“Hi, Dave.”
“You stand down three guys from ICE using my name? To keep a pair of wetback deadbeats in the country? I’m the guy who wants a wall! Remember? A ninety-foot wall that ruins all the wetlands and bird habitats and bankrupts your snowflake school lunch program and gives you ulcers every time you open the fucking newspaper!”
“But you know these guys aren’t deadbeats or wetbacks.”
“Really? And how do I know that? Do I take their word for that?”
“No, Dave. You take my word for that.”
A short tight silence. Then: “Shit.”
“These guys are hard-working immigrants, just like your great grandparents and my great grandparents. Here’s a funny story. Miranda took the kids to New York last Thanksgiving, and they checked out the new interactive exhibits on Ellis Island. There’s a big computer screen where you can look up anyone’s name and Miranda found Abraham Kenisovsky.”
“So that’s your real name! I always thought Kennis sounded fake.”
“They picked it, not us. Anyway, my daughter, Carrie, was staring at the name and she said, ‘That’s daddy’s ancestor! And I give Miranda credit—without missing a beat she said, ‘That’s your ancestor, too.’ It was a revelation for my daughter. I wish I could have seen her face at that moment.”
“Okay, I get it—starving huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But Grimes tells me one of these guys you boosted is a murder suspect. That right?”
Grimes must have talked to Charlie Boyce while they were waiting for me. “I have lots of murder suspects right now.”
“And this piece of wretched refuse from the teeming shores is one of them.”
“Yeah.”
“I do not believe this. I may be running for Governor in a couple of years!”
“And you’ll win because you stand by your principles.”
“No. I’ll win because I have the best attack ads. Now listen to me, my friend. You’re telling me—you honestly believe this guy is innocent?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then prove it, before the story hits the papers. Clear his name. You have twenty-four hours. After that I’ll come out there and drag his hard-working immigrant ass back to Guadalajara myself!”
He ended the call.
I turned to Sebastian. “We have to talk.”
Chapter Ten
A Layer of Dust
The bitch I’d mentioned to Sebastian earlier met us at the door, in a barking, body-twisting seizure of delight. Daisy was a two-year-old springer spaniel, so pretty much par for the course. Sebastian grabbed her and manhandled her to the floor, rubbing her chest as she jack-knifed in circles on the linoleum. “Who’s my girl? Who’s my best girl?”
Daisy was no savant, but she knew the answer to that one.
Five minutes later we were all settled on the sagging couch in the messy living room, the humans with cups of coffee—the remains of the morning’s dark roast, microwaved—and the dog with the tattered stuffed rabbit, her constant companion. She shook it hard and occasionally let go, sending it flying. Then she’d bound off the couch, retrieve it, and start again.
Sebastian grinned with pride. “You see? She plays fetch all by herself. All I have to do is watch.”
We watched Daisy rip into her hapless friend for a few seconds, then I began. “I’m not sure how much you got from that phone call.”
He frowned in thought. “Let me see. Your family arrived at Ellis Island with a different name. The State Attorney General has political ambitions, and you have many murder suspects. Since at the end of the call you told me we need to talk, I must now assume I’m one of them.”
“Good listening. But there’s more. I have to clear you by this time tomorrow or he’s going to let those three stooges from ICE walk in here and take you away.”
He shook his head sadly. “I live on this island more than a decade. I raise my boy here, start a business, good business, I employ fourteen people, and yet…I could be gone tomorrow, like I was never here at all. Like a beer can on the beach. You see those clean-up crew people? Rich do-gooders?”
“They do some good. This place needs a lot of clean-up.”
“You see how they spike the cans with those poles they have? Jab, lift, into the trash bag and gone. That’s me. When do you feel like you really live here, man? Like you’re part of the life here?”
“I don’t know, Sebastian. I’m a washashore, too.”
“So not yet?”
“Not yet.”
We sat silently for a while, Daisy watching us for some sign that a new game was going to begin. Time to get practical. I edged forward on the couch. “Right now? I want to focus on keeping you here as long as I can. That means I need something for Dave Carmichael.”
“To prove I’m innocent. That’s not good for me, Padrone. I have lots of motive for this killing, and probably opportunity, too, if I set my mind to it. But no alibi.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. How do people even remember exactly where they were at such-and-such a time? That seems suspicious to me right there.”
“It can be. But people aren’t usually that sneaky. Or that smart.”
“And I am both?”
“I know you’re smart.”
He sighed. “It feels like a lottery, like the scratch cards at Lucky Express. If you happen to remember where you were at the time of the murder, if someone happened to see you, if they happen to remember, if they noticed you, and most people notice nothing. They’re too busy worrying about people noticing them. ‘The suspect says he was at the car wash Saturday afternoon. Did you see him?’ ‘I don’t know—did he say anything about my car? It was so dirty I was embarrassed to drive it!’”
Cars had come to his mind first thing. That could be useful. “Were you driving?”
“I don’t know. I guess I could have been.”
“The Red Sox game was on. Were you watching it?”
“I was listening to it. On the radio—yes! In my car. So I was driving. Does that help?”
“It depends. Do you remember the Sandoval home run?”
“Everybody remembers the Sandoval home run.”
“Were you driving when it happened?”
“Yeah. I hurt my hand, banging it on the steering wheel. Is that an alibi?”
“It depends. Was anyone with you?”
“No. I was driving out to Shimmo to check on a job.”
“Where did you start from? Could someone have seen you getting into the car?”
“I was in town, I had just gotten a late lunch from Walter’s.”
“So they’d remember you.”
“Probably not. I didn’t know the girl behind the counter. Some Nepalese girl, she spoke just enough English to take my order and she never even looked up at me. I was one of a thousand Hispanic men in work clothes ordering a New Yorker sub and a bag of chips.”
I brightened. “Did you pay with a credit card?”
“Cash.”
“You’re not making this easy, Sebastian.”
“I like to pay cash and get paid in cash. It protects me from the government. That’s why no cell phone. See over there?” He twisted his head toward the cluttered desk that served as his home office. “I have a landline with an old-fashioned answering machine. One of those micro cassettes. The sound is always off on both of them. You call, you leave a message. Every day at four I check the machine.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. You should try it sometime, lower your blood pressure.”
“But what if one of your guys has an emergency?”
“They take care of themselves. Like Daisy.”
“What if a customer needs to talk to you?”
“They wait.”
“Wow. How do your customers feel about that?”
“Fuck my customers. I’m the best and they know it.”
He was one of the best, it was true, installing the elaborate gardens that Paula Monaghan sneered at, mowing lawns, putting in hedges and even stands of trees, laying down crushed-shell driveways, building stone walls, and laying brick walkways and flagstone patios. Jane had mentioned him. In her day job, she worked as a humble grass-cutting landscaper, occasionally deadheading a flower patch or picking the weeds out of a bluestone driveway. She couldn’t compete with giant crews like Sebastian’s and she didn’t even try. “Hey,” she told me once, “they can’t write clever dialogue.”
Of course in Sebastian’s case that wasn’t quite true, either. Most of his dialogue was strident and dogmatic but I recalled a moment from his Columbine-on-Nantucket play, Thinning the Herd, where a kid much like Hector is talking to his crush, trying to reassure her about the unlikeliness of being attacked by crazy kids with guns:
I don’t know, for me, talking to girls is the scariest thing. I’ve had a monster under my bed since I was three years old and he’s never done shit to me. I think he has a crush on the monster in my closet. No, really—it’s a girl monster in there. The monster under my bed can’t talk to girls, either.
The girl takes his arm and says, “You’re doing okay tonight.”
It was a lovely moment of calm before the bloodbath. If writing about murder made you a potential killer, as so many people seemed to think, he and Jane had that in common also. But the idea was absurd. Sebastian was no killer. We just had to prove it.
We had a good start. He was driving at the TOD. “We need some external anchor to place you on the street at that time. Do you remember anything?”
“No, man, I was working, I wasn’t paying attention to anything—not even the ballgame until Sandoval. I’m lucky I didn’t run somebody over.”
“I’m not sure I understand. You were working? On what?”
“My new play, man. Kind of a Prince and the Pauper thing, set on Nantucket. Except in my version the little prince wakes up.”
I thought of Jackson Blum, the classic Nantucket Scrooge, now living an extraordinarily generous and open-hearted post-A Christmas Carol life. It could happen, but it wasn’t a typical Sebastian Cruz development. “Are you getting mellow in your old age?”
“My middle age, amigo. Yeah, maybe, I don’t know. Somebody got to learn something sometime.”
“How were you writing in the car?”
“I use a little dictaphone.”
“More micro cassettes?”
“I work it old school.”
“Old school would be dictating to your wife, like Nabokov.”
He snorted. “Maribel would never go for that shit.”
I pushed forward. “So the tape was on while you were driving?”
“Yeah, sure, had to be.”
“Can we listen to it?”
“Oh, I see. Yeah, why not? But you’re not gonna find anything but me talking.”
“You never know.”
“Okay, hold on.”
He levered himself off the soft pillows and Daisy used the opportunity to snuggle up to me with her head in my lap. I scratched her behind the ears and her tail thumped the couch. Sebastian picked the little tape player off his desk and fiddled with it as he sat down—little bursts of high-pitched word-scramble, then a moment of his voice, then more fast-forward noise.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Here we are. I remember I was working on this ‘money can’t buy happiness’ thing between the father and the son, just fooling around.” He pressed play. I could hear the car engine and the low mutter of the baseball color commentary under the tinny version of Sebastian’s voice:
“Money can’t buy happiness. No—it’s a barter system. No, but you think you can lease something just as good. No, Dad, or you wouldn’t be so fucking miserable.”
“I was just riffing here.”
“If money could buy happiness, you’d still be waiting for that half-off sale,” he said from the tape. “You’d have cornered the market by now. You’d be manufacturing it in China.”
“I was closing in on it, here,” Sebastian offered.
Then I heard the dogs barking.
“Stop the tape.” He did. “Play it back.” He did. “What’s that? Do you remember that?””
“I don’t know. Wait a second. Oh, yeah—there was a big dogfight on Main Street—some little mutt and this huge bull mastiff.”
“Great! We can verify that.”
“I don’t know. It could have been any dogfight anywhere.”
“Maybe. Keep going.”
He pressed play. More “money can’t buy happiness” jokes: “You’d make sure there was five-hundred-page user’s agreement and a no-returns policy. You’d be cutting it with cheerful, and selling it on the street. You’d be scalping it to the clinically depressed.”
I heard the roar of the crowd—that had to be the home run. Then the announcer started shouting and his voice broke up into static. Sebastian stopped the tape. “I remember now. I couldn’t hear shit after that until I got past Fast Forward. Those fucking powerlines, man. There’s no reception on Orange Street, not in town. Not for AM radio, anyway.”
I reached over to turn off the tape. I remembered my conversation with Joe Stiles, when Jane and I were picking up Max at his house a few days before. Joe told us he’d mapped the bad radio reception areas in town. In any case, just driving under those powerlines with the radio tuned to WFAN would be proof enough, plus I had the dogfight to define the chronology. How many bull mastiffs could there be on the island? And, anyway, the fight would be memorable. All we had to do was canvass the store owners; tracking down the dog people was just a matter of footwork and phone calls. The MSPCA would have vaccination records.
I had Sebastian pinpointed at an exact place and an exact time at the moment the murder went down.
He was in the clear, with twenty-three hours to spare.
I made a mental note to call Dave Carmichael after lunch. For the moment Sebastian and I had other things to talk about.
“This is perfect,” I said. “At the exact moment of Refn’s death, I can place you within a hundred feet, more than two miles from the crime scene.”
Sebastian let out a long breath. “Bad radio reception and a dogfight. Amazing. So we’re done?”
“Not quite.”
He nodded. “Of course. The sexting.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“My Hector had nothing to do with that.”
“Yeah, but we still have to prove it.”
“Then find the person who took his phone!”
“It’s a big school, Sebastian. Hector’s a popular kid. People misplace their phones all the time. And whoever did this only needed the phone for a few minutes. Does Hector have any idea who it could have been?”
“Many ideas and none. It could have been anyone, so it might as well be no one.”
“But the boy is interested in Carrie.”
“Probably.”
“And jealous of Hector.”
“Yes.”
“And he knows Carrie well enough to know she’d hate getting…a picture like this on her phone.”
“So he wants to break them up?”
I nodded. “That’s my reading of it. It’s someone who knows both of them, I’d guess a teammate on the Whalers, someone who’s talked about Carrie, and probably gotten rejected by her, someone who’s done crazy stuff like this before. A person who doesn’t mind lying and cheating to get what he wants. That narrows it down a little. Talk to Hector. He may know someone who fits the profile.”
He was studying me as I spoke. Then he made his decision. “You still suspect my son.”
“Sebastian—”
“I heard the speech you gave at The Rotary Club last year. You were talking about all the crime scene technology available today—the lasers and electron microscopes and all of that. All the toys, you called them. You said you preferred to work old school—like me and my cassette tapes, yes? You said one smart, observant investigator could trick information out of a crime scene or a suspect’s apartment better than any fancy, high-priced gizmo. I remember you used the word ‘gizmo.’ It made me laugh.”
“What’s your point?”
“Come upstairs with me. Look at Hector’s room. Study it. Be smart and observant like the ideal investigator in your lecture. You will see the home of an innocent boy. A good boy. A boy incapable of such…obscenities.”
“Listen, Sebastian, I’m running late and I really should—”
“Put yourself to the test!”
“I—”
“See what I see every day! Then you’ll know the truth about my son.”
I stood. “Okay. Let’s give it a try.”
Sebastian led me upstairs, with Daisy right behind us, stuffed rabbit clamped in her jaws. Someone might want to throw it, or have a tug of war with it, at least. I admired her unfailing optimism.
Sebastian nudged the bedroom door open. “I’ll leave you alone. Don’t move things around. Hector’s very particular about his things.”
“Okay.”
I stepped inside, scanned the set-up: neatly made bed under the big double hung window, posters on the wall—Joy Huerta featured on a Jesse and Joy concert one-sheet, pictures of Kiko Alonso and Blake Martinez, suited up and ready for the next pass rush or tackle. The was a travel poster for a place called Sumidero Canyon, in Chiapas—immense vertical walls rising out of the dark blue river against the pale blue sky.
The other wall was taken up with bookshelves—planks resting on metal brackets. Poetry—Marquez, Lorca, and Neruda, along with younger poets like Juan Felipe Herrera and Mirtha Michelle Castro Marmol, who had branched out into acting, public speaking, and podcasts, with a huge following for her Instagram account. Maybe that was the way to make poetry work these days. I muttered aloud, “Beats scribbling doggerel between the budget proposals.”
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