Mating Season

by Jon Loomis

  “I was glad to hear you’d taken on the investigation into Kenji’s murder,” Baldritch said. “I liked her a great deal. She was one of my favorite clients.”

  “Then you won’t object to letting me look at the letters you sent on her behalf.”

  Baldritch stuck the cigar into the corner of her mouth and squinted at Coffin through the smoke. “You’ll have to be more specific than that,” she said. “I sent a number of letters on Kenji’s behalf.”

  “The ones regarding her father’s competence,” Coffin said. “Of course, if there are others that might shed light on the investigation, I’d like to see them, too.”

  “There’s a matter of attorney-client privilege in play here, you know,” Baldritch said, making a little steeple of her index fingers, then pointing it at Coffin. “Client’s death notwithstanding. It’s my feeling that most of the legal correspondence we prepared for Kenji Sole is not relevant to her murder. There may be a couple of avenues, however, that might be relevant, and I’m prepared to discuss them with you. The first, as you say, is the issue of her father’s competence.” A black leather folder lay on her desktop. She opened it, extracted a sheet of paper, and pushed it across the desk with her fingertips. “I wrote this letter at Kenji’s request.” She tapped the letter on the left. “This one, in February, shortly after Kenji’s father was picked up by the police after having a stroke.”

  “I heard about that,” Coffin said. “I met with Towler about an hour ago. He told me the whole story.”

  “Then you know that at the time of his stroke, J. Hedrick Sole had methamphetamine in his system.”

  “Yes,” Coffin said. He read the letter. It did not seem like a routine inquiry to him. It was, he thought, a strongly worded demand for an extensive physical and psychiatric evaluation of J. Hedrick Sole, by physicians of his daughter’s choosing. “Would you call this a routine letter of inquiry?” he said when he’d struggled through the three dense paragraphs of legalese.

  Sarah Baldritch snorted. “Hardly,” she said. “It’s a broadside, an open threat. Jerry Sole knew exactly what it meant—and knew it was the precursor to his daughter’s petitioning of the family courts for a competency investigation and hearing. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.”

  “Damned if he allows himself to be examined and fails, and damned if he refuses because it makes him look crazy?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what was his response?”

  “He told us to fuck off.”

  “In so many words?”

  Baldritch shook her head. “He said what a guy like Jerry Sole would say: He would not submit to his daughter’s demands, and if she persisted he could produce affidavits from a dozen medical specialists all verifying that he was in excellent mental and physical health, and any further discussion of the matter would result in her immediate and total disinheritance and a countersuit for harassment.”

  “So then what? What was the next step?”

  “The next step was that Kenji got stabbed to death with a chef’s knife.”

  “Do you think Kenji’s murder was related to her issues with her father?”

  Baldritch shrugged. “There was a lot of money involved. You’d be a fool not to entertain the possibility, at least.”

  “That wasn’t my question.”

  Baldritch squinted at Coffin, then scratched her nose with a blunt fingertip. “Do I think J. Hedrick or his attention-whore of a girlfriend murdered Kenji Sole? No on J. Hedrick, maybe on the girlfriend. She have an alibi?”

  Coffin stroked his mustache with his fingertips. It needed trimming and still smelled like phó. “Sort of. It leaves room for skepticism.”

  “I think we’d all be wise to be skeptical of little Ruth McGurk,” Baldritch said, leaning back in her chair.

  “What’s the other avenue?” Coffin said.

  Baldritch removed another sheet of paper from the leather folder and pushed it across the desk.

  “This is Kenji’s will,” she said. “You know, of course, that she was very wealthy.”

  “Am I reading this right?” Coffin said.

  “If you can read, then you’re probably reading it right,” Baldritch said.

  “The P’town Heritage Museum gets how much?” The Heritage Museum was located in a small stone building near the foot of the Pilgrim Monument. It was a curious enterprise, even for Provincetown: Its prize exhibits were a stuffed polar bear and one of the world’s largest scale models of a Grand Banks schooner. Coffin had gone to the grand opening with Jamie, his first and only visit.

  “The bulk of the estate. About sixty percent. The rest goes to establish a foundation so we can continue to do good work in Kenji’s name, la la la.”

  “So how much is sixty percent?” Coffin said.

  “You’d have to talk to the accountant to get the current number, but the last time I checked it would have been around twenty million.”

  “The Heritage Museum gets twenty million?”

  “Yep.” Baldritch eyed her cigar, then lit it again with the torch. “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Do they know that?”

  “We haven’t notified them, if that’s what you mean. All the notification letters go out at the same time; we’ll probably send them Monday.”

  “Holy crap,” Coffin said. “Twenty million.”

  Baldritch scratched her ribs. “I heard you had a little car trouble getting out here. How you planning on getting home?”

  “Towler called you?”

  “We stay in touch.”

  Coffin nodded, not surprised. “I was going to take a cab to the bus terminal,” he said.

  “The bus? Why not take the ferry? It’s forty-five minutes.”

  “I don’t like boats,” Coffin said.

  Baldritch raised a bristly eyebrow.

  “Long story,” Coffin said.

  She waved a hand. “Well, the bus is out of the question,” Baldritch said, picking up the phone. “Stephanie? Detective Coffin needs a lift back to Provincetown. Call Edward and tell him to warm up the Cessna.” She paused, chewing on her cigar. “And a Town Car to Logan, yes. Thank you, Stephanie.” She put the phone back in its cradle. “You okay with airplanes, Detective?”

  “As long as they don’t crash,” Coffin said.

  Baldritch stood and stuck out her hand. Coffin shook it.

  “Nice meeting you, Detective,” she said. “Let me know if there’s anything else we can do for you.”

  Pre-rush-hour traffic was heavy between the offices of Torkel, Baldritch, Nash and Logan Airport, but the liveried driver of the firm’s sleek Town Car didn’t seem to mind. He swerved deftly around honking semis and made creative use of the breakdown lane when passing herds of SUVs. Coffin turned and looked out the rear window, half-expecting to see a river of wrecked cars in their wake—but there was nothing back there but the usual Boston gridlock.

  “Clearing up, finally,” the driver said, peering up at the sky as he passed a truck pulling a huge pleasure boat on a trailer, the speedometer needle rising past eighty miles per hour.

  “Good,” Coffin said, gripping the gray leather armrest. “Small planes in bad weather. Not fun.”

  “You’re flying out to P’town, right?” the driver said. “I got a sister in P’town. Nice place. I try to get out there a couple times a year. She runs a guesthouse, puts me and the wife up in the bridal suite.”

  “Yeah?” Coffin said. “Which guesthouse?”

  “The White Orchid,” the driver said.

  “Your sister,” Coffin said. “Is her name Julie?”

  “No,” the driver said, looking at Coffin in the rearview mirror. “That’s her partner. My sister’s name is Angela. What, you know the place?”

  Coffin shrugged. “I live in P’town. The White Orchid’s about three blocks from my house.”

  The driver flicked his eyes up to the rearview mirror again. “It’s mostly lesbians that stay there,” he said. “It took me a whi
le to get used to it, I guess. Now they just seem pretty much like anybody else.”

  “Pretty much,” Coffin said.

  “It’s not like we didn’t know about Angela early on,” the driver said, passing a convoy of school buses on the right.

  Coffin looked at the speedometer: It was quivering just above ninety.

  “She was always a tomboy,” the driver said. “Some aunt or uncle would give her a doll for her birthday and she’d take it back to the store the next day, get herself a frickin’ catcher’s mitt instead.”

  “How’d your parents handle it?” Coffin said, trying not to look out the window. He was gripping the armrest hard enough to leave nail marks.

  The driver shrugged. “They were perplexed. They talked to the priest about it. Father Mickey, we called him, on account of he was always tryin’ to show us boys his package. He told ’em the usual—say a few Hail Marys, light a couple candles, blah blah blah. Suffice it to say, it didn’t do shit.”

  “I guess not,” Coffin said.

  “I wasn’t surprised,” the driver said, pulling up in front of Logan’s main terminal. “Even then, I had no belief in the supernatural. If a freak like Father Mickey could make a living off religion, then I figured the whole thing had to be a racket.”

  Flying from Provincetown to Boston could be harrowing even in good weather. The flight path into Logan Airport took you overland almost the entire way, more or less following Route 6 over a crazy quilt of woods, golf courses, residential neighborhoods, salt marshes, and mall parking lots, all of which heated and cooled at different rates during the day. The resulting updrafts and downdrafts could be brutal; even in clear weather the half-hour flight from Provincetown to Logan could feel like an endless and terrifying roller-coaster ride. The twin-engine, ten-passenger Cessnas flown by Cape Air bucked, dipped, and rattled nauseatingly for almost the entire trip before turning north and then west over Boston Harbor for the final descent.

  In good weather, though, the flight from Boston back to Provincetown was both beautiful and serene. Over water the entire way, the flight afforded spectacular views of the South Shore coastline and the deep gray-green of Cape Cod Bay, the Cape itself like a flexed arm extending out from the mainland, the clenched fist of Truro and Provincetown rising slowly up from the horizon as the plane drew near. From the air the Cape always reminded Coffin of a big Italian vaffunculo, swinging arm, fist up, the gesture a larger and more expressive version of the American middle finger.

  Coffin was the only passenger. He sat in a roomy leather captain’s chair, bottle of Evian in the cup holder, copy of Newsweek on his lap. He was looking out the window at the miles of deep, green water below them. His grandfather had drowned in Cape Cod Bay in shallow water off Herring Cove; his father had been lost on the other side of the Cape, miles from shore in the cold North Atlantic, thrown overboard while making a drug run in his fishing boat, the Nora Jean.

  The pilot made an announcement over the PA system. “Looks like we got whales at four o’clock. Let’s go take a look.” Coffin gripped the armrests as the Cessna banked and dove toward the water, which came up at the window with alarming speed.

  “There’s three of ’em right out your port window,” the pilot said, the plane tilted on its side, still descending. “We’ll go down to about a thousand feet so you can get a good look.”

  “Thanks,” Coffin said, knuckles turning white. He looked out the window. Three humpbacks churned the water to a pale, frothy green below his window. They were surrounded by a trio of whale-watch boats. The whales breached and spanked the water with their tails, unperturbed. Two hundred years ago, humpbacks this close to shore would have been pursued and slaughtered with dogged efficiency by Coffin’s Yankee ancestors. Would the whales of 1808 have been similarly relaxed as men with harpoons rowed toward them in their fragile boats?

  The Cessna leveled, then began to climb again. Coffin sat back in his seat and took a deep breath. The sun was going down behind them. The thin, high scrawl of clouds to the east glowed pink, reflecting the sunset’s fuchsia throb. Ahead, Provincetown and the curve of the Outer Cape crawled over the horizon: pale shoulder of beach, shawl of scrub pine. The Pilgrim Monument and the water towers sprouted in the distance; Coffin picked out MacMillan Pier and the dark mass of Town Hall’s slate roof. The Cessna banked again, starting its descent. Coffin could see the pilot through the open cabin door, talking emphatically on his headset radio. He pulled back on the throttle and the Cessna climbed, passing over the airport at maybe two hundred feet. The intercom crackled.

  “We’ve got five or six deer on the runway, looks like,” the pilot said. “Ground crew’s gonna run down there with a Jeep and chase ’em away. We’ll be landing as soon as I can get us turned back into the wind.” The plane banked twice, then twice again, making a loose rectangle in the air. Then they descended, floating over the runway, wingtips dipping and righting before the wheels touched, bounced, then touched again.

  The Cessna’s passenger door swung open at the top and bottom, like a big aluminum clamshell. Coffin climbed down the steep, short set of passenger stairs. His shirt was damp at the armpits, and he realized he stank a bit. He felt like kissing the ground.

  Lola was standing on the tarmac, wearing her uniform. “You don’t look so good, Frank,” Lola said. “Tough flight?”

  “That’s it,” Coffin said. “I’m never leaving the Cape again.”

  “So,” Lola said, driving the big Crown Vic back out Race Point Road toward town center. “What’d you find out?”

  “Princess Maiya and J. Hedrick are both tweakers, hidden cameras are everywhere, and the word for ‘sweet potato’ in Vietnamese is lang.”

  Lola grinned. “Not a bad day’s work. That it?”

  Coffin looked out the window. On both sides of the road the forest of scrub pines was broken by new development, much of it sitting abandoned, half-finished. “If you’re going to take a road trip in an ’84 Ford Fiesta, wear a crash helmet.”

  “What about those routine inquiries from Torkel, Baldritch, Nash?”

  “Routine for Gitmo, maybe. How was your day?”

  They passed a brace of young men Rollerblading along the bike path. They were all muscular and tan, dressed in shorts and muscle shirts, even though the evening was cool and damp. Lola told him about her interviews with the wives. “Also Stavros called,” she said. “There’s a message on your desk. He wants us to meet him at his house tonight, around six.”

  “Fine,” Coffin said.

  “So now what?” Lola said.

  “Home for a shower,” Coffin said.

  Lola wrinkled her nose and glanced at him under lowered lids. “Good plan. And then?”

  “A drink and a nap,” Coffin said, “and then we’ll go talk to Boyle.”

  When Lola dropped Coffin off in front of his house, the battered red Fiesta was parked at the curb. A tall, lanky Eastern European man leaned against the fender; a man who could have been his brother sat in a late-model Dodge truck, idling a few feet behind the Fiesta.

  “You are Officer Coffin?” the first man said.

  Coffin nodded. “That’s right, and that’s my car.”

  The man took two steps away from the Fiesta, then turned and regarded it, lips pursed. He had strong features and dark brows. He was thin, but his arms were long and corded with sinew, his hands big and powerful and black with grease. “This car is some piece of shit,” he said. “Not safe. Front bearings on both sides shot. Fucking wheels fall off, you die. Seriously!” The man leaned toward Coffin and pointed his two fingers at his eyes, then at Coffin’s, then back at his own. “Look at me,” he said. “I’m telling you.”

  “I can’t believe you drove it up here from Brewster,” Coffin said. “What do I owe you?”

  The man stuck out his hand. It was like shaking hands with a big pair of pliers, Coffin thought.

  “I am Bojan,” the man said. “Zoran the tow-truck man is my brother.” He pointed to the man in the car
. “This is also my brother, Drago.”

  The man in the car waved; Coffin waved back.

  “Zoran my cousin should not sell this car to you,” Bojan said. “He did not know you were police man. I buy it back now, okay?” He took a roll of bills from his pocket and peeled six hundreds off the top.

  “I only paid five for it,” Coffin said.

  “Ah,” Bojan said. “Extra hundred for your trouble. No problem!” He tucked the bills into Coffin’s shirt pocket.

  Coffin fished them out and handed them back. “How much do I owe you for the tire and the delivery?”

  “You sure?” Bojan said.

  “I’m sure.”

  Bojan shrugged. “Okay. Is your funeral. No charge for tire; is cheap retread anyway. I replace your serpentine belt, too—also no charge. Car is maybe okay to drive around town.” He wagged a long finger in Coffin’s face. “But not on highway,” he said. “No, no, no. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Coffin said. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Bojan shook his narrow head and climbed into the passenger seat of his brother’s pickup. “I tried, right? I tried, but you said no.”

  “Right,” Coffin said. “You did your best.”

  “Okeydokey, smokey,” Bojan said, giving Coffin a big thumbs-up as Drago dropped the pickup into drive and pulled slowly away from the curb.

  Chapter 14

  Mancini sat at Boyle’s desk, fiddling with a glass paperweight. It was a clear globe with a tiny three-dimensional village inside. When you shook it, a blizzard of fake snow swirled around the little buildings.

  “That’s it?” Mancini said. “That’s all you’ve got?”

  Coffin looked at his notebook, flipped a page, and pursed his lips. “It’s not nothing. Lots of boyfriends, lots of wives, Daddy’s nasty girlfriend—big inheritance goes to none of the above. Some kind of porn angle that we haven’t entirely put together yet. Plenty of people with motive, but not much useful physical evidence so far.” He looked up at Boyle. “What were you expecting after three days? The killer, on video?”

  Boyle was perched awkwardly on the corner of his desk, where Duckworth had been sitting the day before. His face flushed bright red, but he said nothing.