Nantucket Red Tickets

by Steven Axelrod

  The car that caught my eye had nothing to do with the police. It was parked behind the new Cumberland Farms, next to the filling station—a very familiar Chevy Cobalt. I’d run the plates after Tim’s driving lesson at Tom Nevers. The vehicle was registered to Stoller Construction, but the insurance was listed for Mike Stoller’s son, Mike Jr., who had gotten his Junior Operator License at the end of the summer. Another football player, second-string special teams.

  Maybe he was just picking up a microwave hero and a soda at Cumbie’s, but the Pressman connection made me doubt it. If the suspected drug deal Tim and I watched at the old Navy base had gone south because the money was short, a quick smash-and-grab at a local gas station might seem like an easy solution, especially if you’d gotten a few too many concussions from those punt return tackles.

  Karen came around her cruiser as I approached, a tall girl with short black hair, wide-set eyes, and a tight incision of a mouth that could startle you when she smiled. But she used that smile sparingly, and never at work. All those teeth and dimples would make her look unprofessional. I knew the feeling—I’d spent my first two years on the LAPD frowning. I’m not sure it had much effect on anyone else, but it made me feel better.

  “There’s two of them,” Karen said. “No ID on them yet.”

  “One of them is named Mike Stoller.”

  “He—wait. How could you know that?”

  “I don’t know it. Not for sure.” I tilted my head toward the Cumberland Farms parking lot. “But that’s his car over there, and I’ve had my eye on him for a while. Jock, not quite good enough for a college scholarship. Oxy user. Probably started for the pain. Advil only takes you so far.”

  She stared at the reflecting glass of the station office. “Maybe he works at Cumbie’s.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or just shops there.”

  “The thought occurred to me.”

  Charlie walked over. “Bullhorn?”

  “No. We’re supposed to keep this quiet.”

  He nodded toward the growing crowd at the fringe of Sparks Avenue. “Really?”

  “Well, we do the best we can.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Best to wrap it up quickly. I’m going in.”

  Karen stepped back, stared at me eye-to-eye. She was exactly my height. “Chief, I’m sorry, but that’s a really bad—”

  “Shhhhh.” I held up one finger. “I’m not sending either of you in. And Dan Taylor won’t volunteer. Just a guess.”

  Charlie smiled at that. He stood still, watching us both. “You sure about this, boss?”

  “It’s a couple of kids. If you hear gunshots, feel free to storm the place.”

  Charlie turned to Karen. “He’s kidding.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  I pulled them both toward me in a quick embrace. “You’re both right. Now stay alert and let’s get some work done.”

  I walked through the office door, into a blast of warm air scented with new rubber and old gasoline. A big white kid, two smaller Jamaicans. Probably neighbors—the Stollers lived on Essex Road.

  “Hey, Mike,” I said, “too bad about that touchback.” He stared at me blankly. “In the Holbrook/Avon game. I thought you had that one for sure.” Jane had described the game to me, a memorable loss because of the escalating missed routes, tipped passes, bungled running plays, penalties, and injuries that made it a standout calamity in an unhappy season.

  Stoller obviously didn’t want to be reminded. “I slipped.”

  So it was him. “Football in the rain,” I commiserated. “Tough for everybody.”

  He was clutching a Springfield XDs .45 ACP—a small lightweight gun, smooth to conceal—just an inch wide—and easy to shoot. But those 45-caliber bullets could do some serious damage. He swung the gun to point at me. I hated that. You’ve probably never had a loaded gun pointed at you, or looked into that black metal ring that needs one twitch of a finger muscle to ruin your life or end it. I have, too many times. It ages you. It kills you in small ways, even if the gun never discharges.

  But of course you can’t let any of those feelings show. Especially with a drug-tainted, hormone-addled adolescent punk like Stoller.

  “That gun cost more than you’d ever make on this robbery,” I pointed out.

  “Says who?” His voice was thin and brittle, puddle ice that cracked when you stepped on it.

  “Look it up. That’s about five hundred dollars, new. I doubt there’s half that in the cash register.”

  “A hundred and fifty-four bucks,” the attendant said. A heavyset guy in a Toscana sweat shirt and jeans, late fifties, balding, just wanting to get things back to normal.

  Yeah, well. Join the club.

  “But it doesn’t matter because you didn’t pay for the gun. It’s your dad’s, right? Swiped out of his gun safe. Nice work, getting the combination. Though I doubt Dad will give you extra points for that trick.”

  “Shut up!” He spun back on the clerk. “Give me the money. Now!”

  “Mike,” I said. “You haven’t thought this through. If you take the money you’ll be arrested within the hour. We know your address, your car’s parked in front of Cumbie’s and even if you found a clean vehicle, or managed to steal one, there’s nowhere to go. We have the boat docks and the airport covered. Unless you’re planning to swim to Hyannis, you’re stuck here. But you got lucky today. We want to close this incident down and forget about it. So that gives you a choice. You’re a minor, this is a first offense. Put the gun down and come with me. I’ll book you at the station, but those records are sealed. You’ll get six months’ probation and a second chance. But if you touch that money you’re going to jail. And if you pull that trigger you’ll be tried as an adult. You’ll wind up in Walpole with the adult population, and you don’t want that.”

  Okay, I exaggerated a little, there. He’d have to kill someone to be tried as an adult in Massachusetts. But Mike didn’t know that. And I have poetic license—at least in my day job. Getting one for your actual poetry requires a road test.

  Mike looked from me to the clerk to his silent Jamaican friends—and back to me. His little caper had already failed, because of the silent alarm they’d installed a couple of years ago. You pushed a button under the counter and the alarm registered at the police station, which was less than a minute away, disregarding traffic. And my cops loved disregarding traffic.

  “Okay,” Mike said.

  He handed me the gun, and it was over. I used the phone behind the counter to call Charlie’s cell. No police band, no walkie talkies. “Get in here,” I said when he came on the line. “We’re taking them out the back.”

  I walked around to the front after Charlie took the kids away.

  “What’s next?” Karen asked.

  “Crowd control.”

  We walked past the two rows of pumps to the street. The patrol officers had the lookie-loos contained but they weren’t going anywhere. Didn’t they have Christmas strolling to do?

  I addressed the crowd. “Nothing happening here, folks. Couple of kids playing a prank. It takes more than a water pistol and an attitude to scare an old Nantucketer. Right now, Chester in there has a wet shirt, a story to tell at dinner, and a gas station that’s losing money because you’re all blocking the entrance. So move along. Go back to town. The stores are serving hot cider.”

  As the group dispersed, picking their way back to the Stop&Shop parking lot through the traffic on Sparks Avenue, Karen stepped up to me.

  “You are a liar!”

  “What can I say? I was married for twelve years. You develop skills.”

  David Trezize separated himself from the throng and strolled up to me, against the outgoing pedestrian tide. I should have known he’d be there. David ran the upstart local paper and he rarely missed a story. He used social media, alw
ays tracking dozens of Snapchat and Twitter and Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit accounts, all of them flagged for keywords like “robbery,” “assault,” and “domestic disturbance.” He wasn’t likely to overlook a small circus like this one.

  “Hey, Chief,” he said.

  “David.”

  “Hey, Karen.”

  She turned to me. “Are you talking to the press?”

  “She’s still mad because I blew the whistle on her Nantucket Food Pantry bake sale, back in high school. Mr. Bargusfelder…was that his name?”

  “Argusfelder,” Karen said.

  “Right. This guy was the caretaker for a couple of hundred houses—though how that even works, I still have no idea. I guess he did a drive-by every now and then. The twenty-twenty test. It looks good from twenty feet away, at twenty miles an hour. Anyway, he kept all the money from the bake sale and gave the Food Pantry canned goods he looted from his customers’ houses.”

  “He was broke. His wife was sick.”

  “He was a crook! One of the food bank women—Dottie Clutter, she was a friend of my mom’s—she noticed when he brought in a haul of canned abalone and escargots and chestnuts and foie gras, and God-knows-what other expensive crap. She knew no one at school contributed that kind of stuff. I heard her talking to my mom—”

  “You eavesdropped on the extension!”

  “Yeah. We still had a landline in those days. So I started poking around.”

  “And got Mr. Argusfelder fired,” Karen finished for him.

  “He deserved it. He was a dick. I dropped my pencil during a math test and he wouldn’t let me pick it up. Seriously. He said, ‘It can’t fall any farther’—whatever that was supposed to mean. I didn’t think a hole was going to open up in the floor. I just wanted to finish the test. Then he gives me an incomplete. Worst teacher ever. And a crook.”

  “David has always prided himself on his balanced and unbiased reporting,” Karen said.

  “Very funny. Am I biased? Fucking right, I am. I go after the crooks and liars. I want to see justice done. You want to know the ‘he-said-she-said’ with that Argusfelder story? ‘Guilty’ and ‘Great job!’ The ‘he’ was that judge that sent that bum to prison. ‘She’ was the school superintendent who gave me the Good Citizenship award. I still have the pin! Balanced reporting. Forget balanced reporting. Balance is for acrobats.”

  She slipped him a sarcastic half-smile. “That could be your new slogan.” She turned to me. “The kids all hated him after that. Mr. Argusfelder was such a sweet guy. The rich people never missed the stuff, the Food Pantry customers got some treats, and Mr. Argusfelder could afford all those trips to visit his wife at Mass General. It was a win for everyone, until David wrecked it. The rumor was, that’s why the family moved to New York.”

  “My dad got a great job. But I was happy to go. Most kids dread changing schools. I had to go take summer classes to catch up. Dalton was a real school. That was a shock. Didn’t matter—I was thrilled to get away from this place. I swore I’d never come back.”

  “But you did,” Karen said. “People always do.”

  David put his back to her. “So, what really happened, Chief? Did that kid have a gun?”

  “Just a toy, David. It was a harmless prank. A false alarm.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “Because you’re smart. And that’s also why you’re going to leave this alone. When I have a real story, I’ll tell you. I always do.”

  That mollified him but I wanted this particular real story more than he did. Why were the kids robbing the station at all? I had my suspicions but I wanted them confirmed.

  I asked Stoller myself, half an hour later. He sat across from me in the main interview room. No filming or recording, no lawyers. After a quick cup of coffee with the judge, the prosecutor, and the court-appointed defense counsel, Mike’s probation hearing was set for the new year—that is, after the holidays—and we all agreed to release him on his own recognizance, if he agreed to take a guilty plea and talk to me before we cut him loose.

  “So—why?” I asked him. “What was so urgent you needed that hundred and fifty bucks today?”

  “I didn’t know that was all he had. I heard there was a grand in the register.”

  “Why? It’s all credit card transactions at that place.”

  “Oh, yeah. I didn’t think of that.”

  This kid didn’t think of much. We were getting off-topic. “Why did you want the money, Mike?”

  “Come on.”

  “Drugs?”

  “It’s December on Nantucket. What else are you going to buy?”

  “Books? A Netflix subscription? Season tickets to the Boston Ballet?”

  “Yeah, right. But I already got that stuff.”

  That tricked a laugh out of me. He laughed, too, startled by my reaction. Then we settled back. He pushed against the edge of the table, setting his chair on two legs and rocking a little.

  “Who were you buying from?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Really? You’re that scared of him?”

  “I never said him.”

  “Him or her.”

  “Right.”

  “So, what do you think this person would do to you?”

  “People like that—they have their ways.”

  “Like what?”

  “He’d send somebody. He can afford to pay.”

  “Or she can.”

  He smiled. “Right. He or she.”

  I sat forward, rested my forearms the table. “Let’s do this, Mike. Then we can both go home. I’ll say a name and if it’s the right name you just sit there and say nothing, and then if anyone asks you can say you said nothing and you can say that under oath. Because it’ll be true. How about it?”

  He grinned. “I’m not saying a word.”

  “Atta boy.” He watched me, waiting. I let him wait a few seconds, then gave him the name. “Pressman.”

  He said nothing.

  “Gary Pressman.”

  Still nothing. I scraped my chair back and stood up. “Thanks, Mike. You’re free to go.”

  Chapter Ten

  On Tuckernuck Island

  It was time to pay a visit to Gary Pressman. I didn’t have enough evidence for a warrant, but if he really did have a massive supply of opioids in stock out there on Tuckernuck, I needed to stop him from selling it. I’d done my research on the guy. Without judicial authority, guns, or handcuffs, I still had a few tools at my disposal—intimidation and persuasion, shaming and praise, threats and deception. The trick was to use them all at once, like Lyndon Johnson in the Senate cloakroom, manhandling a critical vote from a cringing colleague. It was as much performance art as police work: Good cop, bad cop, fatherly cop, flattering cop, cool cop, crazy cop, crooked cop—all the cops rolled into one.

  I couldn’t arrest him, but I might just confuse him into submission.

  I called Karen Gifford into my office a few minutes later. Her family had a house on Tuckernuck and she knew our pilot fish island better than anyone else at the station. Haden Krakauer went over once a year for the Christmas bird count, but apart from those grueling three-night stays in houses with no heat, the little island was as foreign to him as to most Nantucketers. I knew he’d feel somewhat miffed to be excluded from the excursion—he had seniority, after all, as well as a long-standing friendship with me. I thought of Barton Manges, the cinematographer for the first of the only two movies my father ever directed. Flying to New York for location shooting, I sat next to my dad, and got the window seat, no less. I never thought about it, and evidently neither had my father, but Manges took the seating arrangement as a devastating slight. He always sat next to the director on the plane.

  My dad just shrugged. “Now he tells me.”

  Much in the same way
, Haden had gotten used to being my wingman. But I wanted him at the station when I was gone, and I didn’t like showing up in a gang at Pressman’s house. It was a two-person job. Karen and I made a less-threatening couple. And I thought she might learn something.

  “No problem,” Haden said when I laid out the plan. Which meant there was a huge problem. It was like dealing with my kids. And, as with them, often the best way to deal with a problem was not to.

  “Great!” I chirped, and got the hell out of there.

  “So how do you get out to Tuckernuck?” I asked Karen when she was seated in my office with a cup of coffee. “Do you have a boat?”

  “My family does. I hitch a ride with a scalloper. Or just call the Pereiras. Sal and Joey Pereira? They pretty much have a monopoly on transportation, to and from. My dad let someone bring over some parts for our generator back in the nineties. He wound up feuding with Sal for a decade over it. They’re pretty touchy over there.”

  I nodded. “How many people actually live on the island?”

  “I don’t know—maybe ten families? Sal and Joey live there year-round, and Gary. A couple of kids stayed out there last winter. Some kind of project for college. But that’s about it. Tuckernuck people don’t like visitors. It’s not exactly a tourist spot. You show up and everybody knows it. This time of year the scallopers’ll drop the dime on you. The Land Bank was going to buy a big piece of property a few years ago, but the homeowners got together and outbid them.” She laughed, a rueful chuckle. “No way that was ever going to happen. They don’t like strangers and they don’t like people traipsing around their land.”

  “So what do they like?”

  “Privacy. And quiet. Tuckernuck is like—Nantucket, a hundred years ago. That’s what they like.”