I gave up, let it go, at least for the moment.
Jane was still talking. “…really think this will all work out. I’m pretty optimistic right now. Henry?”
I jumped back into the conversation. “I—yeah. Me, too. Totally.”
“I shamed Tim into taking the garbage out last night. I used a little Our Town. I said, ‘I saw your dad taking out the garbage yesterday, after a hard day’s work. I suppose he just got tired of asking you and decided it was easier to do it himself.’”
I laughed. “That line is a killer.”
“And it worked!”
“One time, anyway.”
“It’s a start. They’re great kids, Henry. Don’t get me wrong. I love what Carrie’s doing with The Grace Notes. They were fantastic at the Firehouse Christmas party.”
“Thanks.”
“From the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ to ‘The Hanukkah Song.’ Who knew the three stooges were Jewish?”
“Not to mention Drake and Scarlett Johansson.”
“Yeah.”
“They really were good, weren’t they? Much better than The Accidentals.”
“Plus they finished with my all-time favorite Christmas carol.”
“’Lo, How a Rose e’er Blooming’? Are you kidding me? No one knows that song. I taught it to Carrie because we sang it in chorus at my high school.”
She made a small curtsey. “Mine too.”
Talk turned to Christmas presents—a new coat for Carrie, an X-box for Tim—and to the fate of Bailey, and Tim’s yearning for him. “It’s hard to believe Lonnie’s family hate dogs so much.”
I shrugged. “They’re worried about the floors,” I said. “Dog claws on the floors.”
“Well the floors are in horrible shape, anyway, so I don’t see what difference a few more scratch marks would make.”
“I could talk to them again. Tim loves that dog.”
“Or we could just do it.”
“Don’t go rogue on me, lady. We’ve had a lot of changes in the last few months. Adding a dog might be a bridge too far.”
“I guess.”
In a show of solidarity I cleaned the bathrooms while she vacuumed, and we had time for a comically fast, half-dressed lovemaking session before we scrambled out to the play.
In the crowded lobby of the Congregational Church, before we filed into the auditorium, several teachers came up to me, including Ted Springer, Tim’s AP Poetry teacher and Ida Gumport, Carrie’s English teacher. Apparently my little Christmas poem had been a hit.
“I see where Tim gets his love of poetry,” Ted told me.
“I cried,” Ida gushed. Giving me a breath-snapping hug. “The police chief! Who knew?”
Miranda, strolling by with Joe Arbogast, witnessed the moment.
“Oh, my God,” Miranda said. “You must be strutting like a prize rooster. The poet laureate of Nantucket High School!”
“An unpaid position, alas.”
She closed in, with an avid smile that told me she had some choice gossip to impart. “Speaking of unpaid, did you ever wonder why Mr. J. Hastings Pell III didn’t just cash in the insurance policy on his seventy-million-dollar boat and carry on with his crazy plan?”
Pell had concocted a scheme to turn Nantucket into the ultimate gated community, through a combination of buyouts, eminent domain filings, and a spectacular land grab. But it had all hinged on leveraging the value of his mega yacht, now resting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, ten miles off the south shore.
“Well, my guess is that he trusted Liam Phelan with the paperwork and Liam let the coverage lapse.”
“He—I…it—how did you know that?”
I had ruined her fun. “Just a guess, Miranda. Liam hated Pell long before his daughter died. So it makes sense.”
She let out a low disgusted sigh and stalked off with Joe, clasping his arm tightly.
Jane watched them go, then took my arm, echoing Miranda’s proprietary gesture. “So how long were you married?”
“Twelve years.”
“Me, too.”
“And she broke it off. I was the dumpee, Jane.”
“Me, too.”
“I was a total doormat for the first year afterward.”
“Me, too.”
“Plus, I can shell a pomegranate in under three minutes, I believe Billy Joel is tragically underrated, and I refuse to throw away old cashmere sweaters with holes in the elbows.”
“Which got there because you insist on sleeping in them.”
“They’re warm!”
“Exactly! It’s like we met on Match dot com!”
“Do they ask questions about this kind of stuff?”
“They should.”
“Marcia!” A large woman with an unruly tangle of red hair was loping toward us across the lobby “Marcia! How are you? When did you get back?”
Jane groaned. “I’m not Marcia.”
“You—it’s…wait, what? How—?”
“Marcia Stoddard. I’m not her.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty much a hundred percent.”
“But—”
“Supposedly, we look similar, but…”
“Oh, my God, you are totally like twins!”
“We have to get inside. Sorry for the confusion.”
Jane took my arm and steered me away from the woman. When we found our seats in the auditorium she said, “People just don’t see what they’re looking at. It used to bother me but I’m over it. Marcia is small and slim with a long face and frizzy hair. She wears baseball caps and clogs and baggy jeans, just like me. She copies my style, for some reason—I started the girls-wearing-baseball-caps thing around here, by the way. But we don’t look alike, Henry. At least I hope we don’t.”
I’d never seen this Marcia Stoddard, so I enjoyed the luxury of not having an opinion.
“I’ll point her out to you,” Jane said as the lights went down. “You’ll see how crazy this is. Which is why you can never trust eyewitness reports, by the way.”
I nodded. That much was true. People were shockingly unobservant, as a rule.
The play went well, and the next day Kyle Donnelly had the phone numbers of Blum’s two party guests waiting for me on my desk.
The first one, Clifford Marks, had a Facebook page, which must have simplified things for Kyle. A sculptor who designed giant public installations, Marks had more than ten thousand followers and a gallery in Boston for his smaller pieces. The owner gave me the phone number for his house in Brookline.
“Clifford Marks,” he said, picking up on the second ring.
“Mr. Marks, this is Chief of Police Kennis, calling from Nantucket.”
“Nantucket! There’s a name from the past.”
“You never come back?”
“I never even look back. I got out when the going was good. Sold my beach shack in Shimmo for the price of the land, packed a suitcase, and grabbed the first flight out. I’m sure there’s some hideous palazzo there now. Sad.”
“I wanted to ask you a few questions about the old days, if you don’t mind.”
“Is this part of an ongoing investigation?”
“It’s police business, yes.”
“But you can’t tell me anything about it.”
“No.”
“Well, all right, I suppose. I have nothing to hide. But I doubt I have much to offer, either.”
“I won’t take up much of your time. I was wondering if you remembered the ‘theme parties’ thrown by Jackson and Marjorie Blum—back in the day.”
“Sure. There was the ‘Catch a Quaker’ scavenger hunt. Margie was fascinated by island history. I remember I found Mary Starbuck and her son, Nathaniel, but I got tricked when they took me to Parliament House—that was the Starbuck home
in Capaum, back in the eighteenth century. Of course it was gone! Turned out they’d used everything they could salvage from the place to build a new house on Pine Street. By the time I figured that one out, the game was over. Margie was a tricky old girl.”
“Do you recall any special party decorations?”
“Oh, yeah—the baseball cards. I hit the jackpot that night, especially for a Mets fan. Sorry, Red Sox, I grew up in New York. Anyway, I got Nolan Ryan’s Topps rookie card, from 1968. I still have it.”
“Any others?”
“Well, there was the chewing tobacco party. That was crazy. Just thinking about the chairman of the New England Division of the American Cancer Society buying all that snuff. It was like a Baptist buying booze!”
I sat up, staring out the big picture window of my office, seeing nothing. “Interesting turn of phrase.”
“Thanks.”
“You thought of it just now?”
“Yeah—no…I don’t know. Maybe I heard it back then. I don’t really remember. Hits the nail on the head, though, don’t you think?”
“Sure does.”
I hung up, and called Rafe Talerian in Naples, Florida. Kyle had located him through a quick NDR search. We spoke for less than five minutes. That was all it took. I disconnected the phone, closed the National Drivers Register website and checked the Mass. Department of Criminal Justice Information services, along with Florida’s DAVID database. I printed out the information for both men to get Haden Krakauer started, and then took the stairs two at a time down to the second floor. Haden was on the phone when I got to his office, but he hung up as I walked in.
“Whatcha got, Chief?”
I put the paperwork on his desk. “I need to know how these two guys are tied in to Jackson Blum. Outstanding debts he paid for them, loans he made to them, jobs he helped them get, trouble he got them out of, bail he paid—any obligation, any reason they’d lie for him, anything I can use to make them tell the truth.”
“You think he got to them?”
“I know it. Unless two people living in different parts of the country and out of touch for decades would spontaneously think of the same phrase remembering a minor social event twenty years ago.”
“Same phrase? I’m not sure what—”
“A Baptist buying booze. Both of them said it. And so did Blum.”
I left Haden to do the digging on Blum’s friends, knowing it would be slow tedious work, but necessary. Like most jobs, the last five percent of a criminal investigation seemed to take fifty percent of the time. I was certain Blum had killed his partner, but so far I had no viable forensics, no ballistic evidence, no witnesses. Even the circumstantial detail of the tobacco purchases had been nullified by Marks and Talerian. Karen Gifford was still working her way through the historical records, but we both knew that was a long shot. If all my digging had caused even a mild civic earthquake, there was no sign of it yet.
The only effect of my focus on Coddington’s murder was that I had let myself get distracted from my present-day caseload. Understandably—no new crimes had erupted, Pressman was in custody, and we had confiscated his stash. Even my speculations about rigging the Red Ticket Drawing had begun to seem absurd and fanciful…until Alana Trikilis got sick, three days in advance of the raffle. With Lizza Coddington set to take over Alana’s duties on the big day, it looked like the plan had actually been set motion. The felon I should have been hunting wasn’t Jackson Blum at all.
It was Max.
Chapter Twenty-one
Scammers
December twenty-third, and the game was on.
The problem was—how to prove the Christmas drawing had been rigged. More than that, how to convince people the proof was real. In my experience facts just irritate the true believer, and the Nantucket Board of Selectmen believed in the sanctity of the Red Tickets Drawing. So did the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce. I needed to be absolutely certain of the plot before I even approached them.
So, where to start?
How do you solve a crime that hasn’t been committed yet? But that was the point. If my theory was right, it had already begun. Getting Alana Trikilis out of the way was a crucial first step.
I was pacing my office. It was ten-thirty in the morning, Tuesday December twenty-third. It was raining again. Everywhere else on the Eastern Seaboard was getting snow, but the blizzards kept missing us, running north and east of the island. The weather was dreary and Nantucket looked as appealing as a wet cat. The chamber of commerce must have been miserable, and for once I agreed with them.
I held a message slip in my hand—Barnaby Toll wrote down my overnight calls and hand-delivered them in the morning. Today’s batch featured a panicky call from Sam Trikilis. His daughter had been admitted to Nantucket Cottage Hospital around eight-thirty the night before, with high fever, nausea, cramps, and vomiting. Four other people had also been admitted around the same time, and all of them had eaten at a new seafood restaurant in town called Ahab’s. The health inspector, Lou Morgenstern, had closed the place down and spent the morning working the site. I called him.
He answered his cell on the first ring. “Hey, Chief.”
“Anything yet?”
“We checked the backflow preventive assemblies on all the plumbing lines—looking for copper contamination. Nothing there. We’re looking at the refrigeration levels, but frankly, if they had a problem there, everything would have gone bad and we’d have a lot more sick people on our hands.”
Lou was methodical, but I was impatient. I skipped to the obvious question. “What dish were all the victims served?”
“I’m getting to that. They all had the crabcakes. I sent samples and the victims’ blood work to the FDA lab in Boston. They’re backed up this time of year and they’re slow anyway. I was going to call you a little later, ask you to pull some strings for us. You’re pals with the state’s attorney, right?”
“I know him.”
“This is the last gasp of tourist season, Chief. It’s in everyone’s interest to wrap this one up as fast as we can. Call in a favor.”
“I’ll try.”
I knew the favor Dave Carmichael would want in return and it wasn’t a parking pass on Main Street or a scrubbed DUI ticket. He used a State Police driver and he never drank.
What he wanted was me.
“I just fired two deadbeat investigators, Kennis. You can have both their jobs and both their salaries. We both know you work harder than the two of them put together.”
“Fire a third one. I’ll take all three jobs.”
“Are you serious? Because I’ll do it. I have just the Entitled-Generation-What-the-Fuck slacker to dump. His dad’s a State Senator. What a coincidence.”
“Generation What-the-Fuck?”
“They want to be called Generation C, that’s what I’ve heard. C for connected. This kid was connected, all right. Not the way they mean, though. Clueless punk. Together the three of them make around a hundred and twenty grand a year. How does that sound to you? And you know our medical coverage. It makes Blue Cross look like Medicaid. Dental included. Guess the deductible. Zero! You’d have to get elected to Congress to find a plan like this one, Kennis. Plus, I can still shift you into that corner office.”
“Dave, please.”
“What? You want a license to kill? I can’t swing that. Maybe a learner’s permit to crack some heads in the interrogation room.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious. People who say torture doesn’t work just aren’t doing it right.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“I get it. You won’t work for a Republican.”
“I can’t work for anyone anywhere but here. We’ve been through this. I can’t raise my kids from Boston and I couldn’t take them with me.”
Hew grunted in disgust. “Family man.”
>
“Sorry.”
“So what do you need? I’m guessing this isn’t an invitation to the NPD Christmas party.”
“We had a case of food poisoning last night. Morgenstern sent samples of the food, and victim blood work to the FDA in Boston. I was hoping you could bump us up to the front of the line.”
“Jesus.”
“You can do it. You must know a guy over there.”
“I know a lot of guys over there, Kennis. And this is the kind of bullshit request that pisses them off and makes them hang up on me when I have a real problem.”
“This is a real problem.”
“Oooo, someone hacked my Apple Watch! They’re cheating me on my frequent flier miles!”
“Now you’re just giving me shit.”
“You’re a bunch of spoiled brats. Did you know that Nantucket Airport gets more traffic than Logan in August? And it’s all private jets.”
“This is December, Dave. All the rich people have gone home.”
“Really?”
“Well, most of them. Can you do this for me?”
“Call me this afternoon. I’ll have the results.”
“Thanks, Dave. You’re The Man.”
“Goddamn right, I am. Write an angry letter to the Herald the next time they say I’m not.”
“Will do.”
“I hate it when that happens. Some tabloid rag telling me I’m not The Man. Now hang up the phone and let me get some work done around here. Before I change my mind.”
I put my phone away and resumed pacing. I had to admit, it was nice to finally have an office big enough for pacing.
I had a few hours before I could call Dave back, and I wanted to use them productively. I deconstructed the scheme, according to my original theory. They needed Alana out of the way, so that Lizza Coddington could draw the winning ticket. But first she had to have that ticket in hand.
The mechanics of the raffle were simple. On Christmas Eve, three uniformed cops would collect all the tickets from all the participating stores, and bring them under guard to the Pacific Bank building on Main Street where they would stay until two more of my officers, some bank personnel, and someone from the chamber hauled the big bags out to the steps and dumped them into the bed of a shiny new Don Allen Ford F-350 parked right there at the top of Main Street. Then, at exactly three o’clock, Lizza Coddington would draw five tickets—four separate thousand-dollar prizes, and the final five-thousand-dollar grand prize.
Nantucket Red Tickets Page 25