Nantucket Sawbuck (30 page)

And this is who did it.

I knew everything now except the details. But there was no exhilaration, no thrill of victory—just the opposite. I felt trapped and defeated and sick, achy and nauseous as if I had actually caught pneumonia sitting in the snow all night. I was shivering. My hand was shaking. I lifted it off the table and watched it tremble. I was dizzy when I stood. I should call in sick, go to bed, sleep for the rest of the day. But I was perfectly healthy. And I had to finish this thing.

I pulled on my coat and left the house, slamming the door behind me.

Chapter Thirty-three

The Whole Truth

I drove to the hospital, to see the emergency room records for the night of the murder.

I had to do my job. I held onto that lifeline as I always had before. That was what kept me going. Miranda had never understood that—to her it was the job itself that poisoned my life. Maybe she had been right, after all. I spent every waking hour trying to find the truth and the truth was toxic. It was ugly. It ratified your suspicions and justified your fears. It made your most cynical moment look naive. People didn't hide the pretty parts of themselves.

“I prefer the surface of things,” Miranda had told me once. But not me. No, I had to dig things up and turn them over and see what was squirming in the crumbling filth on the underside.

I didn't need a warrant at the hospital. They were glad to print out the material for me. In L.A. it would have taken an extra three hours, finding a judge and convincing him to issue a court order.

“Are you sure you don't want to see a doctor, Chief?” the duty nurse asked me.

“I'm fine. Thanks.”

The records verified Haffner's story, but I had known they would.

I walked back out into the frigid late morning, climbed into my cruiser and set the papers on the seat beside me. I was reluctant to start the car. There was a finality about turning the ignition key. Once the engine was on, I was either driving or idling. I couldn't idle now and there was only one destination, once I started to drive.

When I got there, I parked in the dirt and walked around to the side door. Various pieces of snow-clad lawn furniture cluttered the deck, and a muddy track led to the sliding door. It opened into the big sunny kitchen. Fiona was at the table with her ledgers and her adding machine, writing up the month's invoices for the cleaning company. She was wearing blue jeans, heavy wool socks and a Rory Gallagher t-shirt (“The First Irish Rock Star”), which a friend of hers had designed when Gallagher died.

I watched her for a few seconds before she looked up. She smiled and pushed her chair back, stood and opened the door. I could feel the warmth of the house, the smell of recently toasted bread billowing out toward me invitingly. But I wanted to stay on the deck. I wanted to do this in the cold. It was childish. I dreaded going inside, like a kid in a Grimm's fairy tale. I jammed my eyes closed for a second. There was no gingerbread here, just shingles and peeling white paint. Fiona was no witch. There was nothing to be afraid of. But still I hesitated.

“Henry? Are you all right?”

That voice, that lovely accent, broke the stasis.

“I know what you did,” I said. “And I know exactly how you did it. But I don't know why.”

“Henry, what are you talking about, what are you trying to—”

“We can do this here or we can do it at the police station. It's up to you. But if we do it there, you won't be leaving for a long time. I won't be able to help you. If I even decide I want to. Once you're in custody it's out of my hands.”

“I—”

“It's over, Fiona. Just tell me the truth.”

She stepped back and I followed her into the house. She walked with her arms crossed in front of her chest, fingertips pressed to her elbows, binding herself together. We wound up in the living room. Neither of us sat down.

“I'll go first,” I said. “So there won't be any misunderstanding. You disabled the alarms at the Lomax house on the night of the murder. It took longer than you thought because Kathleen came back from dinner and you had to wait for her to leave. When you got back to the benefit you set the grandfather clock to 10:55 and made sure you were photographed in front of it. That was a shrewd idea and it would have worked except that one of the people in the picture with you didn't get to the party until eleven thirty. I have the emergency room records to prove it. None of the other people in the picture had access to the alarm codes, and two of them got into a fight while you were gone. That's what I know. What I think is this. You were having an affair with Nathan Parrish. You lied about it and I believed you. He tried to scare me off the case last night, but it backfired. He wanted Lomax dead and he paid those punks to pull the trigger. He got you involved and now you're looking at an accessory charge in a first-degree murder indictment. How am I doing so far? Pretty close? Because we're talking twenty years to life if you're convicted. I'd love to hear you say I'm wrong, but we'd both know you were lying. And one more lie is all it would take to end this conversation and this conversation is all you have left.”

I stared at her. She looked away. An ambulance passed on Bartlett Road, heading for the hospital. We listened to the diminishing two note wail. Someone was sick, someone was dying. And inside me, the final doubt fell, like the last frail tree in a fire-gutted forest, tipping soundlessly into the ash. Even hectoring her just now, I had half-expected a flash of that Irish temper, an angry rebuttal that would have set things right.

But her voice was quiet when she spoke. “I don't know where to begin.”

“Start with Parrish and Lomax. They were in business together. What was the problem?”

She looked up at me at last. I could see she was going to talk now. I had seen the look before. I had no tape recorder. I hadn't Mirandized her. She hadn't availed herself of an attorney and no attorney had been appointed for her. Nothing she said could be used against her in a court of law.

That was all right, though. I just wanted to hear it.

“Nathan knew Lomax was in trouble,” Fiona began. “He had to do something about it. Ten years ago, Nathan was about to close a major deal, a hotel chain that was supposed to be fronted by a famous quarterback. The deal hinged on this athlete, but he died in a plane crash and the deal went down with him. Nathan lost millions. Or so he says. Anyway, he was determined not to repeat that catastrophe. “Only new mistakes,” that's one of his favorite expressions. Once I told him, “There are so many mistakes, you could make a dozen a day and never repeat yourself. I was right about that.”

She shrugged. “This conversation proves it.”

“Go on.”

“The deal he wrote insured that if Lomax was dead or incapacitated, the Moorlands Mall project would revert to LoGran's corporate control. If Lomax was arrested, if he was a fugitive, the deal would have collapsed in the blink of an eye. LoGran has stockholders to answer to. Well, something Lomax said at the party set Nathan off. I don't know what it was. You'll have to ask him. He slipped upstairs “for a little recon,” that's how he put it, and indeed all the bags were packed. The mortgage button that Lomax was so proud of, the one that was supposedly being inscribed with the family crest? It was in one of the suitcases, in a jewelry box. That tore it. Lomax was about to bolt. And if he escaped we were finished.”

“We?”

“Henry, please. Do we have to—”

“Just tell me, Fiona. No, no, forget it. I'll tell you. Parrish was your ticket out. He was going to save you and your whole crazy family. But he needed the Moorlands Mall money to do it. Then I came along and that was inconvenient. Whatever you felt for me, you knew I couldn't pay off the debts and pony up the legal fees. I wasn't going back to Ireland. I had my own family to take care of. I was the wrong guy. Maybe you loved me, but it didn't matter. You had one shot to get what you wanted, and that shot was Parrish. You were in too deep to say no. He needed some muscle and one of your girls was dating a crooked cop. Jesse was part of Delavane's gang and you'd overheard enough in the last few weeks to know that Lomax owed Delavane some serious drug money. Everyone who knew Delavane knew he was capable of murder. It was a perfect match. You hooked him up with Parrish. Let me guess. Lomax owed Delavane twenty thousand dollars.”

Fiona sat down at the edge of the couch. He voice was so quiet I could hardly hear her. “No. It was ten. Nathan paid him double.”

“Lomax must have told Parrish about hooking the alarm into the police station. It's rich guy chitchat. My alarm is bigger than your alarm. So he knew it had to be turned off. And you had the codes. You took the porringer that night, but that didn't screw things up. You knew the only person who cared about it would be dead by the next morning. And if anyone noticed it was gone, you had your cover story all worked out. It was a neat little story. I believed it.”

“Because you wanted to. That's the clever liar's trick, don't you know? Be sure to tell people something they want to hear.”

I pushed on. “So, you and Parrish worked out the plan on the fly, but it was pretty good. If Jesse had quit smoking like he kept swearing he was going to, and Bob Haffner had ordered a burger instead of clams that night, you'd have gotten away with it. Then when the Moorlands Mall deal closed, it would have been off to Ireland as Mr. and Mrs. Parrish. That would have been quite a homecoming. The Prodigal Daughter returns, with the rich white knight in tow. They say money doesn't solve problems, but you know better, don't you?”

“I—”

“When you disabled the alarm that night, you knew you were helping to kill a man. How could you do that? What goes through your mind? I don't get it.”

Fiona looked up. “People die every day, Henry. And this one won't be missed.”

The urge to slap her pulsed through me like a wave, rising and subsiding. I stood very still. “Yes he will. He will be missed. His daughter misses him. You're a daughter. How tough is that one to figure out?”

“He hurt her, he would have hurt her again. Lomax wasn't ashamed. He bragged about it. He was a bad man, Henry. The world is better off without him.”

“Really? Well, that's exactly the logic Lomax would have used. That's the way his mind worked. Welcome to the club, Fiona. Your fellow members have been turning this world to shit since the first Neanderthal killed the last Cro-Magnon, just because he could.”

Fiona pushed at the tops of her thighs, squeezing the knees of her jeans. She seemed to be trying out answers and discarding them. Twice, three times, she looked like she was about to speak, but she said nothing. I felt the walls closing in on me, the mustard yellow paint starting to flake around the windows, the white shades closed against the winter sunlight and the constant buzz of traffic from Bartlett Road, the shelves of shabby romance paperbacks with their lurid artwork, their simplicities and shameless, pandering happy endings, the air of tired melodrama and contrivance they exuded along with the smell of old glue and yellowing paper; the bad paintings of whaling ships and seascapes hanging slightly crooked, always. It was suffocating. It was giving me asthma. Maybe there were mold spores under the rug. The place was old. You could keep it neat but you could never get it clean. The dirt was ingrained. The silence was impacted.

I had nothing more to say. I turned to leave.

“What are you going to do?” she asked me.

I paused at the door.” I don't know.”

And then I walked out.

Chapter Thirty-four

The Verdict

I drove through the drab mid-island clutter, past the gas stations and the Stop & Shop, around the rotary and out the Milestone Road, my cruiser aimed at the east end of the island. People slowed when I came up behind them. No one could drive properly with a police car in their rearview mirror. No one wanted to be pulled over. Everyone was guilty about something. They weren't inspected or they weren't registered or they weren't insured. They all had unpaid traffic tickets and parking tickets jammed into their glove compartments.

A Range Rover Discovery was right in front of me now, with sand in its tire-treads and no beach permit sticker. Probably no rope or boards in the back, either. I wanted to arrest them all, revoke their licenses, impound their cars, and lock them up.

I finally put my flashers on, stamped on the gas, and snarled past a long line of SUVs crawling behind a front-end loader. It was heading for a job site, probably one of the new lots out on Rugged Road. More forest leveled, more suburban sprawl, more properties for real estate brokers to sell each other. I kept the flashers on and drove fast until the procession was no longer visible behind me. Several people pulled over, adrenaline spiking sourly no doubt, hoping to be let off with a warning for whatever it was they knew they shouldn't have been doing. Good. Let them sweat. Let them fear the law for a few seconds. They might learn something from it.

I turned on to New South Road. It only stretched for a couple of hundred yards, and high school kids routinely used it as a drag strip, pushing the speedometer needle as far as they could before Milestone Road at one end or the chain link airport gate at the other forced them to slow down. It was a tempting stretch of dead-end asphalt, and I gave in to it now, hitting eighty before I had to touch the brakes, just another scofflaw. Part of me wanted to keep the gas pedal pressed to the floor, drive through the fence and keep on driving, until I buried the big cop car in the sea.

Instead I took a left onto the rutted dirt road that led into the Madequecham Valley. It was almost impassable at this time of year; they wouldn't bother to grade it again until the wealthy homeowners showed up in the spring. The Crown Victoria bucked and undulated over the gullies and craters. It took me almost twenty minutes to reach the turn-off that led to the beach.

I thought of Fiona on the Squam Road, the night Lomax was killed. This kind of driving took patience. She had probably rushed, leaving the party, racking the suspension on some of the deeper furrows of frozen mud. She would have taken her time on the way back, though, her mission accomplished and her plan all figured out, with the porringer, her little trophy, on the seat beside her. All she was going to need was a few seconds unobserved to reset the clock. Everyone was drunk by then. It would be easy. And it had been. Everything had gone perfectly. The fall guys had taken the fall. The trial was set to begin just after the New Year.

This line of thinking wasn't getting me anywhere. What was done was done. The mistakes were permanent. The consequences were non-negotiable. Rehashing it all could only distract me and I had to think clearly now.

I parked in the dirt lot and walked the narrow beaten path through the brambles and bayberry to the edge of the cliff. I loved this view. The bluff was only twenty feet above the sand but it seemed higher. You could see the broad beach in both directions and the wind-scoured ocean stretching away to Portugal. The waves were big today and the water was an unwelcoming gray under the milling sky. There were no picnickers, no surfers, no one clamming or fishing. The few houses I could see were closed for the season, boarded up against the northeast wind. It was a harsh place this time of year, solitary and abandoned. I was the only living presence, the single ember of human consciousness at the edge of the world.

I thought about Parrish and Fiona. I could turn them both in, give the new evidence to Ken Carmichael, send them to jail and disgrace them. They certainly deserved it. I could let Carmichael and the Lonnie Fraker take the credit. They'd owe me big-time then, and if Ken Carmichael rode this case into the governor's office the value of that debt would be multiplied a hundredfold, for me and for Nantucket. We'd have a little savings account of goodwill in the State House for as long as Carmichael held office.

It was one of those rare moments when duty and self-interest coincided, and you could actually be rewarded for doing the right thing.

But arresting Parrish and Fiona wouldn't help the people Lomax cheated, or protect the island from the Moorlands Mall. I was in a unique position at this moment. I could do much more than attend to the formalities and complete the paperwork of punishment in triplicate.

I could dispense justice.

I had earned the right by working the case harder than anyone else. They had settled for the easy answers, I hadn't. Closing was all they cared about, getting the conviction, putting the notch in their belts, beefing up the solved-case statistics. One more in the plus column, as they inched closer to their end-of-the-year bonus. But it wasn't just that. The courts performed the simple tasks they were designed for—indict, convict, sentence…and eventually parole. It wasn't enough. The law was designed to punish perpetrators, that was the real problem. And it was useless now, because the perpetrators didn't matter anymore. This wasn't about them, it was about everybody else. It was about this town and the people who lived here. My job was to take care of them. And I was going to do it. That was all I cared about.

Everything else was covering your ass and smiling for the cameras, the easy way out and the route of least resistance.

I watched one more massive wave reach up until it was concave. The thick gray ledge thundered down and the white water churned toward the shore.

It was time to find Nathan Parrish.

It took me a while. Parrish was with a surveying team at the south east edge of his parcel in the Shawkemo Hills, deep in the Middle Moors just east of the Pout Ponds. These vast expanses of rolling heath made the claims that Nantucket had been overbuilt and developed to death seem absurd, ignorant, arrogant. This was truly wild land. Even the narrow dirt roads seemed always on the verge of being swallowed by the dense bushes that crowded them and scraped the sides of your car, if you tried to avoid potholes. I had the “Nantucket pinstripes” on my Jeep—now the moors were going to mark my police cruiser, also.

I was still driving too fast. One particularly deep gouge in the dirt slammed my head into the roof as the big car bottomed out. I slowed down, and skidded a little on a patch of ice.

Parrish was standing in a froth of bearberry and false heather in a cleared section of brush near the eastern tip of the smallest of the Ponds. Spray-paint marked this corner of the property; the surveyors had their tripods set up and were taking laser scan measurements. Cars were parked tilted sideways off the narrow road. I found a spot behind a new Jeep Grand Cherokee. Everyone looked busy and professional except Parrish, who was hovering behind the surveyors and probably just annoying everyone.

Parrish saw me and waved. I walked over.

“Chief Kennis,” Parrish bellowed. “Good to see you. The stuff you're walking on is called poverty grass. Fitting name for it, don't you think? The first thing we're going to do is plow it all under. You see what I'm saying? It's a symbol, Chief. You know, the Indian lore says these ponds were made by some mystical giant. They're his footprints, filled with water, supposedly.” He waved his arm to include a vast swath of land. “Well, this is my footprint. I'm the new giant. And I'll have a new legend. That's what progress means, my friend. My footprint is going to be filled with money.”

I stared at him. “Like your friend's throat?”

“What?”

“That was your idea wasn't it? I don't give Delavane that much credit.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You'll have to do better than that, Parrish. The crime scene was described in the newspaper. Everyone on this island knows what I'm talking about.”

“Yes, but you seem to be implying—”

“Wrong. I'm not implying anything. I'm stating the facts.”

“Wait one moment. You can't just show up out of nowhere and start—”

“Of course I can. Let's take a walk. You're going to want the privacy.”

I started back along the packed dirt, away from the parked cars. After a few seconds, Parrish followed me.

“Fiona told me everything,” I said. “But I still have a few questions. Why did a mortgage button clinch it for you that Lomax was running?”

“You talked to Fiona?”

“Her alibi didn't hold up. Possibly for the first time ever, it was actually in her best interest to tell the truth. So she did. But there are still some gaps, some things she couldn't tell me. Why the mortgage button?”

“I don't have to talk to you.”

“But you are. You're talking to me, Parrish. Because you think there's some way out. And maybe there is. But first I need some answers.”

Parrish stopped walking. “You're wearing a wire.”

I coughed out a contemptuous laugh. “Don't be paranoid. I'd need a court order to record this conversation. It would all be on the record and there'd be no point in having it. No, this is just between you and me. At least for now.”

We started walking again, eyes on the rutted path in front of us, walled on either side by the dense, thorn-spiked bushes. You didn't see too many tourists out here. Once was usually enough for them. Well, that was going to change, if Parrish had his way: this whole area was set to be cleared and paved for the Moorlands Mall parking lot.

“Come on,” I said finally. “The mortgage button. Explain it to me.”

I wasn't watching the other man but I could feel him shrug. I knew this moment; it happened in every successful interrogation. The subjects gave up.

“That button meant a lot to him,” Parrish said. “Maybe he had started to buy his own bullshit, lord of the manor, country squire with the account at The Pearl, and the Hummer in the driveway. Like he had arrived finally. It was a trick, a con game. I know that. He knew it, too. But the place had started getting to him. It gets to people, Chief. They come for a weekend and never leave. That button was who he wanted to be. Listen to this. A year ago, he paid some hotshot genealogist more than fifty thousand dollars to research his family tree. He didn't like the results so he fired the guy and stiffed him on the last payment. Sound familiar? He was a vengeful little prick and the biggest fucking snob I ever met. I knew he wouldn't leave here without that button. Maybe I was wrong. But he'd been giving me the runaround all night, and the way he lied about the scrimshaw and all that bothered me, too. It was so slick. He'd worked it all out. You see what I'm saying? Why bother? If it wasn't important. So I gave Fiona her marching orders, and you know the rest.”

“How did you know I was still on the case?”

Parrish raised his eyebrows inquiringly, then nodded. “Oh, the phone call. I was talking to Rafael Osona…one of those ‘it used to be nice on Nantucket' conversations. He used you as an example. He couldn't imagine the police going through his auction records in the old days. I knew what you had to be looking for. I saw you at the VFW Hall. When I found out Fi had taken that porringer, I lost it. All right? I screamed so hard I went hoarse. But she came right back at me and it was all just talk anyway because we couldn't put it back. But you were sniffing around. So I thought I'd throw a scare into you. Make you back off.” He shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

We walked in silence for a while. I watched a pair of ringtail hawks, circling above us.

“So what's the deal?” Parrish said at last.

I said nothing. I had been on some kind of high when I conceived this plan, but I was coming down hard.

“It's okay,” Parrish said. “I have a pretty good idea. This is the end-game. There aren't too many options left, for any of us. So how about this—I pay off the people Lomax stiffed, and drop the Moorlands Mall and we all walk away happy.”

I was startled into silence.

Parrish read my look perfectly.” Come on, Chief. I'm not psychic. What else was it going to be? I'm a businessman. I know how to do business. So, anyway, as far as the case goes—it looks like a classic ‘he-said-she-said' between me and Fiona, but I have a motive. I
wrote it into contracts myself. I knew about the alarm changeover. And Delavane might recognize my voice. Not to mention your testimony. Even if I got a great lawyer and managed to walk, I'd still be ruined. I mean, let's face it, this is America, where you're guilty until you're proved innocent. And even after you're proved innocent. DeLorean was acquitted of those narcotics charges. But everyone remembers him as the creep who sold drugs to finance his car company. They'd know I did it, too—and they'd be right. If it comes to trial, I'm fucked either way. So how about it? We do this deal, nobody gets hurt. Fiona walks. All the little people get rescued. No Moorlands Mall. And you get the pleasure of seeing me in bankruptcy court. But I can start again, which might be tough from a prison cell. And don't believe what you hear about those ‘country club' prisons, Chief. It's impossible to get a decent tee time and they're letting in just about anyone these days. Kind of like the Nantucket yacht club.” He grinned at his little joke, and stuck out his hand. “Do we have a deal? Cause if we do, let's shake on it. I'm busy today and you've got me running behind.”

We stood like that for perhaps twenty seconds, facing each other across the dirt path, the air between us dense and cold, grained by the thin snow. I saw myself in the mirror of the other man's smile. There was an assumed understanding there: we were both part of the same casual fraternity of corruption, above the law or just beyond it, writing our own rules.