Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  “You’re very kind to concern yourself, Detective, but I hardly think it’s necessary.” Laurie Hopfnagel rose again from her chair. “The owners have decided to let the matter drop.”

  How convenient, Merry thought.

  “And now, if you’ll excuse me—” The manager extended her hand.

  Merry ignored it. “Could you tell me, please, what Jay earned per hour in his position?”

  “Per hour? I think he probably earned around twelve dollars.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “That’s the going rate for waitstaff,” Hopfnagel said stiffly. “Dishwashers earn slightly less. You may not be aware of this, Detective, but it’s expensive to live on Nantucket. Getting service help is even harder. We have to pay them the earth. And in the summer months, give them housing into the bargain.”

  Of course, Merry had never realized that Nantucket was expensive. She had merely been born here.

  “And how many hours per week did Santorski work?”

  “He was part-time. A six-hour shift, three nights a week, with occasional overtime.”

  Merry did a swift calculation and nodded. “Roughly two hundred dollars, before taxes. Thank you. That’s very helpful.”

  “I can’t think why you should need to know,” Hopfnagel retorted, the gentility stripped from her voice.

  “Bank accounts,” Merry supplied comfortably. She had no lingering illusion that Jay Santorski had stolen tips. But she had a fair idea who had. “We can compare his usual earnings with his weekly deposits, and get a handle on just how much of your staff’s money went into his pockets.”

  “He probably spent it,” the woman said bitterly. “I don’t think you’ll find anything.”

  “Neither do I,” said Merry, with a steady look, “but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t try. One more thing, Ms. Hopfnagel.”

  “Yes?” Visible irritation. Perhaps a touch of fear?

  “When did Jay Santorski leave the restaurant Thursday night?”

  “I told your colleague. Around ten.”

  “You let everyone go early?”

  She nodded.

  “When would he normally have left?”

  “Maybe an hour later.”

  “Thank you very much. You’ve been so helpful. And don’t hesitate to report thefts in future, Miss Hopfnagel. We can work wonders if we’re given timely information. Your average pilferer is usually more lucky than clever.”

  Laurie Hopfnagel merely smiled, and looked down at her desk.

  Merry took the only available table, one with a view of the kitchen’s swinging door, and looked forward to a chat with her waiter.

  He introduced himself as David—a shining-faced, redheaded twenty-year-old wearing a suspicion of sideburns. When Merry had ordered a platter of fried oysters and some hot tea, she seized the moment and asked David whether he had known the dead scalloper.

  “Oh, yeah—we’re all wearing black armbands today.” He pointed to his crape-encircled bicep. “I still can’t believe it. I mean, he was younger than me! And he knew the water! Jay was the last person who should have drowned.”

  “So I understand.” Merry fished for her police indentification in her voluminous purse, and presented it for David’s admiration. “I’m investigating Jay’s death.”

  The waiter frowned. “I thought… it was an accident.”

  “I’m sure it was,” she replied, with more certainty than she felt. “But we still have to rule out any other possibility.”

  “Oh.” He glanced over his shoulder at a florid man in a checked blazer who was gesturing frantically. “I’ve got to get that guy some ketchup. Could you wait a minute?”

  Merry could; and after a tedious interval spent surveying the attire and conversation of her nearest neighbors, David returned. He deposited a plate of oysters and stood before her, tray dangling.

  “I don’t know what I can tell you,” he began doubtfully.

  “What sort of a worker was Jay? Did he do his job well?”

  The waiter shrugged. “As well as any of us.”

  “Did you spend time with him outside of work?”

  “Not really. He had his own group of friends. But I liked him,” he added hopefully, as though liking Jay might win him a particular prize. Merry’s good opinion, perhaps.

  “Did most of your coworkers like him?”

  “I guess.” The waiter’s eyes drifted away from her, probably anxious in the event of a summons.

  “You never heard anything that might suggest otherwise?”

  “No.”

  “Did Jay ever seem less than himself when he reported for work? Or did he call in sick a lot?”

  His brows knit. “Not that I can remember.”

  Merry sighed inwardly and picked up her fork. “Well, thank you, David. You’ve been very helpful. You’ve got a good crowd here today—looks like the storm hardly affected Ezra’s.”

  “Yeah. Last night was dead, but now that the weather’s changed, we can’t seat people fast enough.”

  “Good tips?”

  “That’d be a change.” He brushed at a crumb of bread on her tablecloth and smiled suddenly. “I haven’t seen many of those this fall.”

  Merry looked innocently around the room. “You mean it’s been slow?”

  “That, or people are stiffing us.” He glanced at the man in the checked blazer, whose jaws were working at a massive bite of hamburger. “You wouldn’t believe how cheap the tourists can be.”

  The Whalers won the superbowl, forty-eight to fifteen. The dispirited Boston English trudged off the field through the renewed rain, helmets dangling from chilled fingertips, while Will and his buddies carried Coach Victor at a run toward the goalposts. Jorie found Will among the knot of boys caught in a full-throated yell, and felt a faint surprise. He looked so much like the rest of them. She thought of Will as someone set apart—someone whose thoughts were entirely his own. She turned to see whether Paul had noticed, but Paul was already walking toward his truck. Teeth chattering, Jorie followed.

  The two boys could not have been more different from each other. Paul was tall and lean, with gray eyes and blond hair falling over his collar. He was very fair, while Will had the skin of a waterman, tanning quickly and staying dark well into winter. Will’s black hair and blue eyes made his rare smiles somehow all the more startling. Paul used to smile a lot, Jorie thought as she watched him striding ahead of her. He used to laugh in a way that took her by surprise, as though he understood something funny that no one else saw. Lately, however, he had grown remote. Impossible to talk to. He hadn’t wanted to come to the football game today—the high school no longer interested him—and yet, Jorie thought, Paul had no other world. He seemed adrift. Most of his friends had left Nantucket for jobs or colleges on the mainland. His dad had thrown him out of the house six months ago, and now he lived with five other guys in a place on lower Orange Street. Jorie had been there. It was falling down on its foundations, shingles missing, roof patched, shutters hanging awry. An old Confederate flag discarded by a forgotten summer tenant blocked the sun from Paul’s window. It was a depressing place, frightening to Jorie; she had not gone back.

  She was often worried about Paul, even afraid for him. At times she believed she loved him; at others, she knew that what she felt was merely the intense attachment of a seventeen-year-old, and that her life would go far beyond him.

  “Want a ride?” he asked her as she reached the truck. “Ill take you home, if you like.”

  “Aren’t you going to the party?”

  “Party?” He stopped short. “No—no, I don’t think I want to hang out with a bunch of high school kids, thank you very much.” He pulled his keys from his jeans and shoved them into the driver’s side door. But Jorie didn’t walk around to her side of the truck. She stood there, willing herself not to shake with the cold, and studied him intently.

  “Where were you today, Paul?”

  “What do you mean?” He opened the door i
n her face, using it like a barrier.

  “You said you were going scalloping. Will and I were out on the water today for two hours. We never saw you once.”

  “I did some work for the cops.”

  “The cops?”

  He nodded, his eyes on the ground. “They wanted the Easy Street Basin dredged. In case any of Jay’s things ended up on the bottom.”

  “Jay? You mean the guy who drowned?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

  Paul shrugged. Jorie edged around the open car door and touched his arm tentatively. “I’m really sorry, Paul.”

  “He just screwed up, that’s all.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Where?”

  “In the boat basin.”

  “Nah. Just a lot of junk. Waste of time. Are you getting into the car, or what? Because I don’t have all day.”

  Hurt, Jorie glared at him, and for the first time saw the strain on his face. His blue eyes were ringed with shadows, and he was trembling slightly, too, despite the heavy jacket he wore on the water and off. With sudden understanding, she put a name to his restless unease.

  “You’re using again, aren’t you?”

  “None of your goddamn business.”

  Jorie turned as though she had been struck and walked quickly away. She kept her head high and stared blindly at the empty field, lips moving with stifled abuse. He had promised her. He had promised.

  “Jor!”

  The word was torn and desperate.

  “Come on, Jor! I didn’t mean it!”

  She walked on.

  “Detective. As promised.” Dave Haddenfield saluted Merry with a green plastic Gatorade bottle and ushered her into his tiny office. Now that the game was safely won, the assistant coach exuded affability.

  “Congratulations,” Merry said.

  “Thanks. It’s really Victor’s win—the man’s a legend. But if you went to high school here, you know that.”

  “Yes. He even coached my brother.” The thought of Billy suited up to play—had he really been as young as Will Starbuck?—brought a faint spasm of pain. Maybe it was Coach Victor, and all those football Saturdays, Billy had been thinking of when he tackled the grenade.

  “You wanted to talk about Jay,” Dave Haddenfield prodded.

  “Right.” She settled her notepad on her lap and uncapped her ballpoint pen.

  “I couldn’t believe he died that way. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “So everyone says.” She felt the coach’s eyes on her face, and made a show of scribbling something on the pad. Let him formulate the question in his own time.

  “But you still think it was an accident?”

  Bingo. Merry looked up and smiled. “I was hoping you could give me your sense of Mr. Santorski.”

  Haddenfield took off his glasses and wiped the thick lenses with the edge of his sweatshirt. “Is there something… wrong… with Jay’s death?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought a simple drowning would require an investigation.”

  “Mr. Santorski’s death is unexplained. As such, it requires that some questions be asked.”

  “I see. So you’re not considering it an accident.”

  “Saying it was an accident doesn’t exactly explain how it happened,” Merry elaborated.

  “Let’s talk plainly, Detective.” Haddenfield resettled the glasses on his nose. “Was Jay in trouble when he died?”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  Haddenfield hesitated. “I suppose you’ve heard about the Save Our Harbor campaign?”

  Whatever she had expected, it was hardly this.

  “No. I hadn’t. Would you like to tell me about it?”

  “It’s Owen Harley’s brainchild. I’m surprised you haven’t come across a flyer or two at Mitchell’s Book Corner, or posted on the Hub bulletin board. They’re soliciting donations from everybody still breathing. Jay was helping Owen canvass the local landowners and landscape designers.”

  “About the harbor?” Merry’s confusion showed.

  “About voluntary fertilizer limitations. Or even an outright ban for properties in the harbor watershed. They were going to bring it before the selectmen at the next Town Meeting.”

  Like any number of historic New England towns, Nantucket was still governed by a Board of Selectmen and a Town Meeting, at which a number of citizen initiatives were either passed or defeated by two-thirds majority. The two-day political powwow, held every April at the high school, was a forum for public debate and a general ratification of the island’s way of life. Merry had tangled once with the selectmen over an unscrupulous real estate development, but she thought they might consider the case of the harbor without police prodding. If the island’s most vibrant feature was allowed to decline, more than tourism would suffer.

  But what did that have to do with Jay Santorski’s death?

  “A fertilizer ban,” she mused. “I don’t quite understand your concern, Mr. Haddenfield.”

  “It’s Owen Harley. He’s a bit extreme, Detective. An aging hippy, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he had involved Jay in something …” He paused. “Criminal.”

  “Criminal.”

  “Yes. I’ve heard Owen talk about sabotaging the homes of people who refuse to comply with fertilizer reduction.”

  The image of Jay Santorski huddled over a homemade pipe bomb drifted through Merry’s mind. Partly to suppress a wild impulse to giggle, she said, “And would this be before or after they won approval at Town Meeting?”

  Dave Haddenfield stiffened. “I’m sorry you find this amusing, Detective. Jay is, after all, dead.”

  “Jay drowned in the harbor, Mr. Haddenfield.”

  “I know that. I’m merely suggesting that his death might have occurred in pursuit of something… unscrupulous.”

  “I see.” Merry looked down at her notepad. Any theory, however bizarre, was worth remembering. “I’ll keep that thought in mind. Did Jay’s friends know about his involvement with Save Our Harbor?”

  “His friends? They weren’t the sort to be interested in political causes.”

  “What were they like?”

  He shrugged. “Some of them were involved in music—people he knew through Owen—and some of them were scallopers. Or biologists, like Hannah Moore.”

  This was a name Merry hadn’t heard. “Hannah Moore?”

  “She sits on the Save Our Harbor steering committee. Hannah’s married to a local real estate guy—big bucks, and I hear she knows how to spend it. Hasn’t been too much in evidence lately, however. Hannah and Owen don’t see eye-to-eye.”

  “Because she’s not a revolutionary, I suppose. Few wives of real estate moguls are. Was Jay friendly with her?”

  Haddenfield smiled. “It was the other way around, Detective. For a married woman several years his senior, Hannah Moore conducted a scorched-earth campaign in her pursuit of poor Jay. If she hadn’t made herself so ridiculous, it might have been funny. Instead it was just sad. Jay didn’t give a damn about anyone but Margot.”

  “Ah, yes. Miss St. John. It sounds as though Jay had his hands fun.”

  “I suppose,” Dave Haddenfield said thoughtfully. “But neither of them seemed to make him happy.”

  “You’re the first person to suggest that Jay wasn’t a happy guy. From everything I’ve heard, he was Mr. Sunshine. Did you think of him as moody?”

  He studied her expressionlessly for several seconds. “So that’s it,” he said finally. “You think he killed himself. I admit, it’s the only thing that makes sense. Why would a perfectly capable guy of twenty-one, a guy comfortable with boats and the water, drown to death?”

  “Because he fell into thirty-eight-degree water at the dead of night with too many clothes on.”

  From the coach’s silence, Merry was certain her deflection hadn’t worked. The idea that Jay Santorski had gotten dru
nk and killed himself over a woman (or two) would be circulating in a matter of hours.

  “What did you think of Jay, Mr. Haddenfield?”

  “I envied him,” he said simply.

  “Why?”

  “He had everything in the world. Good looks, intelligence, more than enough money, a great education. He knew what he wanted, and he barely had to lift a finger to get it.”

  “And now he’s dead,” Merry said flatly.

  “Yes. It’s bizarre. I can’t get used to it.” He lifted his glasses from his nose and rubbed wearily at his eyes. They were red-rimmed—from wind? Or sleeplessness?

  “Did you like Jay, Mr. Haddenfield?”

  “It was impossible not to.”

  “Barry Gohen doesn’t think so.”

  “Oh, well, Barry—he had a lot of reasons to dislike Jay. Most of them having to do with Sue. But you’ll have to ask them about that.”

  “I already have.”

  “That’s probably why Jay was planning to move out.”

  Merry looked up from her notepad. “He was?”

  “He was going to live with Margot. In the Baxter Road house. Jay said the place was too isolated in winter for Margot to be alone; she was frightened at night. The whole thing made Sue absolutely furious.”

  “Really?”

  “They had a huge fight about it at three o’clock in the morning. Woke the whole house. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “No.”

  “I suppose I can see why not. Pretty embarrassing for her.”

  “You’ve had a difficult time of it in that house, Mr. Haddenfield, with so many tensions among your housemates.”

  At this, the football coach smiled. “It wasn’t a healthy situation. It sounds brutal—but Jay’s death will probably help.”

  In the end, it was Rafe da Silva who dropped Will and Jorie at the post-game party. He pulled up in a parking space outside the coach’s house and turned off the ignition.

  “You’re sure you’re warm enough?” he asked Jorie, a small furrow between his brows.

  She nodded.

  “Give her your jacket, Will, just in case.”

  “Really, Mr. da Silva—I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine,” Will said, and shrugged out of his coat. Before she had time to protest, he draped it around her shoulders, fingers cool against the back of her neck. She felt herself flush stupidly. “We’ll find you some coffee inside.”