Nantucket Sawbuck (22 page)

First up was the landscaper, Jane Stiles. Her “I was at home all night” soon clarified itself. There were some minor details that Charlie Boyce had skimmed over. It turned out that she was indeed at home, but she wasn't alone. She was with her little boy, and her ex-husband had called several times on her landline, a comforting anachronism she maintained so she could still have phone service in a blackout. “Also, once in a while it's kind of fun to actually hear what people are saying. And I don't really need to go online or play Angry Birds while I'm talking to my mother in the nursing home.” It was easy to access her phone records and verify the calls. “Besides,” she said. “No matter what I wanted to do, I couldn't just leave Sam alone. I mean—who gets a babysitter so they can commit murder?”

That made me laugh.

She said: “You should do that more often. It makes you look about ten years younger.”

“But I want to look older. I want to look intimidatingly mature.”

“No chance. I'd say you were going to go directly from boyish rogue to kindly old geezer. No transition at all. Kind of the way we skip spring on Nantucket—late winter, straight into summer.”

In her bright astringent way, she was flirting with me. It was fun but I was taken. And I had a long day ahead of me. I walked her out to the parking lot and went back to my list.

The three most obvious candidates for investigation: electrician Tom Danziger, plumber Arturo Maturo, and painter Derek Briley. The first two had the standard motivation—Lomax was ripping them off catastrophically. Briley was a crank. He had leaked the Moorlands Mall story to the newspaper. He hated Lomax, as a person and as a species. “They're parasites,” he told me in the interrogation room. “Like deer ticks, blowing themselves up like great balloons on other people's blood. I was in Spain, on the Costa Del Sol, working on houses there, when that bubble burst. The big boys were all long gone when the
shite
came down, Chief. The rest of us were swimming in it, weren't we? Useless buggers.”

It didn't take long to unearth the tough little cockney's whereabouts on the night of the murder. Nathan Parrish ran a high-end poker game out of his house and anyone who could afford the five hundred-dollar table stake was welcome. The game provided a utopian model of social equality: Parrish and a few wealthy friends, a retired executive recovering from knee surgery, a Chinese hedge fund mastermind, along with people like Tom Danziger, Derek Briley, and the groundskeeper for the Sankaty Head golf course. Briley didn't like admitting he hung out with the “toffs” as he called them; and his girlfriend thought he was attending AA meetings.

Danziger's wife was a trickier problem: a hard-line Jehovah's Witness who hated gambling. She thought Tom had joined the reading club at the Atheneum, and he was working his way through
Moby Dick.
Tom faked it easily, as he read everything he could get his hands on—including a stray copy of the Lola Burger employee handbook he found on the counter as he waited for his Wagyu hot dog, and the annual Town Meeting Warrant he found in the post office, while standing on line to mail a package. His wife Judy read nothing but her personal translation of the Bible and the
Watchtower
magazine.

I had to ask. “How did you two wind up together?”

He shrugged. “She was the prettiest girl at Nantucket High School. She could probably still qualify as the prettiest girl at Nantucket High School.” I watched him quietly across the chipped Formica tabletop. He knew he had to give me more. “And she's a good person, Chief. She helps people. She volunteers at the food bank. She nursed her sister in our house for two years when she was dying, She had Ewing's Sarcoma. It's like bone cancer. The parents had disowned her and she had no insurance.”

“That sounds tough.”

“If Jill had been a great person it would have been tough. But she was a nasty little bitch and being in pain all the time didn't help her personality any.”

“You sound like the hero to me, Tom. Jill wasn't your sister.”

“Yeah, well. I wasn't as nice about it as I could have been. I recall saying something like ‘If that troll doesn't die soon I'm going to shoot myself just to get the fuck out of here.' But Judy made it work. And she has a sense of humor. You don't normally associate Jehovah's Witnesses with a sense of humor. She came back from her door-to-door visiting thing a couple of nights ago and said, “The Pomeroys' marriage is in trouble, Tom.' I asked her how she knew and she said. ‘They let us in. They'd rather talk to the Jehovah's Witnesses than to each other! That's scary. They seemed really interested in Armageddon. After being in that house for an hour I can see how they might be looking forward to it. They even invited us for dinner. I thought they were going to make up the guest room.' She got me laughing, Chief. She does that a lot. So I'd like to stay with her and I'd really appreciate it if you kept this poker thing to yourself.”

David Lattimer was a regular at that poker game, too, lucky for him. Lonnie had found out he'd been some kind of Delta Force elite combat soldier in Vietnam (“He wears long sleeve shirts all the time, even at the beach. Know why? He's got military tattoos all over his arms!”). Of course the Lattimers loathed the Lomaxes, as old money always loathes new money, but the clincher was that one of Lonnie's men found a pack of Camel Regulars in the Lattimers' freezer when they went in for a follow-up interview. He told them they were for emergencies only, but it didn't matter. The DNA would set the record straight one way or another. In any case he'd been losing at poker—ineptly bluffing his way out of more than a thousand dollars—at roughly the moment Lomax was being stabbed with a screwdriver, four miles away.

His wife had no philosophical problem with poker in particular or gambling in general, but she hated how tragically bad at it her husband was, and it broke her heart to see him lose. I agreed to keep David's secret as I had agreed to keep Tom Danziger's.

I did the same for Arturo Maturo. His secret was much bigger and potentially much more damaging than the others', but it was no more relevant to the matter at hand. I was beginning to feel like a priest, taking all these confessions. No one was confessing to murder, though. That was the real problem. About eighty percent of major crimes are solved that way. But no one had come forward in this case so far, and I had a feeling that they weren't going to.

Meanwhile, I spent my days uncovering the sad and sordid hidden lives of my new neighbors.

Arturo Maturo represented the pinnacle of his type: the arrogant, greedy, inconsiderate Nantucket plumber. Plumbers reigned as the kings of the local trades—uniquely skilled, high-priced, state-licensed, over-booked, indispensable, careless, tactless and smug. They looked down on everyone else—except the equally elite electricians. They stomped into houses and left chaos behind them—dust and chunks of plaster where they cut through a wall or ceiling, water stains where they had cut a PVC pipe, boxes, and packing materials for faucets and sinks piled behind them when their work was done. It was generally understood that the painters would clean up after them, or at least that was what I understood from Derek Briley and Mike Henderson.

Maturo was willing to go face to face with any of the lower orders, and had been known to punch out the occasional plasterer or floor-finisher in the heat of the moment at the end of a job. He was tough. He was macho. He was a legendary cocksman, also—notorious for sleeping with other people's wives, and stealing their girlfriends. He had verbally threatened Lomax on numerous occasions. He was in the Chicken Box when Mike Henderson announced that the tycoon was about to run out on all his bills. Arturo had motive and opportunity. He had the right personality profile. He also had an air-tight alibi.

He just didn't want anyone to know it.

Arturo Maturo was bisexual. On the night of the murder, he was with his gay lover in the kid's family house in Monomoy. That he'd managed to keep that side of his life a secret for this long, among the prying eyes of his neighbors, was something close to a miracle. I didn't want to wreck that for him.

I gave Arturo the news, and a vow of silence, a few days after our first interview.

“I owe you one, Chief,” he said, pumping my hand. “Just name it.”

“Sorry. Cops are like EMTs. We can't take a tip, even if we really want to.”

He squinted at me. “I don't get you. Cops are supposed to be hard-ass pricks.”

“Like plumbers?”

He laughed. “Yeah.”

“The trick is knowing when to be a hard-ass prick, Arturo. That's helpful for plumbers, too.”

“Hey, I'm not turning into a nice guy just because you got me off the hook for this.”

“You don't have to. But you might think about cleaning up after yourself on the job, time to time.”

“Oh yeah?”

“That's what you can for me. Think about other people. Promote harmony.”

“I don't know about you, Chief.”

“Give it a try.”

He nodded but I didn't think there was much chance that he'd follow through. Still, it was worth a shot.

All my other efforts were going nowhere.

I was sitting in my office late on a Thursday afternoon going through the Lomax file one more time, trying to figure out what I'd missed, when Lonnie Fraker barged in, like a cat with a dead mouse in its jaws. He had found another culprit to lay on my doorstep.

“I got a movie for you, Chief.”

I looked up, set the file aside. It was almost quitting time and I was thinking about taking a long weekend. Sometimes the best thing you can for a case is ignore it. The fussy left side of your brain goes to the beach or the barbecue and the secret intuitive part, the corpus callosum, can get some real work done. But it looked like Fraker was ready to put in another shift.

“What are you talking about, Lonnie?”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a DVD in a plastic lined paper cover. “You know how Lomax paid for the kid's apartment off Bartlett Road? Eric?”

“Sure. So what?”

“Well he had it wired for surveillance—state-of-the-art stuff. There's a rig just like it at the Eel Point pile, but they were still installing it when he died.”

“So he was filming his son all the time?”

“HD video and surround sound, baby. “We were searching the place and we found the whole setup. We copied the files, burned them to a DVD—and boomp, it's a done deal.”

“Boomp?”

“I say boomp, you got a problem with that?”

“It's fine, Lonnie. What's on the disc?”

“Wait and see.”

“Let me guess. The brothers murdered him there and dragged the body back to the house.”

“Very funny.”

“What then?”

He walked over to my Blu-ray/monitor set up, grabbed the remote and set the DVD on the sliding tray. “This shit is definitely NSFW—not safe for work. But this is our work, you know what I mean? Which is one of the main reasons that we love our work! Am I right?”

I swiveled around in my desk chair to face the flat screen TV.

“Let's take a look at it.”

The screen went blue for a second, then we were watching a freeze-frame of Tanya Kriel and the Lomax brothers, sitting in the cramped living room of Eric's garage apartment. She was wearing a jeans and a Cutting Edge Painters T-shirt, that sported Mike Henderson's company logo: two brushes crossed under a bucket of paint

“The camera was hidden in the bookshelf,” Lonnie informed me. “Built into a dummy copy of
1984
.
You can't say Lomax didn't have a sense of humor.”

“I'm surprised they had books at all.”

“What a snob! Lots of killers read books. Some of ‘em even write books. Mao was a pretty good poet when he wasn't slaughtering everyone who looked at him funny.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Check it out.”

He hit “play” and Tanya said “You're stuck, both of you. You're going to talk about killing your father until you die and he goes to your funerals.”

“So what do you suggest?” Eric said, walking into the frame.

“Just do it.”

“And how are we supposed to get away with it?” Danny asked. He was sitting in a ratty armchair sideways to the couch where Tanya lounged, legs parted, one foot on the pillow.

“There are lots of poisons. I've been doing some research—poisons that take an hour or ten hours to do the job, poisons that break down in the bloodstream and ten hours later it looks like he died of a heart attack.”

Eric:“And where do get this stuff?'

“Online, obviously.”

Danny: “Poisons.com?”

“There are sites. If you know how to find them.”

“What are they?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. I don't trust you yet.”

Eric: “I don't know.”

Tanya stood. “Fine, whatever. You're right. I don't know what I was thinking about. This isn't fair. It's like asking a pair of paraplegics to carry me upstairs. It's pointless and it's mean…Sorry, boys. I'm outta here.”

She uncoiled herself from the couch and started for the door. Danny said, “No! We can do this.”

“You can act. You can be bold.”

“Yes.”

“You can take charge of a situation.”

Eric said “Fuck, yeah.”

“You can work together.”

Together: “Yeah.”

“You can stay out of each other's way.”

“Yeah.”

“You can have a three-way without crossing swords?”

Silence.

Danny, finally: “Wait, what?”

“Sex is the marker. It tells you everything about a person. That's why I do one-night stands, not first dates. You can bullshit on a date, show off, throw your money around, do your patented cool guy act. Everybody's got four or five hours' worth of that shit. But it all goes away when you're naked. Sloppy kissers are sloppy. Rough boys are bullies. If he calls you a bitch and a whore, chances are he means it. If he comes too soon don't count on him to keep it together any other time. If he won't go down on you, he's not going to come up with anything else you need. Trust me.”