She laughed out loud. “Now he calls me Ma’m! That’s a good sign.” She levered herself up and extended her arm across the cluttered desktop. He stood and shook her hand. “You go do what I say.”
“I will.” Her hand was bigger than his, warm and soft, but her grip made him wince. “Thank you.”
They stood for another second then she tilted her head at the door. “Time’s wasting, Mr. Sprockett.”
He left her office knowing his plan—his last resort. He was bewildered by how fast he had gotten there. It should take longer to reach the end. Better to stop thinking about it. Thinking wasn’t going to change things one iota. Iota—the ninth letter in the Greek alphabet, which no one ever noticed, the smallest letter, too, synonymous with the insignificant since Biblical times, the perfect term for Arnold himself.
Nothing had ever made him feel quite as insignificant as the prospect of asking Jackson Blum for money, but there was nowhere else to go now, and no one else to ask. Blum was Althea Rose McCandless’ place and person, the dreaded destination, the doomed request. Or perhaps not doomed after all. That was Althea’s real message. He decided to take a whiff of hope from her broad serious face and her X-ray smile, breathe in some optimism, let it fill up his chest like the icy Boston air rushing along Francis Street after the overheated lobby.
Yes, he was insignificant. But that could be a good thing! If he made himself insignificant enough, Blum might have mercy. Blum might help him.
After all, it was almost Christmas.
Chapter Eight
Inspector Claus
I was worried when I moved to the island from Los Angeles that life on Nantucket would be uneventful to the point of tedium. Not my most astute prediction. I’d faced killers and pornographers, drug dealers and arsonists. I’d saved the Boston Pops concert from a bombing and watched a seventy-million-dollar mega yacht sink without a trace.
By now I was just hoping for a respite. No such luck.
But I was juggling things pretty well until the armed robbery.
I started the day at the station, running another set of fingerprints. The Whalers’ quarterback, Dave Prescott, had been arrested the year before, shoplifting a sweater from Murray’s Toggery Shop. When we brought him in he had an ounce of weed in his pocket, along with some rolling papers. It was early November, the height of the football season and the school swept down on us like an old-fashioned New England blizzard, and, like a blizzard, it covered everything up and slowed everything down. Coach Alan Brock—the music teacher’s husband—made it clear to the Selectmen, who made it clear to me, that Dave Prescott was not going to be prosecuted. The drugs disappeared and Murray’s dropped the charges.
The Whalers didn’t have a particularly deep bench, and the backup QB hadn’t thrown a pass since Pop Warner. That gave Dave Prescott something like diplomatic immunity—a minor envoy from the sovereign nation of Big Time Sports, able to park where he liked and litter with impunity. If Prescott parlayed his scholarship to Notre Dame into a Heisman Trophy and a slot in the NFL, Nantucket would have another star to brag about. Meanwhile, the Selectmen, the school, Prescott’s parents, and the NPD were busily working together to assemble a classic spoiled-brat turbo jock who would no doubt assume cheating on a poetry exam was his right and privilege.
He had walked away from the incident at Murray’s clean, but we did get his fingerprints. I ran them against the test answer sheet.
No match.
Well, that made sense. He’d have someone else do the dirty work. But who? I called the school and got the roll-call list for Tim’s poetry class. One name stood out from the list of fifteen kids: Hector Cruz. I hasten to add this had nothing to do with his Hispanic name. I respected those kids. They had been dragged here from Mexico or Ecuador, dumped into an alien world, with both parents working—most of them had two or even three jobs, putting out a lot more energy and ingenuity than their complacent local competition. I remembered sitting at Lola Burger one summer afternoon, having lunch with Mike Henderson, whose painting contracting business was struggling against the low bids and fierce industry of the newcomers. As we watched the rotary traffic, we saw two Hispanic guys on bikes, each one holding one end of a forty-foot extension ladder.
No truck? No problem.
“See?” Mike said. “I can’t compete with that.”
The kids were on their own a lot of the time—no tutors, no nannies. Thank God for the Boys & Girls Club. But they did all right. On top of everything else, most of them were bilingual, which was more than I could say for my own children—or myself. Hector Cruz was probably reading Frederico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda in the original.
None of that mattered to me. What mattered to me was football. Hector was on the Whalers—a tight end who Jane Stiles had pointed out to me at one of the home games. I had never cared much for football until I met Jane, but she loved it, any form of it—pro football, college football, arena football, high school football…she even played the Madden video game and was getting Tim hooked on it.
She had won me over to the NFL, but Whalers games remained a duty I tried to shirk. I always made sure to have a fully charged Kindle with me in the stands, but on this occasion, Jane had roused me from my book.
“He’s totally free! He’s in the clear! Are you blind? There’s no coverage on that kid! What the hell? You throw a screen pass? Air it out! HE’S IN THE END ZONE! Jesus, Henry. What the hell is going on out there?”
What was going on? A tight end named Hector Cruz was never getting the football.
“He hasn’t had a touch since the West Bridgewater game.”
He was a stocky kid, with a crew cut and big ears. He was deceptively fast, though, running clean routes and usually twisting free, waving for a pass that never came.
He was the most likely accomplice in Tim’s poetry class. A kid like that would do almost anything to get on the quarterback’s good side.
I e-mailed Bissell to send me a picture of Hector and when I opened the attachment a few minutes later I recognized him instantly.
This was the boy who had approached Carrie in the school lobby and then chickened out. He fit the Hispanic profile in one way, at least: he probably came to the country before the age of twelve, so no fingerprints. I checked with INS. The Cruz family paperwork dated from 2007. He would have been eleven when they arrived—just under the wire.
I had a hunch I’d find his fingerprints on that tin of chocolates from Carrie’s mystery admirer. If they matched the prints on the test sheet, I’d be closer to my answer. Not quite there, though—I’d still need a verifiable print for Hector, and he was nowhere in the system.
As a cop you were often in this position: knowing something you couldn’t quite prove. In a big city with a grown-up who had committed a real crime, the next step would be obvious—take what I had and sweat a confession out of him. But this was a small-town kid and a minor infraction. The situation called for a more delicate touch.
How to get Hector’s prints? That was the question. An idea occurred to me but I didn’t have time to act on it.
I had a Santa suit to put on.
***
Millie Graham was walking up Blum’s driveway when I arrived that morning. She ran a crew of house-cleaners, but Blum insisted she clean his mansion herself. It was a compliment and an insult at once, praising her, but snubbing her girls and increasing her workload. Blowing him off wasn’t an option. As Millie often pointed out, she didn’t have enough customers to pick and choose.
I had been friends with the Graham family since I first arrived on the island, but the affection between us had been clouded lately by the death of Millie’s son, Oscar. I had attended the “nine night” memorial service and eventually solved the boy’s murder, but none of that had brought us the mythical “closure” we had been taught to expect. I could have let the man behind Oscar’s death drown, and I s
uspect Millie wished I had. It wouldn’t have helped, though. I would always be a bitter reminder of her darkest days.
Still, she managed a smile this morning. “Hey, there, Chief. Lovely weather.”
“For April! But this is December.”
“You’re going to be sweating in that Santa suit.”
“Tell me about it.”
“At least you don’t have to come back here and clean this place twice in two days!”
We stopped at the front door while she pulled her keys out of her purse. “You were here yesterday?”
“Yeah, but I had to spend all my time cleaning up that boy’s room. Looked like two dogs been fighting in there. But I know it was them boys, though. I spent three hours cleaning the bathroom, scrubbing blood out of the grout with a toothbrush! I tell you, Chief, I never seen such a mess. He lets those kids run wild.”
I went on-point, a bird hound set to spring when he hears the goose splash down. “Blood? Really?”
“They were just roughhousing and it got out of hand. That’s what Max told me.”
“Roughhousing with who?”
“You know, that gang of his, Dave Prescott and the others. That Dave! Sylvester calls him the Boy King of Nantucket. Strutting around like he does. Max takes him in hand, though. Most of the time.”
“So…they got into a fight?”
“That they did. And I’ll bet you diamonds to dog shit it was about girls or money.”
I laughed. “Diamonds to dog shit? I thought it was dollars to donuts.”
“Well, Chief, you got to adapt. This is Nantucket. We got five jewelry stores and nobody minds the leash laws.”
She let us in. The house had a rumpled look to it, cups and plates and a small saucepan piled in the kitchen sink, pillows and throw blankets from the couch on the living room floor, a coat slumped in a pile below its hook in the front hall. I hung up the coat as Millie tidied the living room. I was checking out the kitchen sink when Blum came downstairs, his arms full of a plastic-draped Santa suit. He’d had it dry-cleaned—hopefully he’d gotten the smell of Homer’s cigarettes out of the fabric.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said by way of greeting.
I gave him a hearty grin, to shame his absurd distemper. “Merry Christmas!”
“Spare me.”
I wanted to get upstairs. But how? Perhaps I could play on his home pride. “Do we have time for a quick tour?’ I asked. “I’d love to see the house.”
“Especially Max’s room,” Millie said. She winked at me, but Blum missed it.
“Why not? Max needs to get his ass out of bed, anyway. Oh, and Millie? We’ve talked about this before. Do not leave the vacuum cleaner handle leaning against the wall again. Not if you want to keep cleaning my house. I expect that kind of thing from your people, but not from you.” She started to speak, but he raised a hand to cut her off. ‘You know better than that.”
Chastised, Millie scurried away. Blum turned back to me. “Come on, time is money.”
“Is it, though? Wouldn’t everyone be rich if that were true? We all have the same twenty-four hours every day.”
“But most people waste them, Chief. They’re not productive. They’re lazy. I make money every second of every day.”
“Your investments do, you mean. Your money has an excellent work-ethic. How about you?”
“Look around you. I do fine.”
He led me upstairs. Max was in the shower, but if I knew Millie there’d be no evidence of his brawl left between the tiles. His room looked like he’d been tearing it up in his sleep—clothes scattered, bedding twisted, dirty plates piled in the corner, an ashtray full of brown resinated nubbins of rolling paper—roaches. Max had been doing a lot of weed, and the room smelled suspiciously floral. It seemed like a pointless subterfuge if you weren’t willing to empty your ashtrays. I shook my head: Millie worked mornings, so this mess represented a single afternoon and evening of teenage entropy. I thought of Carrie and the chaos she left in her wake. It was like living with a cyclone.
A pair of bowls anchored the cluttered desk, one full of coins, the other one heaped with Max’s collection of marbles. I felt a quick spark of connection—I had been obsessed with marbles as a kid, and launched an apocalyptic fight with my mother (the worst one of my childhood) when she threw them out as if they were trash just before my fifteenth birthday. Most of them were used (some quite well used) with the predictable moons, chips, and flakes. But I had some real treasures, too, including a Christensen Agate Banded Transparent that someone probably wound up selling for close to a thousand dollars, at least if New York City trash collectors took the active interest in their merchandise that Sam Trikilis did.
I glanced over Max’s collection—nothing special: some pretty core swirls and branded opaques, a Lutz or two, and a funny little Sulfide with an off-center whale floating inside—nothing mint or even near-mint. I was turning away from the bowl when a tiny alarm went off in the back of my mind, like the beep of a low battery fire alarm through a closed door. What’s wrong with this picture?
“Chief? You want to take a look at the master bedroom? We just installed a whirlpool tub in the bath.”
“One second.”
I put my back to Blum, reached over to the bowl and plucked the piece I wanted from the bowl. If I saw it, Max would too. It was a small miracle that he hadn’t noticed anything yet. Chalk it up to all those doobies.
Blum stepped toward me. “Chief?”
“Let’s go,” I said. “You’re right. We’re running late. Time is money.”
I took the Santa suit from him, thinking that Blum’s “time is money” axiom probably didn’t carry much weight at the North Pole, where a fat guy with perversely low-tech transportation managed to deliver billions of presents on five continents in one night. Santa had time management figured out.
***
This was the setup. A drive out to Wauwinet, followed by fifteen-minute boat ride down the length of the harbor back to town. I disembarked and walked from the town pier to Blum’s with a crowd of kids and their harried parents behind me. Blum had the store arranged with a huge chair draped in red silk and fake white fur. The suit was cumbersome and the fake beard was itchy, but the walk was fun.
Listening to the toy requests tamped my mood down a little. Girls wanted Frozen merchandise—dolls and ice castles—despite the movie being more than two years old. Some kids wanted toy smartwatches; the more ambitious ones requested the real thing, along with ominous-sounding toy drones and quadricopters. A lot of grown-ups on the island had real drones, and Blum was one of them. What else? Some kids still wanted LEGOs and playmobils, but a shocking number asked for iPhones and tablet computers.
“We don’t make those at the North Pole,” I informed one particularly irritating ten-year-old girl wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket over a striped dress with matching leather bows.
“So do you, like, outsource them, or what?” she said.
I sighed. “Right. The elves can only do so much.”
I’d been working for about two hours, and the line was still out the door, when Barnaby Toll rushed in and pushed his way to my chair.
“We got an emergency, Chief,” he whispered. “They’re robbing On Island Gas and they took two hostages.”
“What?”
“Charlie Boyce is on the scene, but he’s never had to deal with this kind of stuff. He’s scared.”
I thought for a second. “Okay. You’re taking over here.”
“Wait—what? No, are you kidding? I can’t—”
“Come into the back with me, you can get changed.”
“But, I can’t—I don’t know—How am I—? What are you supposed to do?”
“Just ask the kids what they want and tell them to be good. For goodness sake. I’m not handling hostage negotiations in a Santa s
uit. Come on.” I stood up. “Hold on, everybody. There’s going to be a short delay.”
We left the grumbling behind us and dodged into the stockroom where I had left my clothes. We changed quickly. It was a relief to disentangle myself from the folds of bulky fabric. The suit that had been too big on me looked like a red tent on Barney, but that was okay. All he had to do was make room on his lap and promise every kid who climbed up there anything they wanted. I knew he had political aspirations—he often talked about running for Selectman.
This would be good practice.
Chapter Nine
Hostage Negotiation
My cell phone went off as I drove toward mid-island—Dan Taylor calling me. “I want total security on this,” the Head Selectman was shouting when I touched the steering wheel to open the bluetooth line. It was as if I’d caught him in mid-argument. He didn’t even need me to join in anymore. After seven years, he knew my side of every argument. “Radio silence, do you understand me, Kennis? News blackout. Minimal backup, no sirens. No chatter on the police band. You send six cars to a bar fight. Not today! This isn’t happening. Not in my town. Not on the busiest shopping day of the year.”
I didn’t have time to parse that outburst—to mention that a stickup at On Island Gas, across the street from the busiest and most profitable Stop&Shop supermarket on the Eastern Seaboard (almost doubled in size after a year-long renovation) with a parking lot full of people with smartphone cameras, would be impossible to keep secret. The “police band chatter” horse had left the barn, and—FYI—I never sent more than three cars to break up a bar fight.
Also, Nantucket wasn’t his town. Not yet.
There were three cruisers parked around the pumps when I pulled in, past the crowd of gawkers, all of them hoping for a selfie with the gas bandits, no doubt. I wondered how the infinitely calibrated sarcasm of Carrie’s cool group might respond to a posting like that. “Sweet! Your sweater matches his gun! Totes Bonnie and Clyde LOL.”
The official presence at the crime scene: A patrol car with officers Randy Ray and Bob Coffin leaning against the hood and my chief detective, Charlie Boyce, using his own ride, a mud-spattered Jeep wrangler. The last car, a perfectly maintained canary yellow nineties vintage Opel Manta, belonged to my new junior investigator, Karen Gifford. The daughter of a wealthy island family, she had surprised them all by choosing law enforcement as her career. She was smart and eager and felt she had a lot to prove—a good combination, from my point of view.
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