“Just one.”
“Gary Pressman, am I right?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nantucket was a small island and Tuckernuck was even smaller. I shrugged and said, “Yeah.”
Stackpole tipped his head forward. “No surprises. Little Gary always was a problem. Getting girls in trouble. Joyriding cars. He drove one off the bluff at Cisco his senior year. Thought that was hilarious. Just a nasty little person.”
When we reached the beach at North Pond, Stackpole started laughing. “That boy must be doing too many of his own drugs!”
Pressman’s outboard motor, small in the distance, whined at a steepening pitch. But the boat refused to move, caught in the narrow inlet that led to the waters of Madaket Harbor.
I glanced over at Stackpole. “What’s happening?”
His laugh had collapsed into a cough. He paused and pulled in a deep breath. “What’s happening? Low tide is happening, that’s what’s happening! The little punk is high and dry.”
Pressman had run aground.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now we borrow one of Pee-Wee Ottinger’s two-man kayaks, and you paddle out to the rescue.”
“How is Pee Wee going to feel about that?”
“Well, Pee-Wee spends his winters in Key West, so he ain’t around to make his feelings known. But it’s a neighborly sort of a gesture, in aid of the local constabulary, so I’m sure he’d be happy to oblige. Not to mention, anything that rids this place of Gary Pressman will be cause for celebration come Memorial Day.”
We drove to the Ottinger house, its windows boarded up against the winter gales, and found the kayak around the back by the garage. Stackpole helped me carry the bulky vessel back to the shore, and pushed me off when I got settled, bobbing and rocking on the water.
He lifted his binoculars as I started to paddle. “I’ll keep an eye on you, Chief. He’s still in rifle range!”
It took ten minutes to cross North Pond and by the end of the trip, I was seriously considering buying a kayak of my own. The splash of the paddle, the quick spurt of movement over the still water, the sense of gliding across the face of an untouched world—it all shifted me into a state of almost supernatural calm.
Pressman was sitting in his boat, tense and miserable, like a kindergarten miscreant banished to the corner and missing recess. I felt bad for him, turned back on himself like an ingrown toenail, failing to appreciate the New England winter day arching above him. It would take a week of monsoon rain to create this kind of icy clarity in the Los Angeles air. Here it was so ordinary you forgot about it.
“Do I need to read you your rights, Gary?” I asked.
“You might as well.”
I Mirandized him, and then said, “I got a call from Pat Sauter yesterday.”
“So?”
“He was calling on your behalf, Gary. As you know perfectly well.”
“He does what he does. I can’t control Pat Sauter.”
“Come on. Why not use real thugs, if you wanted to scare me off the case? Your supplier must have an army of them. Old School Dorchester leg-breakers.”
He looked away. “I would never threaten a cop. Or ask anyone to.”
“All right, look…I don’t want to nail you for obstruction. I have enough on you with the oxy. I don’t want to arrest Pat over a deniable phone call. I just want to know what’s going on in my town.”
“Well, okay. First, off, it’s not your town and it never will be. But…whatever. Pat and I go back to high school. I tutored him so he could stay on the Whalers and he was my bodyguard. We weren’t exactly friends, but…he was part of my life and vice versa and that’s the way it is around here. When his kid got into the opioid thing, Pat came to me.” he caught my look. “For help, Chief. For help. Pat wanted to keep it secret, so, you know—no time off from school, no rehab. The idea was, I’d keep a stash and string the kid out, taper the dose for him, until he was clean. And it worked. Then Jake got hurt last year playing football, he threw his back out and they put him on painkillers. They didn’t know not to, because nobody told them and nobody was going to tell them, either. So Pat came to me and we went through the whole withdrawal dance again—and it worked again. Happy ending, so far. Jake is back on the field and nobody knows what happened except me and his dad—and now you. So if I asked Pat to help me out, he would. Not that I did.”
“Okay. Thanks, Gary. It’s hard to get to know a place when no one tells you the secrets.”
“These secrets going to be used against me in a court of law? Just wondering.”
I gave him my best dopey bland innocent stare. “What secrets?”
He grinned and I helped him into the kayak. We almost capsized it. I gave him a paddle. He could have attacked me with it. But I knew he wouldn’t. Part of it was the new intimacy between us, but I could see that the hushed noble beauty of the day had affected him, too.
Climbing ashore, he said “I really love this place.”
I couldn’t let him off the hook. “Act that way, then,” I said, “if you ever come back.”
Chapter Eighteen
The Grinch
I had a good guess about at least one of Prescott’s cohorts and I decided to brace him while I still had the element of surprise. I’d put off my visit to Jackson Blum’s store, but my talk with Pressman justified the delay. I needed to brace Blum, too, but once again, my cold case could wait. I had much more reason to suspect his clerk, Arnold Sprockett, now, as my view of the sprinting wraith in a New York Giants hoodie, glimpsed on my last visit to Tuckernuck, clarified.
I hadn’t mentioned Sprokett when I called Dave Carmichael and Lonnie Fraker on the drive back into town. I wanted to keep my options open—and Sprokett’s. He could tell me so much: the other members of his Quixotic conspiracy, and their sources; perhaps I could even turn him as an undercover agent and let him strike a real blow against the drug dealers who had taken advantage of his son’s injuries to create one more customer, probably a customer for life. I had other concerns, too: buying these drugs only to destroy them was an expensive proposition. Where was a retail clerk getting the money to pay for his portion of that investment?
My first thought was embezzlement—Blum was a fat target for such a crime, and the daily temptation must have been overwhelming. In fact, Blum and Sprockett were going at it when I slipped into the store, which was open, despite the CLOSED sign in the window. The voices were coming from the stockroom beyond the cash register desk.
I paused, just inside the door, listening.
“—and you’ve only yourself to blame,” Blum was saying.
“I don’t get it. What difference does that make? This isn’t about me. It’s about my son. It’s—”
“Of course it’s about you! It’s about your reckless negligence and your small-minded, short-sighted penny-pinching stupidity. You gambled with your son’s future and you lost.”
“But I had no idea—”
“Grownups don’t predict the future, Sprockett. They plan for it. They hope for the best and prepare for the worst. They don’t just stagger ahead blindly until they step off a cliff. But that’s what you did. And now you’re falling and you’ve dragged your family along with you. You’re all taking the plunge together. You’re in freefall and when you and your wife and your little boy hit the ground you’ll be shattered. You’ll be broken beyond repair. But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is—you know it’s your fault, and so do they. There’s got to be a lot of rage in your house right now. A lot of anger. Anger at life, anger at the world, and especially…anger at you, for not keeping them safe from that big bad world out there. That’s your whole job, Sprockett! Protecting your family. And you failed!”
“I know, sir. I know that. Which is why—”
“Sir? You’re calling me sir now?”
“Yes,
I—uh, I thought—”
“You thought I’d appreciate the show of respect.”
“I—”
“You thought I’d preen myself at the first note of flattery, and never wonder why I’d never heard you call me that before.”
“No, no, I just—”
“Why not go all the way then, Sprockett? Get on your hands and knees. Kiss my shoes. Beg! Grovel and beg and debase yourself for an amount of money so sad and tiny I wouldn’t even notice if you stole it from me! Crawl for the spare change rattling around in my clothes dryer. Plead for my pennies. Go ahead, do it. Do it or get out.”
I heard some sort of shuffling, and stepped closer. Was Sprockett really going down on his knees?
Then: “Please, sir? Mr. Blum…I’m begging you. I have nowhere else to turn. And like you say…it’s not for me. It’s for my son. He never hurt anyone. All he wanted to do was play football with his friends and be happy. He has his whole life ahead of him. I don’t want him to live it as a cripple. I couldn’t stand that…knowing, like you said, that—that it was my fault—so please…if you could only—”
“Lend you the money?”
“Yes! Just for a while, just until—”
“I loaned you money before, Sprockett. And you never paid me back.”
“But I did! I gave you—”
“The principal, but not the interest. Almost three thousand dollars in interest, compounded quarterly. Two thousand eight hundred and forty dollars, to be precise.”
“I’ve tried, but my rent went up and I have back taxes that—”
“So you haven’t paid the government either. I call that downright unpatriotic, Sprockett. Some people would call it treason.”
“No, no, I worked out a payment plan—”
“Which is more than you did with me. Do you remember what I told you on that occasion? Because I do.”
“You said…you told me—”
“I pointed out some salient facts. And I laid down the law. Your credit was nonexistent—I checked. I pointed out that in an actual crisis, I’d be your bank of last resort. I told you—pay the money back on time, Sprocket! Every penny, including the interest I charged you, so that I wouldn’t have to pay a gift tax on my generosity. Because if you don’t, I told you, and I made it very clear, if you’re a day late or a penny shy, when that day comes you’ll get nothing from me. I’ll watch you go bankrupt and hope it teaches you a lesson. Do you remember that?”
Sprockett’s voice was almost too quiet to hear: “Yes.”
“Did you think I was joking?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you think I was bluffing?”
“No, sir.”
“But perhaps you thought I’d forget. Forgive and forget! Well I’ve never done either and I never will.”
“But I just hoped…”
“What? What did you hope?”
“I mean, I thought…because it was Christmas…”
“But I don’t care about Christmas, and you know it. I care about the number of shopping days until Christmas—thirteen of them as of today. And I care about the day after Christmas! That and the day after Thanksgiving are my biggest days of the year. Christmas is money in my pocket, and that’s all it is.”
“No, no, sir—it’s more than that! It’s—”
“It’s a way for parents to dope their children with chocolate and bribe them with useless toys they’ll be taking to the landfill before the next round of spending starts. It teaches children greed—you’ve heard them whining for their overpriced baubles on Santa’s lap. It teaches them cunning, when they sniff out the hiding places and debunk the imbecile mythology, the elves and the reindeer and the fat man in their chimneys. The holiday turns them into ravenous little consumers and that’s the best thing about it! But don’t pretend you fall for the treacle, Sprockett. Or maybe you really do believe in all that love and generosity propaganda. In which case you’re a sucker as well as a fool.”
“So…you won’t help me…at all?”
“I’d rather take the money you need and set on fire in front of you. Would you like that? I might consider that.”
There was a long silence as the weight of the truth settled on the little clerk. Finally, he said, “You’re the Grinch. There really is a Grinch. And it’s you.”
“Wrong again, Sprockett. I don’t have to steal Christmas. I own it already. Now get to work or get fired.”
I spun and light-footed my way to the door and outside into the icy breeze. The last thing Arnold Sprockett needed was to know that anyone had overheard his humiliation. There was one plus side for him, though. I knew now that he couldn’t be part of Jim Prescott’s drug-buying scheme. He simply couldn’t afford it. Sprockett couldn’t afford takeout coffee.
I’d missed the first part of the conversation but I could piece it together without much trouble: Sprockett’s kid required knee surgery, and for some reason the clerk’s insurance didn’t cover it. If Sprockett was really broke, a wealthy boss might well be—what did Blum call it?—the bank of last resort. But not this time. I felt bad for Blum’s clerk, but there was nothing I could do for him except suggest a Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately, that process was uncertain at best and took time. From the sound of Sprockett’s voice, time was running out fast.
The good news—Sprockett was no drug kingpin. I was happy not to make the poor man’s life more difficult, but with him eliminated from my suspect list, I couldn’t help wondering as I climbed into my cruiser, who the mystery man in the New York Giants sweatshirt might be.
***
It was Prescott himself, I found out later that day—Pat Folger’s coconspirator in the opioid destruction scheme. It turned out that everyone but me knew he was a lifelong Giants fan, washed ashore from Massapequa Long Island in 1997, when he came to visit a college friend. Like so many people who came to Nantucket for a honeymoon or a weekend, he had simply never left. A salesman for a discount furniture chain in his mainland life, he applied for a job with the Maury People, and the real estate firm stuck him in their new sleepy ’Sconset office, figuring it would give him time to learn the trade while he studied for his license. The first walk-in wound up buying a six-million-dollar house in Quidnet. And Jim was on his way.
“It’s like picking up money in the street,” he had told Jane once. They had dated briefly before he met his wife and settled down. Of course they had—everyone knew everyone on this little island.
Pat Souter ambushed me as I was leaving my house on my way back to the station after a quick late lunch. I was distracted, concentrating on work, tying up all the threads of Pressman’s indictment—we had to seal off and fingerprint the Tuckernuck house, confiscate the drugs, get started on the subpoena for Pressman’s credit card bills, phone records, and bank accounts. It was delicate because I wanted to catch Pressman’s supplier and also shield the hapless islanders who had gotten tangled in his schemes, both the do-gooding parents who had bought the drugs to keep them off the market and the kids who had been lucky enough to have their business with him delayed. With any luck I could turn their brush with criminality into a teachable moment instead of a life-wrecking catastrophe.
So I had a lot to think about, and I felt safe on Darling Street. It was the kind of lull in the action my old LAPD pal Chuck Obremski used to warn me about, quoting seventeenth-century tactical genius and samurai Miyamoto Musashi’s Go Rin no Sho or The Book of Five Rings, one of his favorite survival handbooks:
“When the battle is over, tighten the straps of your helmet.”
I was actually looking down at the pavement when I literally walked into Sauter, and more or less bounced off his chest. He had just stepped out from the side of the next house down. I looked up, about to apologize, and saw who it was. The adrenaline jolt yanked me back into the present moment: fight or flight.
Or both? Or neithe
r. I heard Chuck’s voice in my head again: “We don’t do fight-or-flight, ’kay? We don’t have that luxury. We do balk-and-talk instead.”
Balk and talk—stop the action, de-escalate, argue them down, chill them out.
“I told you to leave Gary alone.”
First mistake, Pat. “Actually you were smart enough not to mention his name. And you did it on the phone where I couldn’t positively identify you.”
“Yeah, well. Problem is, once you’re knocked out you can’t remember shit about the last five, ten minutes before it happened. The brain don’t have time to store it cause the brain is fritzed out. That’s why we’re gonna wait a little while before I beat the shit out of you, Chief. Because I want you to remember this part.”
“Looks like you thought this whole thing out. Or someone did it for you.”
He grunted out a laugh. “You think you’re a nail set, and you’re nothing but a lousy pot hook.”
“What?”
“That’s tradesman slang, Chief. You’d know it if you ever worked a real job.”
I was interested in spite of myself. “So…a nail set is—necessary? And a pot hook?”
“Just something to attach your paint to your ladder. Nothing special, lots of guys use a twisted up coat hanger.”
“So, I could say…you think you’re a stainless corner trowel and you’re just a plastic putty knife.”
He shoved me but I was waiting for it and twisted a little to deflect the blow. He stumbled forward, off balance, and I took a step back, ready to catch him if he tripped. He got his balance back, but now I was making him mad. I almost expected him to say it—the classic bully’s answer to victim resistance.
He got to the point instead. “For the last time…drop the charges, close the case down.”
“Too late, Pat. It’s already been turned over to the Staties and the Mass AG’s office.”
“Bullshit.”
Another thought occurred to me. “How do you know I didn’t drop the case already? You expected your phone call to work, but it didn’t. And you found that out somehow, and now you brace me on the street. So who’s talking to you, Pat? Who’s your friend on the Nantucket Police force?”
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