Nantucket Red Tickets

by Steven Axelrod

  This was taking too long. “So, no Santa this year?”

  “I’d scare the kids away.”

  “Any suggestion for a replacement?”

  He grinned. “You, Chief. You’d be perfect.”

  He was right. I grabbed the suit on my way out.

  Chapter Four

  HackAck

  My phone “Me and Julio”ed as I walked out of the church. I draped the cumbersome red suit over one shoulder, reached into my pocket and silenced the guitars.“Kennis.”

  “Chief, it’s Shep Rollins. I have some news for you. Can we meet somewhere?”

  “I’m on my way back to the station.”

  “Do they serve lattes there?”

  I had to smile. “Not yet.”

  “How about the Handlebar Café—it has all five-star Yelp ratings.”

  “Five minutes.”

  I poked the end-call, slipped the phone back into my pocket, and manhandled the suit into the backseat of my cruiser—silly hat, ridiculous white beard, fur-trimmed red boots, and all. Wearing that costume for a long morning in Blum’s overheated store was a grim prospect. But the kids might be fun.

  Rollins had two lattes in front of him when I walked into the little coffee shop. With its scattered bookshelves and low tables, groups chatting on the low-slung armchairs and kids working on laptops, it always reminded me of a student lounge at Oberlin College. All it needed was a ride-board and an extracurricular sign-up sheet.

  I sat down. “How’s your drink?”

  He grinned. “Perfect. That little blonde is the best barista in the world and I watched her teaching the Eastern European girl how to add the steamed milk. Which is not easy. You have to learn how to do stuff, you know? Everything is a skill. People don’t realize that.”

  I lifted my latte; there was a perfect milky fern laid over the darker foam.

  Rollins saw me notice. “Nice, huh? I got a heart.”

  I shrugged. “The really good baristas do portraits. But it costs extra.”

  He took the joke seriously. I suspected he did that a lot. “I’d pay for it. A work of art created to be destroyed. Like those Renaissance painters who made frescoes on the unprimed walls. They knew the pictures wouldn’t last. They just wanted to do the work.”

  “Like you.”

  “I enjoy the process. It’s interesting. Take your skeleton, for instance. I dug out some of the fillings—all amalgam…silver fillings, you’d call them, though the main ingredient is mercury. Nothing but mercury can actually bind the copper, tin, and silver together into a strong enough filling to last. And they do. They’re still recommended for the back teeth, where people grind the molars together. The new resin composites are stronger, but that’s just in the last ten years or so. So, I thought—no news here. You know, standard old-school dentistry and good solid workmanship. Could be anyone. Then I removed the amalgam and I saw the scoring around and inside the tooth. They used an erbium YAG laser to ablate the caries and modify the enamel—sorry, to get rid of the decay and prep the tooth for the filling. The laser etching is like a footprint. Can’t miss it—like you guys could tell the brand of sneaker some perp was wearing by the tread pattern. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, probably if the ground was soft, but I’m not sure what—”

  “What I’m saying is they didn’t start using the erbium laser until 1997. So now you have a cutoff date. This guy was killed within the last twenty years.”

  “So, he’s not the missing link.”

  “Sorry, Professor. They found that guy last year in a cave outside Johannesburg, ‘Homo naledi’. Check it out. Apparently they buried their dead…and did a better job than your killer!”

  I drained my coffee. It was tepid, but sipping hot coffee would have just slowed me down. I wanted to get moving. “This is great stuff, Shep.”

  “And it was a winter murder. Remember I told you about the dark cementum?”

  “Right.” I was sure I had jotted it down in a note somewhere. “So, is that it?”

  “Well…for hard evidence. But the combination of the laser work and the amalgam makes me think this guy was an early-adapter, an outlier.”

  “A geek.”

  Rollins laughed. “Exactly! Someone like me.”

  I drained the last of my coffee and stood. “Thanks. You’ve been a real help.”

  “No problem. I’m going to do the dental X-rays myself. I’ve gotten attached to this guy.”

  We shook hands. “Let me know if you find anything interesting.”

  He grinned. “I always find something interesting.”

  I pulled out my phone as I left the Handlebar Café, thinking—the skeleton dates from twenty years ago, who can tell me about twenty years ago? I called the station. Barnaby Toll picked up, after a while.

  “Nantucket Police. Can I help you?”

  “You let the phone ring five times, Barney. I need you to pick up on the second ring. It shows respect.”

  “I…uh, okay. Yes, sir. I was in the bathroom.”

  “No, you weren’t. You were texting someone.” The guilty silence told me I was right. “Leave the cell phone in your locker, Barney. Anyone who wants to call you can wait a couple of hours.”

  “What if there’s an emergency?”

  “They can reach you on the department landline.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you get me Kyle Donnelly?” He was the detective on watch that morning, and just about to head out. He liked working the graveyard shift but he’d be eager to get home, and not happy about one more assignment before he could climb into bed.

  “Quiet night?” I asked when he came on the line.

  “Couple a DUIs, fight at the Box, the usual.”

  “Can you get me Ted McGrady’s contact information?”

  “Ted McGrady?”

  “He was the chief before me.”

  “You hired me. I never met the guy.”

  “But we must send his pension checks somewhere.”

  “That’s handled out of Boston by the State of Mass.”

  I blew out a breath. “He lives in Maine, somewhere. Can you run a search on him?”

  “Right now?”

  Then the obvious solution hit me. “Put Haden on the line.”

  Haden Krakauer was my assistant chief. He’d lived on the island all his life, joined the NPD at twenty, and he’d been McGrady’s assistant chief for more than a decade before I showed up. A lot of people thought he should have gotten the top job when the old man retired. Haden wasn’t one of them.

  “Camden, Maine,” Haden said when he picked up the phone. “I’d give you his e-mail but McGrady doesn’t do e-mail. No Facebook page. Which is crazy for a guy doing PI work. I’ll text you his number. He doesn’t text, either, by the way. He told me once, he likes his text ink on paper.”

  “I know how he feels.”

  “So what’s this about?”

  “The skeleton. The murder happened in the last twenty years.”

  “Rollins figure that out?”

  “Yeah.”

  Haden chuckled. “You big-city boys.”

  “Not me. Not anymore.”

  “Whatever you say, Chief. But McGrady’s the right guy to talk to. He never forgets a case. One time we were following someone on Milestone Road—pulled them over for erratic driving, turns out they were totally bombed at one in the afternoon. Just before we hit the flashers, Ted said, ‘Weird—that license plate number is exactly the same as this drug dealer I pulled over in the city when I was still a rookie. Huge bust. Must have been ten pounds of coke in the trunk. Of course, those were Jersey plates.’ How he kept all that crap in head, I’ll never know.”

  “He was old school.”

  I disconnected, climbed into my cruiser, and drove out to one of my favorite par
king spots—across from the old windmill, beside a miraculously undeveloped meadow at the top of South Mill Street. I pulled in next to the split-rail fence, opened my texts, scrolled to Haden’s text of McGrady’s number, and tapped it.

  “McGrady Investigations. We set things right.”

  “Were you sitting on it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what my family always said when someone an answered the phone too fast.”

  “Kennis?”

  I wasn’t surprised that he recognized my voice. McGrady didn’t miss much. He had noticed the nimbus of pale skin around my wristwatch at my swearing-in—and said “You can wear the Rolex again, Kennis. Put that Timex in the drawer. You’re the police chief now.”

  He had instantly recognized that pale ghost of a more impressive predecessor. It turned out to be a good metaphor—for years, taking over the NPD after his storied reign, I felt like an inadequate cheaper replacement, myself.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “You still out on the Rock? Bet you are. Call out of the blue like this, I’d say you were looking to rummage around in the archives.”

  “That’s what you call your memory?”

  “That’s what my wife calls my memory. As in, Oh God, here we go, another trip through the archives. Always looking ahead, that old girl. I’m a little more nostalgic. But she spent thirty years trying to get us up here. Terrified I’ll decide to go back.”

  “Any chance of that?”

  “We get the Inky every week, Kennis. I keep up with developments.”

  “So you’re not tempted.”

  “It’s not the place it was, even when you got there. I’ve been following your career. Seems like you have more crime in the average month than we had in a decade. The only thing that doesn’t change is the style. In my time they spend five million dollars building a swimming pool and make it six inches too short for competition. Nowadays they paint the bottom half of the Unitarian Church, spend eighty thousand dollars putting up a staging—and don’t bother to paint the top half. Eighty thousand dollars for a two-tone church.”

  “Don’t tell me you left the island to get away from human stupidity.”

  He chuckled. “Can’t be done, son.”

  That was one of McGrady’s catch phrases back in the day, his standard response, whether it was to an unlicensed driver with a lapsed registration asking not to be handcuffed for the ride to the station, or a teenager in jail overnight for a marijuana bust requesting a box of Downyflake donuts for the munchies.

  “So, was it just your wife wanting to get away?”

  “Naah, we owned some property up here. When we sold our crappy little house on Helens Drive, we built this place—ten thousand square feet and lots of extra bedrooms for the grandkids. Plus you can’t beat the view of Penobscot Bay.”

  “It’s a little cold for swimming, though.”

  “Like I ever had time to go to the beach! That’s the real reason I quit. I was working too hard.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “But you love it. And I didn’t any more. Still paying attention?”

  “Trying to.”

  “So what’s your problem this morning? I know you didn’t call to chat about real estate.”

  I described excavating the skeleton in Madaket, and laid out the initial moves we’d made to identify it—the bone histology, tooth analysis, and the laborious sifting through twenty-year-old dental records, on- and off-island. “What I’m looking for now is some anecdotal evidence. Something happened twenty years ago and it wound up with a body in a shallow grave. Does any of that jog your memory?”

  After a few moments of silence, McGrady said, “Well, there was the body that went missing from the funeral home. That was memorable.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It was Billy Delavane’s Uncle Brandon. Crazy old drunk. Jacked so many deer out of season he was running a goddamn butcher shop out of his house—big walk-in freezer, hooks for the carcasses, you name it. I would have arrested him but he made the best venison sausage I ever ate. Anyway, he died and the burial plans kicked off a classic family feud. See, his wife was a devout Catholic. She wanted him to have a proper burial—the wake, the funeral liturgy, the Rite of Committal, the whole nine yards. That didn’t sit right with the Delavanes. They knew he was a heathen who wanted to be buried in the Nantucket dirt, no ceremony, just some good stories and a bottle of Bushmills Twenty-one for his family, a few old friends. That meant stealing the body, and somebody did just that. Broke the lock on the bulkhead door, in and out, no witnesses, the night before the open-casket viewing. Everybody figured it was Ed Delavane, but he and Billy alibied each other and Ed’s girlfriend backed them up. Case never went anywhere, but the wife sued the funeral home. The Delavanes didn’t participate in the suit, which I thought was interesting.

  “Ed said, ‘It worked out fine for Brandon.’ The crime was a misdemeanor in the state of Mass at that point, anyway, and the funeral home had plenty of evidence for the theft. I seem to recall they settled out of court, and the widow moved away. Betsy something. She had run for Selectwoman five or six times over the years, trying to expand the dry Sunday laws to restaurants. That was her whole platform—prohibition! My feeling was, good riddance. Anyway, if it really is old Brandon Delavane out there in Madaket, you might find traces of formaldehyde in the dirt. They were pretty far along prepping him at the funeral home—the body was snatched the day before the open-casket showing. Get a soil sample and keep me posted.”

  I hung up and sent Haden’s nephew, Byron Lovell, to dig up a soil sample. It was worth a try.

  I had another mystery waiting for me when I went to pick up the kids at school. Tim was in trouble.

  “You have to go to Bissell’s office,” he said to me as the crowds of newly liberated teenagers pushed past us into the parking lot.

  One of the kids, a handsome Hispanic boy of fifteen or sixteen, stopped for a second against the rush of bodies like a tree in a landslide. He was staring at Caroline as she rolled toward me, in the middle of a crowd of her friends. The boy’s wingman whispered something to him and pushed him. The group of chattering, texting girls reached him.

  This was his moment.

  I watched the scene, pinned and transported, remembering my own high school mortifications. The boy stepped forward, reached a hand out to touch Caroline’s shoulder as she saw me and let the pack of girls move away. The boy lost his nerve and fled, running down the less crowded hallway past the glass walls of the basketball court, cutting and juking past the occasional student or teacher like he was running a kickoff back through the Boston Latin secondary.

  He was a natural sprinter. He looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him.

  “Dad!” Tim shouted. “Hello! You have to see Bissell. Right now.”

  I turned to him, trying to catch up. “What?”

  “He cheated on his English midterm,” Caroline announced.

  He spun on her. “I did not!”

  “His cross-grade poetry class.”

  “Dad—”

  “Go to the car and wait for me. Both of you.”

  I stalked through the big glass doors to the wide main lobby and into the school offices. I nodded to Bissell’s secretary, Alice Damaso, and she gave me a helpless shrug that said, “I deal with this crap every day.” I returned the shrug on my way past.

  Bissell perched behind his desk, trim and pinched, with his usual blazer and bow tie. His hair looked more real than the last time I saw him; maybe he had finally splurged on implants.

  “What’s going on?”

  He looked up from some paperwork, set his Montblanc pen aside. “Why don’t you tell me, Chief Kennis?”

  “You’re accusing my son of cheating. That’s all I know. Well, that’s not quite all. I also know he needs to cheat on a poe
try exam about as much as you needed to plagiarize your last article in Pedagogy Review. I mean—who else would write a polemic about bringing back corporal punishment?”

  “You read that?”

  “I read everything that might affect my children.”

  “Then you know my philosophy. Spare the rod, spoil the child. It’s in the Bible.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They need better fact-checkers at Pedagogy Review. That’s a quote from Samuel Butler. A poem called “Hudibras.” I think you could relate. It’s about a pompous blowhard who turns out to be a hypocrite and a clown. And whatever the nuns who rapped your knuckles with their rulers might have told you, the poem has nothing to do with beating school children into submission. Hudibras’ girlfriend wants him to prove his love by flagellating himself. Here’s the quote. Hold on.” I had memorized the poem a long time ago. I couldn’t remember the bulk of it anymore, but the key stanza had always stuck in my mind. I recited:

  If matrimony and hanging go

  By dest’ny, why not whipping too?

  What med’cine else can cure the fits

  Of lovers when they lose their wits?

  Love is a boy by poets stil’d;

  Then spare the rod and spoil the child.

  Bissel pursed his lips so hard his eyes squeezed shut. “Well, Chief. That’s very impressive. All the more tragic then, that your son not only fails to share your love and knowledge of poetry, but feels he can cheat with impunity to hide his ignorance.”

  “I guess. Except that didn’t happen.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “I know my son.”

  He sighed. “If I had silver dollar for every deluded parent who has stood in my office making that plea…well, realistically, I could probably afford…what? Let me see. The down payment on a nice little bungalow on the Cape somewhere? Nantucket would still be out of my price range.”

  “You’re saying I’m deluded?”

  “I’m saying that you suffer from one of the two most common delusions of our benighted species. We believe our children are faultless. And that we are the only good drivers on the road. But with all the traffic accidents and miscreant children out there, someone has to be mistaken.”