“But we love him.”
Billy nodded. “Everyone loves Dervish. One time when he ran away…or not exactly ran away, he’s kind of a dog-about-town, but he’s always home for dinner…but one time I drove into town looking for him and some little girl was carrying him down Main Street.
“‘We’re calling him Nemo!’ she said. ‘Because we found him!’ I had to nip that one in the bud. There you go. A little higher.” Billy had nudged Karen’s arms up. “You’ll get much better recoil control now.”
“Can I borrow my officer for a moment?”
“Sure, sorry.”
I took Karen aside. “I have to submit the paperwork, but you’re officially handgun-qualified as of this morning,” I told her. “Nice work.”
She flashed her sunrise smile. “Thanks, Chief.”
Normally, I would have let Charlie Boyce or Kyle Donnelly run her through the exam, but I wanted to talk to her away from the station. “I know you feel like you should be breaking down doors now, and dropping fleeing perpetrators in their tracks, but I have another research job for you.”
“Chief—”
“It’s important. Something’s going on in this case, between Hollister and Refn and Judge Galassi, and I need to know what it is. I want a complete rundown on all three of them—go back at least ten years. Education, employment status, marriages, divorces, debt problems, lawsuits, criminal histories. Everything. We know Refn—whoever he really was—used a stolen identity. The real Refn vanished. He’s probably dead, and our boy probably killed him. You need to track him back to the identity change and figure out who he was before that. God knows when the print identification is going to come back. It could take another week and I need a complete rundown on this guy now. He was a predator. He came to Nantucket because it was a good hunting ground for the kind of people he liked to use. I think his path crossed with Hollister somewhere along the line. That’s a good place to start.”
She was nodding as I spoke, instantly committed to the job on hand. She had a pad and pencil in her pocket but she didn’t take them out. She reminded me bizarrely of the old waiters in my father’s favorite L.A. restaurants like Musso & Frank, Romanoff’s, Dan Tana’s. They were seasoned pros—not secret writers or movie star-wannabes—who never wrote down an order, even for a party of ten, because they didn’t need to. They remembered. They’d been doing this job for thirty years and they were good at it. Karen had the same poised quiet expertise, the same lack of vanity. She could take a compliment, but she didn’t need one. I didn’t give her one now.
I just said, “Get back to me as soon as you can. We need to untangle this.”
She glanced over at Billy with a regretful shrug and followed me back to my cruiser.
Otto Didrickson was in the backseat, with a hand jammed into the pocket of an old Burberry raincoat. I noticed what looked like a Marine Corps pin on the lapel. I didn’t see him as a soldier; maybe he’d stolen that, too.
“I have a gun,” he said. “Lose the girl, get in and drive.”
Karen laughed. “He does not have a gun! And he wouldn’t know how to shoot it if he did.”
Otto squinted up out the car window. “Karen Gifford?”
“Hi, Otto. Take your hand out of your coat pocket before you get yourself in trouble.”
“Karen Gifford on the NPD. I would have guessed—corporate lawyer?”
“But I don’t like lawyers.”
“Me, neither. Same with brokers. That’s why I never got into real estate.”
“Also you couldn’t pass the broker’s exam.”
A sheepish shoulder lift. “Yeah, that too. So, you like cops?”
“Some of them.”
I stepped up to the car. “I’ll take a ride with him, Karen. Billy can give you a lift home.”
“Yeah?”
“Go on, finish your lesson.”
“Thanks, Chief.”
She jogged back to the range and I climbed into my cruiser. “Get in the front with me, Otto.”
When we were settled and seatbelted I pulled out onto Madequecham Valley Road. The dirt had been graded for the rich people but recent rains had reduced it to the usual rutted moonscape. We undulated over the potholes and washboards.
“I didn’t kill Refn,” Otto said.
“But he was blackmailing you about the Tarrant engagement ring.”
“I told your detective—I got the ring at an auction. Years ago.”
“Rafael Osona has no record of it.”
“It was a Jim Kirkpatrick auction.”
“He doesn’t sell estate jewelry.” I was guessing there, but I clearly guessed right. Otto folded.
“So are you going to arrest me?”
“I’m going to warn you. Losing our premier Ghost Walk guide would disrupt the summer season. But stop. No more grave-robbing, Otto. Seriously.”
“Grave-robbing! It sounds crazy even saying it. Like—who would rob a grave in this day and age? Am I right?”
“Otto.”
“No more grave-robbing.”
“Thank you.”
“I went to his house, though. Refn’s.”
“When was this?”
“About a week before the murder. We had a fight. I was inside searching the place when he came home. He clocked me good! Right in the kisser.”
I thought of the blood on the chair pillow. This could be an alternate explanation. “How did you get in?”
“The door was open?”
I recognized that interrogative upswing in his voice—you hear it when liars are trying out a new lie, as if they were asking for your approval.
He didn’t get mine. “Come on, Otto. Refn was paranoid. He kept that place locked up tight.”
Otto surprised me with a toothy grin. “But on the other hand, he lived in Naushop, where the houses are built cheap and the locks are garbage.”
“Now I have you for breaking-and-entering as well as assault.”
“He assaulted me!”
“He was justified. Technically, it was a home invasion.”
“Jeez. I’m trying to help you out around here.”
“Feel free to start.”
We had turned onto the tarmac of New South Road and were waiting for a line of cars to pass on Milestone Road. Everyone slowed down for the police cruiser.
“I found something in his house. A couple of things, actually.”
“And you took them.”
“They could be evidence.”
I made the turn and we started back to town. “You’re pushing it, Otto.”
He pulled a folded piece of paper and two bills out of his pocket. I eased over onto the grass by the side of the road, and he handed me the money. They were hundred-dollar bills.
“A bribe?”
“Just look at them, Chief. Take a long hard look.” I unfolded the bills, turned them over. “Look at them side by side. Like they were twins.”
I thought of my dad’s friend Lee Pozniak, a brilliant production designer, whose impeccable eye for detail had created the look and the atmosphere of dozens of great films, stretching back to the seventies. He had been like a second father to me, as arrogant, charming, and funny as my real father, and I had always been able to tell him apart from Carter Pozniak, his identical twin brother—also a production designer, and quite a good one, though not quite in Lee’s class. Minute, fractal differences set them apart, nuances of expression, hand gestures, a shared squint that looked intent and curious on Lee but suspicious and calculating on his brother. My dad said I had an “odd small genius for spotting discrepancies.”
Was Otto asking me to do that now? I spread the two bills flat, one on each knee, and really looked at them.
“Anything?”
“Not yet.”
“See the vertical strip? That shou
ld fluoresce in this light.” He leaned over to work a yellow pencil and blue bar-light out of his pocket. The vertical line stayed dull under the illumination. “That’s one way to tell,” he said. “But you don’t need the high-tech stuff. Joe Shop-Owner uses this.” He handed me the pencil. “Draw on it. Wrong paper, the yellow goes black.” I scribbled an X—it stayed yellow. “That means they either got some paper mill—probably in Europe somewhere—to make the perfect linen-cotton mix paper. Or, more likely, they bleached a one-dollar bill and printed over it. Hold it up to the light, see if you find see the ghost image.”
It was faint, smoke on fog, but I picked it out. “Wow.”
He grinned. “You’re ready for the Secret Service now, Chief!”
“You found this at Refn’s house?”
“Yeah.”
“And thoughtfully seized it as potential evidence in your role as an upstanding member of the Commonwealth’s citizen-constabulary?”
“Naaah. I just stole it.”
“But then you realized it was fake.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“How did you know what to look for?”
“Fake is my business, Chief. It’s what I do. I find this shit fascinating, always have. Art forgeries, those small-town facades they put up at movie studios for street scenes? Masks, human doubles, the plastic food in Japanese restaurant windows, you name it. One of my best friends back in the day did faux painting—you know what that is? This guy could make anything look like anything. He could paint mahogany to look like knotty pine and vice versa. He took all the steel door handles in this guy’s house and painted them to look like burled oak so they’d match the floor. Crazy shit.
“When they moved the organ in his church, it cracked a couple of big marble slabs on the floor. This stuff was irreplaceable, I mean, it came from some quarry in Romania or something that closed down in the fifties. So Tucker, that’s his name, Tucker Brand, he painted new faux marble squares right on the floor—cement base, fifteen layers of glaze, the whole schmagoo. And nobody can tell the difference. The guy’s a genius, but according to him, it’s his brother who’s got the real brains. Go figure.
“Anyway, Tucker’s the one who got me into the counterfeit money thing. I think he was considering it, you know, as a sideline, but he couldn’t afford the equipment.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It’s a real problem. We’re talking paper, engraving plates, printing presses, ink—oh, yeah, they have a special ink that changes color in different lights. You can get it on the black market but that’s a whole other crime and you’re dealing with, you know…”
“Criminals.”
“Bad ones. There’s great counterfeit money coming out of Columbia right now, but that’s a whole other level. This stuff looks strictly American grade to me.”
I handed back the money. “So you found this in Refn’s house.”
He nodded. “What do you think it means?”
“It could be nothing—some counterfeit bills are circulating, and Refn wound up with one of them. I can check with the Staties and the FBI, see if they’ve heard anything.”
“But it could be more than that.”
“It could be. Refn could have been the counterfeiter, or had dealings with them. The bill could be a trophy, or part of a bigger stash.”
And the thought occurred to me—it ran parallel to Hollister’s play—fake money, fake jewels.
“Could it be a message?”
“Or a warning. Someone knows about him. Someone knows what he did.”
“Big-time. Check this out.”
He gave me the sheet of paper—expensive stationery with initials engraved on the top of the page.
I carefully unfolded it and read:
I read it twice. No date, no signature. It was produced on a standard laser printer. The writer was obviously educated and clearly deranged.
“Did you find an envelope?”
He shrugged a no. The postmark might have helped, but I had the strong feeling that this note had been hand-delivered. There was obviously another one of these letters, sent to Refn’s partner in crime. But the odds were, whoever received it, burned it instantly. Any way to trace that? Ash? Long gone. Trash? Needle in a pin cushion. So why didn’t Refn get rid of his letter? He thought he was invulnerable? He liked keeping mementos of his exploits, like that hundred-dollar bill? A dozen pathologies could explain the security lapse, but Refn was no longer around to clarify things.
The partner might have already fled the island, either after getting the letter, or more likely after Refn’s death. A date on the letter would have helped. Still, it would be worthwhile checking the airline manifests for one-way tickets, and the Steamship Authority computers for vehicles with short notice reservations and open returns. Still, for the moment, for practical purposes, I had to assume the person was still on island, and in jeopardy.
It sounded like they probably deserved whatever was going to happen to them, but that wasn’t my call.
Calls—we needed to check Refn’s phone records. There could have been a flurry of panic phone calls between the two partners.
That left the monogram at the top of the page: J.F.L. It was a giant clue, but whoever sent this letter must have assumed Refn would destroy it. Anticipating Refn’s first sight of those initials must have been worth the risk.
J.F.L. Joseph Frederick Little.
The man who had summoned Donald Harcourt to the crime scene, whose wife was being blackmailed by the newly deceased Artistic Director.
It felt like a fourth-quarter third down and inches on the other team’s goal line. One quick rushing play and the game was over. The case was solved, another life (however unworthy) was saved, and I may as well admit it, sitting there staring down at the letter, I began to feel like the hero.
I would remember this moment the next time Lonnie Fraker blundered into a false solution and came strutting into my office bragging. I teased our local State Police Captain, but Lonnie wasn’t the only one who could be tricked by the sly trifecta of eagerness, arrogance, and ignorance into making a complete fool of himself.
As Jane said to me later: “Welcome to the club.”
Chapter Nine
Sanctuary City
I caught up to Joe Little at the new golf course in ’Sconset.
“He and his friends have their boys’ club out there,” Laura told me when I called the house. “It’s not even exercise—they ride those ridiculous carts. But it gets him out of the house and he’s always in a good mood when he gets home. So I’d be crazy to complain.”
I found them on the eighth hole—Little, Don Harcourt, and Howard Kohl. I was the last person any of them wanted to see, but I took advantage of the moment—“one stop shopping,” as Chuck Obremski used to call it. I needed to talk to Kohl, also—his wife was another blackmail victim.
Kohl cut an elegant figure between his two hefty friends—six-three, barely one-eighty, by my estimate. With his aggressive beak and close-set eyes, he reminded me of the red-tailed hawks circling above the manicured, pool-table lawns of the golf course.
He was glad to clear himself. “I was in Bonn, West Germany, until last night,” he told me. “Business trip.” He pulled a flask out and took a swig. “Wheatgrass smoothie—from The Green. World’s best jet lag cure.”
“I’ll give it a try, next time I get out of this time zone,” I said.
He put an arm around my shoulders and led me away from the others. “Do me a favor, Chief. Leave my wife alone. She had nothing to do with this—this incident. She’s right on the edge. She couldn’t hurt a deer tick…which is the closest insect equivalent to Refn. Don’t look at me that way! Of course I hated the guy. So what? Your bona fide killer, that’s a rare animal in this world, Chief. Cops forget that. They see murder all the time and they start to think it’s normal. My dad was a
highway patrolman in New Jersey. Listening to him, you’d think it was some kind of demolition derby out there. Road rage and drunk drivers and drug mules. It never occurred to him that ninety-nine percent of drivers were regular boring people just trying to get home. He dealt with the worst element and it warped his mind.”
“I deal with lots of regular people here,” I said.
“But you come from Los Angeles. And your brother is that sex crimes FBI guy. I can’t imagine what he must think about the world!” He caught my surprised look. “Hey, I googled you—and your brother. That Phil Kennis is really something! He must lord it over you, doing this nothing job.”
“I like this job. And I don’t talk to Phil much these days. Just birthdays and Christmas, mostly.” Time to pivot. “Tell me about Bess.”
“There’s nothing to tell. She spends all day in her bed, drugged up with the TV on. She’s so full of anger and hate…I think she’d confess to the murder just so she could take credit for it. But who’d believe her? Don’t waste your time on Bessie. That’s my job.”
We walked back. Kohl’s friends were waiting for him, and another foursome lingered on hole behind. I was disrupting the game, slowing things down.
I spoke to Joe Little while Kohl teed up for his drive. “What else did Refn do to you?”
“Excuse me?”
“What was the crime exactly? It had to be more than blackmail.”
“That was enough.”
“To justify murder?”
He stepped away from me. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I have your letter. Refn never got rid of it.”
His look was authentically blank. “I never wrote Refn a letter.”
“So you’re saying someone stole your stationery?”
“I don’t use personal stationery. I have letterhead paper for my business. Laura has some kind of pink notecards with a lighthouse and scallop shells. Sound familiar? No? Didn’t think so. It’s not exactly appropriate for death threats.”
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