Nantucket Red Tickets

by Steven Axelrod

  “Another puzzle.”

  “That’s Max.” We started back toward the house. At the door Dave turned to me. “There is one more thing, though. He said something about—you know, the girl who’s holding the winning ticket: ‘Someone from my lonely-hearts fan club,’ that’s what he said.

  “Do you know who he was talking about?”

  “No idea. But it’s a clue. Right?”

  “It is, indeed, Dave. Thanks.”

  We left it at that and I drove home. All I could really think about at that point was getting my frozen pizza into the oven and opening a bottle of wine. But it was not to be.

  I got home to find Jane and Sam had given up on me. Her note said they’d gone for burgers at Crosswinds. But I wasn’t alone. Chief Selectman and new Town Crier Dan Taylor was sitting in my living room. He had let himself in—like most locals, Jane and I never locked our door. Dan jumped up when he heard me walk in. Offhand, I couldn’t think of anyone I less wanted to see at the end of a long frustrating day.

  “Dan,” I said by way of greeting, “you could have called.”

  “I’ve been calling all day! Check your messages! You can ignore the phone all you want but you can’t ignore me. You can run, but you can’t hide!”

  “I’m not running and I’m not hiding. I live here.”

  “Really? You’d never know it.”

  “Can this wait until tomorrow? I’m officially off duty.”

  “Tomorrow will be too late! And, according to you, a cop is never off duty! Or is that just hot air like everything else you say?”

  Clearly he wasn’t going anywhere. “Try to calm down, Dan. I’m opening some wine. Have a glass with me while I get dinner started.”

  “I don’t drink and you know that.”

  “I didn’t, actually. Has it been a problem for you?”

  “You’re my problem, Kennis. You’re like that little pissant newspaper punk crapping all over the new Dreamland Theatre, or those kids who toilet-papered the Main Street Christmas tree last year. You just want to spoil this place for everyone.”

  I remembered one key phrase from David Trezize’s “Dreamland”editorial:

  “The old theater got sold to the first hustler with a wad of cash. He gutted the interior and stormed off in a huff, leaving the rubble behind. Well, the new theater is certainly an improvement on rubble, but that’s setting the bar low, even for Nantucket.”

  The column went on from there, but to Trezie’s credit, he printed Dan Taylor’s furious response in the next week’s issue.

  With me, Dan’s response had to be private, and I had a pretty good idea why. It didn’t matter. He could badger and annoy me but he couldn’t ruin my appetite. He glowered at me as I opened the wine and half-filled a plain Italian jelly glass. I took a sip, turned on the oven and pulled the pizza out of the freezer.

  “So, what’s the problem, Dan?”

  “You know very well what the problem is! That’s insulting! Asking me to lay it out like it wasn’t the most obvious goddamn thing in the world! We both know the problem! I’m here to give you the solution.”

  I took a sip of wine and set the glass down on the counter. “Be my guest. Or more accurately—be my intruder.”

  “Very funny. Get a lock for your door if you want to keep people out.”

  “Not ‘people,’ Dan. Just you.”

  Believe it or not, I had talked Dan’s son, Mason, down from a suicide attempt just a couple of years earlier. The kid was doing well. You’d think Dan might have retained some residual gratitude. Or maybe not. I thought of Jim Prescott, just this evening—furious at me for showing him a side of his son he should have seen himself. I’m sure Dan wanted to be the one to help Mason. But, as usual in Dan Taylor’s life, he was the problem not the solution. And I was the reminder of that. “No good deed goes unpunished,” that was the old platitude. It struck me that there might be a very good reason. Jane Stiles had recently cleaned up her ex-husband’s apartment—out of concern for her son, Sam, who had to spend half his time there. Phil wasn’t grateful. He took the long day’s work as an insult and an accusation. Jane’s efforts made him look like a slob, and I made Dan Taylor look like a bad father. No one likes to see themselves clearly. That’s why we turn away from the dark glass of the computer until the screen lights up and hides our reflection.

  “Here’s how it’s going to be,” Dan said. “You are going to stop investigating this supposed plot to fix the Red Tickets Raffle. You’re going to stop talking to people, and bothering people and rocking the boat. This is the biggest shopping season of the year on this island. We’ve built it up from nothing over the twenty years, turned it into a month-long event. The raffle is the centerpiece of all that. I’m the new Town Crier and I’m going to make sure the drawing goes off without a hitch. It’s our biggest communal celebration, it’s the crown jewel of everything we’ve been trying to accomplish here since the nineteen eighties.”

  “That’s why I don’t want to see it trashed, Dan.”

  “You’re the one who’s trashing it! You’re pissing all over it. Everything was fine until you came along!”

  “Actually—”

  “So here’s the deal. You back off. You know nothing and you like it that way. If someone comes to you and confesses, you ignore it. So everyone has a wonderful Christmas and goes back home smiling to Summit, New Jersey, and Greenwich, Connecticut, or Houston or wherever they live and Nantucket stays their pristine paradise, and they come back in the summer and they tell their friends and contribute to the new hospital fund and everyone’s happy and you keep your job. How does that sound?”

  I unboxed the pizza and slipped it into the oven. “That sounds okay. I’ve hit a brick wall on this one anyway. No one’s talking to me, and even if they did, there’d be no way to know anything for sure. Talk is cheap.”

  “So you’re giving up.”

  “I guess it’s my civic duty.”

  “It’s your job security. It’s your professional survival.”

  “Well then, I guess I’m lucky the investigation failed.”

  “Yes, you are. Now make sure you keep it that way. And have a nice dinner. I’m late for mine.”

  I ate my pizza and salad with a second glass of wine, alone in the quiet house after Dan stalked out. The silent TV, the absence of bickering children and One Directions songs created a resonant sense of peace and quiet. It was like sliding down into the bathwater until your head is submerged and you can hear the warm silence chiming in your head. This was one of the great advantages of divorce: the nights off. I sipped my wine as the Unitarian Church bells rang eight o’clock in the distance and a car rolled past the house heading for Orange Street.

  I had lied to Dan. I wasn’t ready to give up. Dave Prescott had given me a lead and I was determined to follow it. I wolfed down my meal and headed out to Max Blum’s house. I knew Max wouldn’t be there, but something in his room might lead me to his hideout.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The Geodesic Dome

  Marjorie Blum came to the door when I rang the bell. I don’t know who she was expecting but she looked irked and disappointed to see me standing in the winter drizzle.“My husband’s not home,” she said by way of greeting. “And I already told you everything I have to say about—”

  I held up both hands, palms out, to staunch the flow of words. “I just wanted to take a quick look around Max’s room, if that’s okay. I know he’s disappeared.”

  She seemed to refocus. “Can you find him?”

  “I can try.”

  “Well…all right. But wipe your feet and be quick. Jackson wouldn’t like finding you here and he could be back any minute.”

  Up in Max’s room I concentrated on the bookshelves—two of them, about five feet high, holding maybe three hundred volumes. I started pulling them out, fanning the pages,
checking for slips of paper or cutout centers, but there were no obvious leads in the boy’s library—just science fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson and Ted Chiang, a doorstop volume of Westeros maps, texts on computer coding, and works by Borges and Calvino, Nabokov and Tim O’Brien.

  Max never met a metatext he didn’t like.

  I thumbed through a copy of Paul Park’s All Those Vanished Engines, with a smile of surprised respect. It wasn’t a book you’d find in every library, though it deserved to be. Max was obviously as thorough and relentless in his reading as he was in every other area of his life. But I wasn’t looking for clues to his character. I needed some ingeniously coded hint that could reveal Max’s hideout—the equivalent of a treasure map. I was almost finished before I found it.

  Max had a lavish leather-bound fore-edge-painted book sitting on his desk. It reminded me of Jane’s collection and I recalled her mentioning that Max’s father had bid against her for some oversized collectibles at one of Rafael Osona’s auctions a few years before. Despite Max purloining this tome, it would never be listed in any inventory of his possessions, maybe even after his father’s death, if there was no specific bequest in the will. It would never even occur to an estate agent that…

  I set the book down on the desk and stood very still, as if a careless movement could jar the thought loose. I had just made the connection.

  I pulled out my phone and got Haden Krakauer on the line. “Do me a favor,” I said. “Check the deceased gun license rolls for firearms where no one filled out an FA-10 form to transfer ownership.”

  “How far back am I supposed to go?”

  “Mid-forties—just after World War II. But you can optimize the search. I have a couple of terms you can use: 22 caliber Ruger and Blum. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “So it’s the father’s gun.”

  “Could be.”

  I put the phone away and picked up the heavy fore-edge book again. I opened the cover and spread the pages, revealing the picture hidden on the page ends: a geodesic dome with blue ocean and sky behind it. The title page announced it was part of the Old Nantucket Collection. I had never seen a geodesic dome on the island but I was hardly an old Nantucketer. I did know a couple of them, though, and I had one of them on my speed dial.

  “Nantucket Shoals,” said David Trezize.

  “Don’t you have secretaries at that newspaper?”

  “I’m lucky to have paper, Chief. And I wouldn’t mind a little news from time to time, either.”

  “I do my best for you. The Lomax murder? The Pops concert bomb scare? The mega-yacht sinking last summer? You scooped everyone on every story. Thanks to me.”

  “Those papers are landfill. What have you got for me today?”

  “You’re incorrigible. Today, I have a request.”

  He sighed. “Shoot. And I say that with a little anxiety, you being a cop and all.”

  “I have never shot a journalist. But I’m starting to rethink that policy.”

  “Now you’re scaring me. What’s the question?”

  “Do you know anything about a geodesic dome on Nantucket?”

  “Sure. There was a Buckminster Fuller house out on Cliff Road for years. A crazy old biddy owned it. Rode her bicycle to the Yacht Club every day. Some big Hollywood types bought the place, leveled the structure and put up the usual McMansion. This was like ten, fifteen years ago. Summer people. Couple of years ago, the kid got into trouble. Illegal firecrackers or something. He and some local pals kind of ran wild on the property, lived in the guest cottage, called it the bat cave. One of them hacked into the NPD computers and voided out a bunch of parking tickets. Sound like anyone you know?”

  “It certainly does. Can you dig up that address on Cliff Road?”

  “I can do better than that. I can send you some Google Earth screen grabs. It’s the dirt road just before you get to Tupancy. No one’s around this time of year. They’re strictly one-week-in-August types. Miller or Mahler, something like that. Mohler, that’s it, Kenneth and Francine Mohler. He produces that reality show about people who work at Home Depot.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll text you the info. Think you’ll be able to find it on that newfangled phone of yours?”

  “My daughter gave me a tutorial. I’m thinking of starting a twitter account. @copshop.”

  “To send out words of wisdom?”

  “And to chastise my enemies!”

  “Next stop, the White House.”

  I found the house easily. It was hard to miss, even tucked in far away from the road on the brink of the cliff overlooking Nantucket Sound. The place was absurdly, comically huge for two parents and one child. It must have had ten bedrooms at least. I remembered a kid I knew during my Hollywood summers growing up. His house was so big they used an intercom system to talk to each other from distant ends of the mansion. He got a BMW two-seater convertible for high school graduation, but he still stole cars for fun. He got bombed on his parents’ booze every night, and died of a drug overdose at age twenty-six. It never seemed like a healthy parenting strategy, giving your kids everything they wanted whenever they wanted it, dipping the ladle over and over again into an inexhaustible ocean of money. I was glad I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t afford it. I was a sterling and recondite parent—by default. I suspected that if I had the Mohlers’ money, I’d be spoiling my kids just as badly. So, lucky for them.

  I drove down the winding narrow direct track and the massive shingled palazzo loomed slowly into view. Three chimneys, six dormers, and a widow’s walk. Beyond the four-car garage, along the path to the wooden steps that descended to the beach, I found the guest cottage, modest and inviting, just like the image David Trezize had sent to my phone. I climbed out of my cruiser and stood leaning into the steady north wind for a minute or two, listening for some sign of life, watching for any movement.

  I pulled out my phone and spread my fingertips on the screen to enlarge the black-and-white photo of the geodesic dome that David had sent me. The weathered boards, cracked glass, and rusting framework had a weather-battered homemade look that stood, or perched, at the edge of the precipice as a stern New England rebuke to the ostentatious pile behind me. But the rout was clear. The cranks had lost and the cronies had won, the eccentric bought out and brushed off by the extravagant. Money would always win those battles, but I found the triple chimney triumphalism disheartening.

  The property was deserted, the main house windows boarded up. But the cottage showed signs of life. The outdoor light was on, the shell driveway showed fresh tire tracks, and spying in the windows I could see a sweater draped over a chair in the living room and dishes in the kitchen sink. On the wall visible from the sidelights of the front door I could see the alarm, turned on but unarmed.

  The door was locked but I always kept a set of Peterson lock pick tools with me—the fancy one with the rubber handles. I had been trained by a paroled burglar back in Los Angeles, though I rarely needed to use my modest skills on Nantucket, so I was a little rusty with the pick set, and the Schlage lock was stiff. It took me almost five minutes to get inside.

  The house was warm, with a comfortable-looking old couch and a pair of armchairs arrayed in front of a working fireplace still showing a pile of ashes from the last blaze. Hooked rugs softened the wide-board pine floors and tall bookshelves stood between the windows. The view of the Sound made the house feel airborne. The big kitchen was messy but Ikea modern with the required six-burner Wolf range, granite countertops, and Sub Zero fridge.

  Upstairs I found two bedrooms, only one of them in use, bed rumpled and unmade, clothes on the floor, papers strewn across the desk—a plank laid across two filing cabinets. I counted an Apple PC, two Asus laptops, a Sony PlayStation, a Samsung flat-screen TV, and an iPod among the electronic clutter.

  This had to be where Max was living—the central chamber of the bat cave. />
  Someone was living here with Max, or at least staying over often enough to leave her clothes in the closet. I checked the sizes—a big girl, not normally Max’s type. So—a secret romance, with a girl no one would suspect he liked? That would be a perfect candidate for the final member of his team. The sex to bind her to him, the secrecy to make her win look clean. But who? I set the question aside and continued the search.

  I checked the papers—notes for his video game, scratched-out lines of computer code, drawings, nothing connected to the Red Ticket Raffle. Was I hoping for some notebook in which he gloated about his accomplices and laid out his plans? If there was such a thing it would be on one of those computers, in a file hidden by numeric pin numbers and firewalls. I did find a stash of Red Tickets, along with a standard printout of the ticket numbers, listed in order. One of them might be the winner, but I had no way to tell which one; and in any case Max could already have handed it off to Lizza. I needed to find the person with its twin—the little red jackpot someone would be clutching in their hand tomorrow afternoon.

  But who?

  I found a solid clue in the medicine chest.

  The girl kept a collection of cosmetics here, and they were all too familiar—the Rimmel mascara, the Smashbox eyeliner, Urban Decay black lipstick. I was sure most of it would match the stains on my towels.

  Hello, Patricia Whelden.

  I put everything back, suddenly hyperaware of my police cruiser sitting in the driveway. I didn’t want to be caught here in uniform, for a lot of reasons. I was committing a crime, first of all, several crimes, in fact: criminal trespass, illegal search and seizure, though I hadn’t seized anything yet, and of course the familiar old standby, breaking and entering. But beyond all that I didn’t want Max to know I’d been here. If the plan I was putting together succeeded, Max’s heist would vanish without a trace, a seagull into a fog bank—no one would know it had ever been there and not even Max would understand what happened.