High Season

by Jon Loomis

  Coffin thought about Tony—wondered how he could stand it, all that mess and commotion at home. Tony seemed to take the whole business in stride, like a big, good-natured Buddha. Coffin liked the peace that living alone brought, liked eating when he wanted, going to bed when he wanted, not having to pick up anyone’s mess but his own. He’d been married for five years, in Baltimore, but things had gone sour—the divorce a cold slap in the face. His wife had gotten pregnant toward the end, but then she’d had a miscarriage.

  He tried to sleep for a while, but whenever he began to drift off he felt dizzy; the darkness behind his closed eyes was a bottomless pit into which he fell and fell. He got up and made coffee and toast. He put half-and-half and sugar in the coffee and buttered the toast and then threw the toast away. As he sat and sipped his coffee he saw that Jamie had left most of a cigarette in the ashtray—she’d apparently lit it, then put it out almost immediately. He eyed it, deciding to let it be. He showered and shaved and dressed in his least-rumpled khakis and flannel shirt. On his way out the door, he picked up the cigarette and put it in his pocket.

  Chapter 12

  Ahalf hour later, Lola sat in Coffin’s desk chair, flipping through her notebook. Coffin was on the phone with Shelley Block.

  “Thanks for the Merkin report, Shel,” he said.

  “Hope it helps,” she said. “Just don’t tell anyone you got it from me. You’re not authorized, you know.”

  “Any ID yet on the body from the Duarte house?”

  Someone flushed a toilet upstairs, and water rushed through the sewer pipe above Coffin’s desk.

  “It’s wall-to-wall gorks here,” Shelley said cheerfully. “Haven’t had a minute. But hang on—I’ve got his stuff here somewhere.” There was a rustling of papers. “Here we go. Personal effects. Wallet, watch, two rings, earring. Let’s just look in the bag, shall we?”

  She paused a moment; Coffin heard plastic rattling.

  “All righty,” Shelley said. “One wallet, smoky and wet, containing bank card, credit cards, insurance card, nude photo of girlfriend—nice dye job—and Mass driver’s license, issued to one Jason Duarte.”

  “So it’s him, then.”

  “Unless somebody went to the trouble of putting Jason Duarte’s wallet in someone else’s pocket before they killed him, yes. Once we get dental records, we’ll know for sure.”

  “Great,” Coffin said. “When can you do the autopsy?”

  “Now he’s interested in my work,” Shelley sighed. “C’est l’amour. Your guy’s at the top of the list. I’ll shoot for this afternoon.”

  “I owe you lunch,” Coffin said.

  Shelley laughed. “Yeah, yeah. Anything but barbecue.”

  Coffin’s phone buzzed as soon as he hung up. It was Boyle.

  “Coffin? Mancini’s here. He’s holding a briefing in ten minutes. You and Winters are required to attend.” He hung up before Coffin could say anything.

  “Mancini’s here,” Coffin said. “He’s going to brief us on the murders.”

  “That should be interesting,” Lola said.

  At one o’clock precisely, Vincent Mancini strode into the cramped squad room, with Boyle two steps behind him. The Cape and Islands district attorney was tall and tight-lipped. He wore round-rimmed glasses, a blue suit, and a red power tie. His hair was gelled into a premeditated rumple. Mancini set his briefcase down on the desk, stood behind the small lectern, and looked at his watch. The gabble of conversation died.

  “As you know, the CIDA’s office and the state police detectives division are now investigating two homicides committed this week in and around Provincetown,” he said. “While we are making good progress, we ask that you keep your eyes and ears open and notify us at once if you obtain any information that may prove to be pertinent.”

  Tony raised his hand. “Like what kind of stuff?” he said.

  “Facts. We’re interested in Merkin’s movements in the hours before his death. The PPD should not directly question potential witnesses, but we do ask that you notify us immediately if you hear of anyone who might have information pertaining to either of these cases.”

  “That sucks,” Tony said softly.

  Mancini frowned and straightened his tie. “While you will not be an active part of the investigation, I thought it wise to come here today and fill you in on where we stand at the moment. You may want to take notes.” He held up three fingers. “In a homicide investigation, we look for three things: means, motive, and opportunity. Let’s begin with motive. Murder happens for one of two reasons. Who can tell me what they are?”

  Mancini waited, eyebrows raised expectantly. No one moved.

  “All right,” Mancini said. “I see we’re starting from square one. The two basic motives for homicide are sex and money. Everything else is just a variation on those themes.”

  “Mr. Mancini?” Tony said.

  “What is it, Officer?”

  “What about revenge?”

  “What do you mean, what about revenge?”

  “You said there were only two motives for murder, but you didn’t say revenge.”

  Mancini rolled his eyes. “All right, Officer. If you insist. Sex, money, and revenge.”

  Jeff Skillings raised his hand. “What about self-defense?”

  Mancini glared at him. “All right, all right—sex, money, revenge, and self-defense. Is that it? Is everybody happy now?”

  Two more hands went up. Coffin looked down at the floor, hoping Mancini wouldn’t see him grinning.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Boyle said, standing near the door. “Can we get on with this? Would that be all right with you people?” No one spoke for a moment.

  “As you all know,” Mancini went on, “the majority of homicides are committed by the victim’s family members or acquaintances, so that’s where homicide investigators tend to look first. At the moment, our best suspect in the Merkin killing is Merkin’s wife, who stands to inherit his entire estate, valued in the range of one hundred million dollars. She had motive and opportunity and no alibi for the time period in which Merkin most likely was killed. That is where our investigation will focus.”

  Tony raised his hand again. “What is it, Officer?” Mancini sighed.

  “What about means?” Tony said, looking down at the scrap of paper on which he’d been taking notes.

  “What’s that, Officer?”

  “Before, you said you had to have motive, opportunity, and means. Then just now you said the wife had motive and opportunity, but you didn’t say means. Does that mean it’s okay not to have means?”

  Coffin cringed. Several officers were visibly struggling to suppress the giggles.

  Boyle’s face was very red. Coffin imagined his head popping like a balloon.

  “Are you just about through, Santos?” Boyle demanded.

  “But—”

  “Santos!”

  A quick bark of laughter popped out of Jeff Skillings’s mouth. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment, like a small but lethal cloud of poison gas. Then there was another sound, out in the hallway, muffled a bit by the squad room’s closed door. Someone was shouting, and another someone was shouting back. The first voice sounded a lot like Kotowski’s. The voices got louder. The Kotowski-sounding someone said, “Hold still, you fucking weasel!” Then the second someone yelled, “Get him off me!”

  The officers in the squad room leapt to their feet in almost perfect unison. They charged into the hallway, skidding on the polished terrazzo. En masse, they rounded the corner, charged up two flights of stairs, and barreled toward Louie Silva’s office, where the sound of shouting was now punctuated by a heavy, wet thwacking noise.

  Coffin pushed through the knot of cops who’d gotten stuck in Louie’s doorway. Kotowski was there, standing over Louie, who lay in front of his desk curled in the fetal position, arms protecting his head. Kotowski brandished a large dead fish. “You had my house condemned, you crooked little cocksucker!” he yelled, thwacking Louie over t
he head with the fish.

  “Lunatic!” Louie said. “I had nothing to do with it!” His left eye was puffy, and his upper lip was split. His face and hair were slimed with scales.

  Pinsky drew his service weapon and assumed the textbook firing position: feet at shoulder width, right arm extended, heel of his left hand bracing the gun butt. “Drop it!” he said.

  Kotowski waved the fish. It was shiny and appeared to be very fresh—its eyes were black and unclouded. “Back off, stooges,” Kotowski said. “This is between me and Mr. Greasy Palms here.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Coffin said. “Put your gun away.”

  “But he’s assaulting Mr. Silva with a codfish, Detective,” Pinsky said.

  “It’s a striped bass, you ignoramus,” Kotowski said, giving Louie a backhanded smack.

  “I think you’ve made your point, Kotowski,” Coffin said. “Whatever it was.” He held out his hand, and Kotowski handed him the fish.

  “This little douchebag let them condemn my house,” Kotowski said. He let go of Louie’s tie. “Monday that blond dyke showed up and tried to buy me out, and today the building inspector comes by and tells me he’s condemning the place. Bad wiring, he said! Rotten sills! Unfit for human habitation!”

  “I had nothing to do with it!” Louie said, wiping his reddened, fish-slimed face with a handkerchief. “That’s the building inspector’s job.”

  “He said you ordered the inspection,” Kotowski said.

  “We had a complaint!”

  “From who?” Coffin said.

  “That’s confidential,” Louie said, pointing a pudgy finger at Kotowski. “Confidentiality’s written into the statute—protects people from lunatics like him.”

  “All right, boys,” Coffin said to the gaggle of police offers crowding Louie’s office. “Fun’s over. Everybody back to work.”

  “Um, Frank?” Tony said as the other officers filed out. “Shouldn’t we arrest him?”

  “Arrest who?”

  “Kotowski.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know—assault with a big-ass fish, I guess.”

  “Louie? You want to press charges against Mr. Kotowski for assault with a big-ass fish?”

  “Go ahead,” Kotowski said. “Then we can tell the judge and the newspapers about how you’re in league with these real estate sharks.”

  “Just get him out of here,” Louie said, struggling to his feet, “and keep him the fuck away from me.”

  “I’ll keep him away from you if you uncondemn his house,” Coffin said.

  “I can’t do that. Once the citation’s been handed out, you can’t just take it back. But there’s an appeals process.”

  “Nice little striper,” Coffin said, handing the silvery fish back to Kotowski. “What is he, about ten pounds?”

  “Okay! Okay!” Louie said, holding out his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Jesus Christ. I’ll take care of it. But I don’t ever want to see this nut-job in my office again.”

  Chapter 13

  Anywhere else in the world,” Coffin said, “a two-hundred-forty-pound man in a floral muumuu would have been about as anonymous as a circus clown at a Mafia funeral.”

  They were walking the block and a half to Al Dante’s. Commercial Street was mobbed; the sidewalks overflowed with lesbian couples pushing strollers and knots of retirees and lean, muscled young men, some with their shirts off, displaying their carefully depilated chests. Adolescents, pierced and tattooed, rattled past on skateboards. Children gawked while their parents window-shopped. The line of traffic was blocked by the fake trolley that ran tours of Historic P’town all day long; bicycles whisked by in both directions, missing cars, pedestrians and telephone poles by millimeters. Three TV news remote vans were parked in front of Town Hall, beside the horse and carriage you could rent for a scenic jaunt around the Commercial Street–Bradford Street loop, at fifty dollars an hour. A group of women beat drums arrhythmically in front of the Unitarian church, which appeared to annoy the carriage horse; it tossed its head and snorted as a family of tourists climbed into the ornate buggy, helped by the driver, a tall woman in a top hat with a red plastic rose tucked into the band. The horse had a small sign on its forehead that said DON’T TOUCH! I BITE!

  “A man in drag wouldn’t necessarily stand out here,” Lola said, “but a man in really bad drag might.”

  Al Dante’s was on the inland side of Commercial Street, in the basement of an upscale boutique called Num Num. The walls were brick, the low ceiling supported by stout timbers. Most of the dining room’s heavy oak tables were occupied, and the long, boatshaped bar was packed. The customers were mostly well-dressed gay couples, tanned from long days at Herring Cove, nibbling appetizers and sipping green or red or blue cocktails from martini glasses.

  “I’ve always wanted to eat here,” Lola said.

  “After you win the lottery?” Coffin said.

  Lola took a menu from the rack by the hostess station, glanced at it, put it back. “Yowch,” she said.

  A woman emerged from the kitchen and drifted toward them. She was young and very thin, with jet black hair cut in a twenties bob and two gold rings in her left eyebrow. She wore low-riding black leather bell-bottoms and a short black top; six inches of flat, tanned belly showed between them. A third gold ring glinted in her navel.

  “Dinner for two?” she asked, turning the reservation book on its little podium. “Name?”

  Coffin showed his ID. “Detective Coffin, Officer Winters,” he said.

  The hostess put a slender hand over her heart. “Oh my,” she said, smiling at Lola. “Am I under arrest?”

  Lola shot Coffin a glance—see what I mean?

  Coffin arched his eyebrows.

  “Ah, no,” Lola said. “We’re looking into the movements of Ron Merkin on the night of his death.”

  The hostess’s lip curled a bit. “Why bother?” she said. “The world’s better off.”

  “Hate the sin,” Coffin said, shrugging. “Love the sinner. Were you working Friday night?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Coffin held up Merkin’s picture. “This is him. If he came in, he might’ve headed for the bar, ordered a couple of dozen on the half-shell.”

  The hostess took the picture and sniffed. “I don’t know,” she said. “We get a lot of tall ships in here. After a while they just merge into one big, tacky blob. Seen one, you’ve seen ’em all.”

  “Mind if we ask Cal?” Coffin said, pointing his chin at the bar.

  “Help yourselves,” the hostess said. She wrote a phone number on a card and slipped it into Lola’s hand. “Here,” she said. “In case you’d like to interrogate me further.”

  “Cute girl,” Coffin said, as they climbed onto a couple of just-vacated bar stools. “She likes you.”

  “Too young,” Lola said. “Too skinny. Too—I don’t know—fancy. I like tomboys.”

  “Aren’t you even curious?” Coffin said.

  “About what?”

  “Where else she was pierced.”

  Lola punched him in the arm. It hurt.

  “Lecher,” she said. “Stop projecting.”

  Coffin waved at the bartender, who was pouring two purple martini drinks from a chrome shaker. The bartender waved back and flashed a smile. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and remarkably handsome.

  “That’s Cal, I presume,” Lola said.

  Coffin looked at her. “Handsome, isn’t he?”

  “Gorgeous,” she said. “He must be a popular guy.”

  “He’s been with the same partner for ten years. They own a place out in Truro. They’re getting married in September, I think.”

  “That crashing sound? Hearts breaking all over P’town,” Lola said.

  “Well, if it isn’t my favorite peace officer,” Cal said, leaning across the bar to give Coffin a hug and kiss on the cheek. “You two look like you’re out on a date.”

  Coffin introduced them.

  “I’m hon
ored, ma’am,” Cal said. He kissed Lola’s hand. “Drinks?”

  “Absolutely,” Coffin said. “Scotch for me. And a dozen raw, if they’re fresh.”

  “Came in at lunchtime,” Cal said. “They don’t get much fresher than that.”

  “What are those purple things you just made?” Lola said.

  “Black orchids,” Cal said. “Black vodka, Chambord, and cranberry.”

  Lola wrinkled her nose. “Stoli martini, dry as dust,” she said.

  Cal smiled. “ ’Atta girl,” he said.

  “I can’t believe you actually eat those things,” Lola said when Cal had gone to make their drinks.

  “Oysters? You don’t like them?”

  “I don’t even like to think about them.”

  Coffin looked at her. “You’ve never tried one, have you?”

  “Well, no,” Lola admitted. “They look nasty. Just the thought kind of makes me queasy.”

  A waitress brought the oysters on a stainless steel platter. They glistened in the muted light. Their shells were wonderfully complicated—rough and ugly on the outside, smooth and pearlescent on the inside.

  “What they look like,” Coffin said, squeezing a lemon wedge over three of the oysters, “are big old blobs of sea snot.” He pierced one with a small fork and chewed it slowly. “Mmmm,” he said. “Delicious sea snot.”

  “They’re full of germs, you know. Hepatitis and God knows what. Not to mention mercury.”

  Coffin ate another. “The mercury,” he said, “is what makes them so good.”

  Lola laughed.

  Cal arrived with the drinks. “Plain old boring scotch for you,” he said. “Kick-ass martini for the lady. How are the bivalves?”

  “Fantastic,” Coffin said. He picked up one of the oysters and slurped it from its shell. “People who won’t even try them are big wussies.”

  “I’d never date a man who wouldn’t eat oysters,” Cal said, leaning a hip against one of the chrome beer coolers. “It’s a very bad sign.”