood retained prints—not surpris­ing, really. Most people thought a surface had to shine in order to show the ghost of a f inger. The problem with the harpoon, however, was the sheer volume of prints it revealed.

  Merry sat back, chagrined. The f irst element to be lost from a print was water; some f ingerprint processes depended upon reaction with it, and could only pick up fairly recent deposits. Ninhydrin, however, re­acted to the amino acids f ingers left behind when they touched a porous surface. The spray was capable of picking up traces of touch that were days old. Her own prints were probably on the harpoon somewhere—she’d undoubtedly gripped the shaft during the swordf ishing expedition, as had Peter. And Rafe. And Del herself. There was no telling how many people had handled it recently, and very little hope of proving con­clusively that a particular print was deposited in the act of murder. She read on.

  Joe Duarte’s study had been ransacked, the contents of a f iling cabinet strewn across the f loor. The cabinet’s metal surfaces were carefully wiped clean of prints.

  This brought Merry up short. In her mind’s eye, she’d thought of the killer—all right, she’d thought of Jackie—harpooning Del in the midst of a f ight, and running out the door. She hadn’t allowed for a jaunt farther into the house, dying woman ignored and caution thrown to the wind, in order to steal some f iles. Files? What crime of passion turned on f iles?

  Clarence had endeavored to f ind out. In Del’s room, which the mur­derer had apparently not entered, the crime scene chief discovered sev­eral items of interest neatly stacked on her bureau. First among them were two threatening letters, composed of newsprint, and reproduced in Clare’s notes.

  i warned you adelia duarte get out of town. i’m losing patience, the f irst simply said.

  leave under your own power while you still can, the second began. the life you save may be your own.

  Both were signed The Avenging Angel.

  “A cliché wrapped within a cliché inside a cliché,” Merry muttered. The poisoned penman might have cri
bbed his—or her—notes from a Threatening Letters for Beginners manual. These two must have arrived in the days following the Town Pier f ire. Merry hadn’t spoken to Del since she’d shown her the f irst letter that night.

  Clare had sprayed the paper with ninhydrin—again, few people thought of f ingerprints when they forged a check or sent an anonymous note—and had come up with some beauties. He intended to search for a match among the station’s existing prints, but these should also be mailed to the state crime lab for comparison with its database. That could take some time, of course, and it would be useless if their killer wasn’t already in the computer. More than likely he wasn’t.

  The f inal item on Del’s dresser was an inventory of the f ile cabinet. Trust a former off ice administrator, Merry thought. She must have gone through Joe’s papers at some point after the funeral. Everything he’d stored was carefully noted, as were the items Del discarded and the f iles she added for herself. Clarence had cross-referenced the inventory and the cabinet’s remaining folders, and discovered that only one was missing. Del had labeled it “Personal Documents.” Whether Joe’s or her own, Clarence couldn’t say. The inventory told them nothing more.

  In the galley kitchen, everything had appeared ordinary to the crime scene chief, except for a bottle of Glenf iddich scotch standing open on the counter. Near it stood two clean glasses. Clare had poured the scotch into a sterile container for analysis, dusted the bottle and glasses, and transported them to the station in plastic. The bottle revealed beautiful thumb and foref inger prints that bore no relation to Del’s or those he’d found on the threatening letters.

  Probably Joe’s, Merry thought sourly.

  The glasses had no prints at all.

  Now, that’s bizarre, she thought. Del offers the murderer a drink, which he pours, and after a bit of scotch, the killer stabs his hostess, tosses her f iling cabinet, and carefully washes the glasses, drying them with a towel to remove all prints. But he—or she—thoughtfully leaves the bottle for Clare to dust. Huh?

  The remainder of the report concerned the particulate matter vacuumed from the scene and the body. Clarence was struck by the lack of surface dirt on the premises—Del had apparently cleaned thoroughly only a little while before. Nonetheless, the crime scene chief found a few large links of copper chain embedded in the rug near the body, probably torn from a piece of the perpetrator’s jewelry; some f ine blond hairs; and sandy grit—probably from a shoe. Del was wearing green cotton f leece. Her hands, unclenched by Dr. Fairborn, had torn at clothing made of beige raw silk and linen.

  Merry sat back in disbelief. Jackie Alcantrara’s hair was mousy brown, and she doubted he had ever worn silk of any color in his life. Linen might be a possibility—but on a Wednesday night, when he’d probably been mending net or working winches on the Lisboa Girl all day? Indigo from a pair of jeans was more like it, or the cotton f ibers of a Hanes T-shirt.

  She pulled her half-glasses from her nose and f lipped them shut. First thing to do was discover Jackie’s whereabouts Wednesday night. She glanced at her watch. Seven a.m. Time to beat it before Matt Bailey accused her of turf-jumping. She snapped off the light and threw her bag over her shoulder.

  Jackie Alcantrara lived in a twenty-year-old frame house off the Surfside Road, not far from the high school. Merry stopped for Scotch oatcake and coffee at the Downyf lake off the Rotary and pulled up in Jackie’s drive a few minutes before eight o’clock.

  His truck was gone—like any f isherman, he’d have been up at dawn and on the road not long after. She eyed the house and noted what appeared to be a fresh paint job. The lawn, too, was neat and newly landscaped. Either the Alcantraras had a generous landlord or they’d bought the place and put some money into it. But where had that come from?

  Merry rang the bell.

  “Constance Alcantrara?”

  She was a short bleached blonde with sharp brown eyes, a tendency toward plumpness, and a f ixed simper. In her cotton knit stirrup pants and matching large tunic she looked, Merry judged, a good f ive years older than Jackie’s twenty-eight. She stared at Merry blankly.

  “Yes?” Hot pink f ingernails with small gold charms at their tips grazed through the blonde fringe.

  “Detective Meredith Folger. Nantucket police.”

  Wariness replaced the blankness for an instant, and then the simper returned. “What can I do for you, Detective?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about Adelia Duarte.”

  She stood back and held the door wide, the smile more f ixed. “Please come in.”

  The living room shared space with the dining area, and both were done in baby blue and pink. Hearts and f lowers in the same shades were stenciled on the walls at ceiling line, and sprays of lace and dried blooms were tucked into pictures, nailed above doorways, and springing from every corner. The sofa was of ruff led gingham, and magazines were stacked in a rack coyly made in the shape of a pig. An open box of chocolates and a mug of coffee proclaimed it breakfast hour in the Alcantrara household.

  Constance bent to clear the sofa with a hostess’s f lutter. “There!” she said brightly. “Now we’re ready for guests. Would you like some coffee, Detective? Or herbal tea?”

  Merry declined and sat down in a padded rocker. She winced.

  “Oh, let me take that for you.”

  Merry reached back and felt for the hard knob that had driven into her back. The head of a rag doll, tough plastic surmounting calico and nylon lace. She handed it to Constance and pulled out her laptop.

  “I feel just terrible about Del,” Constance began. “But then, everyone does. The poor thing had such a tough life. But then I have to say we make our luck.”

  “When did you hear about her death?” Merry said.

  “Well,” Constance said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “I ran into Margot Grant yesterday afternoon—you know, she works as dispatcher at the f irehouse, and she’d just run across the parking lot to Stop N Shop to buy some tomatoes—and she told me there’d been a rescue squad sent to the Duartes’ that morning. She f illed me in on all the details.” Her round lips were pursed and her eyes avid. “I understand she was impaled by a harpoon. Would you like a chocolate?”

  “No, thank you,” Merry said. Never in a mil­lion years would she have imagined bullet-headed Jackie, with his sim­mering rage and blunt words, tied to this refugee from a bad soap opera. “And did you tell your husband, Mrs. Alcantrara? Or did he hear the news elsewhere?”

  “Call me Connie.” She reached for a piece of Russell Stover’s and sat back into the cushions, primed for a long gossip. “Jackie’s been out f ishing for the past few days, but I managed to raise him on the radio and give him the news. He said he’d start back today when his lockers are full.”

  “You have a radio here in the house?”

  “In the kitchen. That way he can let me know when he’s due, and I can have something nice and hot waiting when he pulls up in the truck.”

  “Whereabouts was he when you raised him?”

  “The Bank.”

  A full day’s trip out of port. “And he left to f ish when?”

  “Wednesday morning.”

  Twenty-four hours before Del’s body was discovered. He’d have made the Georges Bank by the time she was killed, if indeed he didn’t f ish somewhere nearer shore that f irst day, and return to the harbor under cover of darkness for the express purpose of harpooning her. Then he could have reached the Bank during the night and had his alibi f ixed. Merry would get Terry Samson at the Coast Guard off ice to check a log of radio calls. The f ishermen always gave their coordinates when they buzzed the Brant Point station.

  But that sort of calculation and scrupulous timing didn’t f it with the found weapon, or what seemed to be the spontaneous nature of the crime. Damn.

  “He managed to f ind a crew, it seems,” Merry said.

  “Not rea
lly a crew.” Connie pulled a face. “Just that Swede. He has nothing better to do, I guess. After what he did to Joe Duarte, I’d rather Jackie f ished alone.”

  “What the Swede did?”

  “Letting the doors in careless like that. It’s criminal.”

  “Happily, it worked out to Jackie’s benef it,” Merry said carefully.

  “Well, it’s an ill wind as doesn’t blow somebody good. Jackie deserves everything he gets, believe me, Detective. And once that lawyer said he could f ish—as if he should have to ask anyone’s permission—there was no holding him. Wait another week, I said, and hunt up some real crew, but Jackie was heading out, and I wasn’t going to argue.”

  “The news about Del must have been a shock.”

  Connie shrugged. “I don’t think so. He always said she’d come to a bad end.”

  Her indifference made Merry burn for an instant, and she had to look away from Connie Alcantrara’s self-satisfied face. “Why did he think that, Mrs. Alcantrara?”

  “Connie,” she said automatically. Merry’s questions seemed hardly to bother her. Merry wondered for an instant if she’d expected the police visit or simply enjoyed the atten­tion. “Well, you can hardly blame him after the way Del behaved.”

  “Over the boat, you mean?”

  Connie laughed and took another chocolate. “Those Duartes. Always acting like they ruled the world, and both of ’em dead. No, I meant the way she ran after Jackie a few years ago. Practically threw herself at him, try­ing to get him into bed. As if she’d be the sort of woman he’d f ind attractive. But she never had any morals, did she? I mean, that baby came along somehow, didn’t it?”