“I guess.”
“And by the time they do poke their heads up out of whatever hole they’ve climbed into, I might have enough evidence to put them away. Thanks to you.”
“The Ford?”
“The new black F-150. How many of those can there be on the island?”
“Lots?”
“We’ll track it down, don’t worry. And I’ll have my boys keep an eye on you for the next few weeks. Cruise by the house from time to time. Make sure you’re safe.”
“Can you really do that?
“I have a lot of officers and a lot of cars. We may actually outnumber the criminals right now.”
I stood up and she did, too. The interview was over. “Okay, great,” she said. “That would be really nice. Thank you.” She extended her arm across the desk awkwardly and I shook her hand. “I really want you to catch these guys.”
“Me, too.”
***
Lattimer was next, but he had little to add: he’d seen the fire from his house and called 911. No one at the station took it that seriously—he had called the emergency number twice before in the last couple of weeks, both false alarms. A possibly senile old man freaking out about non-existent “prowlers” didn’t strike anyone as a major law-enforcement priority. But other calls, several to the fire department, got everyone moving. Lattimer had an excellent vantage point—the Thayers were his neighbors. They owned a huge parcel, mostly undeveloped, and he hadn’t seen any of them since the summer. After he called in the alarm, he stumped across the property line to have a look at the blaze, as anyone might have done.
“It’s December on Nantucket, Chief Kennis. There’s not much else to do, and very little in the way of entertainment.” He saw no one and nothing suspicious, but he wasn’t looking for anything, either.
Mark Toland, the film director, was equally unhelpful, though he promised to e-mail me the photographs he’d taken at the scene.
Chapter Eight
Witness Interviews:
Mike Henderson and David Trezize
Mike Henderson clarified the situation for me.
“Am I a suspect again?” He walked into the office. A nasty combination of motive, opportunity, and the apparent lack of an alibi had put him in my sights a couple of years ago, but only briefly.
“No, no—not at all. But I have to ask…what brought you out to the middle of the moors on a cold winter day?”
“It was personal.”
“Bad answer, Mike. Most serious crimes turn out to be personal, one way or the other.”
“So, I am a suspect.”
“Not unless you turn yourself into one.”
We studied each other across the desk.
Finally he said, “I really don’t want to talk about this.”
“Think of me as your Father Confessor.”
“So everything I tell you is secret? Nothing leaves this room?”
“Unless you do actually incriminate yourself.”
“Embarrass myself, maybe. But that’s it.”
“Then you’re fine.”
I let a silence trundle by, like a line of traffic inching past some road construction. Finally I lifted my hands, palms up, eyebrows raised along with a half-smile, as if to say “So?”
“I’m not sure where to start.”
“How about the middle?”
He laughed, more out of surprise than amusement. “Okay. I was following Mark Toland.”
“You know him?”
“Not exactly.”
Then I remembered. I’d been flailing around, trying to hit the dangling light-switch string in a dark bathroom. Now I grabbed it and yanked it, and the light came on. “Cindy was staying with him at the Sherry Netherland hotel the night Preston Lomax was killed. You were supposed to be in New York with her, but you were staying at your customer’s brownstone.”
He stared at me. “How can you possibly remember that?”
“Are you kidding? It was the best non-alibi ever. You couldn’t account for one second of your time off-island. That was a record.”
He started to speak. “I mean—you couldn’t prove anything. No paper trail at all. It was amazing.”
“That’s one word for it. I was scared shitless.”
“So let me fill this in for you. Cindy came back, and you thought it was over, and then he shows up on-island two years later and Cindy’s been a little distant lately, with the toddler wearing her out every day, and you see this guy, or read an e-mail you shouldn’t have, or hear the end of a phone call—”
“The name was on her phone. He’s on her contact list.”
“So you were stalking him.”
He shrugged. “Basically. There was a text about his flight time. Cindy didn’t meet the plane. Maybe she was having second thoughts. I haven’t really talked to her about this yet. Anyway, I was there and I was just…keeping track of him.”
“Well, he’s gone now.”
“Hopefully for good.”
“Hopefully.”
We sat in silence for a few seconds. “Do you know what happened at the house?” Mike asked. “Was it arson? Were there painters working there? A pile of thinner rags or a bag of floor sanding dust with all that urethane in it…?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. State investigators are flying in to look the place over. I’m asking questions like—did you see anything today, notice anything unusual, or…?”
“No, sorry. I was just watching Toland. I’d make a shitty detective.”
***
David Trezize had an equally embarrassing reason for his trip to the moors that day. But, unlike Mike Henderson, he actually enjoyed talking about it. As a newspaper editor, he knew a good story, and he appreciated a funny one, especially when he was the butt of the joke.
David sat down in the chair facing my desk, rumpled and unshaven, looking as though he’d been up all night in the basement office of his little newspaper, which he probably had, with deadline one day away, despite all the writers he had recently poached from The Inquirer and Mirror. “No matter how many writers I steal, I still have to do all the work,” he said. “Anyway, I was spending some of my extremely limited free time out at the Thayer property because of my ex-wife’s diary, so I really should start by telling you why I was reading it in the first place.”
“Are you sure you feel comfortable doing that?”
“Who else can I talk to? Kathleen wouldn’t want to hear it, that’s for sure.”
I could understand why David would want to conceal his stubborn obsession with Patty from Kathleen Lomax. The daughter of the island’s most prominent murder victim, she had fallen in love with David and saved his newspaper from the old man’s efforts to destroy it, bailing the business out financially after Preston Lomax died. David owed her a lot. She didn’t deserve to suffer through his irrational adolescent crush on the ex-wife. It wasn’t even love in any ordinary sense. Like so many stalker types—and he was turning himself into one—David needed to remain part of Patty’s life, to be fully included in his own exclusion, in complete control of his own helplessness. I’d felt a twinge of that when I first got divorced, but it passed like a twenty-four-hour virus. David had a full-blown case, complete with the fever and the body aches.
“I was okay until I heard that Grady was moving in with her,” he said.
In the last year, over half a dozen five-dollar burger nights at Kitty Murtagh’s, I’d gotten a fairly complete picture of David’s Grady Malone problem.
Grady Malone was an architect, the glamour architect of the island. He’d built notoriously stark corporate headquarters and prize-winningly lavish private homes. He’d designed every house in a gated community on Prince Edward Island. He had moved to Nantucket to relax, but had built a huge practice in less than five years. He designed the Preston Lomax man
sion on Eel Point Road, and he was supposed to be the favored architect for several huge residential developments on the island, none of which had materialized yet.
Grady had taught at Stanford and RISDE, worked on Habitat for Humanity with Jimmy Carter. He had consulted with Frank Gehry on the Guggenheim Museum in Barcelona and had a design in the finals for the New York 9/11 memorial. He had the casual air of having seen and done it all, and the irritating fact (you had to admit it) was that he actually had seen and done quite a lot. More than most people; much more than pudgy, plodding David Trezize, for example—as Patty took every opportunity to point out.
“Why can’t you be more like Grady?,” Patty would ask, after Grady had calmly but forcefully ejected a drunken heckler from a lecture at the Unitarian Church, hooked up their Blu-ray player to the television, or cooked them his famous Osso Buco.
He had no good answer, so Patty divorced him and started dating Grady. It wasn’t quite that simple, but it seemed that way sometimes.
This new rumor of cohabitation had pushed David over the edge, which was why he broke into her house and read her diary.
“Are you sure you want to be telling this part to a police officer?” I asked him gently.
“It wasn’t breaking and entering! I used to live there! I have a key.”
“I thought you told me she changed the locks.”
“Yeah, and she hides the new key under the same old shingle. That’s high security! Like putting your money in your shoe when you go for a swim at the beach. Come on.”
“Sorry. So you found the new key and let yourself in.”
“I don’t even know what I was looking for exactly—some sign of Grady—an extra toothbrush in the bathroom, or his brand of beer in the fridge. He drinks Stella Artois. Maybe a bottle of some weird aftershave in the bathroom, or a Yanni CD. Anyway, what I found was Patty’s diary. It was in her underwear drawer. I was checking for new racy lingerie. Hey, that would be a sign! But she was still wearing the same old plain cotton panties, for what it’s worth.”
“David—”
“No, no you might as well hear it all. If you’re going to make an ass out of yourself, do it right! That’s my philosophy. So, the diary was at the bottom of the drawer, kind of a pink-and-gray flowered cover held shut with an elastic ribbon. So there I was, alone in the house, with everything I needed to know about Patty’s state of mind lying there. What would you have done?”
“I wouldn’t have been there at all.”
“So you wouldn’t have copied her passwords and hacked into her e-mail?”
“No.”
“I kind of figured that. I didn’t know what I was going to do, myself. Really. I stood there, just kind of staring at the diary, turning it over in my hand. I knew I could never violate Patty’s privacy by reading it…and at the same time, I’m studying the elastic ribbon to be sure I can replace it exactly. Who was I kidding? Anyway, I don’t know how long I was stuck there, when I heard someone at the door. I totally freaked out. I had no excuse to be there, and no way out. I mean—my car was in the driveway. But it was just the mailman.”
“So you took the hint and got the hell out of there.”
“Not exactly. I knew I was never going to get another chance to do this thing. I’d never get the up the nerve again.”
“So you read it.”
“Yeah.”
“My grandmother always used to say, ‘Don’t eavesdrop—you won’t hear anything that makes you happy.’”
“Well, your granny had a point on that score. But there was plenty of good stuff. And I’ll tell you something. Even the worst of it helped me. She described sex with Grady like a lapsed Catholic walking into a church after being born again. Can you believe that? She said something like ‘those cheesy stained-glass windows are suddenly illustrating miracles.’ So she never had an orgasm with me—yeah, that’s in there, too. But sex with Grady is religious experience! Thanks so much. There was a lot more, and it cured my stalking problem for good. Apparently I’m like an old smelly dog that won’t leave you alone, and you feel guilty about wanting to kick it, so you pat it and then you have to wash your hands afterward. That’s exactly what she said. Nice, huh? But fuck all that. What matters is the land deal.”
I sat forward, palms braced against the edge of the desk. “The land deal?”
“You don’t know about that? Your ex-wife is all over it. She and Elaine Bailey. It’s making Patty nuts—she wants a piece and she can’t touch it. The only upside for her is that Grady Malone’s the architect.”
“The architect for what? Can’t touch what?”
“You know the Thayers own a huge chunk of land out in the moors. Hundreds of acres. The family’s been fighting about it since the old lady died. Some want to sell, some want to sit on it. Some of them are hurting for money and some of them are doing okay. Some of them care about the island and some don’t. It’s the same old story. Remember Pimney’s Point?”
“Sorry.”
“It was before your time, I guess. The Crosby family owned all this land on the harbor and when the grandma died she left it to the church. Kids were furious but they couldn’t break the will. Then the priest she had left in charge—can’t recall the guy’s name—he subdivided it and made a fortune. It reminded me of something Billy Delavane used to say, quoting old Mrs. Thayer, talking about the new people. She hated the new people. I guess that meant anyone who came here after 1926. She said, ‘Divide and conquer? Not these people. Subdivide and conquer, that’s their strategy.’
“It seems to be working pretty well. You ever walk around Sanford Farm? Ann Sanford’s kids went to court to break the will, and all Ann’s friends testified that she was in her right mind when she gave the land to the town. So the kids lost, obviously. Fuck them, they were all millionaires anyway. Nothing’s ever enough for them. It’s like a disease. They have to have more.”
“So the Thayers sound like a classic Nantucket story.”
“They finally decided to sell to the Land Bank. They’re getting a pretty good price and all the kids are already planning their new trophy houses. That’s where Grady Malone comes in. They could have made a hell of a lot more selling out to a developer but they would have been pariahs in this town after that. And some of them do actually live here. It’s like it was ’Sconset. If you own a house in Codfish Park and you decide to sell it? Better make plans to leave the island. You’ll never play tennis at the Casino again. These people are vicious.”
“But it sounds like everything worked out fine.”
“Except there was one holdout. Andrew. And his house burns down a month before the sale deadline.”
“I don’t think that fire had anything to do with real estate, David. There was a lot of bad stuff going on out there.”
“Which you can’t talk about.”
I shrugged.
“I wanted to check it out myself. But by the time I got there the fire engines were pulling up. So…”
“And you didn’t see anything suspicious?”
“Just the fire.”
I stood. “Thanks, David. Thanks for coming in.”
“And the stuff about the diary…”
“That stays between us. Since it’s never going to happen again.”
“Don’t worry. I’m done.”
“Good.”
“I can wait for her to ask for another bullshit favor, dangling the chance that we might get back together again in front of me. That’s one of her favorite tricks.” He stood with a sheepish smile. “This is actually very liberating.”
“I’m glad. And if you think of anything else, remember any details, anything odd about today…give me a call.”
Chapter Nine
The Holdout: Andrew Thayer
My last interview was with Andrew Thayer himself. He was distraught, barely able to talk until I gave hi
m two fingers of whiskey from my Lagavulin stash. It was against regulations, but that’s one of the perks of being the chief.
“I can’t believe this,” he said, for the tenth time in five minutes. “I just can’t believe this. It makes no sense.”
“Maybe, maybe not, That’s what we’re here to find out. Was the property insured?”
“Of course it was insured! But I’d have nothing to gain from that! It’s all done through the Thayer Trust. Any insurance settlements or litigation awards get donated to the Maria Mitchell Association. Edna was on the board for years. She helped with fundraising for the Loines Observatory and helped them buy the new telescope. No one could coax a thousand-dollar check from a hedge fund manager like Edna. She used to say—‘that’s like getting steak bone from a Boston terrier.’”
“I see, so do you—?”
“I loved that house! That was my mother’s house! Her grandfather built it with his own hands. That was our whole family history, right there. Not just the house but the photographs and diaries, the letters and clippings and…yacht club party invitations. My grandfather was a member when it was still only a rinky-dink offshoot of the New York Yacht Club. We go back…that house—it was the…It was us, it was who we were.”
“So you don’t think anyone in the family might have set the fire?”
“God, no!”
“Someone who knew you were against selling the property?”
“Absolutely not!”
“You’re sure?”
He took a big swallow and set the glass down, reaching over to place it on the blotter, not my desk. His life might be falling apart but he wasn’t going to leave a wet circle on a piece of fine cherry wood.
“Chief Kennis, my siblings may be awful but they’re not horrible.”
“I’m not sure I see the distinction.”
“A horrible person burns down houses! That’s the distinction.”
I nodded. “And an awful one?”
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