Nantucket Red Tickets

by Steven Axelrod

  “You’re supposed to be a civic leader in this town. You should start following Whalers football.”

  “I go to games.”

  “Ever hear them chanting ‘It Takes Two!’ when nothing but a long pass will get the team out of a third and fifteen? Two—that’s Dave’s number, man. Mine was Fourteen.”

  “It Takes Two”—that was the phrase that popped up on HackAck in the comment stream about the Red Tickets Drawing. There were other connections between the two quarterbacks. “Dave may not be a go-getter, but he managed to get your girl, didn’t he, Max? Lizza Coddington, right? You two were quite a couple back in the day.”

  “Forget it, Chief. We’re all good friends. Lizza goes where she wants. And Dave has been picking up my leftovers since he joined the JV practice squad.”

  “So, what does he want the money for?

  “Ask him. But I can tell you—Lizza ain’t cheap. You don’t take her for a sub at Stubbys. More like a steak at Pi Pizzeria. And that shit adds up.”

  “Forget about Dave for a second. What do you want the money for?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Good thing. The stuffed animal caper went south and so did the gas station job.”

  “What? That holdup? That wasn’t me.”

  “It was Mike Stoller.”

  “So?”

  “You like movies?”

  “Sure.”

  “You ever see The Big Lebowski?”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen it. So what?”

  “I think of you and Prescott and Stoller, you fit the characters. You’re the Dude, Dave is Walter. And Mike Stoller is Donny.”

  He laughed. “Shut the fuck up, Donny!”

  “Right. So don’t tell me Donny cooked up that gas station heist.”

  “I’m not telling you a thing. And you can’t prove anything, either.”

  “True.” I walked over to the desk, poked a finger through the bowl of marbles. I wasn’t quite done with him. “So your mom says you make up video games?”

  “Yeah, well. If you have a good game engine and a decent IDE, it’s no big deal.”

  “IDE?”

  “Integrated Development Environment. The one I’m using has a good compiler and I work with Python, which helps. That’s a programming language.”

  “But it’s all just the means to an end.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “The game itself.”

  “Sure.”

  I picked up a marble. It wasn’t at all like a stuffed animal eye. He should have noticed. “Does your game have a hero?”

  He brightened a little. “It has a superhero, dude. He can slow time. He can stop it, too, but that’s easy. Anyone born with the Gift can stop time. Learning to slow it down is the hard part. But my game is different because my guy has to deal with real life problems. I mean—having the power is a problem. Being part of the secret guild is a problem. He’s, like…alienated.”

  I nodded. “With great power comes great responsibility.”

  He grinned. “Or great irresponsibility.”

  “Just don’t fall into the Spider-Man Geek Fallacy.”

  “The what?”

  “Geeks like you get tripped up by it all the time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s this idea that Spider-Man or—you know, heroes like him—are regular people because they have normal problems. And you can write something meaningful about them because of that.”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “So it’s bullshit, Max, that’s what. Spider-Man and your time-shifter guy aren’t real people and they don’t have real problems. They have the problems a real person might have if they turned into Spider-Man or time-shifter guy. But that’s very different. Okay, it’s an improvement over Superman, who had no problems at all, except Kryptonite. But still, it’s all nothing but nonsensical brain candy. Which is fine. Everybody likes candy. But you’ll never say anything worthwhile about life when you go down that route. Which is what I mean by the Spider-Man Geek Fallacy. It’s ruined a lot of smart, cool geeks. Look out or you’ll turn into one of them.”

  “Why should you care?”

  I smiled. “That’s my super power.”

  “Caring about people? So you’re a guidance counselor in Spandex? Sounds like the most boring comic book ever.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  Max stared at me. “Anyone ever tell you that you think too much?”

  I smiled. “Yeah. Usually just before I arrest them.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Anyway, game-playing runs in your family. I heard about your father’s scavenger hunts.”

  “Did you hear about the Easter egg hunt when I was eight? No? You missed that one? He kept me hunting after all the other kids went home. In the dark, in the snow. No dinner until I found the last Easter egg.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “He finally gave me a hint. I was half frozen by then. He said, ‘When it comes to Easter eggs there’s coloration and then there’s protective coloration.’”

  I got it, and shook my head with mixed admiration and disgust. “He hid a white egg in a snowbank.”

  “Yeah. It was pitch dark by then, no way I was ever going to find it. But when I figured out the clue, he let me off the hook. He said, ‘It’s the thought that counts.’ Thanks, Pop. What an asshole. Whoo hooo! You fooled a bunch of eight-year-olds. Good for you.”

  “But you still like the games.”

  “I like winning.”

  “We have a big game coming up. Any thoughts on how to win it?”

  “You lost me.”

  “The Red Tickets Raffle on Christmas Eve. People have been daydreaming about rigging that game since it began. The top prize is five thousand dollars. That beats robbing gas stations or pulling apart some poor kid’s teddy bear.”

  “But it’s impossible.”

  “Is it?”

  “Hey, if you could cheat the lottery they’d be splitting that billion-dollar Powerball jackpot three hundred million ways.”

  “But this isn’t a lottery, Max. It’s a raffle. All you need to win is the right ticket.”

  “And how could you get your hands on that little item, Chief?”

  “I’ve actually given the problem quite a bit of thought. Because, you know—I think too much. But so do you. It would actually be pretty easy. But it takes more than one person. In other words, to work at all it has to be a criminal conspiracy, with fines up to ten thousand dollars. That wipes out your winnings. Plus you’re looking at up to ten years in jail. Conspiracy is considered one of the ‘inchoate’ crimes because the criminal act consists of preparing to commit the crime, even if you chicken out and do nothing. Then there’s ‘attempt,’ where you bail in the middle and walk away. Oh, and don’t forget ‘solicitation.’ That’s getting other people involved. Multiple counts mean multiple sentencing guidelines. And that’s before you actually do anything.”

  “Good thing I’m not planning to.”

  “Yeah. Because you’d need someone who works at a participating store to palm the winning ticket instead of putting, in the bin with all the others. Once you have a matched set, you need the right person drawing the ticket on raffle day. Normally, that would be the Junior Miss winner, who happens to be Lizza Coddington this year—your girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend, I mean.”

  “Which wrecks your theory, because the Town Crier’s daughter, Alana Trikilis, is drawing the tickets. I’d take a long look at her, Chief. And her dad. That garbage man pulled some serious strings to get her the job instead of the Junior Miss winner who usually does it. Change the rules, get his daughter in position to make the switch. And it just so happens he’s about to lose his house. What a coincidence! Five grand would come in real handy around about now. I’d c
all that motive and opportunity.”

  It was an absurd accusation. Sam Trikilis was no criminal. In fact, he was the opposite of a criminal, as unthinkingly virtuous as a Buddhist monk or a Labrador retriever. But even as I was thinking that, I could sense the stress fractures in the analogy. Buddhist monks were killing Muslims in Myanmar; and our old Lab knew exactly what he was doing when he snagged the Christmas roast beef off the table just before the guests arrived for dinner—why else would he have been cowering behind the toilet afterward?

  So, no one was above suspicion. That’s what my old pal from the LAPD, Chuck Obremski, always said. Even saints—“They get canonized for not getting caught.” That was Chuck’s viewpoint.

  But if someone planned to rig the Red Tickets Drawing, as the anonymous posters on HackAck seemed to think, then I’d put my money on Max Blum any time.

  I turned to go. At the door I said, “Lizza’s still the first alternate for the drawing. If anything happens to Alana Trikilis.”

  “So?”

  “So let’s hope nothing does.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wild Geese

  Back at the station, my cold case was heating up. Haden Krakauer was waiting for me in my office, staring out the big picture window with his binoculars.

  “There’s a Townsend’s solitaire in the trees over there,” he said as I walked in. “My first one ever. I thought it was a flycatcher at first.” He handed me the binoculars when I walked over. “Take a look. About almost at the top of that big elm tree. They like to perch up high to advertise their territory. Just like certain Selectmen I know. But much prettier.”

  It was a lovely bird, pale gray with darker gray wing accents and a white ring around the eye like a monocle. It took me a few seconds to locate it, and as I watched, it lifted off in a thrashing of wings and disappeared. “Gone.”

  He took the binoculars back. “You’re my witness. A Townsend’s solitaire! Right here in front of the police station.”

  “Any other news?”

  “We picked up the kid who stole Paul Healy’s tools off that Squam jobsite. Your pal Mike Henderson dropped the dime on him. He wondered how a twenty-five-year-old kid came to have all these antique tools—Disston handsaws, wood-molding planes, some old scraper with a wooden knob handle. At the other end of the scale, the kid was using a Festool sander with the vacuum dust-catcher. That’s expensive shit. And Healy had been at the Muse the night before griping about the robbery. Mike put it together and made the call. It’s tough being a thief in a small town.”

  “Snoops and gossips.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Or you could call it community policing. I’ll call Mike and thank him.”

  “Good idea. Oh, and the soil sample from the Madaket grave came back.”

  “So fast?”

  “I told the boys to skip the State Police lab. They’re backed up two months, and that’s for active cases. I have a pal who teaches at UMass, in the Ag. Department. They have a brand new defracting laser and he had to tell me all about it. But I FedExed him the sample and he did the tests at lunch. You were right about the formaldehyde.”

  “So, case closed? And Brandon Delavane found.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “But?”

  “Kyle Donnelly tracked down old Ben Tillotson. We used to call him ‘choppers.’ He was our family dentist until he retired. Kind of a crazy old guy. He worked out of his house on Cliff Road and gave kids candy if they behaved in the chair. You called him on it, he’d just laugh and say, ‘Job security, laddie!’” I remember he had the biggest Novocain needle I ever saw. Scared the crap out of me. I hadn’t seen him in years. I heard he moved to Florida. Turns out he sold the house when his wife died and moved into Academy Hill. But he still has all his files stored at Sun Island. Kyle took a couple of uniforms and spent three days going through the X-rays. It wasn’t as bad as you’d think. They got to skip the women and the kids, and Tillotson retired in ’04, so that meant only seven years of material to search.”

  I felt my pulse spike. Haden was grinning.

  “They got a match?”

  “They did. Fella named Ted Coddington. Ted Bainbridge Coddington the Third, to be precise. Old money. Four generations on the island. He was Jackson Blum’s partner until November 1997, when he disappeared.”

  He had to be Lizza Coddington’s father—Anna must have been pregnant when he died. I thought of Max Blum’s evasions about the girl. One way or another, the Blums and the Coddingtons were still intertwined.

  “No one could ever figure out what happened,” Haden continued. “They never found the body, obviously.”

  I tucked a Keurig pod into my coffeemaker, and pushed the flashing blue button. “Well, now we know.”

  The next moves crowded into my mind like rock fans at a festival seating concert: call Ted McGrady again, talk to the Coddingtons—all the relatives. I’d need a list. And if the body wasn’t fresh from the funeral home, what was formaldehyde doing in the grave? I needed the complete soil sample ASAP. And I was going to have to talk to Blum again, too. I needed to know what exactly had been—

  “You might want to put a mug under there, Chief!”

  “I—what? Oh, shit!”

  A thin thread of Starbucks Pike Place roast was pouring into the tray. I grabbed a mug and salvaged about half the coffee as Haden shook his head and raised his eyebrows—universal body language for “What a nut!” At least he was kind enough not to say anything.

  I sipped the coffee. It was a little late in the day and the brew tasted bitter without milk. I set the mug down, thinking.

  “Here’s what I need,” I told Haden. “A list of Coddington’s connections—family members still on the island, friends, business associates, anyone who was around twenty years ago who could shed some light on this. Schedule a call with Ed Delavane at FMC Devens.” That was the Federal Medical Center—a prison for convicts with mental health issues, which described Billy Delevan’s brother perfectly. We’d need to get in touch with the Special Investigating Agent at the prison. “Set it up with the SIA. I have a couple of questions for him. Also I want a complete ballistics report on the bullet we dug out of Coddington’s skull. Cross reference it against gun permits and everyone who successfully completed the certified safety course, 1967 to ’97 and the voter registration rolls. That covers the thirty years Blum was on the island before the crime was committed. I don’t see him registering the gun after that—unless it was with the cod and the haddock in the Great South Channel. I want to know the location of any gun on this island that could be a match, on the off chance that it’s still around. People are funny about guns. They get sentimental. Plus your friend’s soil sample analysis, and an appointment with Blum.”

  Haden was scribbling in his notebook. He had actually taken a shorthand course after college and he still swore by it. He looked up with a grin. “Is that all?”

  “Not quite. Get someone with patience and a good attention span to go over all the public records from 1997 on—newspaper stories, arrest records, blogs, published memoirs, organizational minutes. I want to see if we can place anyone at the site in Madaket in the right time frame. Maybe they remember something.”

  “You’re looking for witnesses?”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  “I’ll put Karen on it. I’ll tell her we’ve spotted a lot of wild geese at the west end of the island. She can chase some of them.”

  “She might not get a birding joke.”

  “That’s not a birding joke, Chief. That’s a crazy long-shot desperate police work joke.”

  “I hope she gets a chuckle out of it. And tell her I’ll scrape a bonus out of the budget for her if she finds anything.”

  He put the notebook back in his pocket. “Okay. First thing in the morning.”

  I nodded. It was quittin
g time. “Thanks, Haden.”

  As he left the office, the phone rang on my desk. Barnaby Toll said, “Some guy wants to talk to you, Chief. He won’t give his name. I told him you were probably gone for the day, but he says it’s urgent and I wasn’t sure exactly what to do, so…”

  “Thanks, Barney. Put him through.”

  The voice was familiar but I couldn’t quite place it. “You get one warning, Chief. Stop harassing people. Keep off Tuckernuck and mind your own business.”

  “Thanks anyway. But if by people you mean Gary Pressman, and he is in fact selling drugs out there, harassing him is more than my business. It’s my job description.”

  “One warning. Back off. Or you’ll be sorry.”

  Caller ID showed it as a blocked number. “Who is this?”

  But he hung up. I can’t say the call didn’t scare me, but it also piqued my curiosity. Gary Pressman was getting nervous, which I took as an encouraging development. Of course, the caller had been careful not to mention Gary’s name, which would allow the hipster to plead both innocence and ignorance. I could just hear him: “Maybe it was one of my neighbors, Chief. They’re touchy about trespassing.”

  I’d been threatened by real criminals during my time with the LAPD. These were professionals, with the personnel and firepower behind them to inflict real damage—and the disregard for all known statutes of civilization to do so without a flicker of conscience or a moment’s pause.

  This call felt more like a shove from a schoolyard bully. Still, you had to be a little crazy to make menacing phone calls to the police chief in a town as small as Nantucket, and I had never met a trained officer in the military or law enforcement who wasn’t scared by crazy.

  Crazy schoolyard bully.

  I made the connection and recognized the voice. There was nothing I could do about it now, but at least Pat Sauter wouldn’t have the element of surprise if he came at me again.

  I hung up the phone, straightened the papers on my desk and went home to cook the first dinner for my new compounded family in our new house.

  Chapter Fourteen