Nantucket Grand

by Steven Axelrod

  Half an hour later he was done.

  He allowed himself a moment of giddy laughter as he packed up and put the ladder away. The job was perfect. He had always been good at matching colors, but this was his masterpiece. Even if Sue Ann figured out what he’d done, she would have to bow down at the perfection of his work. He even thought for one leaping second of selling his little mixture to other painters—another million-dollar idea, like the heated screwdriver tip for melting paint in screwheads and the miniature windshield wipers to clear the fog off goggles. Of course, you almost never saw slotted screws anymore, and goggles misted up from the inside. This idea was equally foolish—merely a way to advertise his own ineptitude. Better to keep it as a proprietary cleanup technique. “No trick, no trade,” as his first boss had loved to say.

  Even better: don’t make the mess in the first place.

  Still, walking back to the car he was feeling happy and accomplished, the hero of his own mundane action movie—Indiana Jones and the Temple of Drips, Raiders of the Lost House Keys. Losing house keys—the painter’s worst nightmare, the inexcusable negligence that made owners and contractors and real estate people look at you like some demented organ grinder’s monkey who needed a choke collar and a short leash. Well, he hadn’t lost a set of keys in years, and he’d never made a painting mistake he couldn’t fix.

  Today was a perfect example of that.

  His only actual mistake was not heeding the initial sense of foreboding the LoGran mansion had given him. But there was no way he could have known the truth: he was walking away from a house with a dead body sprawled in the front hallway in full view of any passing eyewitness, his hands covered and his tee-shirt stained with a brown liquid that looked alarmingly like dried blood.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Arrest

  The 911 call from the LoGran corporate retreat came at ten forty-five in the morning. Kyle Donnelly and two uniforms answered it. I trailed them by five minutes. I had been heading out to Wauwinet on the Polpis Road when I picked up the call. Sylvester Graham was working on a new trophy house out there and I had some follow-up questions for him. They’d have to wait. I skidded into a U-turn, hit the flashers, and gunned it back to town.

  Live-in caretaker Douglas Blount made the call. Apparently ship’s engineer Liam Phelan had the guest cottage on the property under siege. The dispatcher could hear him trying to break down the door. He was shouting too. She couldn’t make out what he was saying over the phone, but Phelan had clearly worked himself up into a murderous rage, and given the quality of new construction on the island these days Blount’s front door wasn’t likely to hold up for the six minutes Kyle needed to get there.

  Blount and Phelan—two big men with anger management problems. I wouldn’t have put my money on either one of them to win the fight, but they’d each be sure to collect their share of bodily damage and felony assault charges before they called it a draw. The problem was that the law would come down squarely on Blount’s side. Liam was caught on tape for criminal trespass, breaking-and-entering, and the “assault” side of assault-and-battery. That charge may sound redundant, but verbal threats constitute assault in the state of Massachusetts. Battery comes when you follow through, and Liam was about to cross that line also.

  I hit the steering wheel, swerving around a pair of tourists on mopeds. I knew what had driven Liam to this idiotic attack. It confirmed what I already suspected: Blount had given Liam’s daughter the drugs she ODed on. I didn’t know what evidence he’d managed to dig up, but by withholding it from the police all he’d managed to do was make Blount into the victim and get himself thrown in jail.

  Vigilantes—a hundred years of books and movies and TV shows had turned them into romantic heroes. In fact they were misguided and emotion-driven, reckless and inept. They invariably did damage—and when they were as crazed with rage and grief as Liam Phelan, they didn’t care. Liam just wanted to hit someone. That he’d probably made the right choice of who to hit this time wasn’t going to do any of us much good.

  Passing Sanford Farm on Madaket Road, I saw the LoGran F-150 and hit my flashers. We stopped side by side, taking up both lanes as we talked—a long-standing Nantucket tradition. Sue Ann Pelzer was behind the wheel, wearing jeans, a suede jacket, and a beret. She had a pair of binoculars on the seat beside her.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “I just saw my first prothonotary warbler! Got my lucky jacket on. It sure worked for me today!”

  It was a beautiful brown suede. “Just don’t wear it in the rain.”

  “I’ve never been caught yet! And it never fails—the prothonotary warblers have usually migrated by now. Long gone! But this one was just strutting around Madaket Harbor under Millie’s Bridge. The top feathers are the sweetest cornflower blue. I was thinking—that would be perfect camouflage when you’re flying! No one could see you against the sky”

  “So, wait—you’ve been in Madaket?”

  “I saw your assistant chief out there. It’s a great day for birding.”

  “Doug Blount just made a 911 call from the cottage.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Liam Phelan is breaking the door down.”

  “Oh my God. Is Doug all right?”

  “Just follow me.”

  I stamped on the gas, checked the rearview mirror, and saw her making a three-point turn behind me. A line of cars waited patiently for her to finish. In August they’d be honking like a New Jersey tailgate party in a Brooklyn traffic jam. But June was still mellow.

  At the LoGran house, Kyle Donnelly had the situation under control. Two officers, Ned Hollis and Jerry Cone, stood at either side of the cottage front door; Kyle was inside with Doug Blount. I told Ned to keep Sue Ann outside and took a quick walk around the perimeter. I heard Sue Ann’s car pull up, heard the door slam and her shoes crunching on the crushed-shell driveway—the swift decisive stride of a woman taking charge. For now she was Kyle’s problem. I kept moving, checking the windows, the shingles, the lawn, the hedge, and the mulch behind it. I couldn’t have told you what I was looking for, but that left me open to whatever I might happen to notice.

  Like for instance: the hilt of a hunting knife.

  The blade was buried in the mulch against the foundation. I stood still, staring at it. It looked carelessly out of place—like finding my ex-wife’s Maui Jim sunglasses in the salad crisper.

  It was confusing. This had nothing to do with Liam Phelan. If he had brought a knife, and I doubted he would—he was more the bare-knuckled brawler type—the blade would be lodged somewhere inside Doug Blount by now.

  I pulled on a pair of latex gloves, eased through the hedge, and pulled the knife out of the ground. Dirt caked the blood on the curved steel. Someone had used this weapon recently. I hefted it. It was surprisingly heavy, superbly balanced, designed for gutting and skinning big animals—a deer-hunter’s tool. But the blood on it was human—I’d seen enough of it, and smelled enough of it to know the difference.

  I set the blade on top of the hedge and walked back to the front of the cottage.

  Sue Ann had cornered Kyle Donnelly. “If there’s a problem here I have to deal with it! Every single thing that happens on the property is my responsibility. If someone is hurt in there, if anything’s broken, or—”

  “Sue Ann.” She turned. “I need you to let me into the main house.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “I don’t know. But, yeah, probably.”

  We walked across the lawn and along the side of the mansion, skirting the low stone walls, following the path of granite flags to the big front door. Cars passed along Eel Point Road.

  The birds chirping in the trees sounded random and purposeful at once, like an orchestra tuning up. It was a gorgeous late spring day, but it felt wrong to me, more like dusk in November. I took a deep lungful of the mild air whi
le Sue Ann worked the key. I had a feeling I was going to need it.

  The smell hit us as soon as we stepped inside, that coppery, rotten meat stink of death. There’s nothing worse, and you never get used to it. The physical recoil burst in my stomach and bulged up my throat. I gagged back the vomit and glanced at over at Sue Ann. She seemed perfectly composed, calmly studying the splayed body, the head floating in a pool of coagulating blood.

  “Well, this carpet is ruined,” she said.

  I understood the need to banter, to shrug it off, to distance yourself. I’ve heard the worst dirtiest jokes of my life, standing over dead bodies at crime scenes.

  “And forget the floorboards under it,” I said. “You can’t get rid of blood.” We stared at the corpse. “Do you know him?”

  She shook her head. “I think I’ve seen him around. He was a friend of Doug’s.”

  It was Andrew Thayer. I had spoken to him only a few days before, patted his dog, checked out the computer screens he used to plan his investments. Death was always so abrupt, so implausible. We carry our futures around with us, as much a part of us as the sound of our voices or the smell of our sweat. Every living moment implies the next, like mapping one vector in the trajectory of a bullet. Life is movement in space and time. No bullet drops out of the air midflight, but that would seem no less bizarre and dissonant than Andrew Thayer’s future collapsing like this, into the black hole of his extinguished mind and spirit. There was nothing left of him now, nothing left of all his decisions and appointments, his plans and his dreams, but this generic human shell, bleeding out from the carotid artery.

  It made me sick, it made me frightened, and most of all it made me mad. Someone had done this. Someone had drawn a knife across another man’s neck, watched the lifeblood gushing and left him to die. It made me want to kill in turn, to hunt this monster down and let him feel the rough justice of a blade against his own throat. But I couldn’t give into that rage. I was no vigilante. Two wrongs never made a right. They made a catastrophe, they made a holocaust, they made a war.

  My job was to find this creature. That’s all—just find him.

  The law would take care of the rest. I unclenched my fists, took a shallow breath through my mouth, and led Sue Ann back outside. The fresh air felt like splash of cool water on my face. A plane droned by overhead. A family of deer bounded across the lawn and crashed into the brush. Life continued. Andrew’s departure scarcely registered. When the rug was replaced and the new floorboards installed, the only residue of him would be fading photographs and the flickers of memory along the fragile synapses of his family and friends. It wasn’t enough. It seemed pale, pointless, and paltry, an illegible scrawl, a collection of junk in a hoarder’s garage.

  I turned away from the house. “No one goes inside until the crime scene unit gets here.”

  Sue Ann nodded.“Okay.”

  “What was Andrew doing here?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Had he been arguing with Blount?”

  “Doug argues with everyone. So yeah, probably.”

  “Stick around. I’ll need to talk to you later.”

  I called Lonnie Fraker to fill him in on the situation.

  “It’s turning into some kind of fucking Fallujah over here,” he said. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Something bad.”

  I put the phone in my pocket and sprinted back to the cottage.

  ***

  Inside, the place was a shambles. Two cheap chairs lay splintered on the floor among drifts of broken glass, and wood shards from the battered front door. The boys had been brawling, all right. Blount had an angry-looking black eye starting to bloom; Phelan’s jaw was puffy and blood seeped from a cut on his forehead. Kyle had both of them handcuffed.

  I spoke to Kyle, tipping my head toward Blount. “Take him to the station, read him his rights and stick him in a holding cell. I’ll take care of Phelan.”

  They hustled Blount from the house and Sue Ann followed them. The morning’s carnage seemed to register for her only in terms of work hours and money spent. There’d be a lot more of both after this new fracas.

  When we were alone, Phelan stepped toward me. “Chief—”

  I put a hand up, palm out. “Don’t say a word until I read you your rights.”

  “What are you talking about! My rights? You can’t arrest me! I did nothing wrong. I’m the one who—”

  “You broke down that door and you landed at least one good punch, Liam. That’s criminal trespass, destruction of property, breaking-and-entering, and at least one count of felony assault. If I don’t arrest you, I become your accomplice and we both go to jail. You have the right to remain silent—”

  “I have the right to a lawyer and you’ll appoint one for me if I can’t afford it. Probably that strutting useless boozer Timmy Congdon. Am I right?”

  “If you choose not to seek counsel, anything you say—”

  “Can be used against me. Of course it can. And how about Douglas Blount? Can what I say be used against him, Mr. Police Chief?”

  “Eventually. Possibly. But first—”

  “He sold my daughter drugs! He tried to force her to shame herself on film. Maybe he succeeded. I don’t even know. But I do know this. When she tried to get away from him he gave her the bad load that almost killed her. Might still kill her. Now my Jilly is lying in the ICU ward at Mass General because of that miserable piece of shite and you tell me I’m going to jail? I’ll fucking kill the whole lot of you before I let him get away with that.”

  “No one’s killing anyone, Liam.” Except for whoever slashed Andrew Thayer’s throat with that hunting knife. But Liam didn’t know about Andrew’s murder yet, and I needed to compartmentalize. “I need to know why you’re so certain it was Doug Blount.”

  “I investigated. I talked to people. Like you’re supposed to do.”

  I let that one pass. “Who, in particular?”

  “There’s a girl, Alana Trikilis—”

  “I talked to her, Liam.”

  “Then why didn’t you do anything?”

  “Police need evidence. There’s no point in arresting a suspect if I can’t make it stick.”

  “But you arrested him just now! I broke into his house and you arrested him.”

  “That’s a different matter. It’s—unrelated.” I thought of Jane Stiles, and her literary theory of the connections between cases. Or was it a small-town theory? Either way, it occurred to me that she might be right. But that was none of Liam’s business. I had other questions for him. “Alana and Jill were pretty good friends,” I said. “I’m surprised it took you so long to track her down.”

  “I’ve been in Bermuda, with the Nantucket Grand.”

  “That’s Pell’s boat?”

  “It’s his ship, Chief. A boat is something you put on a ship.”

  “His ship, then.”

  “She needed a lot of work this winter. A new starboard engine, new water coolant filters. We overhauled the electronics and the GPS system. Dry docked her for a paint job. It never ends.”

  “And you had to oversee it all?”

  “I’m chief engineer.”

  “It must have been hard, though. Being down there with Jill up here in the hospital.”

  “I had a lot of time to think.”

  “And brood.”

  “If you like. I had to fly back to Hamilton Harbor after I brought the Grand back here. Arrangements for the winter mooring. And they’re building a teak-paneled screening room for the lower deck which had to be inspected before it was taken apart for transport. Good thing I showed up. The carpets were the wrong color, there were no dimmers for the recessed lighting, the finish was supposed to be satin not gloss. Worst of all, the seats were all an inch too narrow, with no lumbar support. Total cock-up. So it’s back to the drawing board.
And no one gets another penny until Jonathan Pell is satisfied.”

  “How long have you been back on-island? Let me guess. Twenty-four hours?”

  “I took the last flight out of Boston yesterday.”

  “That was fast.”

  “The gate opens, the horse breaks.”

  “Alana was frightened.”

  “Of course she was. That little wisp of a girl.”

  “She didn’t want Blount coming after her?”

  “He won’t be.”

  “Because we showed up. By chance.”

  “A cell or a box, either way he won’t be preying on little girls.”

  I stared at him. “You’re saying you came here to kill him?”

  “Oh no, Chief! You thought I meant a coffin? I’m talking about a box at Fenway Park! Nothing like a Red Sox game to distract a sociopathic sexual predator. Calms them right down. By the seventh inning stretch they’re tame as toddlers.”

  “Good. We wouldn’t want to have any misunderstandings about that.”

  “Heavens, no.”

  We watched each other for a few seconds. “You’re still under arrest, even if Blount chooses not to press charges. Sue Ann Pelzer’s going to want you booked for the B and E anyway. Come on. I’m going to have the boys take you back to the station, see about finding you a lawyer.”

  “How long will I have to stay there?”

  “That depends on Blount. If he chooses to press charges…”

  “Of course he will! He hates me. He knows I can take him down. And I will.”

  I pressed a hand to his shoulder. “Then I suggest you share the evidence you’ve found with us. We can take it from here.”

  “That sounds lovely. I know what the bastard did. But knowledge isn’t proof, Chief Kennis. As you just explained. My hope was to beat a confession out him, and I don’t think that’s really your style, if you’ll permit me the liberty.”

  “My way works better, Liam. It might not be as fast or dramatic—”

  “The wheels of Kennis grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.”