“None in the least,” Merry agreed equably. “Glad to see you’re such a team player, Tim. Let me know when I can do you a favor. It’d be a pleasure. Really.”
A flip of the fins was her only reply.
“What an insufferable jerk,” she muttered, gazing after him. “As though he owed Bailey something.”
“He probably does.” Howie was busy stowing the bicycle lock in a plastic evidence bag. “Bailey’s been prepping him for promotion to sergeant. Tim wants to be a detective. He always has.”
“And I’m blocking his upward mobility. Meredith Folger, the Female Quota Filler who runs to Daddy. I can hear Bailey preaching the gospel now.”
“It might have helped if you hadn’t made him feel like an idiot, Mere,” Howie said gently.
She seemed about to snap his head off, but smiled crookedly instead. “It’s one of my specialities—didn’t you know?”
“Actually, you make me feel that way all the time.”
She squeezed his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Seitz. You’ve done a good job here. How much longer do you think it’ll take?”
“Two hours, maybe. They’ve covered about half the basin, but it’s a little tough working around those dories.”
“Then ship ‘em,” she said immediately. “Get Tim to help. And tell him to concentrate his dives in the water out near the jetties.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. Take that chain over to Clarence’s office. He’s gone to Boston for the autopsy, but he should be back tonight.”
“Okay,” Howie said, and secured the evidence bag. “What then?”
“Start interviewing the people on Old North. I’m going to talk to Owen Harley right now—but I’d better hit Fog Island first. I need some coffee, and the last guy I interviewed didn’t offer any.”
“Barry Cohen?” Howie asked, on a hunch.
Merry nodded. She was eyeing the rear windows of Old North Wharf’s cottages. “Which one of these is Harley’s?”
“Second one in.”
“That old wreck? Geez! Make that two cups of coffee.”
“He keeps his gear on the ground floor. The upstairs is better.”
Merry’s gaze traveled from the tumble-down facade of Owen Harley’s home, to the narrow strip of dock that ran along the back. There was space to moor a boat, but it was vacant now. “I’m surprised he’s not out on his slip getting a ringside view.”
“Give him some credit for feeling, Mere. Harley was Jay’s buddy.”
“Was he, Seitz?” she asked idly. “I wonder.”
“Mr. Harley?”
Merry pounded once more on the massive sliding doors of the fishing shack and strained for some hint of life within. Perhaps Owen Harley was taking a shower—the sound of running water trickled over the noise of the throttled scallop boats and the slap of waves against the wharf pilings. She peered through a porthole-sized window and made out a huddle of darkened shapes: enormous blocks and tackle, coils of rope, heaped tarpaulins, a snare of fishnet.
Where did someone perch in all that clutter? Upstairs? Howie had promised it was an improvement over the present view. Merry set her steaming coffee on the ground and cupped her hands around her eyes, shutting out peripheral light. A circular staircase curved upward in the room’s far corner and disappeared through a hole in the ceiling.
The rest of Old North Wharf turned a prosperous front toward its gravel drive. Directly across from Harley’s was an artist’s studio and gallery—austere, well-tended, and obviously above the meaner concerns of money, Brass ship’s lanterns swung majestically from its painted roof cornice. Several doors down stood a beautiful little one-room cottage with a postage-stamp lawn and window boxes that in summer thrust unruly flowers to the sky. The Wharf Rats—a loose fellowship of storytellers and old tars—had their clubhouse here; a fortunate few of the seasonal tourists rented cottages opposite. In the midst of such order, Harley’s dereliction seemed almost eccentric, like a bag lady muttering on the fringe of a theater crowd. But, Merry reflected, his was the only part of Old North that recalled the vanished days of whaling. Built as a fisherman’s working warehouse, it was a working warehouse still. There was a certain truth in its decay, a Learlike nobility.
She picked her way around the shack’s foundation and homed in on the sound of running water. It led her to the strip of dock hugging the house’s rear wall, and below it, a scallop boat that hadn’t been there the last time she had looked. It bobbed in the harbor’s chop. The fishing shack’s neighbors, stridently residential, sported neat white balconies above the Easy Street Basin. Owen Harley was more prosaic.
He looked up from the hose he had trained on a gleaming black wet suit, registered her face, and spat tobacco juice from one corner of his mouth. He was standing on the broad planks of his boat slip, wearing nothing but a pair of long Johns aged the color of old love letters. His unruly black hair was grizzled, and his face was so mapped and trenched by weather that it resembled the eroded facade of a cathedral, gargoyles lurking in the crags between nose and chin.
“Mr. Harley?”
“Ayeh?”
“I’m Detective Folger—Nantucket police.” She pulled out a badge in a plastic case, feeling slightly foolish as she did so, and fought the impulse to stare at the seat of his long Johns. It sagged and gapped like an empty pillowcase. With the air temperature running at about thirty-one degrees, the scalloper should be freezing; but Owen Harley seemed impervious to cold.
“You responsible for all this hoo-hah in my backyard?”
“Yes, actually. I’d like to talk to you, if I may.”
“Just a minute,” he said, and dropped the spouting hose. It snaked backward, dousing Merry at knee height. She did a little dance, mouth open with dismay, and caught a flash of amusement working its way across Owen Harley’s seamed face.
“Sorry.” Two sharp turns of the spigot. Deliberate movement, frugal speech, averted eyes. Merry knew another New Englander when she met one. Harley was unlikely to volunteer much about the dead Santorski.
“It’s about your mate,” she attempted. “Jay Santorski.”
“You mean my late mate.” He straightened and looked away from her, toward the dogleg in the channel that led to the jetties. The Hyannis ferry, up and running again, was just rounding Brant Point. “I didn’t think you dropped by to talk about parking tickets.”
“Have any you’d like to get off your chest?” Merry asked idly.
Owen Harley grunted. He shook out his wet suit and hung it on a hook apparently reserved for that purpose. Then he stepped around her. Merry had no great desire to follow in the wake of those sagging long Johns, but after a moment she did.
“Coffee?” Harley suggested. “Just about to make some.”
“I’ve got some, thanks.” Her foam cup from Fog Island was still sitting in the gravel below the shack’s front window. “But you go ahead.”
He shoved aside one of the massive sliding doors and stepped inside. An indescribable smell rolled outward—part salt, part moldy wood, part rotting scallops—and engulfed Merry. She choked and slapped a hand over her nose. Owen Hurley ignored both the atmosphere and his guest’s reaction, and shambled toward the stairs. When her senses had stopped reeling, Merry stepped after him.
As Howie had promised, the second story was a revelation.
Clean, whitewashed walls; expanses of sea-reflecting glass. Skylights in the ceiling flooded the room with light. Braided rag rugs the color of pomegranates. A few pieces of clean-lined furniture, a sofa upholstered in sailcloth. Merry touched a fingertip to the Windsor back of a chair, recognizing the work of a local craftsman. “These are Stephen Swift’s, aren’t they?”
“Ayeh. Guy’s got great hands.” Owen Harley scooped some coffee into a maker. “Mind if I shower real quick before we talk? Give the coffee time to brew.”
“Go ahead,” Merry said, suddenly content to sit down and absorb Harley’s million-dollar view.
But in fact she re
mained standing. And when the scalloper had disappeared through a doorway and she heard the sound of streaming water, Merry set about disturbing Harley’s peace.
The first thing she registered was the tenor sax, propped in a corner. She hefted the instrument with all the comprehension of a primate; it might have been so much stick. The next thing she saw was a flowered silk dress lying discarded over the seat of a chair. A small cosmetic case rested near it on the floor. Merry considered these expressionlessly for an instant, then lifted a sofa cushion and peered below. A pull-out couch. So Harley had company.
The corner of the room—the farthest from the windows-was arranged as a home office. A substantial desk, a filing cabinet, computer equipment, and a fax sat competently in front of a rank of bookcases. Photographs of what Merry concluded was marine life were tacked at random on the walls, and scribbled over with black marker showing measurements of various kinds.
Harley also owned a lot of books. But the copyright dates seemed to trickle away in the mid-70s, as though he had never entered a bookstore afterward. Noam Chomsky on linguistics; Leo Tolstoy on peasants. Stephen Cohen’s study of Bukharin. Derrida and Foucault at opposite ends of a shelf, and on another, nothing but marine biology. Books on music theory. And several decrepit volumes of A. A. Milne.
“We have an anarchist,” Merry said softly, “with a weakness for Pooh.” She recognized only half of the names and titles, but it didn’t matter; she had caught the general drift. Owen Harley had been an angry young man. What had he grown into?
A block of sunlight materialized on the bookshelves, then faded quietly, a ghost. Merry turned to the window facing Steamboat Wharf, and saw the gray sky unraveling. Saw the approaching ferry, no longer a toy, its prow awash with people, and the small dory strung with lights that carried a blazing Christmas tree through the winter season. And saw, finally, that Owen Harley had a clear view of the channel’s dogleg and the barrier beach of Coatue. Impossible, however, to make out even a stone of the harbor’s jetties, a half mile away, much less a body rolling against the breakwater in the flat light of a stormy morning.
If Owen Harley had gone out scalloping yesterday, however … but perhaps the nor’easter had kept him at home.
A gull cried beyond the window, then veered and hovered near the pane, searching for a perch. The bird caught Merry in one crazed eye, reminding her for an instant of Jay Santorski’s ravaged face; and she laid a hand against the glass. Cold to the touch—poorly sealed. A true frame in a cockeyed building. All manner of sounds filtered in from outside. The sound of a fight, perhaps, or even a scuffle? A cry in the dark, and then a splash?
The shower suddenly ceased.
On impulse, Merry turned to the narrow galley kitchen and peered through the window over the sink. Old North’s gravel drive, and a patch of Easy Street beyond, the jumbled roofs of town. In the offseason, few lights shone here at night; but it might have been possible to see a man on a bike pedaling down the street. Particularly a man one expected.
“Looking for a mug?” Owen Harley emerged fully dressed from his bedroom doorway. He was wearing clean, pressed khakis and a blue striped shirt; he looked nothing like the waterman of a quarter hour ago. “They’re in the lefthand cupboard.”
“Kitchen windows are a weakness of mine,” Merry replied evenly. “I don’t have one myself, and I miss a view when I’m washing dishes.”
“Every window should frame something. And every wall should have a window.”
“Not exactly possible, in most houses,” Merry observed.
“But then I never cared for most houses.” Harley reached up for the mugs, poured a neat cup of coffee. “Cheers.”
Merry raised her foam cup in a gesture of cordiality. “Are you celebrating, then?”
For the first time, the scalloper’s eyes met hers fully. They reminded her of the gull’s—too pale and expressionless. The right one had a cast in the iris, green on gray.
“No,” he said after a moment. “I can be a cold-hearted bastard, but not that cold. Jay was a good kid. He didn’t deserve to die the way he did.”
“I wasn’t referring to Jay. I wondered whether you were celebrating Christmas Stroll. You look like you have company.” She took a sip of coffee and wandered back to the harbor window, giving him time to think.
He followed her slowly. “I offer the sofa to friends when they need it.”
“Ah,” Merry said, letting it hang. Harley didn’t elaborate. She watched the M/V Eagle nose into its berth and throw out its anchor. A crowd of reddened faces peered over the bow, eager despite the rain. She wondered how many of them had slept on the floor of the ferry terminal last night.
“Is there something you’d like to know about Jay?” Harley asked.
“Oh, probably everything there is to know about Jay. I haven’t the faintest idea who he was, or how he came to drown in the boat basin Thursday. I thought perhaps you could help me.”
He sat down on the sofa and balanced his coffee mug on his knee. “Jay was probably coming to see me. He fell off the edge of the wharf in the darkness.”
She noticed Harley had dropped the laconic “ayeh.” “Could he swim?”
“Like a fish. But that water is cold enough to kill a man in minutes. That’s why I wear the wet suit—” He paused, uncertain. “I’m sorry, I’m terrible with names.”
“Detective Folger.”
“Thank you. I wear a wet suit, Detective, and I’m only working on top of the water. When you’re in it, you go numb pretty fast. It makes perfect sense to me that Jay died.”
Merry frowned. “Whereas it makes no sense whatever to me. Were you expecting Jay Thursday night, Mr. Harley?”
“No. But he often dropped by.” A slight stiffness, as though the scalloper had braced himself for a blow.
“And were you here around midnight?”
“As it happens, I wasn’t. I was rehearsing with some friends out in Sconset.”
“Ah, yes. The swing band.” At his look of surprise, she said reassuringly, “I’m not clairvoyant. I have a friend who plays bass for you.”
“Of course—Howie. He’s a great guy,” Owen said, with unforced enthusiasm. “He’s completely honest, you know? In his dealings with people, and in his music. He can coax more from a bass than I’d have thought possible.”
“I’ll have to come hear you play sometime. So you were with Howie that night. And your … temporary guest?” she inquired idly.
“Was also with us.” The stiffness hadn’t dissipated. “Is there some reason to check everyone’s movements, Detective? Jay’s death was an accident, after all.”
Ah, the betraying anxiety, so suggestive of guilt. In almost every detective novel Merry had ever read, Owen Harley would be immediately pegged as the murderer. If this was a murder.
“Well, Mr. Harley,” she said, sitting down in an armchair across from him, “you tell me if this seems normal. As your scalloping mate, Jay Santorski has been coming to Old North day in and day out for the past two months. He’s gotten pretty comfortable with your slip and the Easy Street Basin it services; he knows the deck of your vessel. So it doesn’t seem likely he fell off your dock. He must have gone into the water where we found his bike—right beyond this house, down there in the basin.” She gestured over her left shoulder toward Harley’s beautiful, broad window.
“Is it likely Jay would overshoot the gravel drive into Old North—a fairly wide drive, I might add, and not entirely unlit, even in the off-season—just to careen into the water and drown there? It’s not very deep at the wharf’s edge. I checked. Between two and five feet, on average, given the tides. And you’ve just told me he was an accomplished swimmer.”
“Well—when you put it that way—” Harley set his mug on the coffee table and propped his chin on his hands. “Poor bastard. He must have been wasted.”
“Drunk?”
Merry let the word hang between them, and waited.
“It happens to everybody, sometime.”
“Did it happen much to Jay?”
“Actually—no. He was a very moderate person.”
“Were you aware, Mr. Harley, that Jay Santorski was an intravenous drug user?”
Something flickered in Harley’s eyes, then vanished. “Why do you think that?”
“We found needle marks on his left arm.”
Harley set his coffee mug deliberately on the table before him, his fingers lingering an instant on the rim. “Oh, Jay…”
“You didn’t know?”
He shook his head. “He never showed any sign of it on my boat.”
“Interesting. We won’t have an autopsy report for several days, but we think it is possible Mr. Santorski was drugged when he went in the water.”
“I understand.” Harley stood up restlessly. Crossing to the harbor window, he gazed out unseeing at the car ferry’s superstructure just visible above the wharf buildings opposite. “That would explain it. I wish I had been here! I might have heard something—been able to help.”
“Yes,” Merry said evenly. “It was unfortunate that no one was here.” The silence hung between them, and Merry waited for Owen Harley to fill it. He disappointed her. “Tell me, Mr. Harley. How did you come to hire Jay?”
“I worked with him at Woods Hole last summer,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“We’re both—were both—marine biologists.” He didn’t turn away from the window. “Jay was studying mollusc habitats at Harvard. I study them here. After the summer, I invited him to join me for the scalloping season, and record the devastation at close hand. He agreed. He was good at what he did, Detective, and he cared about his subject. He wanted to know the harbor as intimately as the lab.”
That explained a great many things, Merry thought, remembering the textbooks in Jay’s room. It also raised a host of further questions. “So you’re not really a scalloper,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Harley shot back contemptuously. “Can’t scallopers be educated?”
Merry’s anger flared at the ridicule in his voice. “You know what I mean. You have an alternative. You have a career. You don’t depend on a dying resource for your livelihood. I’m a native Nantucketer, Mr. Harley, and I grew up with watermen. I’ve seen what the decline in the scallop harvest has done to people. There’s not much you can tell me about that.”
Death in a Cold Hard Light Page 9