Nantucket Sawbuck (3 page)

“Not my Mom, not directly, not stabbing and that stuff with the money and all that. She'd get Kevin to do it for her. She always gets someone else to do her dirty work. I bet he jumped at the chance.”

I scribbled Kevin's name, circled it and added a question mark. “You indicated that there might be other people who—”

“I wasn't the only one eavesdropping last night.”

Charlie Boyce closed his phone and started toward us. I held up a hand to stop him. He met my eyes, nodded and faded back to his position by the front door. Whatever he had to say could wait.

“Who else was there?” I asked Kathleen.

“The paint contractor, Mike Henderson. And he was with that girl.”

“Mike is married.” I said it automatically, but it sounded foolish even to myself. So Mike Henderson was cheating on his wife? Well, who wasn't? Extramarital sex was the island's primary indoor sport. I might as well have gotten huffy at people letting their dogs off the leash.

“He's not going to be married for long,” Kathleen said. “Not when his wife finds out.”

“Who was the girl?”

“Her name is Tanya Kriel.” She must have caught my startled look. “You know her?”

“We've met. Your brothers were fighting over her at the Chick Box a few nights ago.”

“That sounds right.”

“And you think she's a suspect?”

Kathleen took a deep breath and let it out with an exhausted shudder. I knew that particular fatigue: the dread tedium of explaining the obvious. How often had I said to one of my officers, “I shouldn't have to tell you this. You should know this stuff! You tell me!” That was the vexed impatience I heard in Kathleen's sigh. Maybe I was pushing too hard. Maybe we should continue this later, at the station.

But she forged on. “Her sister used to work for my family. I was away at school so I wasn't sure what happened. But there were fights about her. She got pregnant. Then she went away. Anna Kriel, that was her name.”

“Did she quit or get fired?”

“She died. I heard Dad say, ‘She went to the wrong abortionist.'”

“I'm sorry.”

“It was creepy. But that's how things happen in this family. You cause a problem and then you're gone. I could have told them it was crazy having her around. Dad was too rich, and she was way too pretty, especially in those little maids' outfits. She looked like a porn star. Seriously. And there's a word my dad invented, he was pretty funny sometimes. Nonogamy? He was like, ‘I don't do nonogamy.'”

“I'm not sure …”

“It means being sexually faithful to a woman who's not…you know. Who's not interested.”

“And your mother wasn't interested?”

Kathleen looked down. “She was interested in Kevin.”

I had to get her back on track. “So the sister gets knocked up and dies and then Tanya shows up. What? A year later?”

“Six months.”

“Quite a coincidence.”

That got a laugh out of her. “Right. What are the chances? She wasn't even trying to hide it. I heard her talking to Danny and Eric about how to kill people. She knows all the techniques. Poisons and stuff.”

“But your father was stabbed. So it was more likely to be Henderson.”

“Oh yeah, sure. That makes sense.”

“But why would he do it?”

“Well—Dad was going to stiff everyone—take off without paying. He was gloating about it after the party. We all heard him. Henderson freaked out. So I don't know. That's a pretty good motive. If Dad was dead, the estate would have to settle the outstanding bills.”

“Not in time to help anyone. If they were living paycheck-
to-paycheck.”

“I guess.”

I flipped a page in my notebook, mostly for effect. The message was, we're moving on. “Was there anyone else who might have held a grudge? Your father seems to have made a lot of people angry.”

She nodded. “You know how some people need to have harmony at any cost? I'm like that. I hate confrontations. But my dad was the opposite. He loved to fight. He loved pissing people off. He never lost an argument. He always had one more fact, you know? One more little piece of information. Even if he had to make it up on the spot.”

“So who was he fighting with?”

“Lately it was mostly the tradespeople. Pat Folger? Do you know him?”

I knew Pat, and I'd seen him rip into Lomax at the same Christmas party. That was one argument the tycoon didn't win. I nodded, scribbled the name. The notes made some people nervous and I used them that way when I needed to. But they were calming Kathleen down. She needed to know what she said was important.

“Pat has to pay all his sub-contractors, so I guess money is pretty tight for him right now. But some of the worker people are independent. Mike Henderson, and the plumber, and the electrician. They had to go to Dad directly. He was bragging about it at dinner one night—not having to pay Pat Folger his percentage, cutting out the middleman. Dad hates the middleman. I feel bad for those guys, asking him for money directly. I could barely get my allowance out of him. The electrician, Tom Danziger? He's a total sweetheart, despite the ‘I stand with Arizona' bumper sticker and all his second amendment blah blah. It just goes to show—politics don't mean anything. Some of the ickiest people I know are Democrats, sorry. Anyway, Tom helped me change a flat tire one day, in the rain no less, and the next time he saw me he said ‘you've cut your hair'. I took like two inches off. No one else even noticed.”

“He sounds like a good egg.”

“He told me, ‘If I don't get paid soon your Dad's going to own my company.'”

“Did he seem angry?”

“He seemed sad. He said people do this stuff all the time, they brag about not paying the final bill. I guess the idea is, like, all the tradesmen are ripping them off and over-charging, and the final bill is pure profit.”

“Right. Can't have mere tradesmen making a profit.”

That earned a quick brittle laugh. “Exactly. The plumber was really mad one day. I saw him slam the door on the way out but I don't even know his name. He's kind of scary, though. Can you tell who might have committed murder by things like that?”

“Not really. I wish we could.” There was a pause, then. She squinted in thought, like she was trying to remember a line from a movie or the tune of a song. “What?” I said.

“Speaking of scary guys …”

“Go on.”

“A big mean-looking guy came to the house last week and then drove off in this big black pick-up truck. I'd never seen him before.”

“He wasn't working on the house.”

“No,”

“Would you recognize him? Pick him out of a lineup?

“Oh yeah. Totally.”

“I may ask you to do that later. He won't be able to see you.”

“Okay.”

I was done. I closed the notebook. Charlie Boyce hoisted his phone and said. “Fraker's ten minutes out, Chief. More like five minutes, now.”

“I think I need a glass of water, or an aspirin or something,” Kathleen said. “Percocet would be good. No, seriously. Would that be all right? My Mom has some in her medicine chest.”

“That's fine. But I'd go easy on the Percocet, if you've been drinking.”

“I had like one glass of wine. And that was hours ago. I wish I had been drinking. I could use a drink right now.”

“That's probably not the best idea.”

“I know. I'm just going to get the stuff, okay?”

“Sure. But I'm going to send one of the officers up with you. If that's all right.”

“Sure, fine. Whatever.”

She pushed herself off the couch. I nodded to Charlie and he started upstairs behind Kathleen.

Kyle Donnelly came inside and walked over to a hutch with beveled glass doors. Various pieces of silver were displayed inside. “You'd think a burglar would take some of this stuff, Chief.”

I got up and walked over. “Tough to fence.”

“Still. Looks tempting to me. And no one says these boys were especially bright. You know what I mean? Chief?”

I was staring into the hutch. Something bothered me about the collection of silver pieces. They were laid out on four shelves: tankards, a tea service, bowls and spoons, little engraved boxes. The arrangement wasn't quite symmetrical. It was as if someone had shifted things around and failed to put them back properly.

“Something wrong, Chief?”

“I don't know. Make sure all this stuff gets printed.” I turned away from the hutch. “Let's see what else we've got here. I want to be ready when the state police show up. Any sign of Barnaby?”

“Not yet. But we got the break-in site. In the basement. Come on. I'll show you.”

We went down the basement steps. All the lights were on. At the bottom there was a small landing, with a storage area to the left and a big garage on the right. There was a window on either side of the garage door. The one on the left had a broken pane in the top sash, in front of the lock. “One of them could have gotten in here, a thin one.” It was a small window. “Then run upstairs and opened the place up for the others?”

I shook my head. “Where's the broken glass?”

“He picked it up?”

“Maybe.”

I hit the garage door control and it started grumbling up on its metal tracks. I pulled a flashlight off my belt and ducked outside. The light hit the shards of broken glass on the brown mulch below the window.

“I don't get it,” Charlie said.

“Sure you do.”

It took another moment, but finally Charlie nodded. He was a little sharper than Kyle Donnelly. “Oh. Yeah, okay. That's why the alarm didn't go off.”

“Talk to the girl. Get the mother on the phone. I want a list of everyone who had access to that alarm code.”

“Maybe it was just off for the night.”

“It's the most expensive system Intercity sells. It's wired with Cat-5 networking, motion detectors, glass break monitors, and they just got it hooked into the station. You don't have a system like that and not use it.”

Charlie shrugged. “I got a four hundred dollar a month gym membership and I don't use it.”

I stopped myself from making the obvious uncharitable reply. Instead I said: “I don't watch much cable TV, either. But this is different. Get me the names.”

“Okay.”

I patted Charlie's arm. “It's getting late. Let's check out the bedroom.”

I shut the garage door and we went back upstairs. The bedroom was closed off with yellow crime scene tape. I ducked under it, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. Charlie followed me.

“Move anything?,” I asked. “Touch anything?”

“Chief.”

“I mean it, Charlie.”

“So do I. This ain't Podunk.”

I smiled. “People who actually live in Podunk must spend their whole lives pissed off. The name just means hick town full of rubes and retards. There must be some bright people there thinking, ‘Hey, Des Moines ain't exactly Paris, either.'”

Charlie laughed nervously. It seemed disrespectful, but I knew better. In these death chambers you worked quickly and you made bad jokes. One SID tech I had known in L.A. sang Puccini arias while he worked. Death may have won but you wanted life to make a showing. That was what dignity meant to me. No puke, no despair, just shrug it off and do your job. Measure the spatter patterns. Examine the ligature marks. Check the hands for defensive injuries. Pace the scene off for droppings, for the bits and pieces the perpetrators left behind. It was Locardo's Exchange Principle, the fundamental axiom of police work. I had studied it at the Los Angeles Police Academy; Charlie had written a paper on it at John Jay College. Events leave traces, things rub off on each other, nothing moves without leaving a trail. So I always looked and then I looked again; and again. Sometimes I found nothing, or a weird little scrap of information that didn't fit, like the extra screw left over after assembling my son's Christmas bicycle. Other times I got lucky.

Like tonight.

I pulled a tweezers and a plastic evidence bag out of my coat jacket pocket, kneeled down and plucked the cigarette butt from where it was lying on the carpet, half-obscured by the dust ruffle of the king-sized bed. I stood, and extended it to Charlie. You could see the thin gold ring just above the filter.

“Look familiar?”

Charlie squinted at the cigarette. “I don't smoke, Chief. You know that.”

“But you think. That's what I pay you for.”

The edge in my voice seemed to wake him up a little.

“Lattimers',” he said. “It's like the cigarette we found at the Lattimers'.”

“Exactly. Camel Lights. If the DNA matches, we're closing in on them.”

“Thanks, Chief.”

“Thanks?”

“For not riding me about that comment I made at the Lattimers' house. ‘What are we supposed to do with that piece of information?' or something. Like it was nothing.”

“—I said ‘Remember it.' And you did.”

I looked around the room, noted the packed suitcases, three Louis Vuitton bags lined up in the corner of the room

Charlie followed my gaze. “Looks like this guy was getting ready for a trip,” he said. I nodded, walked to the closet and opened it. We both stared inside. It was empty.

“What the hell—?”

I smiled. “A little trip? I'd say he was making his getaway, Detective.”

I returned to the bed. “That's a screwdriver in his chest. It looks like one of those four-way tools they sell at the Marine Home Center front counter. Two sizes of flat head and Phillips on either end of a shaft that fits into the handle.”

“So?”

“So…for one thing this was a big strong guy because he only had one shot. It's in there deep and the screwdriver bit would have pulled loose coming out of the chest cavity. For another thing…Lomax owed a lot of people money, Charlie. Hundreds of people worked on this house. I've heard them talking: everyone's waiting for their last payment. And he's clearing out? Someone must have known he was splitting. Someone in the trades.” I thought about Mike Henderson, eavesdropping after the party. If he had told even one person what he'd heard, the news would have spread across the island like a case of strep throat through an elementary school. “Problem is, it could have been anyone. Everybody has a screwdriver in their toolbox. And that makes everybody a suspect. We need a list—everyone who worked on this house. Masons, plumbers, electricians, drywall hangers, plasterers, floor finishers, painters, the people who install the granite countertops and the custom cabinetry, landscapers, the people from Intercity alarm, the people who put in the sound system, the decorators, the wallpaper hangers…and am I forgetting anyone?”