Darkness First

by James Hayman

  She skipped the run-in with Ganzer and spent twenty minutes taking Carroll through her conversations with Frank Boucher and then with Pike and Donelda Stoddard. He listened attentively. Asked a few questions but not too many.

  ‘I assume Conor Riordan is an alias,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure it is. Though we better check it out. Maybe it’s a name he’s got some connection with.’ They both knew aliases are often variations on a bad guy’s real name or other intersections in their lives.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No, except that there were a couple of times, especially toward the end, I thought I might have to shoot the damn dog.’

  ‘Well that certainly would have capped off your next of kin notification nicely,’ Carroll laughed. ‘ “Pardon me, sir, your daughter’s dead and … oops, by the way, so’s your dog.” ’

  Maggie didn’t laugh back. Remembering the size of Stoddard’s Rottweiler, especially its teeth, she didn’t find it all that funny.

  ‘Anyway, on this whole boat business? You think Pike’s lying and Donelda’s telling it the way it was?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Based on what?’ asked Carroll.

  ‘Right now, nothing but instinct. I intend pressing a little harder on it. I’ll go back tomorrow. Come down hard on Pike. Ask around down on the pier. If any of the locals saw Tiff or this Conor Riordan guy take the Katie Louise out in January, I intend finding out.’

  ‘Okay. Anything else?’

  ‘Soon as I feel we have probable cause, I’ll get a search warrant for the house. See if we can find Pike’s 10,000 dollars.’

  ‘Think he’d keep it around the house?’

  ‘Doubt he’d put it in a bank.’

  Carroll looked thoughtful. ‘You know what I don’t get? Why would Pike Stoddard lie to protect somebody who might have killed his daughter? Why would any father?’

  ‘You mean aside from the fact that Pike hates cops and his first instinct is to lie?’

  ‘Yeah. Aside from that.’

  Maggie shrugged. ‘Bunch of possible reasons. Major jail time is the most obvious. Taking money for the boat makes him an accomplice in one of the biggest drug heists in local history. Number two: If he’s got the 10,000 dollars, he probably wants to keep it. Losing it to us isn’t going to bring Tiff back. Number three: Simple fear. If he talks and Conor Riordan finds out he could end up as dead as Tiff.’

  ‘But he told you he never laid eyes on Riordan.’

  ‘He could be lying about that, too.’

  Maggie downed the remains of her beer, caught Damian’s eye and pointed at her glass.

  A minute later he brought their food and drinks, two extra plates, a big pile of paper napkins and a bunch of wet-naps.

  ‘Okay, you win,’ he said, eyeing the ribs. ‘Dietary virtue ain’t always what it’s cracked up to be.’

  Maggie pushed the platter into the middle of the table. They each cut off a rib and started gnawing.

  20

  9:10 P.M., Saturday, August 22, 2009

  After leaving the restaurant Maggie turned north on Route 1. About ten minutes later, the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth sounded from inside her jacket pocket. Caller ID showed a 215 area code. Philadelphia.

  ‘Detective Savage?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is Detective Louisa DelCastro returning your call.’

  ‘Thanks for getting back to me.’

  ‘No problem. Just wanted you to know, before I called, I confirmed your bona fides with a Sergeant Michael McCabe at the Portland PD. He told me you were working TDY on a murder case with the Maine State Police. How can I help you?’

  ‘Does the name Samuel Harkness mean anything to you?’

  ‘Is he a suspect?’

  ‘Not yet. I was just wondering if you could fill me in on an incident that took place three and a half years ago in a suite at the Palomar Hotel.’

  ‘Indeed I can,’ said Detective DelCastro. ‘Indeed I can.’

  For the rest of the way into Machias Maggie listened to the details of Sam Harkness’s adventures in the City of Brotherly Love, asked a few questions and made her mind up that tonight was as good a time as any to drop in on Emily’s ex.

  Maggie felt a stab of familiar things forever lost as she turned her Blazer into Sam Harkness’s driveway at the end of Schoppee Point Road in Roque Bluffs. Investigating a murder where you grew up, among people you grew up with, might turn out to be tricky.

  She squeezed in next to an old Nissan Maxima with a UMM decal on the rear window. Not Sam’s car. He wouldn’t be caught dead driving anything so plebeian. Sam preferred swanning around in vintage Mercedes convertibles or, when he felt a need to show his macho side, slumming in a rusty old Chevy pick-up.

  From outside, the house hadn’t changed a bit since Maggie had last been here or, for that matter, since Sam’s great-aunt Julia built the place in the early thirties. A plain-Jane, shingled cottage with a wraparound porch set on three acres of oceanfront property between Great Cove and Englishman Bay. Just behind the house was the barn Julia had converted into an artist’s studio. Maggie wondered if Sam still had the paintings Julia left behind when she died. Wondered especially if he had the ones of her.

  Maggie’s last visit had been a little over three years ago. Just before the break-up. Em invited her for dinner the night before Maggie was due back in Portland. She had some news, she said cryptically. Something she wanted to tell Maggie in person.

  It had been an unusually warm night for late April, warm enough to allow them to sit on the porch after dinner and watch the tide come in. Sam for once was on best behavior. Hadn’t been too flirty. Hadn’t had too much to drink. Just enough to make his accent a little more southern, a little more Louisville than it was when he was totally sober. Perhaps he sensed what Emily had in mind.

  After coffee, Maggie and Em walked down to the beach and Em told her the marriage was over. She’d had enough, she said. Couldn’t take any more of Sam’s drinking and rages and endless womanizing. She’d taken her wedding vows seriously and given the marriage everything she had until now, at long last, there was nothing left to give. ‘Nothing at all. I’m running on fumes.’

  Maggie knew it was all true.

  Did Sam know, she asked?

  No, not yet. Not officially. Em planned to tell him in the morning. That was the only time of day she could be reasonably sure he’d be sober enough to discuss it. He’d still blow up, of course. His ego couldn’t take rejection. He’d yell. Scream. Make ugly threats. Remind Emily in a snarky tone of the till death do us part line in her vows. Warn her that she wouldn’t get a dime. Not now. Not ever. Warn her of that even though he knew perfectly well she didn’t give a damn about Julia’s money. Whatever might be left of it. Which, given Sam’s ceaseless and careless spending, probably wasn’t all that much. The only thing Em told Maggie she regretted was they’d never had a baby. She’d always wanted a child and now, given the dearth of eligible bachelors in Washington County, it seemed unlikely she’d ever have one. Though she could, she supposed, go out and find a sperm donor and do it all on her own.

  Maggie listened as she’d listened so many times before to the gruesome details of her best friend’s marriage. Even so she was surprised it was finally coming to this. That Em was actually calling it quits. Emily, the eternal team captain who, even when they were ten points down with less than a minute to play, would still try to rally the troops, still try to convince them there was a way to win.

  It was the first and only time Maggie had ever known Emily to give up on anything she’d committed herself to. To actually admit there was something she couldn’t effect through sheer force of will. But no, Emily said, not this time. Not any more. She was finished blaming herself for Sam’s ugly behavior. This time, at long last, she was moving out. Filing for divorce.

  Maggie supposed Sam must have sensed what was coming. Supposed that was the reason for his subdued demeanor during dinn
er.

  ‘Where will you go? Back to Portland?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘No, I’m not giving up my practice. Just my marriage. I plan on converting the second floor over the office into a small apartment. I’ll live there. Back where I began.’ Emily gave her a sad smile as they started back toward the house. ‘At least it’ll be a better commute.’

  Maggie forced her mind back to the present and walked across the lawn to where Sam was sitting. He was midway between the cottage and the beach, slouching on an aluminum lawn chair, one of the cheap, old-fashioned ones with green and white plastic webbing. There was a second, similar, chair, empty, next to him.

  Sam was dressed as Sam always dressed in summer. A blue-and-white-striped button-down dress shirt, the top three buttons open at the neck, tails pulled out over khaki shorts, beat-up Topsiders on his feet. He held what looked like an icy martini in his left hand. Stoli, she remembered, with less than an eyedropper’s worth of vermouth and a pair of baby onions nestled on the bottom. She supposed it was possible Sam’s tastes had changed in the years since she’d seen him last. Maybe he’d gone and done something radical like switching from Stoli to Absolut or maybe even gin but somehow she doubted it.

  He held an oversized racquet in his right hand and was bouncing a worn tennis ball up and down on the strings, reducing the young and eager Springer Spaniel in front of him to a state of quivering yelps. After the fifth or sixth bounce the former captain of the Exeter tennis team neatly rotated his wrist and managed, without spilling a drop of the martini, to hit a graceful forehand that sent the ball flying, then skipping, thirty or forty yards down the lawn toward the beach. The spaniel followed in hot pursuit.

  ‘Hello, Sam,’ said Maggie.

  He looked up, acknowledging her presence for the first time. ‘Well, if it isn’t the beautiful Maggie May.’

  An old nickname she hadn’t heard in a while. ‘Nice to see you,’ she said, returning his smile.

  ‘And you.’ Sam nodded then turned his attention back to the dog, who’d already raced back from the beach. He put down the martini and pulled the slobbery ball from its mouth.

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ he asked. The soft southern accent and the subtly slurred words suggested he was already well into his cups.

  ‘I was hoping you could spare me a few minutes. Something I need to talk to you about.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘Maggie, this is Willie. Willie, Maggie. I don’t believe you two have met.’

  ‘No,’ Maggie said. ‘No, we haven’t.’ She knelt down and scratched the spaniel behind his long silky ears. ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Willie joined me shortly after my former wife – I believe you remember my former wife – after she announced – the phrase she used, if memory serves, was that she could take no more. Willie arrived, just in time to fill the aching void Emily’s departure left in my heart.’

  ‘Aching void? Jesus, Sam, give me a break.’

  ‘I’m serious, Margaret. I loved Emily and when she left she did leave an aching void in my heart.’

  Maggie decided not to tell Sam that, if he loved Em so much, he had strange ways of showing it. There was no need to go down that road.

  ‘Anyway,’ Sam continued, ‘that’d make Willie, oh let’s see, just about three now.’

  Sam downed the remains of the martini including the onions, tossed the ball in the air and hit it again. Harder and farther this time. It bounced into the water. Willie followed.

  ‘May I sit?’ Maggie asked nodding at the empty chair next to Sam’s.

  ‘Of course, how rude of me.’ Sam rose, bowed and gestured toward the chair with the formality of an usher showing the mother of the bride her honored place in the front pew. ‘Anyway, I was just going to fix myself a refill. May I bring you something?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Sam.’

  ‘There are a couple of cold bottles of Piper in the back fridge. I remember how much you enjoy good champagne.’

  ‘No. Really. I just dropped by for a chat. I probably won’t be here long enough to justify a drink. Not even champagne.’ Maggie bent down and picked up a pair of women’s flip-flops that were neatly lined up beneath the chair she was sitting in. ‘Besides, it appears you have company. Am I breaking up a party?’

  ‘Hardly a party. Just a student who came by for a critical evaluation of her efforts.’

  ‘Her writing efforts?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Why, of course, Margaret. I teach writing.’ Sam’s brows went up in a display of injured innocence. ‘Whatever else would I be talking about?’

  ‘Of course. Whatever else? How were they? Her efforts, I mean.’

  ‘Not very good, I’m afraid. She’s inside resting now.’

  ‘Recovering from your criticism?’

  ‘No, actually. From three of my martinis. The poor thing usually only drinks beer. Bud Lite, may the Lord forgive her.’

  Unlike the fine wines he so enjoyed blathering about, Sam wasn’t improving with age. His Exeter/Harvard snobbery, barely noticeable in the young man she first met as a teenager, now seemed both obvious and obnoxious. Perhaps it was simply his growing bitterness that he’d never become the celebrated novelist he’d so carefully created his persona around. Of course, Maggie thought, it wouldn’t have hurt if Sam spent more of his time writing and less of it drinking. Or evaluating his female students’ efforts.

  She took off her light summer jacket, revealing the 9 mm Glock 17 strapped to her hip and the gold detective’s shield clipped next to it. She hung the jacket on the chair behind her.

  Sam glanced at the weapon. ‘I see you’ve come armed.’

  ‘Yes. You remember, I’m a police officer.’

  ‘Of course I remember. Always amazed me. Female cops aren’t supposed to be attractive. Except, of course, on TV. There they’re always beautiful.’ Sam threw her another smile. ‘Like you.’

  Maggie supposed Emily’s leaving and the divorce that followed made her a more legitimate target of Sam’s attentions. Though, to be honest, he’d made a clumsy pass or two back in the day.

  ‘Well, thank you, Sam,’ she said with only a hint of sarcasm. ‘By the way, speaking as a cop, I do hope your inebriated guest is over twenty-one. I’d hate to think you were serving alcohol to a minor.’

  Sam shook his head. ‘For once in your life, dear Margaret, you leave me utterly speechless.’ He turned and headed for the house, walking what some might have considered a straight line, though to Maggie’s eye he did seem to be listing a bit to starboard. ‘I shall return,’ he called out, waving the racquet over his head.

  Willie trotted back, wet and sandy from his swim, and dropped the slobbery yellow ball by Maggie’s feet. When she showed no interest in picking it up, he retrieved his prize and followed his master into the house.

  Maggie sat, watching slivers of moonlight reflect off the still water that lay beyond the narrow stone beach and thought about Emily and Sam. Where, she wondered, had that beautiful boy gone, the one they both met the summer after high school graduation and had both fallen in love with, though, of course, it was Emily he’d chosen.

  Images from that summer of 1991 flooded back into Maggie’s mind. Sam, three years older than Maggie and Em, was spending the summer between his junior and senior years at Harvard here at Julia’s house. Julia had offered him the house as an escape hatch, hoping it would give the young and talented writer time and space to finish his first novel away from the dismissive attitudes of his more immediate family, who all summered along the coast in the more fashionable environs of Northeast Harbor. Without exception they considered Sam’s dream of living what he called the writing life little more than foolishness.

  And so Sam came to Machias that summer. To great-aunt Julia’s in Roque Bluffs, to finish his first novel. He probably would have too if he hadn’t wandered into Ed Kaplan’s hardware store on the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend looking for a surf-casting rod and had run, instead, into the store owner�
��s tall, beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter. Sam’s chances of doing much writing after that quickly dissolved from slim to none.

  Most of his days were spent daydreaming about Emily instead of concentrating on the book. Most nights, Em would head out to Roque Bluffs as soon as she finished work. More often than not Maggie tagged along and the three of them would sit around a fire on the beach, smoking Julia’s pot or drinking her expensive French champagne. Julia, at eighty-one, was still living in the house and seemed to have an unlimited supply of both.

  When Em and Sam wanted to be alone, which at some point in the evening they always did, Maggie’d wander up to the barn that served as Julia’s studio. Julia would break out some more pot or more champagne and, while she worked at her easel, tell Maggie tales from her life as an artist and an outcast.

  ‘I built this cottage in 1934,’ she said, ‘as a summer place for myself and my friend Zanie Theobold. Zanie and I weren’t welcome in Northeast Harbor, where my brother, who was Sam’s grandfather, and our various cousins spent summers in what they like to call the family compound. Actually, I don’t think they started calling it that until after Jack Kennedy was elected president. If the Kennedys had a compound, then the Harknesses damn well wanted one too. Anyway, Zanie and I escaped up here to Washington County, where we figured no Harkness would ever deign to tread.’

  ‘Why weren’t you welcome down there?’

  ‘Well, for one thing I was a painter and Zanie was a poet. My family looks upon anything remotely artistic with great suspicion. For another Zanie and I enjoyed what in those days was called “a Boston marriage”.’

  ‘You were lesbians?’

  ‘Were. Are. Always will be. Of course, Zanie’s dead now so I guess she’s not technically a lesbian any more. I don’t think dead people can be said to have sexual feelings one way or another. Most of the figure studies both at the house and here in the barn are of Zanie at various stages of our life together. As you can see, she was built like you. Wonderful body right up until the end. Of course, she died far too young.’