Nantucket Sawbuck
A Henry Kennis Mystery
Steven Axelrod
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Steven Axelrod
First E-book Edition 2014
ISBN: 9781615954681 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
Nantucket Sawbuck
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Map
Part One: Premeditation
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Part Two: Post Mortem
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Epilogue
More from this Author
Contact Us
Dedication
To Annie Nick and Caitlin:
Family given and chosen.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my brilliant editor Annette Rogers, and the faculty of Vermont College of the Fine Arts, where I finally learned how to write: Chris Noel, Domenic Stransberry, Diane Lefer and the inimitable Douglas Glover. Cheers also to my astute and merciless writing-group beta-readers, Neil Brosnan, George Murphy and Kathy Butterworth. My argument with Neil about Henry’s final disposition of the case made it into the book almost verbatim. I’m grateful for the advice and guidance of the real Nantucket Police Chief William Pittman. He would want you to know that Henry’s poetry and procedural mistakes are all my own. Finally, thanks to Suellen Ward for jump-starting this project over soft-shell crabs ten years ago. And to my Mom and Dad, Ed Breeding and Mimi Beman, true blue supporters who will have to miss the launch party.
Map
Part One: Premeditation
Chapter One
Preston Lomax
Just before two a.m. on a Friday morning three weeks before he was murdered, Preston Lomax was making a list of all the people who wanted to kill him. It was a long list. First of all, there were his three sons, whom he had humiliated for most of their lives. They naturally assumed they would be inheriting an almost incalculable fortune. He heard them joking about it: how to commit the perfect crime. Of course they would be the primary suspects if he were found dead, so they toyed with the idea of making it look like a suicide. Danny’s handwriting was virtually identical to his own, which meant faking a suicide note would be no problem. They often entertained themselves devising drafts of this document: “I can no longer live with myself,” the best of them began. “Wives can divorce me, children can run away from home. Friends can shun me. And they do. Everyone can flee the foul putrid horror that is Preston Lomax. Everyone except myself. For years I have had to live with this tedious, conniving self-centered monster twenty-four hours a day. At last I have found my own way to escape.”
Of course the boys had no idea their apartments were bugged.
Preston Lomax didn’t believe in anyone’s privacy, except his own. Secrets were a luxury that you had to earn.
His wife and daughter would no doubt like to get rid of him, also. He had cheated on Diana with every one of her friends, all three of her sisters, two of her business partners, and the few attractive members of her support group: Women Who Love Men Who Hate Women, or Women Who Hate Women Who Love Men Who Love Hating Women Who Hate Men, or whatever the hell it was called.
If they needed someone to love and hate at the same time, he was happy to oblige.
His daughter hated him too. He had the tapes from her psychiatric appointments. He was apparently a demanding, unappeasable tyrant who forced her to play a game she called Guess My Mood. His rages and silences were as unpredictable as the occasional moments of warmth. She had never felt loved. She had “abandonment issues” and “anger management” problems. The hundred-and-fifty-dollar-an-hour shrink was supposedly helping her to “own” them. Lomax smiled. That girl could hardly even afford the down payment. If she ever did take full possession of all those pent up resentments, she might become dangerous. But that was at least a million dollars’ worth of therapy away. Right now, she could barely look him in the eye over breakfast.
Who else wanted him dead? His drug dealers, his bookies. Several dozen top-of-the-line call-girls. None of them had been paid for months. There was a string of bad business deals going back fifteen years, dozens of people he’d left owing massive amounts of money while he disappeared with various companies’ assets. It was mostly legal, or close enough to legal, and the lawsuits that would have disentangled the criminal from the legitimate would have been too time-consuming, and too embarrassing, to pursue. He knew his victims. He was shrewd about people, but one thing you could never predict was when someone was going to snap. Many of these fools had threatened him with bodily harm over the years. Lomax sighed. He brought out the Kamikaze in people.
Then there were the servants.
He had fired so many, tormented so many more into quitting. Desperate fringe people, bitter and unemployed, could easily feel that they had nothing to lose. Murder might seem like a reasonable option. Lomax generally wore thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry—his Rolex watch alone would make the killing worth the trouble for any of that rabble.
And think of all the kitchen maids, secretaries, and au pairs over the years. Some of them had fallen in love with him, some had gotten pregnant. Many of them had friends and family members as disgusted as they were. Why, the murderous potential of just the siblings of the girls he’d used and discarded multiplied the threats he faced exponentially. He had a brief chilling vision of a veritable army of hate-filled, cheated, abused, furious people, like the villagers in those old Frankenstein movies, storming the castle with their torches.
He walked to the window of his study overlooking Central Park. Fifth Avenue was almost deserted at this hour and the quiet soothed him. All day long he had heard the children in the playground across the street. He still had the remnants of a headache from that clamor.
Walking back to his chair he sat down and went over the list again. It w
as incomplete. He had ignored a vital segment—the people who would want him dead in the near future. Most of those new victims lived on the island of Nantucket, thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts. They were tradespeople and retailers, professionals who relied on home owners like Preston Lomax for their sustenance. They saw the huge trophy fortress he was building on Eel Point, they noted his urgent attempts to gain admission to the ever so particular and stuffy Nantucket Yacht Club, chuckled over the way he had insisted that the residents whose house he had leveled to build “Sea Breeze” give him their 228 exchange telephone number and their two digit, in-town mailbox—small but significant indicators of “old” Nantucket money; an aura that instant millionaires like Lomax craved.
They assumed he was there to stay. The gossip mill ground out its formal conclusion from the benches of Main Street to the counter at Crosswinds, from the Wharf Rat’s club to the editorial offices of the Inquirer & Mirror. Lomax was another fat cat who would plunk his slab of property tax money down every year. In return he’d spend four weeks out of fifty-two in his shingled palace, call himself a “native” and grouse about the “new people”, especially the ones whose houses, no uglier or more ostentatious than his own, blocked his ocean view. He’d be a regular at the most expensive restaurants, running tabs at Topper’s and The Pearl, and the cops would offer him a lift home when he got drunk. In other words, he was a type, a part of the island landscape, as unremarkable as the successful Irish contractor building a house in Tom Nevers, or the hard working Jamaican riding to work on a too-small bicycle, or the old lady from Greenwich volunteering at the Hospital Thrift Shop. He was common as mildew, regrettable as red tide, inevitable as fog. And that was just the way he wanted it.
Because none of it was true.
The reality was that Preston Lomax’s company was under investigation by the Attorney General’s office. And he knew exactly what the audit would show. He’d been robbing LoGran Corporation blind for years. No matter how well he covered things up, some ratty little accountant would turn State’s evidence and screw him. But he was going to escape long before that, and Nantucket was the perfect staging area for his embarkation to parts unknown. All he had to do was keep things running normally and make no obvious moves. He had to keep building his house, for instance. That was fine, it would cost him nothing. He had paid everyone their first third, so they assumed he was good for the rest. Together they had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor and materials to the Preston Lomax fund. They just didn’t know it yet. Appearances were everything and he appeared to be the safest bet around.
Well, let that be a lesson for them. And if the tuition at this particular school bankrupted them and ruined their lives, so be it.
Everything had worked perfectly so far. One of his bookies had even told him to start thinking about a second mortgage. His cocaine dealer was worried that he might find a cheaper on-island connection. The camouflage was perfect. And at the other end, there was enough money to keep him fat and happy in Central America for the rest of his life. All he had to do now was disappear.
He crumpled up the list of possible assassins and threw it out. They were all too late: in a month he’d be gone.
He poured himself a glass of neat Lagavulin single malt, walked to the window again. Looking down on the dark trees beyond the Park wall, he toasted the shadows.
“One month,” he said aloud. And he drained the glass.
Chapter Two
The Scene of the Crime
Preston Lomax was found murdered at home in the early morning hours of December 16th. The body was discovered by his daughter Kathleen, after returning from a party in Wauwinet just after 1 a.m., according to her initial deposition, which I took on the scene. Her mother had been off-island, and her two brothers maintained separate residences, Danny in a renovated second floor condo in Freedom Square, Eric in a converted garage apartment on Helens Drive. So Lomax had been alone in the house for the evening.
“I knew something was wrong before I even got inside,” Kathleen told me.
I watched her, letting her take her time. We were sitting on one of the two big couches that flanked the fireplace, in the great room of the Eel Point mansion. If she had been drinking at the party she held it well. If her father’s death affected her, I saw no sign of it. Maybe she was in shock. Maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she had killed Lomax herself, and was still in some nerveless fugue state. I didn’t want to rule anything out. But she seemed smaller than she had the previous night, when she had danced happily into her father’s Christmas party and disappeared upstairs a few minutes later. She was pulled into herself now, crumpled like a plastic bottle when you suck the last of the water out.
“The house was quiet in this odd way,” she said. “I mean…Dad usually listens to music when he’s alone—he always has his Frank Sinatra CDs with him. Francis Albert, Dad calls him. The Chairman of the Board. I always thought it was funny because Sinatra was just this old singer and Dad actually was the chairman of the board, you know? Anyway…I had downloaded like fifty of those songs onto an iPod. I was going to give it to him for Christmas and I—” She stopped talking, pulling herself back from the brink of tears.
I began to relax—this was the kind of response I’d been waiting for. “Walk me through it slowly. You pulled up in the driveway. Did anything strike you as unusual?”
She nodded. “The lights were on. I mean—all the lights in the house. Which was bizarre, because my dad is always like ‘turn out the lights, I don’t own the electric company yet.’ And the door was open. I mean…closed but not latched. I didn’t need my key. That really freaked me out. I had reset the alarm before I went out, so I figured maybe friends had dropped over. Except it was so quiet. Then I thought, maybe Dad went out, but there’s no way he wouldn’t have locked up. He’s paranoid about burglars, even on Nantucket where’s there’s totally no crime, right?”
I shrugged. “I wish that was true.”
We fell silent for a moment. The tragic absurdity of her last comment seemed to roll over her like a breaking wave. Nantucket would never be her safe, idyllic island again. She pulled her pony tail loose and was wrapping the hair elastic around her fingers, binding three of them together, doubling the band twice, cutting off her circulation.
I could hear my men moving upstairs, taping off the bedroom. I had sent Barnaby Toll back to the station for the dental stone casting kit. We‘d gotten lucky—I saw that as soon as we arrived. A brief late December thaw the night before had left the lawn and driveway muddy, the perfect medium for absorbing footprints and tire tracks. Then the weather turned cold again, the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees in the last few hours. That meant the impressions stamped into the wet soil were hardened into ice and easy to preserve. I only wished my detectives had understood the situation. Kyle Donnelly actually tripped on the icy ridge of a footprint and wound up on the ground staring at it. I had to smile when he stood up, cursing about the slick soles of his police brogans. The print he’d been staring was some kind of ridged vibram type, exactly the kind of footwear Donnelly had been requesting since the first dusting of snow in November: a man’s print, but not a policeman’s. And the Lomax clan didn’t strike me as work-boot people. This could be our intruder, but Donnelly hadn’t made the connection. That’s why I go to every crime scene, when the Board of Selectmen would prefer to keep me sitting in my office fiddling with paperwork. There was no point in giving my detectives on-the-job training if there was no one on the job to train them.
I pointed out the obvious and I could see his face light up, as the synapses sparked. It reminded me of my kids’ Lego blocks. With enough time and patience they could build the rocket ship or skyscraper pictured on the box. Kyle was building something much more important: the working police officer’s opportunistic style of perception, always hunting for the odd detail, the small anomaly, and the connections between them.
/> He had a way to go, but he was getting there. One block at a time.
The state police would be arriving soon. The C-Pac unit would be on the first flight over from Hyannis. Four other officers were securing a wider perimeter around the house. One of two big red garbage cans was sitting on the front walk; the other was upstairs. I always brought them to a crime scene. It was a trick I had learned from the lead homicide detective I’d worked with in L.A. The cans were for police trash: cigarette butts, coffee cups, candy wrappers, tissues—anything that could confuse the SID people and contaminate the scene. People got careless, even cops, and especially after a late night. The trash cans helped.
Kathleen was fading. Her fingers were turning white. “I have to call my brothers. They don’t know what happened. I have to tell them, I need them to be here. They—”
“You have three brothers, is that right?”
“What? Oh—yes, that’s right. Timmy’s in Dubai, he works for BP. But Dan lives here now. He dropped out of law school to write a memoir. Life with father? Or something like that.”
I knew Daniel Lomax. I had arrested him at a beach party the summer before and watched while his father paid off everyone to drop the charges. The money must have been pretty good because a lot of furious people turned sweet and warm way too fast, like dumping sugar into day-old coffee and popping it into the microwave. I had hauled Danny in again a few weeks ago, after a fight at the Chicken Box, and Daddy had taken care of that problem, too. The gravy train was permanently derailed now. Every tragedy has a bright side. I pegged the kid for a spoiled arrogant little bully. He didn’t strike me as the literary type.
I turned back to Kathleen. “And the third brother? The youngest one? Eric, is it?”
She nodded. “Poor Eric. He checked himself out of Riggs two weeks ago. The Austen Riggs Center? In Stockbridge? It’s a rehab clinic. Daddy made him go. They had a huge fight but it didn’t matter. He checked himself out like two days later.”
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