Andre went in search of David. Merry released the dog and walked over to the main stairs. They were one of the oldest features of the house, straight and steeply pitched with no landing. Laney had said that she could see her father walking down the back hallway to Spence’s bedroom Sunday night from the steps. She hadn’t lied. The doorway to Spence’s office was visible from the third step when Merry mounted it. There, the back hallway made a sharp turn and David would have disappeared from view as Laney went up the stairs.
The dog was still at Merry’s feet, and with his head cocked, was inviting her to follow him to the second floor. She led Tav back to the doorway and rubbed his chest.
“Morning,” David Murphy said.
He had come from the kitchen. His expression was as shuttered as usual, no more nor less. If the provisions of the will had shocked or angered him, he had mastered his emotions. David would make a formidable adversary in court, Merry decided; he gave nothing away.
“I’d like to talk to you privately about the disposition of your father’s estate. Perhaps in his office?”
“Certainly.”
He led her to the small room and sat, as he had once before, in Spencer’s chair. She drew a side chair up to the desk and opened her laptop.
“I met with Alice Abernathy this morning. She explained your father’s will.”
“I see.”
“Could you tell me, please, in what way the present document differs from the will you previously drew up for him?”
“I’m not sure it matters. That document is now moot.”
“Unless you decide to fight the new one in court.” Merry smiled at him over her computer screen. “And given that a number of you in this household cannot have known that your father had a new will on the night he was killed, the previous document is very much a part of this murder investigation. People have been known to kill for an expected inheritance—whether they receive it or not.”
David sighed. “The will in my possession—the one I was prepared to execute—had very different provisions. There was no trust, no establishment of a foundation. My father’s assets and this house were to be divided equally between Elliot and me.”
“And the value of those assets?”
David hesitated. “Well, my valuation of the house is only a guess. Maybe fifteen million, solely because of the lot. The structure’s not in great shape. Anyone buying the place would raze or renovate it.”
Merry shuddered inwardly at the thought of the battles either would entail with the historic preservation board. “You planned to sell?”
“I did. Elliot wanted to keep the house—I told him he’d have to buy me out.”
Families, Merry reflected, had been destroyed for less.
“And the value of the rest of your father’s estate?”
“That fluctuates, according to market,” David said vaguely.
“Where are those assets at present, Mr. Murphy? Invested? In a bank?”
“Both.”
He was plainly uninterested in sharing financial information.
“Alice Abernathy suggested the estate could be worth as much as thirty million, altogether.”
“I’m not sure where she got that figure.”
“From Spencer, I would assume.”
“But as we know,” David said, “his mind was failing.”
“Which is one reason you had power of attorney,” Merry added helpfully. “So that you could handle his accounts. Pay his bills. Did you handle his investments, too?”
“Why do you feel compelled to ask, Detective? You’re investigating my father’s murder, not his financial health. He was an old man. He’d lived a long time on his laurels. He had made money, sure—but he’d spent it, too. The taxes on this house alone are killing. And he was hurt by the economic downturn in 2008.”
Merry clicked on her screen. She was looking for the email summary of the Murphy background checks Howie Seitz had sent her forty-five minutes ago, while she was happily eating at the Downyflake. “A lot of us suffered in the downturn. Let’s talk about Cape Wind.”
“I’m sorry?” David said, startled.
“Cape Wind. The private development company whose goal was to construct the first major wind farm off the United States, here in Nantucket Sound. It ran into some snags.”
“It did. What has that got to do with my father?”
“You tell me, David.” Merry looked at him blandly. “Most of the two billion in financing Cape Wind needed was from major underwriters—the Bank of Tokyo, a Danish pension fund, a Dutch private equity firm. You’re a securities lawyer. You’re not Cape Wind’s lawyer—but you knew people there.”
“I know many people in a professional capacity all over the country.”
“Exactly.” Merry nodded, as though he were a star pupil. “You organized a consortium—a group of twelve individual investors who pooled their funds. You sank a lot of that fund—something close to fifty million all told—into Cape Wind. You thought clean energy was the future and that wind power was inevitable in Massachusetts, where there are no fossil fuels to speak of and natural gas is expensive as hell. You wanted to be in on the ground floor. But then the downturn hit, didn’t it? Cape Wind stalled during the recession; clean energy was a nice idea, but less of a state or federal priority when people were out of work and tax dollars were tight. Your consortium lost money. Some of the investors were clients. Some were friends. One was your brother, Elliot.”
David didn’t speak. He was sitting very still in his chair.
“You must have been thrilled, a few years ago, when it looked like Cape Wind was turning around—that they’d get the green light to start construction.”
“I was,” he said.
“Is that when you stole money from your father, in the hope of earning back your investors’ stake?”
“I didn’t—it wasn’t—”
“Stealing,” Merry finished. “It was borrowing, right? Against your own future inheritance? And no one would even know, once the return from Cape Wind came in. Spence would live for years. You’d have time to put it all back. With interest.”
David cleared his throat. The sound was painful, as though years of emotion had hardened in his larynx. “It wasn’t borrowing. Or stealing. It was investing. I had the authority to invest Spence’s funds.”
“In something he would never have approved? Your daughter told me he hated the wind farm project. It was going to ruin his view. He wrote editorials going back for years, in the Inky Mirror. Am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong. Dad lived in the past. He wasn’t a business man.”
“Unlike you.”
David’s eyelids flickered. “It was totally unforeseen that the major energy companies would walk away from their contracts to buy Cape Wind’s product. Or that the legislature would kill the wind farm. Or bar Cape Wind from bidding on future projects. Nobody could have known.”
“Nobody could have known that Spence would draft a new will, either,” Merry said. “One more question, David. When you checked on your father after the fireworks Sunday night, was he dead or alive?”
Kate Murphy had parted from the others as they walked out of Alice Abernathy’s office. It was impossible to get into the car with David and Elliot; she would walk by herself back to the house. She needed time alone, to hug the copy of the trust documents Alice had given her close against her rain jacket. She had felt David’s rage flaring along the brick sidewalk behind her like a rippling flame. She could still see the abyss of shock that had opened in Elliot’s face as he’d listened to the lawyer’s calm explanation that he could expect nothing from his father. She could not combat either David’s anger or Elliot’s questions right now. Even the bewildered Laney must wait until later.
I should get on a plane for New York tonight, she thought. Get away from all of them before they
destroy me.
But for a few moments she wanted to glory in her surprise and giddiness entirely by herself. Only it would be nice, she thought, if she could share her joy with someone. Maybe Laney—but Laney would want to talk about David, and how impossible he would be to live with, now. She would be drowning in anxiety. Andre would be happy for her, of course, but it would be awkward to talk at Step Above. His attention would be on Elliot.
The image of Nora’s face as she had last seen her—raising a glass to toast them both in Brooklyn a few months before—rose for an instant in Kate’s mind. She closed her eyes and whispered to the shimmering ghost: Thank you.
She would definitely leave for New York tonight.
When she opened her eyes, she realized that she was entirely alone on Union Street and that the rain had increased. She hurried toward town, water splashing from the wet bricks into her flat shoes, the manila envelope full of papers shielded inside her jacket. By the time she reached Main Street her gray hair was dark and streaming with wet. She ducked hurriedly into the Fog Island Café and bought a large hot coffee.
Then she opened the file and began to study her inheritance.
When Merry walked out to her car, she found Laney sitting on the front steps, waiting for her.
“Any idea where your mom is?” she asked the girl.
“She wanted to walk home from the lawyer’s. She said she needed time alone.”
“I see.” Merry handed Laney her card. “Please give her this when she gets back, and ask her to call.”
Laney stood up and dusted the seat of her pants. There had never been a moment since they’d met, Merry thought, when the girl hadn’t looked worried. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure.”
“It’s about my mom, actually . . .”
Chapter Twenty-Two
When Andre walked through the door and saw Elliot’s face, he knew that he needed to get him out of the house as soon as possible. He grabbed the leash and snapped it onto MacTavish’s collar. “Come on,” he said. “The rain’s not that bad. You can talk while we walk.”
“He’ll get filthy,” Elliot said despairingly of the white dog.
“He likes baths.” Andre tossed Elliot his tennis windbreaker. Elliot zipped it without further protest.
They headed away from the beach, out Indian Avenue to Sherburne Turnpike, their chins tucked into their collars and their eyes on the ground. From there they could ramble with the dog, almost entirely undisturbed, among the backroads off Sherburne Way. Tav sauntered along happily, his hindquarters swinging, his nose thrust into every clump and tussock he encountered.
“Have you eaten anything today?” Andre asked.
Elliot shook his head.
“I brought some Scotch Irish cake back from the Downyflake.”
“I can’t believe you sought out the police,” Elliot muttered. “What were you thinking? Why did you do it? You know how biased they are against black men—”
“I thought I should tell them that I’d met Nora,” Andre said, “and got to know her in New York. Kate put me in touch with her.”
Elliot’s feet slowed. Andre kept walking, in pace with Tav.
“You met Nora?” Elliot repeated.
“Yes.”
“And never told me.”
“Yes,” Andre said. “I was hoping eventually to repair the relationship between you two. But she died before it could happen.”
He looked over his shoulder. Elliot was standing dead still on the road’s wet verge, the latest shock of the weekend all over his face. Andre walked deliberately back to him.
“I’m ready to talk about it now,” he said, “if you’re ready to listen.”
Clarence Strangerfield was used to being damp. He had grown up in Siasconset sixty years ago, when the island in general and particularly that village had been virtually deserted after August. His father had put him on a boat before he could walk, and had taught him to scallop in the Coatue bends during the November commercial season—Coatue still had shellfish in those days before Brown Tide—with a chain mesh dragging net off the boat’s stern. Sometimes young Clarence had hunted for bay scallops on his own, after school, wearing his father’s waders that came up to his armpits and carrying a long, stocking-hat-shaped scallop net. The boys—it was always boys, except for Nellie Wilson, who had four brothers and never had a choice in the matter—picked them up one by one in rubber-gloved hands. On those days they waded in Madaket, riding out to the western end of the island on their bicycles, even in the rain. Sometimes they took out their pocket knives and shucked the scallops while still standing in the water, eating them raw.
So a brief summer shower or three didn’t bother Clarence. Particularly in July, when the heat and mugginess were sometimes oppressive. What bothered Clarence was standing on his aching feet while Nat Coffin dumpster-dove through the roll-off construction waste bins that they were forced to search for Spencer Murphy’s instrument of death. They had been at it for most of the morning, the construction dumpsters being full of such things as scraps of wood flooring, scraps of insulation, scraps of drywall and demo’d tile, ancient toilets and rolls of carpeting, various local residents’ plastic and lavender-scented dog-poop bags they had hurled into the dumpsters while walking at night, other people’s picture frames and old cartons and pizza boxes and paint cans—myriad, mostly empty, paint cans, which were technically toxic waste required to be recycled—tossed opportunistically into the dumpsters. The construction bins were the standard size generally in use on Nantucket—fifteen cubic yards. But they were microcosms of disposable American culture, Clarence thought, and of the quiet rebellion of island residents—who were so restricted in their garbage disposal that tossing a contraband item in any available receptacle was a secret pleasure.
Nantucket had faced a choice in the late ’90s: organize around the stink of the town dump, which was noxious and alienating residents within a five-mile radius of its location along Madaket Road; or pay through the nose to ship all of the island’s garbage—all of its garbage!—across the Sound to Cape Cod. The Selectmen had opted, in typical New England fashion, to support the environment and the future. Now 91 percent of the island’s waste was recycled, processed as compost in the anaerobic digester, or buried in a strictly monitored landfill. But that meant everyone—resident and summer tourist alike—had to tediously separate their garbage into three distinct bins: Compost, Recyclables, and Landfill. It drove many Nantucketers nuts. Particularly the ones who flew in to rent someone else’s house for two weeks each year, and saw no reason to get with the program.
“Hey, Clare,” Nat Coffin said.
He was braced on a pile of refuse inside the final construction roll-off they’d targeted. It was the largest they’d dealt with, about forty cubic yards, Clarence guessed. It was positioned in front of a massive foundation cut into the sand above Steps Beach, the whole lot already terraced for multiple levels of dwelling, the native vegetation stripped and the soil nothing more than a wet and sandy slash on the face of the cliff. The dumpster sat right near the conjunction of Lincoln Ave and Lincoln Circle, closer to town than Step Above.
“Ayeh?” Clarence said.
Nat lifted a garden shovel in his latex-gloved hands. Clarence reached for it gingerly with his. The shovel was spade-shaped, not square-edged, and the apex of the tip was stained rusty brown. Clarence squinted and examined it narrowly. There were still a few silver hairs stuck to the steel.
“Well, I’ll be,” he said.
“Wait,” Nat cautioned. “There’s more.”
And, grunting, lifted an ancient garden wheelbarrow over the dumpster’s rim.
“I was trying to spare you pain,” Andre concluded, as the two of them walked back up Indian Avenue toward Lincoln Circle. “You earned a lot of scars in this family. However much you loved Barbara, your relationship was always co
mplicated. Spence was your hero. I couldn’t let Nora destroy that. If I could persuade her not to publish . . . to channel her anger into good somehow . . . the foundation seemed ideal.”
“But the house,” Elliot attempted.
“I thought maybe we could put in an offer. Buy it from the trust.” He hadn’t told Elliot that he’d expected to be running it. That was a private wound Elliot didn’t need to hear right now. “We still could. Maybe Kate’ll cut us a better deal than David ever would.”
Elliot lifted his shoulders despairingly. “Nothing seems worth it anymore, with Spence dead. Everything’s over.”
“Even us?”
They reached Lincoln Circle. Tav started to pull toward Step Above’s drive. But Andre came to a halt on the circle’s grass oval. There was a question he needed to ask before they entered the claustrophobic world of Step Above.
“Can you forgive me, El? For not telling you about Nora?”
Elliot looked at him, aghast. “After all you’ve done for me? Of course. You were just trying to protect me, Dre. You always do. You love me better than anyone in the world. I wish Dad had understood that.”
He reached for Andre. The two men embraced, the dog sitting at their feet.
It was as he held Elliot that Andre saw the two men in the distance, lifting the wheelbarrow out of the roll-off dumpster.
Kate Murphy had prolonged her time in town after her first cup of coffee at Fog Island. She had mastered the contents of the trust documents and had begun to make notes on a pad she kept in her substantial purse. There were so many tasks to consider, to list, to organize. She would first need a timetable for securing the foundation’s assets; that would depend entirely on the speed of probate court and how well David, as executor, cooperated with the process. She would have to file the necessary forms to secure federal tax-exempt status. Consider the location of her offices—the number of staff she would need—how large her board should be and whom she should request to sit on it. She ran through various names in her mind, aware that she had no expertise in refugee-related issues and that she would need advice. Should the foundation concentrate on women and children—reflecting Nora’s experience and legacy? Or should it be gender-neutral? Should it consider assistance for any regions of the world, or concentrate on the worst affected by war? Or were those areas already flooded with aid groups? Maybe she should concentrate on areas the world seemed to overlook. Maybe . . .
Death of a Wharf Rat Page 19