High Season (12 page)

“Very lifelike,” Coffin said.

“Thank you,” said Kotowski. “I think it has a certain
je ne sais quoi
.”

“That's it exactly,” Coffin said, sitting in a ratty overstuffed chair beside the chessboard.

Kotowski was a crank, perilously close to tipping over the edge into sheer nuttiness—in serious danger of becoming one of those salty resort-town “characters” the tourists took pictures of. He sold a few paintings every year in Boston and made ends meet by teaching figure drawing at Provincetown's various summer art schools, giving private lessons, and teaching an occasional course at the community college in Hyannis. He volunteered now and then at the high school and once a week at Valley View Nursing Home, instructing the elderly in still-life painting.

“Saw your mother yesterday,” Kotowski said. “Entertaining as always. We watched
Jerry Springer
together.”

“Thanks,” Coffin said, advancing a pawn. “Good of you to stop in and see her.”

“She's great. She remembers a lot, knows a lot of history. She just thinks it all happened last week, is the problem.”

Coffin nodded. The wind hummed down the chimney.

“Busy day at the office?” Kotowski said, pushing the bottle cap out to meet Coffin's pawn.

“Busy week,” Coffin said.

“Any clues? Any suspects?”

“Clues? Suspects? Who are you, Miss Marple?”

“Not exactly what you signed on for, I guess,” Kotowski said.

“It's not what anybody in this town signed on for,” Coffin said, advancing a knight, taking it back, advancing it again. “Not even Boyle, although he's too stupid and gung ho to know any better. Town Hall's hoping the whole thing is all just a bad dream.”

Kotowski snorted. “Town Hall,” he said. “Lucky you, working cheek by jowl with our fine Board of Corruptmen. Don't be surprised if they turn your office into a condo.”

“Uh-oh,” said Coffin. “Here we go. Let the axe-grinding begin.”

“Scoff all you want,” Kotowski said, crossing his long, skinny legs, “but they're after me again.”

“Who's after you?”

“The real estate cabal. The developers and their government lackeys.”

Coffin took a sip of his beer. The sliding glass doors leading out to Kotowski's deck were open. Outside, a small boat puttered into the harbor, white paint glinting in the moonlight. “Lackeys?”

“Flunkies. Goons. This woman comes to my door on Monday—never seen her before in my life. Skinny dyke in a power suit. Asks me if I'm Mr. Kotowski. I might be, I said. Who the hell are
you?
She hands me a business card. Says she's with some real estate investment outfit. Says she'd like to come in and talk to me.” Kotowski paused and took a sip of his beer. “So I say, what about? And she says she's prepared to make me an offer on my place, right here and now. A
very generous
offer.”

“Pretty aggressive,” Coffin said.

“No shit,” Kotowski said. “I tell her to get lost—not for sale. She takes out another business card, writes a number on the back of it, and hands it to me. ‘That's the figure we had in mind,' she says.” He rummaged through a stack of papers on the floor and pulled out the card.

Coffin looked at it and whistled a soft, astonished note. “Wow,” he said.

“Exactly,” Kotowski said. “But I tell her I live here, and I'm not selling. She asks if she can come in and discuss it with me, and I say no. By now I'm getting pissed. I tell her to take her very generous offer and stick it up her ass. She says, ‘I want this property. You're going to sell it to me.' Then she hops into her little black convertible and drives off, slick as butter.”

Coffin flipped the card over.
SERENA HENCH
, it said, in embossed
script.
REIC
. Two phone numbers were printed across the bottom. “What's REIC?” Coffin said.

“Real Estate Investment Company. Consortium. Something like that.”

“Must be new. First I've heard of them.”

“Know how much I paid for this place, back in '73?” Kotowski said.

Coffin took Kotowski's pawn with a bishop. “Check,” he said.

“Forty thousand. Everyone thought I was nuts. I winterized it myself, fixed the plumbing, put in the woodstove. I had to sell my car to scrape up six grand for the down payment. I lived mostly on beans and rice the first few years. I traded sketches for fish, down at the wharf. Know what my tax assessment is now?”

“Everybody's assessment's through the roof,” Coffin said. “The tax on my mother's place is killing me.”

“Small beans,” Kotowski said, dismissing Coffin with a regal wave. “You happen to be sitting in one of the most valuable homes in P'town.” He spread his arms. “A fucking palace.”

“A regular Taj Mahal,” Coffin said, smacking the arm of his overstuffed chair, watching the clouds of dust rise in the lamplight.

“It's the
land
. I'm on three lots here, prime waterfront. Tear the house down and put up deluxe condos, you could multiply this”—he picked up Serena Hench's business card—“by twenty.”

They gazed at the chess pieces in silence: white's diffident attack, black's clumsy retreat.

“Ever been to Nantucket?” Kotowski said.

“Once,” Coffin said. “When I was a kid. Took the ferry from Hyannis. It was horrible.”

“Nantucket?”

“No, Nantucket was fine. The ferry was horrible.”

“You and your boat phobia,” Kotowski said. “I had some paintings in a gallery there a few years ago. A truly hideous experience.
It was a group show—me, two dune and sunset painters, and a freaking driftwood sculptor, I kid you not. I got drunk and insulted people.”

“The trauma,” Coffin said, throwing his forearm over his eyes.

“No, no, no—that was the
good
part,” Kotowski said impatiently. “
Nantucket
was abominable. Stepford meets the Disney version of
Moby-Dick
. The whole island is perfect and clean and
cute.”
Kotowski curled his upper lip into a canine snarl. “Nobody lives there but rich, glossy white people—self-congratulating lawyers and their lubricious trophy wives, completely zombified on antidepressants. Nothing but suntanned morons wearing Rolex watches, as far as the eye can see. Even the dogs look smug.”

“Nobody likes a smug dog.”

“There you go again—scoffer. There is no Nantucket anymore. It's all been torn down and replaced with gigantic McMansions. You can't buy a sandwich there for less than twelve bucks. That's Provincetown in a year or two. Except the lawyers and the trophy wives will all be queer.”

Coffin yawned. “All the good places get loved to death,” he said.

“All the good places get sold to the highest bidder. It's not love that fucks things up—it's money.”

“It's both,” Coffin said, pondering the board. He considered castling, decided against it, and advanced a pawn instead.

“Ha,” Kotowski said, countering with a knight. “Sounds like somebody's got girl trouble.”

“Jamie wants to have a baby.”

“Well, there it is. Time to jump ship.”

“That seems a little extreme.”

“It's the trap, man. The female conspiracy. I'll bet she said her biological clock was ticking.”

Coffin saw an opening and moved his queen. “Gay man stereotypes straight woman,” he said. “Check again.”

“I am not
gay
,” Kotowski said. “I'm homosexual. To be gay is to be frivolously happy, which I am most definitely not.”

“Your turn,” Coffin said.

“It's scientific fact. Women only need men around for two things. They need our sperm, and they need us to drag home the occasional mastodon and drive off predators until the pups get old enough to fend for themselves. Everything else is window dressing.”

“That's three things. And the window dressing's improved in the last million years or so. Not that you'd be interested.” Something was burning, Coffin realized. The smell of smoke drifted in through the open glass doors.

Kotowski shook his head, eyes moist with pity. “A guy your age, getting led around by his dick like a teenage kid. It's pathetic.”

“Something's burning,” Coffin said. “Smell that?”

Kotowski shuddered, made a retching sound. “I suppose she wants to get married, too.”

A deep red glow was visible above the northern horizon. Coffin could hear sirens in the distance. He stood and walked out onto Kotowski's deck. “Actually, no,” he said. “You're in check.”

Kotowski looked at the board, moved his king a single space to the right. “Don't do it, Coffin. Don't let her turn you into a walking sperm bank. You'll never have a minute to yourself again. Kids are noisy, messy, and expensive, and when they grow up they blame you for all their problems.”

“What the hell is on fire?” Coffin said. “Looks like it's up at the Heights.”

“Fuck,” said Kotowski, staring at the chessboard. “You sly bastard. Time for the Kotowski defense.” He shook the board until all of the pieces fell over.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
rooper Leonard Treadway of the Massachusetts State Police, Cape and Islands Detective Division, flipped open his compact and checked his makeup in the little mirror. He looked good, if he did say so himself. His cheekbones were tastefully accented with a hint of blush, and a careful application of frosted pink lipstick made his mouth look full, almost pouty.
If I was really a girl
, he thought,
I might even ask me out on a date
. His brows lowered. It was a confusing notion—not one he wanted to pursue.

His wig was straight, his makeup tasteful, his clothing attractive but not too far over the top. He wore a short black skirt and a white rayon blouse with a shawl collar. His feet were wedged into size eleven pumps with two-inch heels. They'd taken some getting used to, and he still didn't feel confident walking in them; his ankles turned on every little irregularity in the pavement. The underwear was a revelation, too: Pantyhose were nothing but clinging nylon bags of sweat. Whoever invented them should be shot. And the bra! Bras had seemed insanely complex to Treadway as a teenager, like a test you had to pass to get to second base—all those
hooks and catches and straps—but that was nothing compared to wearing one. The underwires dug into his ribs, and he felt weirdly confined, as if he had a big Ace bandage wrapped around his chest.

So far, he and his partner Pilchard had found out exactly zilch about the murder of the cross-dressing minister. None of Provincetown's parade of gender-confused freaks would talk to them: not the homos, not the lesbos, not the drag queens. Trooper Treadway blamed it on Pilchard. His partner was a large, glowering man who favored brown suits and tended to clench up and go into confrontation mode whenever he had to talk to anyone who wasn't straight, white, and at least middle-class. Trooper Treadway had no problem with homos, as long as they obeyed the law and kept out of his face. Besides, it wasn't just the homos that were less than helpful. Even the regular people seemed skittish, reluctant—some kind of weird Yankee reserve, a small town's open distrust of outsiders. Whatever the reason, the result was that no one knew anything, no one had seen anything, no one had anything to say. The cross-dressing weirdo minister had somehow gone invisible on the last night of his life.

So when Treadway's boss, Lieutenant Markham, called on the cell phone to check in with the two detectives, they had little of import to tell him. Yes, they had made contact with a number of gays and/or transvestites. No, no one remembered seeing the Reverend Ron Merkin. Which, in a way, made sense to Trooper Treadway. Cross-dressing was a kind of disguise, he thought, an escape from one's day-to-day identity. If you went to a costume party, you didn't see the people; you saw the costumes. Provincetown was like a huge costume party, everyone trying on one identity after another. He mentioned this observation to Lieutenant Markham, who told him to shut up.

“You two better find something, and you'd better find it fast,” Lieutenant Markham had said. “I've got Captain Faucett
and
Mancini's office climbing up my ass. If they won't talk to you, you're going to have to try to blend in a little.”

“Do you mean,” Trooper Treadway had said, a little frisson of excitement tingling at the base of his spine, “go undercover?”

“I don't care if you go under
water
,” Markham said. “Just get results.”

Trooper Treadway's eyes were bright as he hung up the phone. He had never gone undercover before, and the idea had always intrigued him. There it was again, that trying on of new identities.

Then he let Pilchard talk him into going in drag. “How else are you going to check out the freaks?” Pilchard had said. “We've got to try to fit in, like the boss said. I'd do it, too, but where would we find stuff to fit me? Besides, I'm so ugly they'd know I was a cop right away.” Pilchard. Fucking Pilchard, who was probably in a bar somewhere drinking beer and watching a Sox game, having a good laugh at his expense.

The town was crowded. A continuous, slow-moving stream of cars rolled down the narrow street, which was all but clogged with pedestrians—families, busloads of camcorder-wielding retirees in khaki shorts, and everywhere men holding hands with men and women with their arms around women, men in leather vests and pants, men dressed up like Cher and Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz.
People on bicycles rode both ways down the one-way street, weaving in and out of traffic, narrowly avoiding clusters of ambling tourists who strayed from the sidewalks. It all made Trooper Treadway count his blessings and thank God that he, Leonard Treadway, had never felt any confusion about his sexual identity—he was a man, he liked girls, and that was that.