“Oh, yeah, right, sure. That was dumb.”
“Not at all. You have to go through the bad ideas to get to the good ones.”
She brightened. “That’s what Mark says about rehearsing a play. He lets actors come up with anything they want, their interpretations or whatever? And eventually they start saying smart stuff. It never fails.”
“Makes sense to me.”
We settled back, inspecting the stage.
“There was something else,” she said finally.
“What?”
“It’s a little weird.”
“That’s okay.”
“The morning I noticed the keyboard cleaner was gone, there was this—smell. In the theater. Backstage.”
“What kind of smell?”
“It was…it smelled like—marshmallows.”
“Marshmallows?”
“I know, crazy, right? No one eats them, there’s none in the kitchen, there was no kids’ thing happening at the church, so…”
“But you smelled them anyway.”
“Maybe it was the ghost of a Boy Scout troop leader!”
“Ghosts making s’mores. I’ll have to tell Otto about that one.”
“He’d love it. I don’t think he’s ever used a smell on his tour before.” She thought for a second. “The weirdest part was, Ted Brownell—he’s one of the New York actors? He stopped by a few minutes later and I asked him about it, but neither of us could smell anything. He thought I was high. But I wasn’t, I swear. The smell was just gone.”
We sat quietly, then. I had no more questions and it sounded like Kelly was done. I pushed myself upright. “Thanks, Kelly. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
“And Jenny’s not a suspect?”
“She never should have been. I have bad ideas too, sometimes.”
I climbed the stairs, crossed the musty lobby and stepped out into the clear June sunshine. I was thinking of packing it in for the day when I got a jubilant call from Lonnie Fraker.
He had arrested Mike Henderson for the murder.
Chapter Thirteen
Needles and Pins
“Jesus Christ, Lonnie, what the hell are you talking about? You’re losing it. You’ve finally gone crazy.”
He chuckled. “Crazy like a fox, Chief. Crazy like a fox.”
“I’ve never understood that phrase. It assumes foxes are smart. Are foxes really smart? They’re wild animals. They live by instinct.”
“Well, my instincts have been telling me that sleazy housepainter pal of yours is guilty of something for years.”
“You thought he was robbing from the houses he worked on last summer. It turned out to be Sheriff Bulmer. You thought he was walking away from the LoGran Corporate residence with blood on his hands two years ago. It turned out to be paint. You were sure he killed Preston Lomax—”
“He had no alibi!”
“He didn’t need one. He didn’t do it.”
“Well, he sure as hell did something.”
“I don’t have time for this, Lonnie.”
“He cheated on his SATs! How about that?”
“There’s no way to cheat on the SATs.”
“He found a way! How else do you explain those scores? And then he goes into the building trades? Come on.”
“He went into his father’s business. Just like Billy Delavane.”
“But Billy didn’t get any 1600 on the SATs. Trust me on that one.”
I drove along for a while, letting Lonnie stew.
“You still with me, Chief?”
“Hanging in. You’ve decided Mike Henderson killed Horst Refn.”
“I didn’t decide anything! I investigated the crime. I found suspects, I formed theories. And now I have proof.”
I blew out an exasperated breath. “How was Mike even a suspect?”
“He was working two houses down from Refn in Naushop that day. He was right there. Then he was gone! And his wife has a big-time grudge about Refn. It’s clear as day.”
“What kind of grudge?”
“They were doing some play a couple of years ago. Cindy had to quit because Refn made a pass at her or something.”
“And years later that’s reason enough for Mike to kill him?”
“He painted the inside of the theater last year. Refn stiffed him on the last payment.”
“You mean the Theater Lab board stiffed him.”
“Yeah, well, Refn signs the checks and apparently there was quite a little tiff about it. No love lost there, my friend. We’re talking about a big-time long-running feud based on sex and money that finally erupted into murder. We’re talking about an unstable guy with a serious grudge who took a job virtually next door to his victim for next to no money just so he could have total access and seize the right moment to do the deed. Which he did! The neighbors heard someone crashing through the hedges. There was a ladder up against the first one. A painter’s ladder.”
I shook my head in the privacy of my car. “I don’t buy it.”
“Then check this out. The blood work came back on that couch pillow you gave Monica Terwilliger.”
“And she called you about it? I told her—”
“Hey, calm down, Chief. Yeah, she called me first. Of course she did. I’ve known Mon since she was the prettiest girl in my senior class. That’s twenty-two years and sixty-five pounds ago, buddy. We go way back. She was the prom queen. She broke my brother’s heart.”
“I hear a lot of people broke his heart.”
A grunt. “Including Jane. Yeah, I always said Douggie aimed high for a kid who hated rejection.”
I pulled into the police station parking lot, killed the engine. Time for Lonnie to deliver his knock-out punch. I stoically tilted my chin up to receive it. “Okay, Lonnie. So what did Monica tell you?”
“The blood work came back diabetic, type two diabetes. They did a whole insulin panel, just to make sure. And guess who just strolled into the Firehouse with two containers full of diabetes syringes yesterday? Mike Henderson.”
“Are you kidding?”
“It’s open and shut, Chief.”
“What does Mike have to say about all this?”
“Don’t know—he won’t talk to anyone but you. Which I gotta say, sounds a little suspicious all by itself. I don’t think law enforcement personnel should be that cozy with perpetrators.”
“Alleged perpetrators.”
“Whatever you want to call them. When they’d rather talk to a cop than their own lawyer? Something screwy is going on. That’s my professional opinion.”
I chose not to comment on that. “Where is Mike right now?”
“Holding cell two, right there at the Nantucket Police station.”
“Thanks, Lonnie. We’ll talk later.”
I climbed out of my cruiser, trotted across the parking lot and into the building. The first person I saw crossing the lobby was Hamilton Tyler, just coming off duty.
Mike Henderson could wait another few minutes. He was used to spending time in jail on trumped-up charges. “Ham!”
He turned at the door. “Hey, Chief. I was just taking off. My girlfriend’s—”
I had noticed Chloe Peterson’s Jeep Renegade idling near the front of the station. Nice girl—she taught English at the high school, she’d brought Jane into work with her creative writing class. What she saw in Hamilton Tyler, I had no idea. “Chloe can wait. This won’t take long.”
“Is there a problem?”
I pointed a slow finger at him where he stood as if I was taking aim with rifle. “Never contact any other agency on behalf of this department again. If ICE or the FBI or the NSA or even the Veterans Administration or the goddamn Boy Scouts of America contact you, do nothing.”
“I can’t even say—”
“
Here’s what you say. ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to talk to Chief Kennis about that.’ Got it?”
“Okay, but I mean—”
“Let’s try it. This is Bob Bullyboy from Immigration and Customs Enforcement: ‘Is it true that you have several undocumented aliens currently incarcerated at your Fairgrounds Road facility?’” I was pleased with my use of bureaucratic jargon. I sounded just like Agent Grimes.
“Ah…I—you’ll have to ask Chief Kennis about that.”
“And certain officers are putting in for unused overtime allowances; can you verify that, Officer Tyler?”
“Ah, no…I mean…you’ll have to ask Chief Kennis about that.”
“That’s better.”
“Sorry, Chief, you’re right, I know. It’s true, that was stupid. I shouldn’t have called ICE, but those guys were—it was just…Listen, it won’t happen again. But these people—”
“‘These people’? Really? ‘These people’? If we hadn’t stolen their land ‘these people’ would still be living in what we call Texas right now. So how does that make them inferior to you?”
Because they lost, that would be Ham’s answer, though he didn’t dare say it. He stared at me and I thought of Judith Barsch sneering, “Here we are. And Nanahumacke is a name on a rock.” Ham Tyler was no different.
“Get going,” I said to him. “And Ham—as of today, I’m looking for an excuse to fire you. Try not to give me one.”
He scurried out the door.
Mike Henderson was waiting for me when I got downstairs, in the same cell where I’d found the Cruz brothers earlier that day.
I signaled Drew Pollack to release the cell door and stepped inside as the low shriek sounded.
“Hey, Mike.”
“Hey.”
“Kill anybody lately?”
A glum little smile. “Everybody needs a hobby.”
I sat down on the hard cot next to him, scootched back to lean against the cinderblock wall—about as close to comfortable as these Spartan furnishings got. Outside the cell, the booking room was quiet. Drew had NPR on the radio—some call-in show about cancer or aging or money or all three: extending your retirement benefits to cover your loved one’s hospice care. I preferred the fundraising.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“The day Refn got killed? I saw someone leaving the house in a hurry and chased them. But I didn’t get a good look at them and they were over the first hedge before I got down off my ladder. So much for my citizen’s arrest.”
“Hey, you tried.”
“I didn’t know anybody got killed. I thought it was a burglar.”
“And the diabetes was a nasty coincidence.”
He laughed. “I don’t have diabetes! My dog does. Check with Sherry Holt. She’s been taking care of Gus since he was a puppy.” I remembered Mike’s old collie. He must be twelve or fifteen years old by this time. “Sherry told me not to feed him treats between meals. She didn’t tell me it would get me arrested for murder.”
“Sorry, Mike.”
“It was kind of funny, actually. The guys at the firehouse were like, hey, tough luck buddy. Time to fix that diet! And I was like—it’s my dog! And they were like, yeah sure, whatever, rolling their eyes. And as I left, one of them picked up the phone really fast, just like in the movies. You know that scene in every dumb movie when the bad guy ominously picks up the phone right after the good guy leaves his office? Just like that. Next thing I know, two of Lonnie Fraker’s goons are snapping on the handcuffs.”
“Jesus.”
“Most of the diabetics I know have a pin or something—maybe a card in their wallet—in case they faint or have a seizure. Of course the Staties never checked. You ever see those pins?”
The delayed recognition struck me like a slap. “Yeah, Mike. As a matter of fact, I have.”
Otto Didrickson was wearing one of those pins when he tried to kidnap me at the gun range. I had thought it was a Marine Corps button, but now I identified its medical insignia—the snake curled around the stake.
Otto was a diabetic.
It was his blood on Refn’s couch pillow.
Neither of them was the killer, but that didn’t help me much. “So,” I said, pushing to my feet. “Are you planning to sue us for false arrest?”
He stood also. “Naah. Maybe next time.”
“I admire your fatalism.”
“It’s the only proper response to fate. And false arrest seems to be my fate around here.”
As we walked out into the parking lot a few minutes later, I put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Do I need to talk to Cindy? Lonnie says she had problems with Refn, too.”
“I never let her kill anyone without me there to chaperone. She makes such a mess.”
“I’m serious.”
He stared me down. “No, you’re not. You can’t possibly be.”
“I guess not. But I still have to talk to her, check the box. And I don’t want to delegate that job.”
“Thanks, Chief. Listen, she’s home right now. Give me a lift and you can talk to her, get it over with.”
I dropped him off, and wound up taking a drive with Cindy. She told me just enough to get herself off the suspects list. The police officer in me was satisfied with the redacted version of her story. The poet in me—and I might as well admit it, the small-town gossip—wanted to hear every detail. But that was none of my business. The truth of what happened that afternoon was her secret and she deserved to keep it. Only one relatively trivial aspect of her illicit romance affected me personally, and I wouldn’t understand why until much later.
Chapter Fourteen
Harebrained Ideas
So, Mike and Cindy Henderson, Mark Toland, Jennifer Feldman and her girlfriend Kelly, were all cleared, along with Jane Stiles and her ex-husband. Lingering suspicions about Donald Harcourt and Joseph Little had faded. Other Theater Lab board members with no obvious alibis looked less and less plausible as cold-blooded murderers. That left me with the unhappy supposition that Blair Hollister was the perpetrator, the “unsub,” as my brother Phil liked to call the ever-changing, eternal quarry in his FBI investigations.
Random bits of evidence pointed at Hollister, but arresting him would mean I believed a man would, with no apparent motive, write a play about the very killing he planned to commit and then come to the killing ground to see it produced. It sounded more like Hollister’s next production than any actual scenario you could use to secure an indictment from a real life district attorney.
In any case, whoever had been giving Dimo and Boiko orders from Joe Little’s cloned cell phone was still keeping them busy, and they helped me solve one crime that week, though there was nothing I could do about it, because they were the criminals. I had more or less given them immunity, especially for a small offense like this one, more of a misdemeanor, really, with no evident purpose and no apparent victim.
At that point, though, I was happy to close any case, no matter how small.
They weren’t going to make it easy for me. I could tell by the jovial look on Dimo’s wide shovel face that he had some little game in mind.
We met on the flight of steps that ran down the hill from Gardners Court to Main Street, just above the old wrought-iron gate that led to the little alley beside Met on Main. Beyond it, we could see people passing on the sidewalk but no one glanced our way. Nantucket had many pockets of privacy like this, in the middle of its public spaces.
A UPS truck clattered up the cobblestones as Dimo said, “We broke into judge’s house—Judge Galassi.”
I recalled the incident report. “That was last week, right after Refn was killed. But you didn’t take anything.”
“You think?”
“Judge Galassi didn’t report anything stolen.”
“He not notice! He not look. Judge should be abl
e to look. Devil is with the detail, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Today we break in again, through bulkyhead door we use last time.”
“Bulkhead,” Boiko corrected him.
“Right! Bulkhead. He never even lock it after! Judge should worry more about crime. Door to basement steps close with—what is it?”
Boiko jumped in: “Hook and eye.”
“Right! Excellent Boiko! His English very good. He knows all the idiots.”
“Idioms.”
“Right, right. So you take your knife, you slip blade between door, then one flick—” He snapped his wrist up. “Hook pops out of eye, and you walk right in.”
He looked at me, grinning, a big dog waiting for his treat. I shrugged and gave it to him. “Nice work, Dimo. But why the second break-in?”
“To put back what we didn’t take last time!”
They both thought this was hilarious.
“Which was what?”
“That you have to guess! We play Match Wits with Inspector Kennis.”
He was referring to a column David Trezize ran in the Nantucket Shoals for a year or so after I took over as Chief of Police. People would send in puzzles and locked room mysteries and old crime stories cobbled together from moldering Agatha Christie books they scavenged from the take-it-or-leave it pile at the dump. I had until the next issue of the paper to come up with my solution. If they stumped me, they got a free cup of soup from Bartlett’s Farm. I had forgotten this, but Jane was one of the only people to trick me, with an elaborate plot (taken from her current work in progress), where a man framed himself for murder with all the clues built to point back his old rival, when examined closely. She deviously exploited and reversed the fundamental law of her mystery stories—that the culprit is never the first person you suspect. I was thinking like one of her readers and fell right into her trap. Soul mates! I should have called her up for a date that very afternoon—a little chowder at Bartlett’s Farm?—but I was in the middle of a nasty divorce and the thought never occurred to me.
Anyway, Match Wits with Inspector Kennis was a nice way to introduce me to the community, but David’s name for the column still occasionally came back to haunt me.
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