High Season

by Jon Loomis

  “Hench?” Pilchard said, opening his notebook. “How d’ya spell that?”

  “Never mind,” Mancini said. “We’ll take it from here, Detective Coffin. You really don’t look well. Maybe you should go lie down.”

  Lola tugged at Coffin’s elbow. “C’mon, Frank. Let’s get out of here.”

  “So what happened out there, Frank?” Lola said, swirling a double shot of scotch in her glass, watching the ice cubes whirl slowly around in the amber fluid.

  “It’s why I quit being a cop in Baltimore.”

  They were sitting in Coffin’s living room. The stuffed goat’s head leered at Coffin. As usual, it seemed about to speak.

  “What is it,” Lola said, “vertigo or something?”

  “Panic attacks. I feel like I’m going to have a coronary or a brain embolism or something, and if it’s really bad I pass out. It seems to be triggered by dead people.”

  “Bummer,” Lola said. “And there’s nothing you can do to fix it? No drugs?”

  “I tried Xanax for a while. The problem with Xanax is, you’re so freaking calm you don’t give a rat’s ass about anything. Your house could collapse with you in it, and you wouldn’t care. It’s kind of creepy after a while. Stepford Frank.”

  “That it? Just Xanax?”

  “I tried Paxil, too. It made me sleepy, itchy, and impotent.”

  “That’s not good.”

  Coffin finished his scotch and refilled his glass. “No,” he said. “Not good at all. The best solution seems to be to avoid the company of dead people. It was working fine till two weeks ago.”

  “Rough little life you’ve been having, all of a sudden.”

  “The truck thing. Yeah, that kind of sucked.”

  “You okay?”

  “A couple of scrapes. Scared the hell out of me. Otherwise fine.”

  “Any idea who tried to flatten you?”

  “Nope. The BMV’s working up a list of blue Chevy pickups for me. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Tony drives a blue pickup.”

  “So does Kotowski.”

  Lola’s eyebrows went up. “Kotowski does seem kind of—unstable.”

  “Absolutely. Crazy as a bedbug. Which is to say, no crazier than anybody else that’s lived here for thirty years.”

  “Know what I’d do if I was you?” Lola said, propping her feet on the coffee table.

  Her eyes were a bit glassy, Coffin thought. She was getting drunk. Maybe the stress was getting to her a little, too.

  “What’s that?” Coffin lit a cigarette and offered one to Lola. She waved it away.

  “I’d quit my crappy job and make babies with Jamie.”

  “You would?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I don’t know her very well, but she seems smart.”

  “She is. Extremely.”

  “And she’s very attractive.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And she obviously thinks the world of you, Frank. So I don’t understand what the problem is.”

  “I’m not sure there’s a problem,” Coffin said. “I’m just not a hundred percent ready, and it would be dishonest to go forward if I wasn’t.”

  “Because of your history, you mean? Your divorce and everything?”

  “It’s not that so much. Just the idea of having kids. It’s terrifying. What if they hate you? What if you’re a lousy parent? What if something happens to them? Wouldn’t that scare you?”

  “No. Not with the right person.”

  “I’m too old to have kids now. By the time they’re in high school, I’ll be sixty. Sixty! That’s if Jamie gets pregnant now.”

  “So? Older guys make great dads. They’re more patient, not so self-absorbed.”

  “I’m hideously self-absorbed. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Know what I think?”

  “Here we go.”

  “I think you’re a great big chicken. If you don’t do this, you’ll kick yourself for the rest of your life.”

  Coffin took a deep drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose. “Can we talk about your personal life now?”

  Lola laughed. “Four.”

  Coffin frowned. “Four?”

  “The hostess at Al Dante’s—Morgan? That’s how many other places she was pierced.”

  “Four?” Coffin pondered for a moment. “I’m stuck at three.”

  “Tongue stud.”

  Coffin let out a low whistle. “How’d I miss that?”

  “Sometimes you’ve got to do a little old-fashioned, down and dirty detective work.”

  “So?”

  Lola shrugged. “I don’t know. We had fun, I guess.”

  “Fun? The girl is twenty-one, gorgeous, multiply pierced—and you guess you had fun?”

  “Twenty-three,” Lola said. “We just didn’t have that much in common. She’s fancy. Her parents live on Park Avenue. She writes experimental poetry.”

  “Good God. I see what you mean. What you need is a nice one. Girl-next-door type.”

  “I think I scare the nice ones,” Lola said. “All they see is Super Butch, the lesbo-cop. So I get the not-so-nice ones. The needy neurotics and the oh my, are you going to arrest me ones.”

  “Sounds a little fishy, if you ask me,” Coffin said.

  “I’m not sure I did ask you,” Lola said.

  “I’m just saying, maybe it’s a two-way street. Maybe part of you likes the not-so-nice ones.”

  “Past tense, maybe. When they’re all twisted up and ironic, it just feels like too much work for what you get back.”

  “Jamie’s ironic. But not twisted up.”

  “The not wanting to marry you thing is kind of inside out.”

  “I don’t know,” Coffin said, dropping his cigarette into the quarter inch of scotch in the bottom of his glass. It sizzled and went out. “I’m neurotic and cranky and I drink too much. I’ve got hair growing out of my ears, for God’s sake. I don’t think I’d want to marry me, either.”

  Chapter 20

  Serena Hench’s house was a newly built, six-bedroom, octagonal trophy model that dominated the bluff overlooking the breakwater and Long Point. Inside, Coffin found himself thinking like a real estate ad: The cathedral-like spaces of the living area afford panoramic water views. In fact, the banks of floor-to-ceiling windows afforded an almost 360-degree view of the outer Cape: Long Point, the harbor, North Truro and Corn Hill—where Edward Hopper’s house still stood above the long sweep of beach curving off toward Wellfleet—Provincetown’s tight grid of cedar-shake saltboxes, the phallic jut of the Pilgrim Monument. The enormous living room was done in blond leather sofas, track lighting, and a self-consciously eclectic mix of antiques and art: a few ebony African masks, a couple of small Motherwell prints, and several dune-and-sunset paintings of the sort that would have sent Kotowski off on a twenty-minute rant about money not equaling taste.

  Serena Hench’s personal assistant was a blonde in her early twenties named Devon. She looked exhausted—her hair hung limp, there were dark half circles below her eyes. Still, she was pretty in the slightly equine way of moneyed New England girls.

  “Serena was not an easy person,” Devon said. “She was very aggressive, in a way that women aren’t supposed to be, and I think sometimes people resented her for it. But I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to kill her—it’s just so crazy.”

  Her accent was subtle, something she’d worked to get rid of, but still there if you knew what it was—that slight swallowing of the vowel-following r: South Shore working class, belying the long-limbed tweed-and field-hockey appearance of patrician breeding. New Bedford, Coffin thought. Fall River, maybe.

  “Why did Serena go to the Moors last night?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes she visited her construction sites, just to make sure things were moving along.”

  “At night?”

  “No.”

  “Was she here last night?”

  “No. She was out with a client.”


  Coffin took out his notebook. “Got a name?”

  “Henderson, I think. Brian Henderson.”

  “I’d like to see her appointment books, e-mail, phone logs—” Coffin said.

  “I’ll have to speak with her attorney first.”

  “Why?”

  “Serena was . . . secretive.” Devon shook her head. “That’s not quite the right word. Protective.”

  “Protective of what?”

  “Her clients. Her partners. Her projects. Her money.”

  “Who were her partners in the Moors project?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know, or won’t tell me?”

  Devon smiled for the first time. “Both.”

  Coffin shifted on the leather couch, which made a soft farting sound as he moved. “Who’s in charge of Real Estate Investment Consortium?”

  Devon furrowed her blond, professionally shaped brows. “I don’t know. Never heard of it.”

  “Really? Serena had business cards with her name at the top and REIC at the bottom.”

  “Serena had a lot going on. She didn’t tell me everything.”

  “If you say so.”

  Devon’s face softened. “Really. I don’t think she trusted me to keep my mouth shut.”

  “What about Serena’s personal life?” Coffin asked. “Did she have a partner? Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”

  Devon frowned. “Not in the way you mean,” she said. “Serena was completely . . . unsentimental. For her, all relationships were business relationships. She didn’t have time for anything else.”

  “So she never had sex? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No—I mean that when she did have sex, it was usually motivated by business considerations, not romantic attachment.”

  One way of closing the deal, Coffin thought. “And her relationship with you? What was that like?”

  “I worked for her—kept track of her appointments, answered her calls and her e-mail, that kind of thing.”

  “You live here, is that right?”

  “Yes. There’s a small apartment downstairs—it came with the job.”

  Coffin sat quietly and watched her cross and uncross her arms, then push a lank strand of hair behind her ear. Amazing how uncomfortable people got when you didn’t talk.

  Devon leaned forward, looked at the floor. “Sometimes we slept in the same bed. It wasn’t really sexual, though—not after the first couple of months. I think I was mostly . . . decorative.” She gestured at one of the big dune paintings. “I went with the sofa.”

  “So what was in it for you?” Coffin said. “I mean, you’re young—didn’t you feel like you were missing something?”

  “Look, Detective,” Devon said, her pale blue eyes meeting Coffin’s, “sex is just sex—I could have that with just about anybody. What I had with Serena was security. Sorry if that’s not enough for you.”

  Coffin put his hands up halfway, palms out. Don’t shoot. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m just trying to get a sense of who Serena was. No offense, okay?”

  “Whatever,” Devon said, suddenly teary. She honked her nose into a cocktail napkin, folded it twice, and dabbed at her eyes.

  “One more question,” Coffin said. “Don’t take it the wrong way.”

  Devon raised her eyebrows.

  “Who inherits? Serena had a ton of money, right?”

  Devon pressed her lips together into a grim little smile. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never asked.”

  Coffin let himself out, climbed into the Dodge—which bucked and coughed before thundering to life—and backed down the long, steep driveway. Serena’s house was less than a mile from Coffin’s neighborhood, but she might as well have lived in a different universe. There was no panoramic view from Coffin’s house, no Motherwell prints artfully arranged. His windows all looked out at other people’s houses, shingled in gray cedar, packed in tight.

  When Coffin arrived at his office, Lola was sitting at his desk, leafing through a pile of curling fax paper. A list, he could see. He picked up the cover note: It was from Hank Walters at the BMV, apologizing for the delay—their computers had been down for most of the morning.

  “You’re looking over my shoulder, Frank,” Lola said.

  She’d changed out of her uniform. Coffin thought she looked like a young attorney in her pale silk blouse and dark slacks.

  “Sorry,” Coffin said. He pulled up the orange plastic guest chair and sat down next to Lola. The list contained the year of manufacture, registration number, and name and address of the current owner for all the blue Chevy pickups registered on the outer Cape—a grand total of forty-one. Coffin slid his desk drawer open a couple of inches and picked out a green highlighter.

  “Looks like there are nine blue Chevy pickups registered in Provincetown,” he said. “Five in Truro, and another twenty-seven in Wellfleet, Eastham, and Orleans.”

  He found Tony’s name right away and drew a bright transparent streak over it. “No surprises yet,” he said. He drew another streak over Kotowski’s name.

  Coffin ran his finger down the rest of the list, stopped, went back. Plotz—there it was. Dunbar Plotz, of Provincetown. Duffy Plotz.

  Coffin drew a bright green circle around Plotz’s name and leaned back in his chair.

  “Plotz,” Lola said. “What an idiot.”

  Coffin shook his head. “The man’s a vegetarian, for God’s sake. He does yoga. Shouldn’t he be free of aggression?”

  “Vegetarians are always in a bad mood,” Lola said. “It’s an amino acid thing.”

  Coffin shrugged. “I guess I pissed him off, out at the dump.”

  “Maybe he’s the killer,” Lola said. “Maybe he thinks you’re getting too close.” She guffawed and put a hand over her mouth.

  Coffin shot her a look. “Very funny.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s too impetuous, anyway, trying to flatten a police detective. It’s out of character for our guy.”

  “What’s out of character is you still being alive.”

  “On the other hand, you can’t eliminate Plotz altogether. He’s not exactly the sanest guy in the world if he’s going around trying to run over people.”

  “What about Kotowski? Shouldn’t we take a look at him? He’s kind of a loon, right?”

  Coffin stood up and turned out his desk lamp. “He’s a total loon, but I’m pretty much the only person in town he’s not mad at. No reason he’d come after me.”

  Lola cleared her throat. “For the murders, I mean.”

  Coffin frowned. “Why? Because he smacked Louie around with a fish?”

  “Well, duh. I mean, if anyone in this town’s got an axe to grind, it’s Kotowski.”

  Coffin steered Lola out of the office and pulled the door shut behind them. “Kotowski’s all show,” he said. His voice echoed in the stairwell. “You know the joke about how many old Province-townians it takes to change a lightbulb?”

  “No,” Lola said. “Tell me.”

  “Twenty. One to put in the new lightbulb, three to do an environmental impact study, five to hold a protest vigil in support of the old lightbulb, three to do a nude performance art piece called ‘Changing the Lightbulb,’ and eight to throw a lightbulb-changing theme party.”

  “Did you just make that up?” Lola said, following Coffin up the narrow metal stairs.

  “The point is, there are lots of wackos in Provincetown. Lots of vocal wackos. Kotowski’s just the most visible.”

  Lola paused at the landing. “He’s a friend of yours, right?”

  “I’ve known him for thirty years, almost,” Coffin said.

  “I guess what I’m saying is—”

  “That he seems like kind of an obvious suspect.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “And you think he might be crazy enough to start killing people.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So you think he’s rational.”

/>   “I didn’t say rational. I just don’t think he’s irrational enough. Besides, he’s got a stone-cold alibi for one of the killings.”

  “He does? I thought he was a hermit, almost. Which one?”

  “Jason Duarte.”

  “Okay. What’s this great alibi?”

  “He was with me. We were at his house, playing chess. I saw the fire from his deck.”

  “Oh. Sorry, Frank.”

  “Forget it. How busy are you right now?”

  “I was just about to clock out.”

  “Put your uniform back on, and I’ll grab us a squad car. Let’s go pay Mr. Plotz a visit.”

  Chapter 21

  Coffin knocked on the door of Plotz’s apartment, but no one answered. He did a palms-up shrug at Lola, who was waiting in a borrowed squad car. A gray armada of clouds steamed across the sky. The harbor was green and choppy.

  “Mind hanging around a little?” Coffin said, climbing back into the car.

  “Sure, why not,” Lola said. “We can pretend we’re cops on a stakeout.”

  Lola pulled around the corner onto Bradford. She parked at the Pilgrim Market, nose out, within view of Plotz’s back windows.

  Coffin smoked a cigarette. Lola waved at the smoke, gave him a look, rolled down the windows. After a while, a beige Toyota sedan puttered down the hill on Bradford, swung into Duck Lane, and parked. Lola waited until Plotz had climbed most of the way up the stairs before she stuck the patrol car into drive and pulled into Duck Lane, stopping at the foot of Plotz’s stairs. Both Coffin and Lola climbed out.

  “Hey, Duffy,” Coffin said. “We need to talk.”

  Plotz stared at Coffin for a long second. “Are you going to assault me again?” he said.

  “Assault is one of the things I’d like to talk to you about. Mind if we come in? You know how people gossip in this town.”

  “Out here’s fine,” Plotz said. “Safer that way. People can gossip all they want.”

  “Where’s your truck, Duffy? The blue Chevy.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “According to the BMV, you own a blue 1993 Chevy pickup. I’d like to take a look at it.”