Nantucket Sawbuck (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

The Widow

I woke up in the dark. Fiona was kissing me. She had taken off the flannel pajamas she wore to bed in the winter, pushed my T-shirt up and pulled my boxers down; she was easing them clear of my ankles with her foot. I felt the dry tight sweetness of her naked body. I was more than ready, I was bursting. At first I thought I was dreaming: the long warm thighs sliding across mine, the breasts pressed to my chest, the firm bare ass filling my palms in the inchoate darkness. In fact I had experienced this exact dream many times as an adolescent, always with embarrassing results and an extra load of laundry in the wash before school.

But this time I was awake. I kissed her open mouth and we rolled free of the covers. She shivered and reached behind her to retrieve them. I had never known a woman before who liked to make love in the morning. It had been an unbroken run of bad luck, from Kathy Jablonski, my first girlfriend in high school, to my ex-wife, Miranda, who could never stand any human contact until her third cup of coffee and acted like “morning mouth” was a venereal disease. I didn't care about it and neither did Fiona. Our circadian rhythms matched perfectly, a Utopian compatibility I had never even known existed. Though, like the possibility of other inhabited planets in the galaxy, or ever getting a good-looking haircut, logic had always indicated that it must.

I lunged up into her, feeling her come. Then she leaned down, brushing against me and whispered, “Let go.” So I did. I rolled both of us over, and the covers were on the floor and neither of us cared anymore. She pulled me down to her and said “Shhhh,” though there were no kids in the house to hear me.

We lay side by side afterward, catching our breath, and she said, “You really did it, didn't you?””

She had told me the night before she would come to the station and answer any questions and cooperate in any way she could—sign depositions, testify in court, make stew for the state police. All I had to do in return was stop thinking about the case for one night.

I kissed her cheek. “I'm still doing it.”

“Not thinking about Preston Lomax at all?”

“Who?”

“I've heard of this before. Sexually induced amnesia. A very serious condition.”

I laughed. “Yeah, because no one wants to get cured.”

But I remembered everything perfectly. The clock was ticking in my head: Lomax had been dead for thirty-one hours and the need to solve the case was multiplying exponentially every minute. Fiona sensed the urgency. By the time I was out of bed and dressed she had the coffeemaker dripping and a pot of McCann's steel-cut oatmeal cooking on the stove. The sound of her moving in the kitchen drew me out of bed. I pulled on my bathrobe and a pair of socks, glanced out the window at the crusted snow. There was no warmth in the pale morning light. The sky was white. The cold bleached the color out of everything. But the house was warm and the smell of coffee made it warmer.

I took a deep breath. The murder investigation could wait until I finished breakfast. These few moments at the beginning of the day belonged to me. I stood still for a second, caught in a domestic fantasy. This was our actual life together, not just an occasional night fitted into the jigsaw of child custody. It was so easy to imagine. A tiny shift of thought changed everything. I could actually feel it: the exotic privilege of an ordinary moment. I shrugged. Maybe someday. And then the trick would be not taking it for granted.

Seeing her standing at the stove barefoot, wearing a pale blue Provisions T-shirt, her red hair tangled around her shoulders, I had to doubt even that small reservation. Anyone who took this for granted deserved to lose it. She turned and smiled, still stirring the oatmeal. The kitchen looked southeast and caught the sunrise. The light from the big windows was dazzling.

I walked up behind Fiona and wrapped my arms around her waist. She had just showered and I could smell the herbal shampoo she used along with her own scent. I kissed her neck.

“Breakfast is almost ready,” she said. “Take a cup of coffee and sit down. Go on now. I'll bring it to you.”

I took a scrap of paper and a pen off the kitchen counter and sat down at the rickety blue table in a dazzle of sun, thinking about the soft lilt of her County Cork accent. I scribbled the rhyme as she put the oatmeal into a pair of blue flower patterned bowls.

The sound of your voice

Is my drug of choice.

I folded the piece of paper and slipped it into my pocket as Fiona set breakfast in front of me. I poured maple syrup and a little cream into the oatmeal, sipped my coffee.

Fiona sat down across from me, touched her mug to mine. “To the future?”

I nodded. “The future.”

It was her favorite toast, but only in the morning, and only over coffee. The thought of a future with her always cheered me, no matter how nasty the weather was, or how grim the day ahead promised to be. I took a first taste of oatmeal.

“Good?”

“Perfect. Everything is perfect. I'm trying to enjoy it because twenty minutes from now this day is going over the cliff. I wish we could spend some real time together.”

“But we can't. The
Times
came while you were getting dressed. You should take a look at it.”

She got up and took it off the counter. I slipped the front page under my bowl, using it like a placemat. I saw the article instantly: top right, above the fold, next to a photograph of a wounded Yemeni sheepherder killed in a drone strike. The Mosul car bomb story ran below the picture. Beside it, there was another headline:

Deceased Executive Indicted for Fraud, Grand Larceny

New York State Attorney General Alan Fichter disclosed today that an ongoing investigation into financial malfeasance at the LoGran Corporation will proceed despite the untimely death of the principal subject of the inquiry, LoGran CEO Preston J. Lomax.

“The truth has to come out,” Fichter said yesterday in a brief press conference at City Hall. “The man's death doesn't change that. The stockholders of LoGran and the citizens of New York State deserve to know what went on in those corporate offices and what crimes, if any, were committed.”

Lomax, who owned numerous properties up and down the East Coast, including a recently completed multi-million dollar mansion on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, was about to be indicted on more than twenty felony counts including grand theft, conspiracy, violating general business laws, and falsifying business records. Lomax allegedly paid himself unauthorized bonuses and forgave loans to himself, an ongoing pilferage of company funds that may amount to as much as fifty million dollars.

J. Thomas Allbright, CFO of the company, pledged all assistance and cooperation to the investigation. “LoGran is a stable and dynamic organization on the cutting edge of the global economy,” he affirmed yesterday, in a prepared statement. “This scandal extends no further than the isolated mendacity of one rogue executive. We hope to put this disgraceful episode behind us. The company is looking to the future.” Allbright, who joined LoGran three years ago after

Continued C3

I lifted my bowl and set the paper aside. I had no desire to read the rest of it. I glanced up. Fiona was watching me quietly. “What do you think?”

I finished my coffee. “I don't know. It just seems like more. More people who hated Lomax, more suspects, more complications, more publicity, more scrutiny. More trouble. Nathan Parrish was in business with Lomax. I'm going to have to talk to him again.”

Done with breakfast, I took the dishes to the sink and let the water warm my whole body through my hands. The grumble and beeping of the earthmovers brought my eyes up to the frost-rimed windows. The crew next door was at work already, excavating a new foundation. The old house, or the partial shell of it that the Historic District Commission insisted the builders preserve, was sitting on a pair of metal beams supported by four towers of wooded brackets. The old structure had been gutted from the inside out. It seemed sad and startled, like a bird frightened off its nest.

Fiona got up and stood beside me “They're everywhere,” she said. “There must be at least ten houses like that around town. It would be far more sensible to just demolish them. What do they think they're preserving?”

I shrugged. “As little as possible.”

“The same thing happened in Ireland, before people like Lomax destroyed the world economy.” I gave her as sidelong look “Well, all right, but he did his best. It was booming for a while, easy money and low interest rates, and new people building new houses. My mother always says, human beings are like the worm in an apple. Everything ahead of us is green and fresh. And everything behind us is brown and rotten.”

“Wow. Really? My mom said ‘Turn a frown upside down.'”

“Well, she was a fortunate woman leading an easy life.” She kissed me on the cheek. “I've got to get dressed.”

I finished putting the dishes away, found Fiona in the bedroom, and gave her a kiss meant to last until we were alone together again.

Twenty minutes later I was talking to Nathan Parrish, with the jostling noise of the press corps still ringing in my ears, all my phone lines on hold, a pile of interrogation transcripts on my desk, and a message log in front of me that was going to take all morning to clear.

“Businessmen are criminals,” Parrish was saying. “Of course they are! Criminals built this country. They didn't call J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie ‘robber barons' for nothing.”

I tilted back in my chair. “So you suspected Lomax was not quite on the up and up?”

“From time to time. But it didn't matter. This wasn't personal. I was doing business with LoGran and I still am. It's a straightforward corporate investment. I mean…obviously the indictment complicates the deal, at least from a public relations perspective. But Tom Allbright is a good man and he has a great team over there.”

“You mentioned all this when we spoke yesterday. You also said the deal was in question now.”

“No, no, absolutely not! Everyone was in a state of shock, that's all. But no one wants to abandon an extraordinary venture like this because of one man's excesses. Or his death. We're putting it behind us.”

“It's been less than two days.”

“Time moves swiftly in the business world, Chief. We don't have the luxury of outrage or mourning. The man did good things and bad things. Then he died. We can't change that. But the meters are ticking, the interest is adding up, and LoGran stockholders want to see results.”

“You mention outrage. Was that how you felt?”

“Not really. But I'm an old cynic. Nothing Preston did could surprise me.”

“Did he have enemies inside the company?”

Parrish snorted. “He does now. They're all coming out of the woodwork. But that doesn't make the Moorlands Mall a bad investment. I'm the one they're dealing with, and I know Nantucket.”

I made a note on a slip of paper, looked up. “Mrs. Lomax is on-island right now. I've asked her to come in this morning. She should be at the station in a few minutes.”

“Is that really necessary?”

I shrugged. “You're a friend of the family. How is she handling this?”

Parrish shook his head. “Not well. You can imagine. He was everything to her. She's a beautiful woman and she's going to be very wealthy one. But I don't envy the man who has to follow Preston Lomax. She's not going to recover from this and she doesn't even want to. She'll probably spend the rest of her life alone, like Mary Todd Lincoln or Yoko Ono.”

I stood. “Thanks, Nathan. I may need to talk to you again, but for now…”

“Any time, Chief.” He pulled out his wallet and removed a card. “You can always reach me on my cell, unless I'm in 'Sconset. There's hardly any reception in Polpis either, come to think of it. Or Madaket. Well, let's face it, the thing is basically useless. But it takes excellent pictures.”

“I use a camera. And a landline.”

“Cunning of you, Chief. Anyway, feel free to call the home number or the office. My answering machines are always on.”

I took the card and slipped it into my pocket. “Can you find your way out?”

“Like a bird dog.”

He flashed a grin and was gone.

Haden Krakauer edged into the office and shut the door. He hadn't shaved in two days and he was starting to look like a revolutionary fanatic skulking around St Petersburg in 1920—or maybe one of those crazy guys living under the Pacific Coast Highway footbridge in Santa Monica. He had a cold and he blew his nose loudly as he came in.

“Don't give me that,” I said.

“You never get sick. You're a genetic immune. You ought to get the flu for once. It would humanize you for the men.”

“I'd rather stay remote and godlike.”

“So—Mrs. Lomax is like Yoko Ono?”

“Eavesdropping again?”

“Monitoring the interrogation, Chief. Just like the regulations specify.”

“In other words, eavesdropping.”

“Well, yeah. But that's what I love about this job. I'm
explicitly required
by strict
department policy,
to be a nosy, officious snoop. Which I've always been anyway. Mrs. Lomax is waiting to talk to you. And FYI…in the dignified widow category, I wouldn't call her Yoko Ono. More like Courtney Love.”

“Hey—”

“I'll go get her. See for yourself.”

While I waited for Diana Lomax, I began to sort through the papers piling up on my desk. I had typed records of most of the interviews pertaining to the case; top copies were in the crime binder upstairs. The state police had brought two stenographers from off-island to keep up with the volume of work. I was falling behind, myself. I liked to read everything. Sometimes not being present at the interrogation actually helped. You could see things in the text that the officer conducting the examination missed. Body language and intonation could be revealing if you were skilled and experienced, but they could distract a small town neophyte.