Nantucket Grand (7 page)

We sat in silence for a few moments while Alana caught her breath and I fought down the urge to go out and arrest these people, praying they'd resist arrest, and sweat them until I got the rest of the names and then book them all and scrub them off the island, like you'd tent a house for termites.

“Jill must have been planning to go to the police. They found out and gave her an overdose.”

I stared at her. “That's attempted murder.”

She didn't look away. “That's why I'm scared.”

“You can't know that.”

“No.”

“It could be a coincidence.”

“Maybe, but—”

“You don't trust coincidences.” I nodded. “Well, cops hate them.”

“So…?”

“Jesus, Alana.” I ran both hands through my hair and squeezed my temples hard with my forearms. This was exactly the kind of horrific bullshit I had come to Nantucket to escape. This was big city stuff, L.A. stuff. But it was following me, like one of those dogs in the movies that sniff their way across the country chasing after their owner, having adventures and getting reunited at the end. Except this dog had rabies and needed to be put down—pronto, as Sam Trikilis would say.

I decided to get the conversation back on track. “You were out at the Thayer place today. How does that fit in?”

“I—this sounds crazy.”

I offered a reassuring smile. “You and Jared are the only sane parts of this story, so far.”

“Okay, well…I started following Chick Crosby. Alana Trikilis, girl detective. But I didn't know what else to do and I had to do something.”

“Why Chick?”

“I guess…he seemed the most harmless, and he had to be the one actually making the movies, he has all the equipment. Plus, he's so clueless and into his own head I knew he'd never notice. I mean, you wave to him in the street and he doesn't notice. So anyway…I started watching his house whenever I could, nights when I told my dad I was at friends' houses studying, and weekends, and whenever he went anywhere I trailed him.”

“Go on.”

“One night I followed him to that house and I peeked in the windows and saw him setting up cameras and lights in the bedroom, and I got really scared and I was going to run but the others showed up. They had this girl, Emily Trott, with them. I sort of knew her, we were on the basketball team last year but we both dropped out. Guys were stamping around the house and I lay flat in the bushes, my heart was beating so loud I was sure they could hear it and I was trying not to breathe, but it was a really windy night, so…finally they were all inside and I realized this was my chance so I filmed everything they did with my iPhone.”

“You're crazy.”

“Yeah. They caught me. They must have seen light reflecting on the screen or something. Blount and the rich guy came out and grabbed me and I was screaming but there was no one around to hear it and Blount said they should give me a shot of heroin right there and then, like he had threatened before, but McAllister called him a ‘stupid thug' and said, ‘I have a better idea.' He took my phone and smashed it and said ‘Now she has nothing.' And I just ran.”

I let her catch her breath. “But you went back. You were out at the house looking for evidence.”

She nodded. “They burned the place just in time.”

I took a pad out of my desk drawer and made a few notes, more to let a little air into our conversation than anything else. I wasn't likely to forget a word she said.

I looked up from my pad. “How much of this did you tell Mr. Phelan?”

“Nothing. None of it. I mean, I told him what was going on, but he freaked out on me so bad and I just got out of there. I thought he might kill somebody himself. I mean—what if it was the wrong person? Or, even if it was the right person, that's totally whacked. That's crazy.”

I nodded. “Good. I'm glad. You did the right thing. No contact with him since?”

She shook her head. “I don't know what to do now.”

“Leave it to the police. It's a police matter.”

“But if—I don't see what you can…the evidence is gone, the people are mostly bigshots who'd laugh at you if you accused them of anything.”

“Not all of them.”

“No, but—come on. Someone like Doug Blount? He's ten times more scared of McAllister than he is of the police. All he has to do is stonewall. He could accuse you of slander and he'd probably win.”

“Unless the victims come forward.”

“But they won't. Jill's in a coma and Emily's parents are shipping her off to some boarding school in Maine. I don't know who the other girls are. But I know one thing for sure—they're too embarrassed to go to the police. No one wants to admit this stuff—being addicted to drugs and—all the rest of it. So it's hushed up and the house where they did it is gone, and who knows where the films are. On some flash drive somewhere, which you'd need a warrant to even look at and you could never get a warrant on hearsay from some girl.”

The diatribe wound down. I blew out a breath while she took one. “You've obviously thought about this a lot.”

“It's all I've been thinking about. For weeks.”

“Could you get Mason to come forward? If he corroborated your story…”

“No way.”

“Maybe I could talk to him.”

“He's too scared. He'll just deny everything. He told me so.”

“How about Jared?”

She shook her head. “Those people could ruin his father. He does most of his work for Brad Thurman. And it's the same for my dad. One word and his whole 'Sconset route goes to Myles Reis. McAllister is Dad's customer and they're all pals on Baxter Road, and my dad doesn't have a ten-customers-more-or-less, easy-come, easy-go lifestyle. Sorry. I'm not going to wreck his business to make some useless point and turn myself into a bigger loser than I already am, for nothing. I'm just not.”

“I could talk to Jared anonymously.”

She stared at me. “They saw him that night. Not just me. Maybe I didn't make that clear. They know who he is. ‘Anonymous' doesn't work around here, anyway, Chief Kennis. Everyone knows everything about everybody. That's why I didn't say anything before. That's why I was trying to…to do things on my own.”

“But you're going to stop that now. Because you understand how dangerous it is.”

“I guess.”

“I need you to be certain about this, Alana.”

“Okay, okay. I'll leave it alone. I will.”

“Thank you.” Time to move on. I had an arson fire to investigate. “Tell me about the house. Was it deserted when you got there?”

“It was burning when I got there. I looked inside and I could see the curtains flaming in the living room. And the couch. It was really smoky. I tried to get in but the doors were locked.”

“Really?”

“I know. Nobody locks their doors around here. I don't even have a key to my own house. My dad must have one somewhere but he never uses it.”

“You said doors…so you tried the back door, too?”

“Yeah and the bulkhead. The whole place was locked up tight.”

“So when you ran around to the back…did you see anything—or anyone suspicious?”

“Just Mr. Toland—and Mike Henderson. They were shouting at each other. When we were leaving I saw the newspaper guy, Mr. Trezize? And some crazy old man—could he have set the fire?”

I thought about David Lattimer. The only way he could set a fire would be smoking his pipe in bed. It was a class issue for him. Felonies were for the
hoi polloi.
I remembered him quoting with evident relish Winston Churchill's response to his first view of real poverty, after touring the East End of London during an early campaign: “How strange it must be! Never to see anything beautiful, never to eat anything delicious…never to say anything clever.” Snobs like Lattimer didn't burn down a house, they filed suit with the Boston Land Court to have it taken by eminent domain.

I shook my head. “Not likely.”

“I know Mike Henderson didn't do it. That's a painter's worst nightmare—setting a house on fire.”

“Yeah, Mike's no arsonist. How about the other guy?”

“I talked to him. He's a movie director. He was scouting locations, taking pictures. That's what he said. He had a really expensive-looking camera. If he wanted to burn down a house he'd wait until he was shooting his movie. I mean, if there was a fire in his movie. Why waste it? Like in
Gone With the Wind
when they burned down all those sets at the MGM studio.”

I nodded, thinking: I want to take a look at those photographs.

“Let's go back a little further. How did you get to the house? Were you driving? Walking?”

“I was riding my bicycle. It's a Specialized mountain bike. I can go anywhere with it.”

“That's good. People in cars don't really look around that much—they're just staring at the road in front of them. Bikers pay attention. They're actually in the environment. That's the whole point.”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

“So what did you see?”

“I don't know…the usual—hawks and cardinals and turkey buzzards, lots of bushes. Some beer cans and paper cups. Someone had dumped an old refrigerator out there.”

“The actual dump is taking them for free right now.”

“I know but…this one looked like it had been there for a long time. The door was off and I think something was nesting in it.”

“Anything else?”

“Not really.”

“No traffic?”

She sat up a little. “I almost got driven off the road by some jerk.”

“Which way was he coming?”

“Right at me.”

“So he could have been coming from the house.”

She took a quick breath, contemplating that idea. “Wow. You really think so?”

“What kind of vehicle? SUV? Truck?”

“It was a black Ford F-150. A new one. I didn't get the license plate.” She must have caught my skeptical look—everyone watches the cop shows. She'd be dusting for fingerprints next. “No, really, I tried! I wanted to get the number. I wanted to report the guy. He was going like forty miles an hour on those dirt roads. I hope he bottomed out or hit a deer or something. Asshole.”

I pushed my chair back. “Okay. Thanks, Alana. You've been a huge help.”

“But nothing's going to happen to those people.”

“Something's already happened. Their secret is out. And like you said—there's nothing anonymous on Nantucket. They tried to scare you, but they can't be sure you won't go to the police, anyway. You were a witness to the fire and there were other witnesses. That's an open arson investigation. Jill Phelan could wake up tomorrow, and her father's on the rampage. Apart from everything else, their little soundstage just burned down with all their equipment in it. They may be safe, but for the moment they're out of business. They're not going to be making any more movies for a while.”

“I guess.”

“And by the time they do poke their heads up out of whatever hole they've climbed into, I might have enough evidence to put them away. Thanks to you.”

“The Ford?”

“The new black F-150. How many of those can there be on the island?”

“Lots?”

“We'll track it down, don't worry. And I'll have my boys keep an eye on you for the next few weeks. Cruise by the house from time to time. Make sure you're safe.”

“Can you really do that?

“I have a lot of officers and a lot of cars. We may actually outnumber the criminals right now.”

I stood up and she did, too. The interview was over. “Okay, great,” she said. “That would be really nice. Thank you.” She extended her arm across the desk awkwardly and I shook her hand. “I really want you to catch these guys.”

“Me, too.”

***

Lattimer was next, but he had little to add: he'd seen the fire from his house and called 911. No one at the station took it that seriously—he had called the emergency number twice before in the last couple of weeks, both false alarms. A possibly senile old man freaking out about non-existent “prowlers” didn't strike anyone as a major law-enforcement priority. But other calls, several to the fire department, got everyone moving. Lattimer had an excellent vantage point—the Thayers were his neighbors. They owned a huge parcel, mostly undeveloped, and he hadn't seen any of them since the summer. After he called in the alarm, he stumped across the property line to have a look at the blaze, as anyone might have done.

“It's December on Nantucket, Chief Kennis. There's not much else to do, and very little in the way of entertainment.” He saw no one and nothing suspicious, but he wasn't looking for anything, either.

Mark Toland, the film director, was equally unhelpful, though he promised to e-mail me the photographs he'd taken at the scene.

Chapter Eight

Witness Interviews:
Mike Henderson and David Trezize

Mike Henderson clarified the situation for me.

“Am I a suspect again?” He walked into the office. A nasty combination of motive, opportunity, and the apparent lack of an alibi had put him in my sights a couple of years ago, but only briefly.

“No, no—not at all. But I have to ask…what brought you out to the middle of the moors on a cold winter day?”

“It was personal.”

“Bad answer, Mike. Most serious crimes turn out to be personal, one way or the other.”

“So, I am a suspect.”

“Not unless you turn yourself into one.”

We studied each other across the desk.

Finally he said, “I really don't want to talk about this.”

“Think of me as your Father Confessor.”

“So everything I tell you is secret? Nothing leaves this room?”

“Unless you do actually incriminate yourself.”

“Embarrass myself, maybe. But that's it.”

“Then you're fine.”

I let a silence trundle by, like a line of traffic inching past some road construction. Finally I lifted my hands, palms up, eyebrows raised along with a half-smile, as if to say “So?”

“I'm not sure where to start.”

“How about the middle?”

He laughed, more out of surprise than amusement. “Okay. I was following Mark Toland.”

“You know him?”

“Not exactly.”

Then I remembered. I'd been flailing around, trying to hit the dangling light-switch string in a dark bathroom. Now I grabbed it and yanked it, and the light came on. “Cindy was staying with him at the Sherry Netherland hotel the night Preston Lomax was killed. You were supposed to be in New York with her, but you were staying at your customer's brownstone.”

He stared at me. “How can you possibly remember that?”

“Are you kidding? It was the best non-alibi ever. You couldn't account for one second of your time off-island. That was a record.”

He started to speak. “I mean—you couldn't prove anything. No paper trail at all. It was amazing.”

“That's one word for it. I was scared shitless.”

“So let me fill this in for you. Cindy came back, and you thought it was over, and then he shows up on-island two years later and Cindy's been a little distant lately, with the toddler wearing her out every day, and you see this guy, or read an e-mail you shouldn't have, or hear the end of a phone call—”

“The name was on her phone. He's on her contact list.”

“So you were stalking him.”

He shrugged. “Basically. There was a text about his flight time. Cindy didn't meet the plane. Maybe she was having second thoughts. I haven't really talked to her about this yet. Anyway, I was there and I was just…keeping track of him.”

“Well, he's gone now.”

“Hopefully for good.”

“Hopefully.”

We sat in silence for a few seconds. “Do you know what happened at the house?” Mike asked. “Was it arson? Were there painters working there? A pile of thinner rags or a bag of floor sanding dust with all that urethane in it…?”

“That's what we're trying to find out. State investigators are flying in to look the place over. I'm asking questions like—did you see anything today, notice anything unusual, or…?”

“No, sorry. I was just watching Toland. I'd make a shitty detective.”

***

David Trezize had an equally embarrassing reason for his trip to the moors that day. But, unlike Mike Henderson, he actually enjoyed talking about it. As a newspaper editor, he knew a good story, and he appreciated a funny one, especially when he was the butt of the joke.

David sat down in the chair facing my desk, rumpled and unshaven, looking as though he'd been up all night in the basement office of his little newspaper, which he probably had, with deadline one day away, despite all the writers he had recently poached from
The
Inquirer and Mirror.
“No matter how many writers I steal, I still have to do all the work,” he said. “Anyway, I was spending some of my extremely limited free time out at the Thayer property because of my ex-wife's diary, so I really should start by telling you why I was reading it in the first place.”

“Are you sure you feel comfortable doing that?”

“Who else can I talk to? Kathleen wouldn't want to hear it, that's for sure.”

I could understand why David would want to conceal his stubborn obsession with Patty from Kathleen Lomax. The daughter of the island's most prominent murder victim, she had fallen in love with David and saved his newspaper from the old man's efforts to destroy it, bailing the business out financially after Preston Lomax died. David owed her a lot. She didn't deserve to suffer through his irrational adolescent crush on the ex-wife. It wasn't even love in any ordinary sense. Like so many stalker types—and he was turning himself into one—David needed to remain part of Patty's life, to be fully included in his own exclusion, in complete control of his own helplessness. I'd felt a twinge of that when I first got divorced, but it passed like a twenty-four-hour virus. David had a full-blown case, complete with the fever and the body aches.

“I was okay until I heard that Grady was moving in with her,” he said.

In the last year, over half a dozen five-dollar burger nights at Kitty Murtagh's, I'd gotten a fairly complete picture of David's Grady Malone problem.

Grady Malone was an architect, the glamour architect of the island. He'd built notoriously stark corporate headquarters and prize-winningly lavish private homes. He'd designed every house in a gated community on Prince Edward Island. He had moved to Nantucket to relax, but had built a huge practice in less than five years. He designed the Preston Lomax mansion on Eel Point Road, and he was supposed to be the favored architect for several huge residential developments on the island, none of which had materialized yet.

Grady had taught at Stanford and RISDE, worked on Habitat for Humanity with Jimmy Carter. He had consulted with Frank Gehry on the Guggenheim Museum in Barcelona and had a design in the finals for the New York 9/11 memorial. He had the casual air of having seen and done it all, and the irritating fact (you had to admit it) was that he actually had seen and done quite a lot. More than most people; much more than pudgy, plodding David Trezize, for example—as Patty took every opportunity to point out.

“Why can't you be more like Grady?,” Patty would ask, after Grady had calmly but forcefully ejected a drunken heckler from a lecture at the Unitarian Church, hooked up their Blu-ray player to the television, or cooked them his famous Osso Buco.

He had no good answer, so Patty divorced him and started dating Grady. It wasn't quite that simple, but it seemed that way sometimes.

This new rumor of cohabitation had pushed David over the edge, which was why he broke into her house and read her diary.

“Are you sure you want to be telling this part to a police officer?” I asked him gently.

“It wasn't breaking and entering! I used to live there! I have a key.”

“I thought you told me she changed the locks.”

“Yeah, and she hides the new key under the same old shingle. That's high security! Like putting your money in your shoe when you go for a swim at the beach. Come on.”

“Sorry. So you found the new key and let yourself in.”

“I don't even know what I was looking for exactly—some sign of Grady—an extra toothbrush in the bathroom, or his brand of beer in the fridge. He drinks Stella Artois. Maybe a bottle of some weird aftershave in the bathroom, or a Yanni CD. Anyway, what I found was Patty's diary. It was in her underwear drawer. I was checking for new racy lingerie. Hey, that would be a sign! But she was still wearing the same old plain cotton panties, for what it's worth.”

“David—”

“No, no you might as well hear it all. If you're going to make an ass out of yourself, do it right! That's my philosophy. So, the diary was at the bottom of the drawer, kind of a pink-and-gray flowered cover held shut with an elastic ribbon. So there I was, alone in the house, with everything I needed to know about Patty's state of mind lying there. What would you have done?”

“I wouldn't have been there at all.”

“So you wouldn't have copied her passwords and hacked into her e-mail?”

“No.”

“I kind of figured that. I didn't know what I was going to do, myself. Really. I stood there, just kind of staring at the diary, turning it over in my hand. I knew I could never violate Patty's privacy by reading it…and at the same time, I'm studying the elastic ribbon to be sure I can replace it exactly. Who was I kidding? Anyway, I don't know how long I was stuck there, when I heard someone at the door. I totally freaked out. I had no excuse to be there, and no way out. I mean—my car was in the driveway. But it was just the mailman.”

“So you took the hint and got the hell out of there.”

“Not exactly. I knew I was never going to get another chance to do this thing. I'd never get the up the nerve again.”

“So you read it.”

“Yeah.”

“My grandmother always used to say, ‘Don't eavesdrop—you won't hear anything that makes you happy.'”

“Well, your granny had a point on that score. But there was plenty of good stuff. And I'll tell you something. Even the worst of it helped me. She described sex with Grady like a lapsed Catholic walking into a church after being born again. Can you believe that? She said something like ‘those cheesy stained-glass windows are suddenly illustrating miracles.' So she never had an orgasm with me—yeah, that's in there, too. But sex with Grady is religious experience! Thanks so much. There was a lot more, and it cured my stalking problem for good. Apparently I'm like an old smelly dog that won't leave you alone, and you feel guilty about wanting to kick it, so you pat it and then you have to wash your hands afterward. That's exactly what she said. Nice, huh? But fuck all that. What matters is the land deal.”

I sat forward, palms braced against the edge of the desk. “The land deal?”

“You don't know about that? Your ex-wife is all over it. She and Elaine Bailey. It's making Patty nuts—she wants a piece and she can't touch it. The only upside for her is that Grady Malone's the architect.”

“The architect for what? Can't touch what?”

“You know the Thayers own a huge chunk of land out in the moors. Hundreds of acres. The family's been fighting about it since the old lady died. Some want to sell, some want to sit on it. Some of them are hurting for money and some of them are doing okay. Some of them care about the island and some don't. It's the same old story. Remember Pimney's Point?”

“Sorry.”

“It was before your time, I guess. The Crosby family owned all this land on the harbor and when the grandma died she left it to the church. Kids were furious but they couldn't break the will. Then the priest she had left in charge—can't recall the guy's name—he subdivided it and made a fortune. It reminded me of something Billy Delavane used to say, quoting old Mrs. Thayer, talking about the new people. She hated the new people. I guess that meant anyone who came here after 1926. She said, ‘Divide and conquer? Not these people. Subdivide and conquer, that's their strategy.'

“It seems to be working pretty well. You ever walk around Sanford Farm? Ann Sanford's kids went to court to break the will, and all Ann's friends testified that she was in her right mind when she gave the land to the town. So the kids lost, obviously. Fuck them, they were all millionaires anyway. Nothing's ever enough for them. It's like a disease. They have to have more.”

“So the Thayers sound like a classic Nantucket story.”

“They finally decided to sell to the Land Bank. They're getting a pretty good price and all the kids are already planning their new trophy houses. That's where Grady Malone comes in. They could have made a hell of a lot more selling out to a developer but they would have been pariahs in this town after that. And some of them do actually live here. It's like it was 'Sconset. If you own a house in Codfish Park and you decide to sell it? Better make plans to leave the island. You'll never play tennis at the Casino again. These people are vicious.”

“But it sounds like everything worked out fine.”

“Except there was one holdout. Andrew. And his house burns down a month before the sale deadline.”

“I don't think that fire had anything to do with real estate, David. There was a lot of bad stuff going on out there.”

“Which you can't talk about.”

I shrugged.

“I wanted to check it out myself. But by the time I got there the fire engines were pulling up. So…”

“And you didn't see anything suspicious?”

“Just the fire.”

I stood. “Thanks, David. Thanks for coming in.”

“And the stuff about the diary…”

“That stays between us. Since it's never going to happen again.”

“Don't worry. I'm done.”

“Good.”

“I can wait for her to ask for another bullshit favor, dangling the chance that we might get back together again in front of me. That's one of her favorite tricks.” He stood with a sheepish smile. “This is actually very liberating.”

“I'm glad. And if you think of anything else, remember any details, anything odd about today…give me a call.”