by Jon Loomis
“Did Kenji ever ask if she could videotape the two of you together?” Lola asked.
Coffin looked at her, head tilted. She shrugged very slightly.
Cap’n Rory’s face reddened a bit beneath its tan. He chewed his cigar for a moment, then shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “I don’t think so, but nothing she wanted to do would’ve surprised me. She was a kinky girl.”
“In what way?” Coffin said.
“It was all about control,” Cap’n Rory said. “Kenji got off on being in charge.”
“So, what,” Coffin said, “whips and chains? That kind of thing?”
“It was never like the whole dungeon scenario,” Cap’n Rory said. “More like silk scarves and a Ping-Pong paddle; light S&M, I guess you’d call it. Beyond that I drew the line. That’s partly why she dumped me.”
“Drew the line how?” Lola said.
“The strap-on,” Cap’n Rory said. He took the cigar out of his mouth, eyed it, shrugged, and puffed it back to life. “She had a big black one, about a frickin’ foot long. When I saw that thing coming at me, I started yelling ‘avocado’ like crazy.”
“Avocado?” Coffin said.
“Yeah,” Cap’n Rory said. “That was our safe word. If you said ‘avocado,’ it meant she was supposed to stop.”
A seagull landed on top of the P’town Princess’s mast, shrieked, and flew away. Coffin looked at Lola. Her eyebrows were up, and her mouth was pressed tight. She was trying not to laugh, Coffin realized.
“So what are you nervous about, Cap’n Rory?” he said, wincing as the breeze freshened, stirring the harbor into a barely perceptible chop.
“Me? Nervous? Who says?”
“The word,” Coffin said. “The word is, you were acting extremely nervous yesterday morning.”
“You know. The morning after Kenji was killed,” Lola said.
“Extremely,” Coffin said, “nervous. How come?”
Cap’n Rory’s face darkened. He looked down at the deck. The cigar drooped in his hand. “Aw, fuck,” he said. “Am I gonna have to get a lawyer?”
“Depends,” Lola said. “Did you kill her?”
“Hell no, I didn’t kill her,” Cap’n Rory said, waving his fat cigar. “I wouldn’t kill anybody. I told you—I liked her.”
“Then why would you need a lawyer?”
“I don’t have to talk,” Cap’n Rory said. “I know my rights.”
“We’re not here to bust you for smuggling,” Coffin said, “if that’s what you’re worried about. This is about the murder.”
“You won’t tell anybody? You give me your word?”
“Sure,” Coffin said. “We give you our word. Just tell us the truth.”
“It’s got nothing to do with smuggling,” Cap’n Rory said. “It’s Linda. She’s pregnant. She says it’s mine, and she wants child support.”
“Linda?” Coffin said, scratching his head.
“Linda Carswell,” Cap’n Rory said. “You know—Stan’s wife.”
“You’re sleeping with Stan Carswell’s wife?” Coffin said, incredulous.
Cap’n Rory winked. “Why not? The girl could suck a golf ball through a twenty-foot garden hose.”
“I thought she left town,” Lola said.
“Yeah—all the way to Wellfleet. Nice little sail.”
“So that’s it?” Coffin said. “You were upset because you’re going to have to pay child support to Linda Carswell?”
“Don’t laugh,” Cap’n Rory said. “I’m seriously screwed. Every nickel I make goes right back into the boat.”
“And we can’t tell anybody because—”
“Because if word gets out, she gets diddly in the divorce settlement with Stan. She’ll fucking kill me.”
Coffin and Lola exchanged looks.
“Speaking metaphorically, of course,” Cap’n Rory said, scratching his chin with a dirty thumbnail.
Coffin persisted. “If she has another kid, won’t Stan be able to figure out it’s not his?”
Cap’n Rory sucked at his cigar, but it had gone out. He fished a silver lighter from his shirt pocket and flipped it open. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said, torching the end of the cigar into a symmetrical red coal. “Stan’s not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. Hey—want to hear a joke? It’s a good one.”
“Sure,” said Coffin. “Why not?”
“Okay,” Cap’n Rory said, holding up his thumbs. “What’s got two thumbs and really likes a blow job?”
“I give up,” Coffin said.
Cap’n Rory grinned and turned his thumbs inward, so they pointed at his chest. “This guy,” he said.
“Holy crap,” Lola said when they were safely back in the Crown Vic. “I had no idea you breeders carried on this way. This town is a snakepit.”
“Things have got to be fucked up when my life is suddenly a model of normalcy,” Coffin said.
Lola laughed. She had a rich, easy laugh that made Coffin feel good. “You are pretty normal,” she said. “For a straight guy.”
Lola drove the length of Commercial Street, past the Coast Guard station and its lonely volleyball net, past Stanley Kunitz’s house, standing empty now that the former poet laureate was dead, past the Red Inn and a few clusters of older cottages, all recently condo-ized. The water glittered in the tight spaces between the houses on the harbor side of the street. They passed Kotowski’s hulking, ramshackle house and the stone breakwater, a low, porous dike dividing the salt marsh from the harbor, built in 1911 to protect the waterfront from a massive storm surge in the event of a gale or hurricane.
At the end of Commercial, Lola turned right onto the eastern terminus of Route 6. The salt marsh percolated silently on their left. A broad plain of mud and cordgrass, the salt marsh was fully submerged at high tide, exposed and ripe-smelling when the tide was out. Home to many species of birds and shellfish, it had always seemed alive to Coffin, breathing seawater in and out like a big, spartina-haired lung.
Up the hill, to the right, the Moors condo complex stood abandoned, some of the buildings skeletal and rickety, still for sale two years after the project had been abruptly halted. During the day the half-built condos seemed pedestrian enough, but at night they were ghostly, translucent, the moon and stars shining through their sagging frames.
“So what was that about Kenji videotaping Cap’n Rory?” Coffin said. “Trying out a hunch?”
Lola grinned and ducked her head. “Yeah,” she said. “You win some, you lose some.”
Coffin waved a hand. “You might be onto something,” he said. “I mean, there’s got to be some kind of psychological connection, right?”
“Between the boyfriends and the porn?” Lola said. “Definitely. I’m not sure I really get it yet, but it’s got to be there.”
“If your two big passions in life are boyfriends and porn, why not try to combine them somehow?”
“You could watch porn with the boyfriends—”
“Peanut butter on my chocolate—”
“Or you could figure out a way to put the boyfriends into the porn.”
“Great theory,” Coffin said, after a short silence. “I like it.”
“Too bad it’s completely made up,” Lola said.
“Well,” Coffin said, “there’s that.”
After a mile or so, Lola turned left onto the Province Lands Road and drove past the entrance to Herring Cove beach and then for several miles between the dunes, Cape Cod Bay visible here and there on the left, a blank stretch of scrub pines and sand on the right, crimson beach rose in bloom, dune grass turning from its winter silver to a bright acid green.
The Province Lands Visitor Center was a two-story octagonal building that sat on a high dune, a hundred feet or so above sea level, with a dramatic view of the Atlantic Ocean and the long curve of camel-colored sand sweeping off to Pilgrim Heights, Marconi Station, and Nauset Beach. In fact, Coffin thought, the visitor center bore a passing resemblance to the Smokey Bear hat that sat on Tommy McCurry�
�s desk. Tommy McCurry was a National Park Service ranger; he directed the visitor center.
“Let’s take a walk,” McCurry said, putting the Smokey Bear hat on his head. “I can’t talk about this here.”
“Sure,” Coffin said. “Let’s take a walk.”
They passed through the big main room with its lively photo exhibit on dune and marine life and stood outside on the deck. A layer of thick, low cloud hung over the ocean, and the breeze was damp and cold. It was just after ten o’clock. There were no visitors.
“You guys could have called ahead,” McCurry said, lighting a cigarette. He was tall and thick through the chest, like someone who lifted weights. He did not appear to be cold in his ranger uniform: gray short-sleeved shirt, green knit pants. He wore a thick gold wedding band on the appropriate finger.
“We like to just pop in on people,” Coffin said, lighting a cigarette of his own. Something about the slow-heaving ocean made him want to smoke. “The conversation’s more spontaneous that way.”
Lola took out her notebook, flipped it open. “Where were you night before last, between 9:00 P.M. and 1:00 A.M.?”
“Home with the wife and kids,” McCurry said. “All five of them.”
“Five?” Coffin said.
McCurry laughed. “We had the first three bang, bang, bang, then figured we were done, but we had a ‘woops’ a couple of years ago that turned out to be twins.”
“When was the last time you saw Kenji?” Lola said.
“Thursday night,” McCurry said. “The night before she was killed. We had a regular thing on Thursday nights.”
“Why was that?” Coffin said. “Wife working the late shift?”
“She liked to go out with the girls and play bingo at the VFW hall. She thought I was out with my buddies at the Old Colony. We had a regular sitter.”
Lola frowned. “She never checked up on you?”
“I don’t know—I was never there. She never said anything, if she did.”
“So you were at Kenji’s house Thursday night,” Coffin said, “or someplace else?”
“Kenji’s place. Unless it was some spontaneous lunchtime thing, we almost always got together there.”
“Nice view up there on Mayflower Heights,” Coffin said.
McCurry laughed. “Like we were looking out the freakin’ window.”
“Was that her choice or yours?” Lola asked.
McCurry’s face darkened; then he shrugged. “It was mutual, I guess. It’s pretty private up there, most of the time.”
“Most of the time?”
“The last time I was with her, we got interrupted. We’re right in the middle—you know—and somebody walks into the house, starts calling Kenji’s name.”
“She didn’t lock the door,” Lola said.
“Nobody locks their door in P’town,” McCurry said. “Do they?”
“Who walked in?” Coffin said.
“Stan Carswell.” McCurry’s mouth tightened. “He was drunk and kind of weepy. He kept saying he wanted Kenji to marry him. Said he was in love with her.”
“A bit of an awkward moment,” Coffin said.
“Considering Kenji and I were both naked and smeared with massage oil, yeah, kind of,” McCurry said.
“So,” Lola said, “what happened?”
“We were up in Kenji’s bedroom, going at it. Stan comes in downstairs and starts yelling for her. Says he knows she’s home. So she puts on a little nightie and goes downstairs to talk to him.”
“Did he know you were there?”
McCurry’s mouth bent into a half smile. “He must have. Not me specifically, but someone.”
“Because?”
“First, because it’s Kenji. She didn’t spend a lot of evenings sitting home alone, you know? Second, you go to see your girlfriend and she comes out of her bedroom covered in oil and wearing nothing but a see-through negligee, what would you think?”
“Did you see Carswell? Talk to him?”
“I stayed put in the bedroom till Kenji got him out of there. Didn’t want Carswell ratting me out to my wife, you know?”
“You’re sure it was him?”
“Sounded like him. Kenji said it was him.” McCurry shrugged. “I’m guessing it was him.”
“What about you?” Lola said. “Did you ever get jealous?”
“Of Kenji?” McCurry took a deep drag from his cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke. “Nah. She was great in some ways—”
“Like in the sack, you mean,” Coffin said.
McCurry stared at him for a second. “That, too,” he said. “She was great in some ways, but she was also a pretty freaky girl. Not somebody you’d want to have a serious thing with.”
“So you had an unserious thing,” Lola said.
“A freaky, unserious thing,” Coffin said. “While the mrs. played bingo.”
McCurry watched a Porsche convertible pull into the parking lot. It was yellow. Two slender men got out and walked down the dune path to the beach, holding hands.
“Look,” McCurry said. He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. “I know—I’m an asshole. Kenji kind of had that effect on people. Sooner or later she brought out your inner jerk.”
“You were okay with that?” Lola said. “The way she brought out your inner jerk?”
“No,” McCurry said. “I wasn’t proud of it, if that’s what you mean.”
“Then why not break up with her?”
McCurry looked down for a moment, and Coffin knew he was trying to decide whether to lie or tell some part of the truth.
“You didn’t break up with Kenji,” McCurry said, meeting Coffin’s eyes. “She kept you until she was done with you. That’s how it worked.”
“Or what?” Coffin said. “She’d tell your wife?”
“Your wife, your boss, whoever. She’d ruin you. I think that’s why she liked married guys. Once she pulled you in, she could control you.”
“She said that?”
“Not in so many words, no,” McCurry said, “but it was strongly implied.”
Coffin smoothed his mustache. One long, wild mustache hair keep curling into his nostril. It made him want to sneeze. “Did Kenji ever film the two of you having sex together?” he said, when the urge to sneeze had passed.
McCurry’s eyes widened slightly. “No,” he said. He thought for a second. “Not that I was aware of.”
“Not that you were aware of? What does that mean?” “It means I was never aware of being filmed by Kenji,” he said. “Why is that hard to follow?”
“What about the other boyfriends? Did she film them?” McCurry shook his head. “Not that I was—” “Aware of,” Coffin finished. “Got it. But you’re not going to say it didn’t happen. How come?”
Coffin watched McCurry trying to formulate his answer. He’d seen witnesses do it a thousand times: try to guess what the cops knew, try to figure out how much to tell them.
McCurry took a deep breath, let it out. “Because it occurred to me that she might. More than once. I’m not sure why. I thought I was probably just being paranoid—but it’s the kind of thing she might have done.”
“The control thing,” Coffin said.
“Right. It’s one thing to rat you out to your wife or your boss. It’s another thing entirely to show them the video. You know?”
“Hey, look,” Lola said. She was gazing out at the ocean, shading her eyes with one hand. “Whales.”
Coffin looked. Two dark, enormous creatures were rolling together in the swell a couple of hundred yards offshore, half obscured by the roiling sea. Now and then a long flipper emerged from the water, or the broad, bladelike flukes at the end of a tail. A plume of steam huffed from a blowhole; then Coffin heard a sharp gasp—a whale, taking a huge breath.
“Humpbacks,” McCurry said. “They’ve been out here all week, putting on a show. Yesterday they were breaching like crazy.”
“I think they like each other,” Coffin said. “Are they mating?�
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“Nah.” McCurry waved a hand. “They do that down in the tropics. They’re eating. The sand-eel hatch was a month ago—there’s gazillions of ’em out there. Perfect whale food.”
“I don’t know,” Lola said. “Whatever they’re doing, it looks friendlier than just eating.”
Coffin squinted. The whales seemed to be rubbing against each other, flapping at the water gently with their enormous pectoral fins.
“Hold on a sec,” McCurry said. He went inside and came back with a big pair of binoculars. “Huh,” he said, after raising the binoculars to his eyes and gazing at the whales for a long minute. “Actually, there’s never been a documented observation of humpback whales mating, and it would be really weird for a female to still be in estrus, this late in the year—but it sure looks like something’s going on out there.”
“That was interesting,” Coffin said, on the short ride back into town center from Race Point. He was looking out the window at the sprawl of new, mostly unsold houses cluttering the beech woods south of Route 6.
“Which part?” Lola said. “The whales fucking, the thing about Stan Carswell showing up at Kenji’s house drunk and weepy, or the part where McCurry lied about being filmed by Kenji?”
“All of the above. I think we need to have another talk with Carswell. We also need to take a second look at Kenji’s house. Something funky was going on there. McCurry made breaking up with Kenji Sole sound like trying to get out of the Mafia.”
Lola stopped at the light on Route 6. “Now?” she said.
“Let’s grab a bite first,” Coffin said. “I’m starved.”
“Do you buy McCurry’s thing about the way Kenji seemed to bring out the worst in people? Or do you think he was just rationalizing his own bad behavior?”
“She seems to have brought out the worst in whoever killed her.” “Yeah—but the other guys, too. They just seem like ordinary guys, you know? Maybe not geniuses, and not exactly Mother Teresa, any of them, but not totally terrible people, either. I mean, you sort of have to feel bad for Stan Carswell and Ed Ramos. Even McCurry, in a way.”
“They made a choice,” Coffin said. “They wanted to fuck up their lives—Kenji was just the excuse.”