High Season (11 page)

“The man liked oysters. After dinner, she goes home, he stays out.” He looked at the last page. “Day three, same routine.”

“Except when he stays out, he really stays out.”

“No mention of any conversations with anybody, except maître d's, shop clerks, and a few business calls back home.”

“Nope. Nothing to be triumphant about.”

“And she has no idea who he saw or what he did when he was out at night?”

“She said he told her he walked around. He liked being seen in his outfits and not being recognized. That's part of the deal with some cross-dressers, apparently.”

“Think she's telling the truth?”

Lola thought for a few seconds. “You mean is she lying about what they did together? Or what he did when he was out on the town?”

“Both. Either.”

“Maybe. I kind of get this feeling when I know people are hiding something—it's like a dog when somebody blows one of those whistles. Your ears kind of perk up, know what I mean?”

Coffin nodded. “
What
is she hiding, though? That's the question.”

“She's either protecting him or protecting herself,” Lola said.

“It's a little late for him.”

Lola finished her water and refilled her glass. “True,” she said.

“Hang on,” Coffin said, padding into his study. “I've been working, too.” He came back with a green folder.

“You got the autopsy report?” Lola said. “That was quick.”

“Ask and you shall receive,” Coffin said. He opened the folder and spread the report and photos on the table.

“The woman at the ME's office—what's her name? She must like you.”

“Shelley Block. We go back a few years. We went out for a while, but every time I thought about what she did all day, I got the heebiejeebies. Still friends, though.”

“Yack,” Lola said, sorting through the photos. “I see what you mean.”

“Here's the summary,” Coffin said, scanning the report. “Time of death uncertain; but probably between late the night of the eleventh and early the morning of the twelfth, given the degree of rigor and the extent to which insects and crabs and whatnot had been working on the body when it was found. Definite strangulation; deep ligature wounds, burst capillaries, blah blah blah. Marks on the legs and left foot indicate dragging, probably postmortem. Lots of sand on the body—big surprise. Alcohol zero,
but
the blood work shows significant amounts of ketamine.”

“Special K,” Lola said. “That's weird.”

“There's nothing about this guy that
isn't
weird,” Coffin said.

Lola drummed her fingers on the table. “Special K used to be a big club drug.”

“In Baltimore the frat boys used it as a date rape drug—wipes out your inhibitions and short-term memory.”

“Explains how a guy that big could go out for a walk and end up getting himself strangled,” Lola said.

Coffin nodded, unbending a paper clip. “Someone spiked his Diet Coke.”

“Any sexual assault?”

Coffin scanned the report, flipped through the pages, flipped back. “No. Want to know what he had for dinner?”

“More than anything.”

“Lobster—confirms the wife's account of the meals, anyway—baked potato, salad with blue cheese, chocolate cake. Reverend Ron wasn't exactly counting calories, and here we go again—raw oysters. ‘Approximately a dozen.' ”

“Did the wife say anything about him eating oysters Saturday night in her highly detailed gastronomic log?”

“Nope. And your friend at the ME's office says they were higher up in the gut than the lobster. Meaning he ate them last.”

“Not bad, as last meals go. How many places in town serve oysters on the half-shell, do you think?” Coffin said.

“There's the Fish Palace,” Lola said, counting on her fingers, “Al Dante's, and the Harbor Café out in Wellfleet. You wouldn't go to Wellfleet dressed like Aunt Edna, though, right?”

“Don't forget Billy's,” Coffin said.

Lola stretched out her legs, pointed her toes, then crossed her ankles. “Only an idiot would walk into Billy's in a wig and a muumuu,” she said.

Coffin shrugged. “Merkin was no Stephen Hawking,” he said. “Let's call the missus back and find out if he had his dozen raw with her or after she went home to watch
Law and Order
.”

“Special K,” Lola said. “Does that mean we're back to thinking of this as a hookup that got ugly?”

Coffin fingered his mustache. It had begun to turn gray; the new silver hairs were coarse and prickly. “Secret lives,” Coffin said. “You never know what you'll turn up when you're dealing with secret lives.”

 

The Ice House, as its name implied, had originally been built to manufacture ice for the fishing industry. It had been converted to condos in the early eighties, just as the AIDS pandemic was gathering steam. At five stories, the Ice House was the tallest building in Provincetown, except for the Pilgrim Monument.

The Merkins' rented condo occupied the entire top floor. The furniture was a mix of chrome-and-white-leather minimalist and art deco antique. A long balcony stretched across the harbor side, with an excellent view of town beach, the harbor with its scatter of
small boats, North Truro, the long, hazed curve of the Cape, and even the ochre strip of smog over Boston.

“Yikes,” Lola said from the master bedroom. “Check this out.” A polar bear skin—complete with grimacing head—lay sprawled on the floor in front of the gas fireplace. Several paintings of sunsets over sand dunes hung on the walls, and a cabinet opened to reveal a large plasma TV. The bed was enormous. The entire ceiling was mirrored.

“Liberace has entered the building,” Coffin said.

“This is one of our premier properties,” said the young man from the real estate office. His name was Wendell. “We have quite a distinguished list of renters for this unit.”

“Like who?” Coffin said from the bathroom. It had a full-sized marble hot tub and, curiously, a bidet. All of the fixtures were gold plated. “Siegfried and Roy?”

Wendell lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “Miss Barbra Streisand, for one,” he said.

“How much does it rent for?” Lola asked.

“In high season?” Wendell said. “Ten thousand a week. More for Carnival.”

Coffin opened a closet door. A light came on inside. The closet was almost as big as his kitchen and lined entirely in cedar. “That's a lot, isn't it?” he said. “Even for Provincetown.”

“This is a very special property,” said Wendell, checking his tie in the big, gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace. It was a pink tie, worn with a shirt made of some shimmering blue-green material. “You can't get this combination of amenities and view anyplace else in town.”

“Can't argue with that,” Coffin said. He picked up an art deco statuette—a nude girl, standing with one knee raised, holding a bronze tray aloft. Wendell flinched a little, so Coffin put the statuette down.

“How did the Merkins pay?” he asked.

Wendell consulted his BlackBerry. “Bank transfer,” he said. “From Tulsa, Oklahoma, under the name Johnson. Same as before.”

“Before?” Lola said.

“Yes—they rented this unit last summer, too. As a Mr. and Mrs. Hank Johnson. They liked it so much they tried to buy it, but it's not for sale.”

Coffin said nothing. He opened the French door onto the balcony and looked out. It was low tide and the harbor looked drained, exposed sand flats undulating off to North Truro. Here and there a small boat was beached at the end of its anchor line, waiting silently for the bay to percolate back in. “Did they look at any other properties while they were here?”

Wendell leaned toward him conspiratorially. “They looked at several investment properties last year,” he said, “but they didn't buy anything. Not from me, at least.”

Lola frowned. “But they might have bought from someone else?”

“It's possible, I suppose,” Wendell said. He shrugged. “They were interested in new development—but there's not much of that going on. Just those new condos out on the west end, and they're not even officially on the market yet.”

“The Moors?” Coffin said.

Wendell nodded. “They're going to be very,
very
exclusive,” he said. “Super high-end.”

“Who's the developer?” Coffin asked.

“It's all
totally
hush-hush,” Wendell said. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I don't know who's running it—but word is they're mega high rollers. Real Estate Investment Consultants, or something like that.”

Lola ran her fingers over the satin duvet cover. “Did it bother you when you found out you'd been renting to Reverend Ron?” she said.

Wendell tilted his head “Money's money,” he said. “Baby needs a new pair of shoes.”

 

They ate a quick lunch at Mondo's, an old Provincetown landmark at the foot of MacMillan Wharf. They both ordered baskets of fish and chips and iced tea, which they devoured at a picnic table in the sun, looking out at the water. The cod was perfect, lightly battered, not too much grease. The French fries were hopeless, a limp afterthought. Coffin threw a fry to a one-legged gull standing expectantly a few feet from their table. The gull gobbled it whole, then flew off, screaming.

“Why would the Merkins, of all people, be looking at investment property in Provincetown?” Coffin said, chewing meditatively.

“Where would Jesus buy?” Lola said, licking a bit of tartar sauce from her fingertip. Her black sunglasses glinted in the sunlight reflecting off the harbor. “I guess a good investment is a good investment, even if it's in Babylon.”

“I guess,” Coffin said. “I wonder if that's what they were celebrating at the Fish Palace—a purchase.”

Lola wiped her hands on a napkin. “Could be,” she said. “But if that's true, why would Mrs. Merkin want to conceal it?”

“Good question,” Coffin said. “Maybe she doesn't want to jeopardize the deal. Bad publicity, and all that.”

Lola shook her head and took a bite of fish. “No sense throwing good money after a dead husband, I guess,” she said.

Coffin leaned an elbow on the picnic table, sipped his iced tea. “Sort of makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn't it?”

 

It was a warm evening, rich with the scent of lavender and low tide. The harbor glittered; small boats lay stranded on the flats.
Jamie climbed the stairs to her apartment, carrying two plastic bags of groceries from the A&P. She fumbled in her purse for her keys, setting one of the grocery bags down on the wooden balcony. Someone had left an envelope on the mat. She unlocked the door, put the bags of groceries in the kitchen, came back, and retrieved the envelope. It was plain and white, with only her name written on the outside. The flap was loose. She looked inside and slid a piece of folded notepaper from the envelope. When she unfolded it, something shiny fell out and landed on the deck. She knelt down. Razor blades. Three of them—the old-fashioned kind, rectangular with two sharp edges. The first thing she thought was
I didn't know you could still buy them.
She looked at the note, written in black Magic Marker. She felt breathless, suddenly. TWAYI SNIHYAAMI, it said in thick capital letters.

 

Coffin parked the shuddering Dodge in front of Kotowski's house. The moon was rising nacreous and fat above the harbor; a bright path of reflected moonlight wrinkled from the beach to the bay's black horizon. Coffin could hear the tide sucking through the stone breakwater as it straggled off to Long Point, a jagged barrier separating the tidal salt marsh from the harbor. It sounded like bathwater running down a huge drain.

The last property on Commercial Street's west end, Kotowski's house was a hulking, dilapidated thing, perched precariously above the beach, the harbor waves gumming its cracked seawall. Three large, hand-painted signs stood among the scraggly tomato plants in Kotowski's front yard: one that said $
ELECTMEN FOR $ALE
, another that said
NO JET SKIS
, and a third, even more direct, that said
THROW THE BASTARDS OUT
.

When Coffin knocked on the door, it creaked open a few inches and the pine-smell of turpentine drifted out. The latch had been
broken for at least twenty years; as far as Coffin knew, the door had never had a lock.

Inside, the house was cavernous and dusty, cluttered with broken furniture Kotowski had picked up at the town dump: a three-legged coffee table supported by a cinder block; caned chairs, bottoms blown out, mended with squares of plywood. Stacks of books and newspapers teetered on every surface. Every foot of wall space was covered with art—mostly Kotowski's own paintings; the recent ones were images of people under attack by improbable animals: a Jet-Skier mauled by fanged dolphins, a colossal squid engulfing a whale-watch boat.

Coffin had gone to visit Kotowski almost every Tuesday night for the past ten years—ostensibly for a game of chess, which neither of them played very well or liked very much, but more and more to drink beer and argue. The chessboard was already set up on a bent TV tray. One of the black pawns was missing; a bottle cap sat in its place. Coffin opened the wheezing, round-cornered fridge and helped himself to a beer.

Kotowski stood in the kitchen, barefoot, dressed in worn jeans cut off below the knee and a paint-smeared T-shirt. “What do you think?” he said, waving at the big canvas that leaned against the table.

“Nice,” Coffin said. “It's new, right?”

“Nice? That's the best you can do? Nice?”

It was a portrait of Spaz, Kotowski's orange tomcat. In the painting, Spaz was the size of a tyrannosaurus, striding through what could only be the Moors, the sprawling new condo complex visible from Kotowski's front door. Spaz had a big, greasy-looking rat in his mouth. The rat's face, on close inspection, bore a remarkable resemblance to Louie Silva, the town manager.