Top of the list: Paying a call on Joseph and Laura Gutterson Little.
I drove out of the station parking lot, and eased myself into the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Old South Road. I was pleased to note the tiny woman in the giant Chevy Tahoe ahead of me putting down her phone and buckling her seatbelt. I could feel her inventorying her parking tickets and moving violations as she leaned sideways, no doubt double-checking her glove compartment for her registration. At times it made me sad to strike such irrational terror into the hearts of the most powerful people in the country. Today it felt good.
I was calling on a couple of billionaires and I needed every advantage I could take. I cleared the rotary and headed down Lower Orange Street past the bustling hive of Marine Home Center, thinking—“take” advantage, how apt. You have to take it. No one’s giving it away.
I skirted the bottom of town, edging the harbor, loving the clear light over the water, then along the “strip” at the bottom of Broad Street, past all the double-parked cars (people grabbing coffee and a muffin, or a sandwich for lunch) and the spill of Young’s Bicycle shop kids in their bright yellow shirts demonstrating mopeds to the tourists. Next, the long straight stretch of road to Jetties Beach, past the clutter of mini-mansions built on what Jane told me had been marshland until the real estate boom of the eighties. I took the steep, narrow Cobblestone Lane up to Cliff Road. The cobbles were the same as they had always been, laid by Portuguese artisans in the nineteenth century, but someone had bought the property that climbed the hill beside the narrow street and turned it into a gaudy wonderland of stone walls, hedges, granite slab stairways, and massive new construction. It got me thinking about the rich people again. It’s hard not to think about them during a Nantucket summer. This is their world and the sheer density of them as a population makes any extremity of affluence seem bizarrely mundane.
I remembered my father’s lawyer in the old days, who contributed a pittance to his infirm mother’s living expenses, but never cancelled a vacation or stinted on his wine cellar, and the billionaire Dalton father who left his struggling kids only a few sticks of furniture.
Nothing changed; it all felt the same here, today—Mike Henderson’s wealthy customers who assumed everyone was trying to rob them, the rich divorcee I took up with when my own marriage ended, who stuffed cash in my pockets before we went to dinner so that no one would suspect she was paying the tab. The guilt, paranoia, and mendacity, predictable as a Nantucket parking ticket.
So, at some point I started to wonder—is this nature or nurture? Do the rich people learn this behavior from their parents? Or is it hardwired into the lizard brain of the human species? Is it a mental illness, or an atavistic hangover from the caveman days when an extra pelt hidden under a rock could mean the difference between life and death?
I knew this much—rich people needed to conceal the gulf that separated them from the rest of us. To admit their true status would be catastrophic. They’d have to cope with unbearable guilt or attempt unsustainable acts of reparation. They would be set upon by the jackals of the underclass and torn to pieces. Better to build walls and moats, live in gated communities, dress down, and only speak the truth to other members of the tribe.
Much of this is learned behavior. Jane’s billionaire uncle, who made his brother-in-law split the tolls on the drive from New York to Connecticut, who called his party guests “freeloaders” because they were drinking his liquor, clearly learned his mean-spirited parsimony at a parent’s knee. It might have been the same parent, in the same tight-fisted culture, that taught J. Paul Getty to install a pay phone in his house so that greedy guests wouldn’t run up his phone bill.
So perhaps this stinginess is not inherent in the human psyche. I had always believed that—until I came into some money myself.
Actually, the story was even better. I only thought I was coming into the money—I never actually saw a dime. The true-crime book I wrote in Los Angeles was going to be a movie until the LAPD fired me and forced me to abandon it. The big deal fell through—most Hollywood deals fall through, except the drug deals. Still, for a few weeks there I saw a vision—the true prospect of a windfall. No more debt! No more overdraft fees. No more punishing eighty-hour workweeks.
Instead—travel, freedom, peace of mind.
And what was the first thing I thought of? How to hide my new fortune from my friends. How to protect it from my needy brother and my greedy in-laws. How to use it without giving myself away, what story I could concoct to explain a new car or a flat-screen TV? Small inheritance? DOJ auction? Scratch tickets?
I was behaving exactly like all the rich people I hated—and I was still broke! Just the thought of money had poisoned my mind and kick-started all the same bullshit I’d been denouncing for years.
That memory gave me an insight into Joe and Laura Little. It humanized them. I needed that, just as much as I needed their irrational fear of me, to conduct a useful interrogation. That’s why I was both wearing my uniform this morning and remembering those brief few weeks when I thought I’d never have to wear it again. The gentleman poet! I had to smile—what a pretentious clown. But there was real value to my failure. It brought me to Nantucket, and taught me the single priceless lesson of my adult life—I love my work.
I love the hunt, I love the hidden fact that turns a case, the lie that doesn’t quite add up, the true story in the shadow of the fake one. I love deciphering the hidden patterns of motive and decision, the hidden logic in the chaos of a crime scene. But mostly I love catching the criminals, outsmarting them, and, I might as well admit it, solving their puzzles, setting the world—my world, my tiny part of the bigger world—to rights.
And I was on my way to do that this morning, uniform and all. I climbed out of my cruiser, crossed the crushed-shell driveway and took the wide steps up to the columned front deck with my confidence refreshed. I was formulating my first questions as I rang the bell.
I heard steps from inside and the glossy forest-green six-panel front door swung inward revealing Laura Gutterson Little—a small, perfectly presented woman, from her short-cropped bottle-blond hair to her Botoxed and surgically tightened face to the pleated khaki pants, short-sleeved white blouse and expensive sandals. Her arms showed the evidence of hard daily workouts. A gym membership at Westmoor? Or a private trainer? Probably both. I guessed her age at just over forty. Her much larger husband, moon-faced and balding, loomed behind her. He wore tennis clothes purchased ten pounds and a couple of years ago, clearly headed out to the Yacht Club for a match.
“Mrs. Little—Mr. Little…thanks for agreeing to see me today. I know you’re busy.”
Laura stepped back, forcing her husband to move out of my way. “Don’t be silly. You’re the busy one. Please come in.”
They led me into the living room—the Great Room, I’m sure they called it—with its spectacular view over the edge of the cliff to Nantucket Sound, blue and sparkling under the dome of the cloudless, early summer sky. I picked out a couple of sailboats, a windsurfer or two, and the ferry inching away in the distance toward Hyannis. The cool, dry house was silent except for the faint whisper of the climate-control system.
We sat down, them on the white silk couch, me on one of the facing white silk armchairs. Everything was pale, squared-off, impossibly clean. I hated to think what my kids and our dog would do to a house like this if they were turned loose in it. Questions teemed to mind: how to vacuum the sand out of the Berber rug, how to scrub the food stains off the elegant chairs, and the dog fur off the perfect couch. The Littles didn’t have these problems. Joe’s children, if he had any, were grown and gone. And more kids weren’t part of the trophy wife equation.
But, then again, neither were infidelity, blackmail, and murder.
“So tell me about Refn,” I began.
Laura studied the Steuben whaling sculpture on the glass-topped coffee table—the white crystal whale in br
eaching flight above a four-man whale boat with peg-legged Ahab wielding a harpoon in the bow. It probably cost as much as my yearly salary. Laura had a nice life here on Cliff Road. She didn’t want to lose it.
“He’s a terrible—” they started to say together. Joe turned to her. “Sorry. You go.”
“I was going to…It’s—he’s a terrible person—was a terrible person. I just wish I’d figured that out before.”
“But charming?” I offered.
“He—yes, I suppose. At first. That killer smile of his. People don’t realize how important a good smile is in this world. Unless you don’t have one. Then you know. You feel it. And you feel yourself being taken in by this totally superficial meaningless arrangement of facial features, and you know what’s happening but it doesn’t make any difference at all.”
“Darwin said smiling is the only universal body language across all primate groups.”
“So I suppose we’re all just apes.”
I shrugged. “My mom always says, ‘we’re not down too long out of the trees’ whenever someone does something particularly awful. She has a point.”
“I suppose.”
“Anyway, you fell for him.”
“Yes.”
“You had an affair.”
She pressed her arms together, clamped them between her legs, hunched her shoulders. It was like someone had cranked up the air conditioning. But no one had. She spoke to her knees. “Joe and I…We have an open marriage,”
Joe coughed up a laugh. “She has an open marriage. I have ED and a Viagra allergy.”
“Joe!”
I glanced over at him. “I had no idea—”
“It’s real. There’s lots of side effects they don’t tell you about.”
This was none of my business. But murder opens up peoples’ lives, the way a twister tears the roof off their house. One quick flyover and you can see everything.
“So…Donald Harcourt saw you together. And told your husband.”
“Yes.”
“There was a brawl at the Sanfords’ fundraiser.”
“Yes, well…Joey had to make a show of it.”
“No one knows about our arrangement,” Joe added.
Laura explained, “I have a book out on the sanctity of marriage, and monogamy and how to make life work in a traditional marriage. It’s called Vows.”
“Like the wedding announcements in the Times.”
“The subtitle is Living Your Ever After—Happily. A revelation like this could wreck my sales.”
“Or double them. Scandals sell books.”
She gave me a look of prim distaste. “My reputation sells my books, Chief Kennis. And I will not have it sullied.”
I spoke directly to Joe. “You couldn’t pay Refn off forever, or even be sure he’d keep quiet, no matter how much money you gave him. But there was an obvious solution.”
“Not that we could see.”
“Here’s how it looks, Mr. Little. You killed Refn and then called Donald Harcourt to the Naushop house. He has his own reasons for wanting Refn dead, and he’s caught red-handed at the scene of the crime.”
“Why would I want to frame Don Harcourt?”
“You tell me.”
A toxic silence spread between us. The knife was out of the drawer. Joe said “I think I need to call a lawyer.”
Laura spoke up. “No! That’s ridiculous! This is all about one cell phone call. Someone must have cloned Joe’s phone.”
“Come on, Mrs. Little. That hardly seems—”
“It’s easy to do. Anyone can buy the equipment online. And my husband lost his phone the week before the murder. Remember, Joe? We were having lunch at Ventuno.” She turned back to me. “It was like an informal meeting of the executive board of the theater—The Kohls, the Harcourts, Judy Barsch, Ken and Sally Howe. Who else? Oh, the Callahans. Anyway…What an awful lunch! Joe got food poisoning. The point is, he had his phone out the whole time, he was checking for likes about some idiotic thing he had posted on Facebook, ranting about the Supreme Court.”
“I just said—they take a case, you know the decision in advance. The very fact that—”
“Please, Joe. Not today. I’m trying to explain something to Chief Kennis.” She touched his knee to focus his attention then withdrew her hand to her lap. “The phone was out on the table for most of the meal and when we were walking back to the car Joe reached into his pocket and it was gone.”
“We went back into the restaurant,” Joe added. “We asked the waiters and the people at the tables near us. But no one had seen it.”
“There was an odd moment at lunch, though,” Laura said. “Just before Joe started to feel sick. That writer, Blair Hollister? I guess he was a few tables away. He strolled over to say hello, and we were all chatting and then everything seemed to happen at once. Someone knocked over a glass of wine, and Joe just—”
“I thought I was going to puke. I jumped up and ran to the bathroom.”
Laura shuddered. “Ugh. I followed him into the men’s room—it was awful…and when we got back there were waiters cleaning the floors and changing the tablecloth and—sort of controlled chaos? But it all worked out all right. And we all got free desserts. Which is a nice treat at Ventuno.”
“I must have picked up a bug somewhere,” Joe said.
“Anyway, like I said, the phone was gone after lunch and then the next morning, I found it on the deck. Just sitting on the table where we have our coffee! How did it get there?”
I shrugged. “Someone noticed the phone at the restaurant later, recognized you and returned it.”
“Exactly! After they cloned it!”
I took a breath. “So, let me try to piece this together. This individual followed you into the restaurant—or had access to the reservations list…and knew Joe’s Facebook addiction…and lurked nearby hoping for the moment when they could snatch the phone off the table? With no one in a party of eleven noticing?”
“Well, I…it’s—I don’t know. How do you explain it?”
“I think I already did.”
“But humor me. If the phone’s sim card really was cloned…”
I met her steady gaze. “Then someone in that restaurant took it.”
“Thank you.”
Joe jumped in. “But no one would! The waitstaff has nothing against us, and no one at that table—I mean, they wouldn’t try to frame me for murder. And also—I mean…those people…our friends…they’re not criminal masterminds, swiping phones and performing all this high-tech magic and luring people to crime scenes. It makes no sense.”
I offered Laura an apologetic smile. “He has a point.”
“But he’s missing the real point, as usual. Joe didn’t make that call. Which means someone else did. And it’s your job to find them.”
“I wonder how you can be so sure Joe didn’t make the call. Were you together?”
“No, but—”
“Where were you?” It had to be someplace public she couldn’t lie about, or she would have.
“As a matter of fact, I had a tennis date with Sally Howe yesterday afternoon. At the Yacht Club.”
I caught Joe’s eye. “And you?”
He looked away, studying the wall of books behind me. “I’d rather not say.”
“Try again.”
“It’s—I was in a meeting. At the Chicken Box.”
The Box was a low-rent mid-island bar, a local hangout leftover from a very different Nantucket. It was hard to imagine Joseph Little in there.
“The Box? Really?”
“I didn’t choose the location.”
“Who were you meeting there?”
“Two Bulgarians, brothers—Dimo and Boiko Tabachev? They’ve done work for me before—moving furniture, dump runs, things like that.”
; I knew the Tabachev brothers. They were smart and shrewd, always careful to stay on the right side of the law, like drag racers on the right side of the road, one wheel riding the yellow line. We suspected them of everything from opioid-dealing to low level protection rackets and even running the (mythical?) Eastern European prostitution ring. But we’d never managed to catch them doing anything worse than operating a betting pool on Whalers’ football games. I brought Dimo in on that one a couple of years ago—just for a warning, which I hoped would be enough. When the interview was finished, the big man, who must have weighed close to three hundred pounds at that point, loomed over me and said, “I am loving this country, Mr. Police. Don’t make me feel unwelcome here.”
The threat was veiled, but then so is a grieving widow’s face at a funeral. That formal concealment reveals more than it hides.
“I know Dimo,” I told Joe. “He does a lot more than move furniture. We just haven’t been able to prove any of it. Yet.”
“I don’t want to get in trouble, Chief.”
“Then tell me what the two of you were talking about.”
“This is off the record. I’ll deny anything I say to you right now. So will Dimo. And Laura will back us up.”
Then I got it. The irony would have been funny, if irony was ever funny. “You were conspiring to commit murder while someone else was actually murdering your intended victim.”
“It was just…exploratory.”
“Here’s some free advice, Joe. Next time you’re exploring the idea of committing a capital crime with a known felon, don’t meet in public. And choose a more reliable felon. Dimo would turn you in for a free round of beer.”
“We did nothing! It was just—talk. Someone else killed Refn.”
“Lucky you.”
I’d had enough. Police work shows you the worst of everyone. Forty-four years old and I still preferred my illusions. Well, who doesn’t? I stood. “That’s all for now. Don’t leave the island. I’ll be in touch if we need to talk again.”
I was suddenly overcome with the fatigue of dealing with horrible people.
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