Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  “I was hoping you could tell me about his friends.” Merry slid onto a bar stool next to the kitchen counter and fumbled in her over-large handbag for her notebook and half-glasses. “I’d like to talk to them.”

  “I can’t give you any names, unfortunately.”

  Merry opened the notebook casually and uncapped her pen. “Can’t—or won’t?”

  “Can’t. I may have seen a face or two in the living room, Miss Folger—”

  Merry winced at the Miss.

  “—but I never met any of them. Jay kept his friends to himself.”

  “You didn’t socialize with him?”

  Barry shook his head, and poured more coffee. Took a long draught, eyes closed, and then sighed like a swimmer emerging from the deep end. “That’s better. God, what would I do without caffeine? What would America do without it? We’re all drugged, if you ask me. No, I didn’t socialize with Jay. Not that I disliked him—”

  Merry believed this about as much as she trusted Cohen’s forced geniality.

  “—but I don’t really socialize with anyone. Well, unless you count the woman in transition at three A.M. But she wasn’t exactly socialized herself.”

  “I understand.” Merry jotted something on her pad; it might have been the word putz. “Dr. Cohen—you’re a trained medical observer. Did Jay’s appearance or behavior ever suggest drug use?”

  Barry swallowed another mouthful of coffee while he considered her question. “Contrary to popular belief, addiction is not that noticeable if it’s well maintained.”

  “So the answer would be … no?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Did you ever notice needle tracks on Jay’s arm?”

  “Should I have?”

  “The medical examiner—Dr. John Fairborn, do you know him? No?—found what he thought were needle marks on the deceased’s left arm. We should await the results of an autopsy, of course, before drawing any conclusions about that…”

  “Of course.”

  “I understand you were asked to formally identify the body.”

  Barry grimaced and looked away. “I’ve never seen somebody come out of the water like that. I hope I never do again.”

  “The one remaining pupil was dilated. Does that seem consistent with a death by overdose, Doctor?”

  “A lot of things about death are strange. Not everybody reacts to drugs—or drowning—in a textbook fashion, Miss Folger.”

  “So you’re willing to write it off?”

  He shrugged. “I guess so. Until a pathologist comes up with a different explanation.”

  There was little hope of enlightenment or revelation here, Merry decided; and so she abruptly reverted to her first topic. “Would either of your roommates, Dave Haddenfield or Sue Morningstar, be better acquainted with Jay’s friends?”

  At the mention of Sue Morningstar’s name, Barry Cohen stood a little straighten His slightly bored expression turned perceptibly more careful. Something to remember, Merry thought, like the doctor’s ill-concealed dislike for Jay Santorski.

  “You’d have to ask them,” he answered. “Dave’s over at the school. There’s a big game today.”

  “And—Miss Morningstar?”

  The guarded expression deepened. “Sue went into the office early. She’s ambitious, is Sue. Practically lives at the Inky.”

  “It must have been quite a shock for all of you,” Merry ventured.

  “Yes,” Cohen said curtly. “Particularly for—particularly when they made me identify his body.”

  He had been about to say something quite different. Someone—Sue Morningstar? Dave Haddenfield?—had been singularly affected by Jay Santorski’s death.

  Merry glanced around the kitchen. A cathedral ceiling soared above; the cabinets were something she thought might be pecan wood; and the counters were gleaming white tile with a design of blue waves and fishes painted on their surfaces. “Nice place,” she offered. “New?”

  “Two years old. I own it. The others rent from me.”

  “Ah. I see. How does that work, exactly?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you choose them, or did they choose you?”

  The doctor sighed. “A little of both. When I first moved on-island, I had more time. I interviewed people, tried to judge their personalities, asked for references and all that. But lately, I’ve just gone with any available warm body.”

  “Is that what Jay was?” She thought of the corpse lying cold and blue in the morgue.

  “Yeah. A woman originally had his room. She moved back to Boston to get married.”

  “So how did you find Jay?”

  “I put a notice up on the Finast bulletin board. He called at the right time.”

  “And how was he, as a housemate?”

  Barry shrugged again. “Okay. I guess.”

  “Did he pay his bills promptly?”

  This drew a grudging smile. “Better than my friend Dave does. He’s always a month behind, and I’ve decided hell never catch up. But what can I say, I’m a softie. I like the high school coach type. Dave’s just an overgrown Labrador puppy, you know? Good-hearted and bright enough, but nuts for a ball. He lives and dies for that ball.”

  Jay, presumably, had lived and died for more complicated things; and they had never won Barry Cohen’s affection.

  “So you wouldn’t have thought Jay was hard up for money?”

  “Nah.” The dismissive word was followed by an equally disparaging wave. “He’s a Harvard boy. They’ve all got trust funds hidden somewhere, no matter how much they slum around in fishing boats.”

  Jay’s mother, the single parent, might have disagreed.

  “Any idea why Jay chose to slum around, as you put it, in Nantucket?” The question had an edge of sarcasm Barry Cohen completely missed.

  “It’s part of the program, isn’t it?” he retorted. “Part of the whole liberal-education guilt thing. Self-indulgence masquerading as noblesse oblige. If he hadn’t dredged scallops, Jay would’ve been teaching English in Hanoi, or building houses in Appalachia. They’re all alike.”

  Since when, Merry wondered, was scalloping a charity venture? “I see. Did you have any reason to dislike Jay, Dr. Cohen?”

  “Dislike him? Me? I didn’t think about him enough to dislike him.”

  “No disagreements? No undercurrents? On your own part, or perhaps Dave’s or Sue’s?”

  The stiffness in Barry Cohen’s demeanor—the palpable unease—increased perceptibly. “What is this, Miss Folger? The kid died by accident. Who cares what Sue or I thought of him?”

  “Detective Folger, Doctor.” Merry underscored the word putz on her notepad and flipped it closed. “I’d like to see Jay’s room now, if I may.”

  It was neat and spare, an almost perfectly square space, with a narrow bed made up in the corner, and a trio of milk crates stacked by the door. These had apparently served to hold Jay Santorski’s odds and ends—textbooks, rolls of film, a couple of photo albums, a ragged stuffed bear. A catcher’s mitt with a torn flap in the palm.

  Merry had donned plastic gloves pulled from her car’s evidence kit for the purpose of searching Santorski’s room. She shifted the crates first, frowning at the weight of a marine biology text holding pride of place in one of them. She thumbed through a notebook—mostly blank, ruled pages with a few math equations scrawled in the front section—and set it aside. Next, she found a bundle of envelopes from the Pacific National Bank—account statements, dated for each of the past three months, and some canceled checks. Merry stacked these on top of the notebook and glanced around the room.

  Hanging upside down from a pair of hooks bolted to the ceiling was a gleaming racing bike in an outrageous shade of green. “Quintana Roo,” Merry murmured, craning her head sideways to read the brand name scrawled on the bike’s frame. It screamed speed, from its carbon-fiber beam to its aerodynamic handlebars; and Merry, who knew something about these glorious machines from Peter Mason, thought it shed an
interesting light on Jay Santorski. She walked slowly toward the machine, assessing the Shimano derailleurs and the clipless pedals. He would have used special bike shoes with interlocking bindings, like Peter did when he raced. She had flipped through enough articles in Peter’s triathlete magazines to guess that the Quintana Roo had cost the scalloper upwards of four thousand dollars. The perfect tone of his lifeless body again rose unbidden before Merry’s eyes. She thrust the vision aside and concentrated on the bike.

  What had he used it for? A piece of modernist sculpture suspended from the ceiling? Or triathlon training, perhaps?

  A formidable U-shaped lock was attached to the frame, near a slim air pump. Merry stood on tiptoe and examined the tires. New, but not too new; the treads were somewhat worn. Her eyes traveled over the frame; the paint was nicked here and there by the impact of stones thrown up from the street. Mud spattered the front fork and caked the teeth of the back wheel’s chain. He had ridden it recently before his death, then—although not to Old North Wharf on Thursday night. Everything about the racing bike was in stunning contrast to the aged three-speed retrieved Friday morning from the boat basin’s shallows. But Santorski would hardly have used this sleek thoroughbred to bump his way over the cobblestones of town.

  A small canvas bag was strapped snugly under the rear of the seat, well within reach of Merry’s probing fingers. It was faintly damp; seawater. She unzipped it and withdrew a single key—for the bike lock, no doubt—a blowout repair kit, a plastic case with tiny wrenches in different sizes, a high-energy protein bar, two five-dollar bills, a folded piece of paper, and a ticket stub for round-trip ferry passage to Hyannis. This last she studied immediately—it was dated Wednesday, December 4. Jay had gone to the mainland the day before his death, and from the price stamped on the ticket, he had taken his bike. This bike, since the stub was in the seat carrier. Had he been entered in some sort of road race?

  She unfolded the sheet of paper. It had probably been torn from the ruled notebook she’d found in the crate. Written with haste across the paper’s surface were a few lines, almost incomprehensible. Jay Santorski’s handwriting? The words, once Merry deciphered them, made absolutely no sense.

  Albatross IV, Wednesday @ 2.

  This was underscored heavily, as though it were important. The reminder of an appointment, perhaps. Three lines below was: Larval tigers. Viral morph/unobserved phenomenon. Spectrometer? Rinehart Coastal?

  After this, nothing but a scrawl of pencil, as though the writer’s hand had trailed away in thought; or perhaps it was an abstract drawing, a phone call’s doodle, a fragment of the moon.

  At this stage, nothing should be thrown away. Merry looked around for the notebook and tucked the slip of paper inside.

  The dresser held a quantity of ragged sweatshirts, three pairs of jeans in various states of disintegration, some underwear, and six pairs of socks. Pressed khakis and a navy-blue sports coat hung in the closet, along with a surprising quantity of ties. On the closet floor were two empty duffel bags, a tennis racquet, a can of balls, a pair of running shoes, a set of strap-on weights, and a hamper full of dirty laundry. Some of it smelled bracingly of fish, oil, and the sea. Merry stepped back, her hand to her nose, and thought again of the mundanities of death. Jay Santorski’s mother would still be washing his clothes, and weeping over every piece.

  There were two framed photographs on the dresser top. One was of a middle-aged woman with striking cheekbones, direct blue eyes, and a firm mouth—the registered nurse, Merry decided, as she assessed the woman’s sleek head. She looked like the sort of woman to raise a Harvard student, and do it alone.

  The other shot was almost less interesting.

  A group of kids barely in their twenties, slack-legged and sunburned on the steps leading up to a building—collegiate gothic, by the looks of it, and probably at Harvard. All giggled for the camera, except one—a girl with white-blond hair and a thousand-mile stare. She seemed to see something beyond the field of the camera’s lens, beyond Jay—who was probably taking the picture. Merry felt the hair rise along the back of her neck, and knew, with sudden conviction, that Jay Santorski had been haunted by this girl.

  And knew with equal force that she was dead.

  Merry dropped the frame as though it burned her fingers, and stood there, amazed and doubting, in the middle of the silent room.

  Chapter Ten

  If a man nearly six feet five can be said to huddle, then Howie Seitz was huddled into his rain slicker as he stood on the edge of the Easy Street Basin. It wouldn’t be so bad, he thought, if he could have worked up a sweat like the guys with the dredges, or worn a wet suit like Tim and Phil Potts; but he had nothing but his regulation blue uniform beneath the slicker, and a police cap on his head. The shower-cap contraption intended to shield his hat from the full effects of the rain only depressed him further.

  The basin was one of the most picturesque spots in the harbor area, with its scattering of dories moored up near the houses of Old North. The gunwales of one of the boats were strung with colored lights. A diminutive Christmas tree sat amidships, the single spot of cheer in an overcast day.

  “Whoa!” shouted one of the scallopers as he dumped his dredge onto a culling board. “Got somethin’ here!”

  Howie jerked himself out of self-pity. The guy who had yelled was one of two hired that morning by the Potts brothers, who knew almost every waterman on the island. He was young, not much older than a teenager, with a shock of blond hair and what Howie privately thought was a bad hangover. Howie had seen him around before—leaning against the brick wall of the Brotherhood, hands shoved into his jeans, or shuffling toward the Town Pier on a weekday morning. He’d said he was a friend of Jay’s, although Howie didn’t remember that; regardless, he had jumped at the chance to make a quick buck. And he handled the boat well enough.

  Dredging must be warm work. The blond-headed kid—what was his name?—had thrown aside his jacket and was working in just a sweatshirt, the sleeves rucked high above his elbows.

  What a life, Howie thought as he shielded his eyes with his hands and tried to make out the object on the distant culling board. Just a kid, already stuck in a dead-end job. The scallop boat was a good fifty yards away, and the slight fog that had followed the nor’easter turned everything—particularly the light—flat and gray. Howie gave up trying to pick out the contents of the upended dredges, and rubbed angrily at his eyes. “What have you got there … Paul?”

  “A bike lock,” he shouted back excitedly. “Chopped off in the middle. I think it’s Jay’s!”

  “A bike lock?” Merry Folger said at Howie’s elbow. “Now that is interesting. Why cut the lock if you’re already riding the bike?”

  Paul threw his boat into gear and nosed toward the Easy Street end of the basin, as though intent upon handing the chain directly to Howie. About fifteen feet from the edge, he gave up. “Too shallow,” he called, and cut the engine.

  Howie cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Yo! Tim, buddy!”

  A wet-suited diver poised on the gunwale of the second scallop boat slid into the water. A few seconds later Tim Potts surfaced amidships and shoved his diving mask high on his forehead. Paul handed him the bike lock—a length of green plastic that ended raggedly in a trail of chain—and Tim walked the last few yards to the basin’s edge.

  “There’s no telling if it’s Santorski’s, of course,” Tim said by way of greeting.

  “No,” Merry conceded, “but we might check it for prints. That plastic should hold something.” She looked over the police diver’s head toward the scallop boat. “What’s that boy’s name?”

  “Paul Winslow.” Tim dropped the ravaged chain at her feet. She ignored it.

  “Use him for this sort of thing very often?”

  “This sort of thing doesn’t happen very often. But no. He volunteered. He was a friend of Jay’s.”

  “That explains it, then.”

  Howie glanced at Merry curiously. S
he was still staring at Paul Winslow, and the expression on her face was forbidding. A mix of pity and anger.

  “Explains what?” Howie asked.

  “The turkey tracks on his left arm. Don’t you see them, Seitz?”

  Paul Winslow was backing the scallop boat carefully—the dories moored in the basin’s shallows made maneuvering difficult—and Howie studied the boy as he worked the controls. Below the rumpled sweatshirt sleeve of maroon fleece Paul’s forearm was dotted with needle marks, dark and inflamed against the pale flesh.

  “He’s been shooting a hell of a lot of something,” Merry said. “Who sells him his drugs, Tim?”

  “If I knew that,” Tim retorted, “he wouldn’t still be buying. You gonna take that chain back to the station?”

  “You must have heard that Santorski had needle marks on his arm, Tim. Nothing’s ever confidential on the Nantucket force.”

  “Maybe I did hear something about that. What are you driving at, Mere?”

  “If that boy”—she nodded toward Paul Winslow, whose boat was now well out into the basin—“was Santorski’s friend, maybe they used the same dealer.”

  “You want me to pump Paul? Find out how he gets the stuff in the middle of the Atlantic?”

  “Well, you are a cop, Tim.”

  “Not after five o’clock,” he said, and settled his mask back over his face.

  “The Chief might be surprised to hear that.”

  Tim’s snub-nosed face, so suggestive of a koala, turned pugnacious. “So now you’re going to run to Daddy?”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Tim.” Merry’s mouth set in a thin line. “If this drug thing gets out of hand, a lot of people are going to be asking questions. Particularly when the summer season hits, and the population swells by a factor of eight. You might think about that, sometime.”

  He ignored her, and prepared to slide back into the cold gray water.

  “Heard anything from Bailey lately?”

  Tim Potts checked in midmotion. “If I had, you’d be the last person I’d tell,” he replied. “There’s never been any love lost between you two.”