Nantucket Red Tickets

by Steven Axelrod

  In the end I couldn’t arrange the papers on Max’s desk exactly as I’d found them, but mess was mess and I doubted he’d notice. Five minutes later I was gone, heading toward Madaket, where I knew Patty lived, with not a single car in sight.

  I punched the name Whelden into the cruiser’s database and got the exact address, down Ames Avenue, across Millie’s bridge and on to Massachusetts Avenue, via Rhode Island Avenue. The west end of the island was closed down and uninhabited, with just a few hardy locals hanging on through the winter.

  The Wheldens owned a sagging saltbox with a priceless view of Madaket Harbor. The cottage had probably been in their family since the nineteen-twenties. The warped shingles, peeling paint, and rotting windowsills told a story of neglect, but not necessarily one of poverty. Old school Nantucketers seemed to take neglecting their houses as a matter of pride, with a Yankee contempt for throwing money away on frills and trifles. After my brief tour of the Mohlers’ pleasure dome, I could start to see their point.

  I drove past once, saw that no one was home and then parked in a driveway a few houses down. I walked back, pulling my coat closed against the cold.

  I looked around once and slipped through the unlocked door. I moved through the low, dark kitchen—chipped porcelain sink and rusting stove, cupped grease-stained pine floors—through a narrow living room with torn armchairs, a sprung couch, and an incongruous forty-one-inch Samsung flat-screen TV, into the pink-accented bedroom that had to be Patty’s.

  I felt tense and uncomfortable violating her privacy, but it was better than arresting her. I glanced around the tight little room—double bed with too many pillows, dresser, closet, desk with a laptop computer. Where would she have put the ticket? It wouldn’t be an elaborate hiding place. She wouldn’t play games as Max did. It would be somewhere personal, near at hand but safe.

  I saw the locked diary on her dresser and knew it had to be there. I picked the lock in ten seconds, rifled the pages and saw the little Red Ticket instantly. “Happy Holidays. From Us to You. Buy Local & Win.” I slipped the ticket out and replaced it with one from my wallet. No one would be alarmed, and the plan would move smoothly until it failed, Patty waiting in vain for her ticket number to be called.

  Plot foiled.

  I closed and locked the diary, set it down in the rectangle of dust I had revealed when I picked it up. I hadn’t read one word of her private thoughts or touched any other object she owned. But my presence in Patty’s house still felt wrong. It was wrong, and it would stay wrong until I made it right. I wasn’t sure exactly how to do that, although switching out the tickets and thwarting Max’s scheme felt like a decent start.

  Haden Krakauer called me as I drove back into town—he had found the gun registration in the old records: a twenty-two-caliber Ruger, belonging to Dexter Blum—Jackson Blum’s father, listed at the same address on Pleasant Street. The gun that killed Ted Coddington was stashed somewhere in that house, and Haden had taken the initiative to get a warrant. Finally, the blow I’d been waiting for—the hammer hitting a hairline crack. And the case was splitting open.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Circumstantial Evidence

  We were on our way out of the station to serve the search warrant on Jackson Blum when I solved the last piece of the Pat Sauter problem. It was a lucky break. Haden wanted to stop in the operations room to get a Twix bar from the vending machine. His nephew, Byron Lovell, was in there talking on the phone, and I heard him say “—that guy? He’s a total plaster button, man.”

  The odd little slang term sounded ominously familiar. After my confrontation with Sauter, I had asked my friends in the building trades if they had ever come across the “small tool” slang that Pat had used. He claimed it was universal, but as far as I could see it hadn’t even gone viral on the local jobsites. Nether Billy Delavane nor Mike Henderson had ever heard of it, though Billy was amused.

  “I know one guy who’s definitely an allen wrench.” Maybe the jargon was going to go viral after all.

  Meanwhile, Byron’s dad installed granite countertops and Pat Sauter had worked for him off and on since the nineties. The connection was obvious and making it gave me a small but distinct pleasure, like setting out an eleven-letter word on a triple word score in a Scrabble game, with the “F” in “infiltrator” sitting on a double point square.

  I told Haden to warm up a car, and took Byron to a desk at the far end of the big room.

  “I understand why you did it, Byron,” I said. “You were scared.”

  “It—I…what?”

  “And I understand that. Who wouldn’t be scared? Pat Sauter is a scary guy.”

  “Hey, wait a second, I don’t know what—”

  “But here’s the thing. I can’t have official police business spread around town like gossip—information directly pertaining to ongoing investigations. It’s sloppy and unprofessional, and it can also be dangerous. There’s no specific law against it—we don’t issue security clearances. But the police photographer who released his own pictures of the Boston Marathon bomber lost his badge over it.”

  “Wait a second! I never—”

  “Obviously, this is very different. But the policy makes sense. Sometimes we take an investigation a down a dead end. No one needs to know all our mistakes. Sometimes we just like to have the element of surprise. Either way, I can’t have leaks. They’re bad for morale.”

  He could see further denials were pointless. “Listen, Chief—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. It was—I mean, I was so…”

  I patted his shoulder. “I get it. So I’m not going to fire you. I’m going to suspend you for a week, put you on probation, and let you work with the summer specials this year.”

  “Writing parking tickets?”

  “If everything works out, I’ll reinstate you next fall.”

  “But—”

  “Call it a do-over. It’s my Christmas present to you.”

  I left him standing there and joined Haden in the parking lot. “Byron screw up again?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing he can’t fix.”

  Jackson Blum answered the door when we arrived with the search warrant.

  “What the hell is this?”

  I handed him the document. “Read it.”

  He unfolded the papers and skimmed the text, blocking the entrance, shifting through all four pages, pausing to study Judge Perlman’s signature. “I’m getting Alan on the phone. He’ll cancel this.”

  “No he won’t.”

  We stared at each other. Blum played golf with Alan Perlman. More importantly, they played poker together. Perlman was a shrewd cardsharp who rarely bluffed and possessed an unerring instinct for “leveling”—predicting and outguessing his opponents. Haden had sat in on some of those games, back in the day, before the stakes got too high and he started losing his beer money.

  Blum handed me the warrant. “So you’re going to tear my house apart on the day before Christmas Eve?”

  “There’s no need for that, Mr. Blum. All we want is your father’s Ruger.”

  “How could you possibly know about that gun?”

  “We still have your father’s registration on file,” Haden said. “You never renewed it.”

  “I never used it!”

  Blum had stepped forward. I raised a hand. “That’s what we intend to find out.”

  “This is outrageous. Nantucket is turning into a police state!”

  I sighed. “Not really. In a police state I’d rough you up, arrest you, and look for the gun later. No warrant, no worries. No, actually, in a real police state? Someone like you would ‘own’ the cops and be untouchable. But this is still a democracy, where we follow the rule of law. Sorry.”

  “I’m not letting you in.”

  “You don’t have a choice. Except this one: ten cops searching your house,
or you peaceably surrendering the weapon. Right now.”

  He looked away first. He knew when he was beaten. “Fine. Stay here.”

  Twenty minutes later I was in the basement of the police station in our small but effective and well-equipped SID lab, handing the gun in its plastic evidence bag to Monica Terwilliger. She had cut her hair and lost a little weight. I wasn’t sure whether to mention it, and she smiled at my discomfort.

  “Eight and a half pounds, Chief. I’m on the longevity diet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “One day I eat what I like—the next day, six hundred calories. It’s the diet you’re supposed to break! That would be my slogan. I appreciate eating on the days when I can, and, frankly, it’s a relief not to think about food on the days when I can’t. Which, I mean—I still eat. Toast and black coffee for breakfast, vegetable soup for lunch, and a big spinach salad with a hard-boiled egg for dinner. All I have to do is keep a pot of soup going and remember to buy spinach. But at least I actually eat the stuff now, instead of letting it turn into a science experiment in the vegetable drawer.”

  I nodded. “Sounds pretty good.”

  “It’s like a little cleanse. It gives your organs a rest from the constant avalanche of food. Not that you have that! I don’t mean you. But for me…anyway, the point is, it works! Plus no more headaches and my eczema cleared up. Too much information?”

  “Maybe a little. I like your hair, by the way.”

  She did a little twirl. “R.J. Miller. He’s the best. Now what have we got here?”

  She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and removed the gun from the bag.

  “Twenty-two Ruger? This could be it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll have to test-shoot it. Then we can look at the two fired ammunition components under the comparison microscope and check the rifling. Shouldn’t take long.”

  “Fired ammunition components? You mean bullets?”

  “Spoilsport! Jargon is fun.”

  “Do you run the data through the IBIS BulletTrax?” The town had paid a lot for that ballistics identification system, but like the disabled-access elevator at the Nobby Shop (which led to the work clothes department!), it had never yet been used.

  “Funny about the IBIS, Chief, even when the 3-D imaging finds a match, it still has to be verified by a human expert.”

  “And that would be you.”

  “Oh, yeah. That would totally be me. Wait here. I’ll be back in a sec.”

  The bullets were a perfect match.

  I had my murder weapon, but still no compelling evidence that Blum was the one who used it. I thanked Monica and took off.

  I was halfway home when I got a call from Karen Gifford. I hadn’t spoken to her about her dusty search through the files and documents, and had left her unsupervised to comb through the historical records for a bystander who might remember those twenty-year-old events in Madaket. I had pretty much forgotten about the plan, but Karen was relentless, like all good cops, and this time her persistence paid off.

  “Get back to the station, Chief. I found an eyewitness.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The Osprey Nest

  “Who and how?” I asked Karen, standing in her first-floor cubicle, five minutes later.

  “Let me do the ‘how’ first,” she said.

  “Go.”

  “Well…I found a story in the Inquirer and Mirror from December of 1997. A police helicopter located a marijuana grow house on the Land Bank property donated by the Coddington family. That was what caught my interest. They used thermal imaging to identify the shack, which had originally been used as some kind of hunting blind in deer season. But they also documented the find with regular photographs. The actual case was a dead end, at least for me. I tracked down the growers and the cops who made the bust back then. No one remembered anything about a murder or a burial on the property. I still wanted to look at the photos, so I tracked down the case file but apparently the pictures were filed separately when the archive was sealed. I filled out a release form and threw your name around a little.”

  “Did it work?”

  “It took a day or two, but I got in there. One of the pictures happened to show an osprey nest being erected on the property. What they call a V platform. There was a decent-sized group in the picture, but of course I couldn’t identify any of them. So I went to the Maria Mitchell Association and checked their newsletters. The ones from 1997 are still on microfiche, so that took a while. Turned out the nest was a school project they had sponsored. There was just a little squib about it. So I went to the high school and started digging out old issues of Veritas. Hard copies, stacks of them, in the basement. They’ve been meaning to get back issues onto the computer, but…anyway. Some years the paper is really well-written and sharp. Nineteen ninety-seven—not so much. But I found the story. Two local boys, recent NHS graduates home from college on Christmas break, helped out with the project. One of them was Haden Krakauer! I talked to him but he didn’t really remember much. He was always volunteering at Maria Mitchell, helping with bird walks and things. He even built a few osprey nests, but he didn’t have much to do with the Madaket project. He was never on-site. The other helper was Billy Delavane.”

  “You’re a genius.”

  “Well, it’s supposed to be ninety-nine percent perspiration. I have that part covered.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “I left a message. Then I called you.”

  “I’m headed out there now. Thanks, Karen. That was great work.”

  I was halfway out the door when she stopped me. “Chief?”

  “What?”

  “I just wanted to say something. I worked at lots of jobs around here before I decided to join the force. The Basket Museum, the NHA, the Theater Workshop. I worked for the Lifesaving Museum and the Town Clerk. And in all that time, in all those jobs, no one ever thanked me for anything. It was like some kind of zero-sum game for them…if they praised me it made them look bad. It was always the same—overpaid people at the top ignoring the people who did the work and taking all the credit. I started to think that’s just the way things worked. The way of the world! But not with you, not in your world. So, just…thanks.”

  She was right about the normal functioning of the world. Things worked the same way in the LAPD, and I had watched the dynamic play itself out when Homeland Security took over a case on-island a few years before. People on top didn’t even want to know how the work got done or how much how much of it was involved in a project or an investigation. The thought of other people working made them feel lazy, and the intelligent people under their command made them feel stupid. Mostly they were, in fact, lazy and stupid, but watching their betters make half their salary added guilt to the mix and the combination was toxic.

  I had always vowed—not in my police department.

  Karen’s awkward gratitude made me think I was on the right track.

  I pulled out of the lot and headed for Billy Delavane’s shack in Madaket, squinting against the glare of the setting sun.

  “I remember that day,” Billy said when we were settled in two chairs facing his wood stove, his pug, Dervish, anchoring my lap. “It was weird.”

  He had offered me a Whale’s Tale ale and since my day was officially over, I’d taken him up on it. I set the bottle down on the flagstone floor. “How so?”

  “The nest was badly made—no predator guards, no drain holes, and the post wasn’t set deep enough. Building a nest like this…it’s like framing a house, because the birds do all the finish work themselves. We just have to give them a good base. Which on this particular day meant starting over from scratch. Lots of digging. But here’s the bizarre part. I had a little preview on my way over. As I was driving into the property I saw this older guy I knew—Jackson Blum? He was coming out of the pine trees, cov
ered in dirt…just the way I was going to be. He even had a shovel in his hand! I remember thinking—that’s weird. And then I got caught up in the job, we were there for like five hours, and I had a date that night and I was late and…I don’t know, I never thought about it again. Until Karen Gifford left that message today. The laundry I had to do that night was more memorable than some random guy I saw standing by the side of the road. I wound up throwing away my shirt.”

  Laundry—that’s what Marjorie Blum had been talking about. She must have washed her husband’s clothes that night. She had known something terrible had happened and she either chose not to find out what it was or she had kept her husband’s secret all these years.

  Billy was putting things together, also. “The skeleton Pat dug up in Madaket. Blum was burying the guy that day. Coddington! It was Coddington land—or used to be. Until they sold it to the Land Bank and the Land Bank sold it out. Did the Land Bank make the deal with Blum? Sure, but they had to get Coddington out of the way first! Another real estate murder.”

  I waved my hands across my face, as if I was trying to stop an oncoming truck. “No, no, no. The Land Bank is clear on this one.”

  “So it was…the Main Street store! Coddy didn’t want to do the Winthrop deal. So—” He flicked the edge of his hand across his throat like a knife. “Bye bye, spy guy.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “But you’re finally going to nail him.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “Wow.”

  “You don’t mind testifying in open court?”

  “Against that guy? I’d re-cobble Main Street by hand to testify against that guy. And Main Street could use some re-cobbling.”