Death of a Wharf Rat

by Francine Mathews

  “Damn,” Kate said. “I forgot. I’ll have to tell your father.”

  “We could go around,” Laney said. “The French doors are open, aren’t they?”

  “There’s yellow tape strung across.”

  “So I’ll duck under it,” Laney said reasonably. “We’ve got to get his clothes. The police will understand.”

  They retraced their steps and went out through the living room doors. Yesterday’s gorgeous weather had given way to clouds and haze, although the July heat and humidity were just as strong. An oppressive day, Laney thought, that even the breeze off the ocean could not dispel.

  “Grab Tav,” Kate said urgently. “He’s not supposed to be out here. They don’t want him on the cliff.”

  Laney lifted the wriggling terrier around his middle and offered MacTavish the ball. He was content to hold it in his mouth as she ducked beneath the yellow crime scene tape that blocked Spence’s open French doors.

  The police had still not been in here; nor were they visible below the cliff. Still hunting for the boulder that had fractured Spence’s skull, presumably. “If we hurry, they won’t even know we were here.”

  Kate set down Nora’s clothes on Spence’s bed and opened the closet door. She began to shift through the hangers draped with garments. A few field vests. Some coats. “He has only six collared shirts, Lane. And look at this! The suit he wore to Nana Barb’s funeral! It was twenty years old then.”

  She lifted the timeworn dark suit from the rod, shoving the rest of the clothes aside as she did so, and laid it on Spence’s unmade bed. “You choose the shirt, sweetie.”

  Laney set down MacTavish and glanced into the closet. So few belongings, for such a long life. There was an upper shelf with boxes of photographic negatives stacked neatly, an ancient fedora, a camera case. Two more suits, equally old and too patterned for dignity. The six shirts. She fingered a striped one, held it out to the light.

  “That works,” Kate said. “Is there a tie?”

  “Just a navy-blue one, with Nantucket Red whales on it.”

  “It’ll have to do.”

  MacTavish gave a short bark and darted forward between Laney’s legs. She grasped his tail, which was stiff as a poker, and pulled him back. He came dragging a black wingtip lace-up in his jaws.

  “Thanks, Tav, that’s exactly what we need,” Laney said, and reached down to take the shoe from him.

  “I remember these from Nana’s funeral, too.” She handed it to Kate. “We should bury him in his Sperrys. That’s what he always wore. Without socks.”

  Kate, arrested, was staring at her hand. Laney’s voice died away. Where her mother had grasped the shoe was a rusty smear, arcing from her thumb over her palm.

  “Is that mud?”

  Kate turned the wingtip over. The soles were clean. But now the stain had smeared both hands.

  “No, Laney,” she said. “It’s blood.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “How soon will we know if it’s Spencer Murphy’s?” Merry asked Clarence Strangerfield.

  “Depends on the lab. They’re coming off a holiday weekend. Even if we request a rush, it could take several days.”

  The crime scene chief had been ready to call off the search for the nonexistent boulder that might have fractured Murphy’s skull when Laney came pelting down the beach stairs, calling for the police. Clarence took the wingtip from Kate Murphy and pinged Merry on her cell phone. He understood immediately that the rules of engagement with the household had changed.

  She and Clarence suited up in sterile jumpsuits and shower caps. They positioned Nat Coffin in front of the open French doors, barring access where tape alone had failed. He was ostensibly dusting doorknobs and jambs with black powder for latent fingerprints. Merry could hear David Murphy peppering him with questions—Kate or Laney must have summoned him from the dining room—but Nat was descended from people who had wielded harpoons in the South Pacific. He could handle a Boston lawyer.

  Merry lay down on her side in front of the open closet door, her face toward the French doors and her knees drawn up in a fetal position. “How tall was Spencer Murphy?”

  “About six feet,” Clarence said.

  “And I’m five-ten. Would it work? If I’d been conked on the head and stored in the closet, would I bleed on those shoes?”

  “A-yeh,” Clarence said.

  “And if his knees were drawn up—”

  “—and riggah set in before the body was disposed of—”

  “We know why we found him on the beach in that odd kneeling position.”

  Merry pushed herself to her feet. “Three hours, at the outside, Summer Hughes guessed, for the body to stiffen. We can assume Murphy was killed sometime after dinner and before midnight—then temporarily hidden, with his bedroom door locked from the inside and the murderer leaving by way of the French doors. Anybody who checked on him from inside the house would think Murphy was simply asleep, and leave him alone. Andre Henrissaint apparently did exactly that. Then, once the household was down for the night, the murderer came back through the French doors to carry the body out to the cliff and stage the suicide. Only the corpse was folded on itself. The rigor hadn’t passed off by the time Murphy was discovered.”

  “Plausible,” Clarence said. “Why didn’t the murderah clean up the closet?”

  “He did everything in the dark. It might have been risky to turn on the lights. He may not have realized Spencer Murphy’s head was bleeding. The fractured skull probably seeped fluid slowly and then coagulated. Otherwise we’d have found blood all over the closet. You know what head wounds are like—stuck pigs.”

  “Or maybe he mopped the floor and missed the shoes,” Clarence said.

  “Did the girl show you exactly where she found the wingtip?” Merry asked.

  “It was the dahg,” Clarence said, pointing to the closet’s far left corner. “We’ll have to exclude for canine saliva when we send in the evidence. I already took a sample from the pooch’s mouth.”

  Trust Clare.

  Merry studied the closet floor. There was the other wingtip, a pair of beat-up Sperrys, and a stained set of canvas tennis shoes. A pair of winter boots.

  Clarence pointed out smears of blood on the boots and the deck shoes, as well as a dried stain in the corner of the closet’s wooden floor. As Merry watched, he sprayed the remaining shoes and floor with lumisol—a compound that reacted to iron in hemoglobin—and shined a black light on the closet interior. The light revealed a concentrated area of blood stains on and around the shoes.

  Clare shined the black-light torch on the carpet between the closet and French doors. No luminescence that might reveal blood. No telltale splotch that betrayed where Spencer Murphy was bludgeoned.

  “If the blood congealed during the time the body lay in the closet,” Clarence said, “there’d be no splatter when the murderah lifted him out to carry him across the room.”

  “I’m surprised the killer didn’t check the closet in daylight.”

  “Maybe the granddaughter sounded the alarm too early,” Clare suggested. “Anybody taking stuff from the closet this morning, when they were all supposed to be hunting for Murphy, would stick out like a sore thumb, don’t you think?”

  “—And then I taped off the entry,” Merry said. “Do we assume Kate Murphy’s hunt for funeral clothes was as innocent as she says?”

  “If either of those women meant to clean up the closet,” Clarence argued, “she’d have come in here alone. And she’d have lost the dahg.”

  Merry walked over to Nat Coffin, who was bent with an insufflator over the French doors. David Murphy had given up bullying him and gone away. “Did you find anything on the cliff face capable of crushing a skull?”

  He glanced up. “Just a few broken beer bottles.”

  “Keep them for Clarence. He’ll check them fo
r blood and tissue.”

  “Unlikely,” Clarence countered, “if the killah has a wit in his head.”

  “You think he tossed the murder weapon in the ocean?”

  “Or somebody else’s trash can, where we’d nevah think to look. There’re a lot of roll-away construction dumpsters in this neck of the woods.”

  He was right.

  “Then search them all.”

  Merry watched Clarence place the wingtips carefully in evidence bags. She could leave him to it; there were questions she needed to ask, and timetables she had to compile.

  Alice Abernathy had spent the July Fourth holiday in her preferred way. She had avoided town and its disruptive crowds entirely, heading out Milestone Road to the Old Sconset Golf Course. This was not the famous and breathtakingly expensive Sankaty Head, which abutted some of Old Sconset’s holes and boasted Silicon Valley potentates among its numerous offshore members. This was the public course that straggled through the cranberry bogs and moors, with its neat parking lot roped off in nautical fashion, its snug and welcoming clubhouse with a working fireplace and bar, surrounded in summer by native perennials. A branch of the Coffin family had owned the land and run Old Sconset for much of the past fifty years, when it was known locally as “Skinner’s,” but they had aged and found that their children, who lived off-island, were not interested in golf. The land was sold to the Land Bank, which happily leased the course to a rival facility, and preserved as pristine open space what might have been transformed into one hundred housing lots.

  Old Sconset offered only nine holes. It was a favorite of year-round islanders who loyally patronized the course in the off-season. Alice liked to play. But she was a terrible golfer, so she preferred to pull into the parking lot on days when nobody else would bother to stop at Old Sconset—like the Fourth of July—and wheel her bag behind her as she tackled the fairways alone.

  After she had hacked her way through the ninth hole—a par four, and her last—for a total score of seventy-two, Alice loaded her clubs in the back of her Toyota RAV4 and drove the short distance down Milestone Road to the center of Sconset.

  She could have ordered a drink at the golf course bar. But the Summer House was so lovely—so evocative of off-island wealth and glamorous lives—that she left her car on the grassy verge of Magnolia Avenue and walked up Ocean to the restaurant fronting the southern tip of the island and the Atlantic.

  There were only two other people at the bar—one black, one white. The black man was arrestingly handsome and enviably dressed. Like a model in a Hugo Boss ad, Alice thought. Whereas the other one was so ordinary—a classic Irish-American of the sandy-haired variety. She averted her eyes from the pair of them, aware that she was staring. She spent too much time alone. It was a problem she’d intended to tackle during the summer months, when the island was less isolated, but somehow her taste for solitude persisted.

  She ordered a French 75 and pulled out her cell phone. She pretended to scan texts while she listened to the two men.

  “We can’t just ask David to disclose the terms of the will immediately,” the sandy-haired one was saying. “But we’ve got to have a detailed plan to present when he does. After the funeral, probably. If he’s intending to sell the house now that Spence is gone . . .”

  “He can’t sell. We can’t let him,” the black man said tensely. “It’s important to you, El. A big part of our future. Where we raise our kids.”

  Alice almost choked on her drink, she was so startled. That beautiful creature? With the Irish-American?

  “Besides, you inherit half the house. Which means you have equal say in what happens to it.”

  “I can’t buy Dave out. He knows that,” the sandy-haired man said.

  “You can’t be sure. Only David knows how much Spence was worth; you could be in line to inherit millions. Just wait and see before you catastrophize.”

  “He wants market value. And you know it needs work.”

  “Shit,” the black man said. “Why can’t he give us a break?”

  “Because he’s settling scores.”

  “I wish I brought in more money, El. I wish I weren’t a constant drain on you.”

  “Don’t,” the sandy-haired man said. “Your work is more important than any inheritance.”

  From the corner of her eye, Alice watched the sandy-haired man press his partner’s wrist. Their fingers clasped briefly; she felt a searing jolt of pain. To have that kind of connection, that kind of unspoken love—

  “When he was still capable of planning,” the black man said, “he talked about a scholarship fund. For a homeless kid who was good at writing. The Spencer Murphy Award for Journalistic Excellence. I bet David has never heard about it.”

  Alice tipped back her drink and set her glass carefully on the bar.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “But I couldn’t help overhearing. Are you gentlemen saying that Spencer Murphy is dead?”

  The sandy-haired man stared at her. “Yes. He died this morning. Why?”

  Alice smiled at him tentatively and proffered her hand. “Alice Abernathy. I’m the lawyer who drafted his last will and testament a few weeks ago.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Merry found David Murphy sitting at the dining room table with a legal pad in front of him and a cell phone in his hand.

  “I’d like to ask a few questions, Mr. Murphy.”

  “I have one to ask you, first.” David set down his phone. “When are you people going to finish here, and leave us in peace? We’re grappling with a major family crisis, not to mention the demand for information from the journalism community. I have difficult and complex responses to formulate for the public. I can’t believe the insensitivity of the Nantucket Police, trailing yellow crime scene tape all over the house—after the interrogation you conducted yesterday drove my father to suicide. We’ve limited the official statement of his death to accident, of course, but with evidence vans and police SUVs in the driveway, rumors are bound to fly all over the island. You’ve even delayed the process of my father’s funeral, by refusing access to his clothes. I’ll be drafting and filing a complaint with your chief, Detective. Suicide is horrible enough for a family to bear; but your incompetence, callousness, and ineptitude have destroyed our privacy, too.”

  “People with privacy concerns rarely give their cell phone numbers to the press.” Merry pulled out a dining chair and sat down. She lifted her laptop onto the dining table and opened it deliberately. She had removed the sterile jumpsuit, gloves, booties, and shower cap she’d worn in Spencer Murphy’s bedroom. It occurred to her that she was dressed inappropriately—in red shorts and a navy blue and white T-shirt dusted with rhinestone stars. Her Fourth of July Parade wear. The dunk tank and face painting booths of the morning seemed to have existed in another country.

  David Murphy bared his teeth. “That’s exactly the kind of remark that will get you fired.”

  Merry glanced at him over her laptop screen. “We have reason to believe your father was murdered, Mr. Murphy, sometime between last night’s dinner and this morning’s discovery of his body on Steps Beach. Could you tell me, please, when you last saw him?”

  “Murdered?” he scoffed. “That’s absurd. Nobody would kill Dad.”

  “Somebody did. And the working assumption is that he or she is staying in this house.”

  “Impossible. Do you know what you’re saying?”

  “That your father was killed by one of his family? Yes, I’m aware of the implications.”

  David reached for his cell phone. “I’m calling the police station right now and getting somebody out here who knows what they’re doing. This is outrageous.”

  “Do you always browbeat people when you dislike what they say?”

  “Yes,” Kate Murphy interjected. “It’s his worst habit. It rarely works. But he never seems to learn from his failures.”
<
br />   She was leaning in the doorway behind her ex-husband. He turned his head and glared at her; but Kate did not drop her gaze. “I found blood in Spence’s closet,” she said.

  David set down his cell phone. “What?”

  “Or rather, the dog did. The police think it was from his head wound.”

  “But he died on the beach!”

  “No,” Meredith said, “it’s probable he died in his bedroom, from a deliberate blow that fractured his skull, and was later carried down to the beach.” Her eyes flicked to Kate Murphy’s face. “Would you be available for a few quick questions in private after I’ve talked to Mr. Murphy?”

  It was not really a request, and Kate understood it was also a temporary dismissal. “Of course,” she said, and walked swiftly away from the dining room toward the stairs. Merry waited until she heard the woman’s footsteps die away at the top of the steps. She had no desire to let Kate know her ex-husband was under suspicion.

  “Now, would you tell me, please, Mr. Murphy, what time you last saw your father?”

  “Around seven-forty-five,” David said. Disbelief still warred with anger in his face. “He’s been tiring early. Dinner seemed to exhaust him this weekend—too much conversation flying around the table that he couldn’t track. I’ve gotten in the habit of walking him to his room as soon as the plates are cleared.”

  “How did he seem last night?”

  David shrugged. “Confused. Tired. He asked the same question repeatedly—about some charity project he thought Kate and Andre were working on together. Which shows you how mixed-up he was. Andre’s the charity guy. Kate just lives off her windfall from the divorce.”

  “How long did you stay with him?”

  “About ten minutes at most. I helped him take off his shoes. Handed him his pajamas. Made sure he had a glass of water by his bed.”