Grey Lady

by Paul Kemprecos

  “It goes beyond that. She thinks he is trying to acquire me like one of those companies he buys up, then dumps at great profit. She likes seeing me with another man.”

  “Then I’m at your service. Shall we walk around and be seen?”

  “I’d love to.” She scanned the crowd. “Oh darn! Would you excuse me for a moment? I see a high mucky-muck on the conservation trust I should talk to. Sorry for being rude.”

  “Not rude at all. I’ll wander around and see if I can pick up any tips on the stock market.”

  I strolled closer to where Ramsey and Ivan were still pressing flesh, artfully shielding myself behind the milling guests. Ivan’s thugs kept several paces behind. Ivan shook one last hand, then said something to Ramsey, who pointed to the rotunda. The bodyguards slid in close behind Ivan, cutting off a couple of glad-handing guests, and followed the other two men across the terrace and into the house. I plucked a couple of champagne flutes from a tray carried by a passing waiter, went over to the auburn-haired woman and offered her a glass of champagne.

  “Compliments of Mr. Ramsey,” I said.

  She took a last puff from her cigarette, dropped it onto the patio and reached out for the flute without looking at me. She slugged down the champagne like a thirsty longshoreman, handed me the empty glass and took the other one from my hand. She downed the second glass and handed it back to me. When I didn’t leave, she removed her sunglasses and appraised me with almond-shaped green eyes.

  “You werk hir?” Her husky voice had a heavy accent. I figured out that she was asking if I worked for Ramsey.

  “No. I’m a fisherman.”

  She brushed a strand of hair back from her forehead. “What you doink in this place, Meester Feeshermenz? Only reech people come to these stupid parties.” She gave me a look. “You don’t look reech.”

  “I’m not rich. I’m a friend of a guest, just like you and Chernko’s associates.”

  She raised a finely arched eyebrow. “Associates?”

  “The two men who went into the house. One is tall and the other was short.” I held my hand high, then dropped it to knee-level.

  “Associates?” She laughed and repeated the word, turning it over in her mouth. “They are eediots.”

  “I agree. But dangerous idiots.”

  A shadow of fear crossed her face. She slipped the sunglasses back on and tossed her head like a high-spirited filly. “What is your name, Mr. Feeshermenz?”

  I told her. “And yours?”

  She hesitated, then said, “I am Tanya.”

  “Russian.”

  She frowned. “Bulgarian. I don’t like Russians.”

  I would have liked to ply Tanya the Bulgarian with more of Ramsey’s expensive champagne to find out why, if she despised Russians, she hung out with them, but I could see into the house. The shorter of the two thugs was coming toward the door. I guessed he must have been sent to check on Chernko’s arm candy.

  I said, “Nice talking to you, Tanya. Maybe we’ll meet again.”

  I stepped away from her, and melted into the crowd of guests gathering around a long buffet table under the tent. I grabbed a plate, but instead of getting in line, I stood where I could see the short thug come up to Tanya. After what looked like a quick but heated exchange, he took her by the arm and practically dragged her back to the house. About five minutes later, the helicopter rose above the roof of the house and darted off in a thrash of rotors.

  I wondered what Chernko’s connection was with Ramsey. Was it the money thing, as Lisa had suggested? My gut told me that they were more than simply fellow members of Nantucket’s Big Bucks club. I was painfully aware, too, that I was over-matched. And that Chernko wasn’t about to lift his death edict. There was only one way to protect myself, and that was to eliminate him as a threat before he turned me into a Roman candle like poor Viktor Karpov.

  I hadn’t gotten off to a very good start. Chernko had met me face-to-face. He knew I was on Nantucket and what I was doing. He’d be able to track me down. I would have preferred to scout him out from a distance. But the meeting gave me a chance to probe him for weaknesses. Chernko was cagey and smart, but I may have found a weak point in his smooth facade. And she had auburn hair.

  CHAPTER 10

  On the drive back from Ramsey’s cocktail party, I was lost in thought. I was wondering if I had screwed up royally. I had taken the Nantucket job so I could scout out Ivan from the shadows. Instead, I’d stepped out into bright glare of daylight in plain view of the Russian and his henchmen.

  Lisa noticed that I was uncharacteristically tight-lipped. “Penny for your thoughts, Starbuck.”

  “Not worth the price. I was thinking what a lovely party that was.”

  Lisa was no dummy. She burst into laughter and punched me lightly on the shoulder.

  “I can’t believe you can say that with a straight face. You saw all those people who think Nantucket is their own little castle, and that it’s surrounded by a moat.”

  “I was trying to be positive.”

  “Well, you were being absurd.”

  “That, too. You know what F. Scott Fitzgerald told Hemingway about the rich being different from everyone else? I’d go one further. Ramsey and his friends are an entirely different species of homo sapiens.”

  “That’s more like it. That is exactly what they are. And they look at us the same way, only as a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder.”

  “Isn’t that a little harsh?”

  “Well it’s true. They are clueless when it comes to what my family learned a long time ago. Reputation is more important than money.”

  Lisa crossed her arms and seemed to go into her own cocoon. It wasn’t hard to figure out the source of her simmering rant about the tasteless habits of the newly rich. As crass as they were, at least they didn’t have a family member charged with murder.

  The village of Siasconset was as still as an abandoned tomb. We drove through the deserted center, then along the shore road and turned off onto the shell driveway between the high privet hedges. By the time I pulled up front of the big house, Lisa’s short-lived blue funk was over. She pecked me on the cheek and got out of the car.

  Before she whirled up the front steps, she turned and said, “Thank you for a lovely evening. Breakfast is at eight. Dr. Rosen will be there so you can talk to him about Gramps. I’ll have the case files for you as well.”

  I gave her a thumbs-up and headed for my apartment. I snatched a cold Grey Lady ale from the fridge and went out onto the deck. The light from the windows reflected off the droplets of a dank fog moving inland. I thought of Plato’s allegory, where people in a cave try to determine the reality of shadows moving on a wall. No shadows danced on the wall of fog. But I didn’t have to see the ocean to know that it was real. I knew from the smell of fish and sea that the mists hid trillions of gallons of water filled with millions of living creatures and plants.

  I had less success when I tried to penetrate the fog of mad thoughts that had enveloped Lisa’s grandfather. Or the mists that surrounded the odd couple relationship of Ramsey and Chernko. After my encounter with Ivan, though, I was sure of one thing. That if I planned to go wandering around in the Nantucket murk in search of answers I needed someone to watch my back.

  I slugged down my ale and went back inside to call Flagg. I got his recorded message. At the beep I said, “Hi, Flagg. Did you know that your tribe has voted to build a gambling casino overlooking the cliffs in Aquinnah?”

  Flagg has the Wampanoag Indian’s mystical reverence for the multi-colored Gay Head cliffs and rolling hills of his home village. The tribe had been trying to open a mainland casino for years. If anything got Flagg’s attention, it would be the threat of destructive development coming to Aquinnah.

  I got undressed, crawled into the bed and sl
ipped off into a fog of my own. I woke up to the “chip-chip” of a male cardinal serenading his mate outside my bedroom window. I showered, shaved and pulled on a pair of tan shorts and a Thalassa polo shirt.

  The front door of the big house was unlocked. I followed the fragrance of frying bacon to the large, sunny kitchen. Lisa was helping a pleasantly portly middle-aged woman cook breakfast. She introduced the woman as Mrs. Gomes. She and her husband had been hired to take care of her grandfather. They had been given a room near Daggett’s quarters.

  I nodded at Dr. Rosen, who was sitting at the table, sipping from a coffee mug, then I sat down and ordered two eggs over easy with my bacon. They were done to perfection and I complimented Mrs. Gomes on her cooking. She thanked me with a smile on her face, and excused herself to tend to some household tasks.

  “Does Mr. Daggett ever join you for meals?” I asked Lisa.

  She made a sour face. “Only once. It was an experiment. Gramps flew off in a rage when he saw Dr. Rosen at the table. He thinks he’s a lowly crewman on the Pequod and had no right to be dining with him. He almost had him clapped in the brig.”

  “What about you?”

  “He was confused when he saw me, but not angry. It fits in with his unformed perception of me. Mrs. Gomes cooks his meals. Her husband and Dr. Rosen take turns bringing meals to him. Gramps accepts Mr. Gomes as ship’s cook. Gramps thinks Dr. Rosen is the cook’s assistant.”

  “It allows me to observe him and medicate him,” Rosen said.

  “He allows you to deliver food, but won’t dine with you?”

  Rosen nodded. “He tolerates me, because he thinks of his study as the main deck of his ship where ordinary crewmen are allowed and the raised floor as his quarterdeck and cabin. Only officers and privileged crewmembers were allowed in the cabin to dine with the captain in the old whaling days. Mr. Daggett fits that protocol into his personality disorder.”

  “Which is?”

  “The broad term is grandiose delusion. It’s a subtype peculiar to those in a manic state of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Dementia can play a role as well in the aging. The patient thinks he or she is a famous, wealthy or powerful person.”

  “The captain of a whaling ship could be all three.”

  “No doubt about it. Successful whaling captains were wealthy and powerful. They were the princes of their society. That role would fit in very nicely with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which involves hallucinations and delusions. The patient is totally out of touch with reality.”

  “Lisa said that her grandfather was behaving in a normal manner up to the time of the murder. Is that consistent with schizophrenia?”

  He shook his head. “Usually the onset is gradual, starting in a person’s twenties. I see where you are going with this and I have no explanation for the swift personality change.”

  “What about the blow to the head?”

  “The blow was to the side of the cranium. He received a slight concussion, but it was not hard enough to damage his mental function.”

  “Could the blow have disturbed his mental equilibrium?”

  “Anything is possible, but major personality changes would have had their genesis in trauma to the frontal lobe of the brain, which governs behavior, among other functions.”

  “So how do you explain his change of personality?”

  “Mr. Daggett was deeply involved in the study of Melville and Moby Dick. It’s possible that he retreated to the sanctuary of this nether world as the result of a shock to his mental rather than his physical state.”

  I finished munching on a piece of buttered oatmeal bread toast and wiped my fingers on a napkin before I tossed out my next question.

  “Like the shock that would have come from killing an old friend in cold blood?”

  Rosen sat back in his chair. “Whoa! Sandbagged me with that one. That’s a big leap that I’m not willing to take.”

  “Sorry to ambush you, Dr. Rosen, but these questions are marshmallows compared to the fastballs the prosecution is going to throw at you.” I pondered my next question, then said, “Based on your evaluation of Mr. Daggett’s present condition and his past behavior, do you think he could have killed Coffin?”

  The answer was quick in coming. “He would not do anything immoral that he wouldn’t do in his normal state. Mr. Daggett is not a killer.”

  “Mr. Daggett thinks he’s a fictional character. Is that his normal state?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “So what if in his delusion he imagined someone was a thing that Ahab detested. The white whale, Moby Dick. Could he kill him?”

  “Yes. It’s possible, but farfetched.”

  “But it is possible.”

  “Yes. It is possible.”

  I looked across the table at Lisa, who had been listening to the exchange. She must have known that my line of questioning would be repeated in court and that it would lead to the institutionalization of her grandfather. There was anguish in her eyes.

  I said, “Maybe we should do this another time, Dr. Rosen.”

  “Yes. I’d like that.” He cleared his plate and left the kitchen. “I think I’ll go for a run.”

  I stared at his back, thinking that Rosen was going to be a fine tool in the hands of the prosecution.

  “How did you find Dr. Rosen?” I said to Lisa.

  “Michael recommended him. He had worked in the human resources department of one of Michael’s acquisitions.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “He’s not going to do well by Grandpa on the witness stand, is he?”

  “Depends on what outcome you’re looking for. If your grandfather is guilty, treatment in an institution could be the kindest thing you could do for him. When he snaps out of the 19th century, you could say he committed the crime while in an altered state.”

  “But we’re not going to let it get that far, are we, Soc?”

  The cool determined tone of her voice, the gaze and the use of my real rather than fictional name told me that I had better get working on the case I was hired for.

  “No, we’re not, Lisa. You said you had some files for me to go through.”

  She slid a string-wrapped packet across the table. “These are the case files. Some of the pictures are quite graphic, so I waited until after breakfast to show them to you. I’ve seen all this material. I’ll talk to you later after you have read the files. I’ve got to go off-island for business today.”

  “I was hoping you could give me a tour of the Serengeti.”

  “I’ll be back late in the afternoon. I could meet you there around five.”

  “It’s a date. Should I bring an elephant gun?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Lisa said, rising from the table. “The biggest type of wildlife we’re bound to encounter is a fox. Before you dig into the police files, I’d like to show you something here on the property.”

  A minute later, I was following Lisa along a winding sandy path that led from behind the Daggett house for a couple of hundred yards down to the beach. At the end of the path, set into the dunes, was a beach cottage around ten-by-twenty feet in size. The silver-gray shingles had been bleached almost white by the sun and salty air.

  A more or less level porch was attached to the front of the building, shading two windows that were framed by faded green shutters. A stovepipe protruded from the asphalt-shingled roof. Behind the building, leaning at a slight angle, was an outhouse, complete with the half-moon opening on the door.

  “This is my grandfather’s hideaway,” Lisa said as she stepped onto the porch. “It was here before the house went up. It was originally built by a couple of local fishermen who liked to surf cast at night.” She reached under a shingle and pulled out a key, which she used to open a padlock.

  “The lock looks new,” I sa
id.

  “It is. We never locked it before, because there was nothing to steal, but a few weeks ago someone walked in and trashed the place. Luckily there was no serious damage.” She replaced the key, opened the door and stepped inside with me behind her.

  There was a cot on the right, and a sink with a hand pump under some cupboards against the left wall. In the middle of the room was a small wooden table with two chairs. There were a couple of kerosene lanterns on the table. Next to the table was an old Boston rocker. At the back of the room was the small wood stove whose chimney pipe I’d seen on the roof. There was a harpoon hanging from one wall.

  “The rocker belongs out on the front porch,” Lisa said. “Gramps would spend hours out there, reading, or simply looking at the ocean, deep in thought.”

  The cool breeze coming through the open door brought with it the low rumble of waves rolling against the beach.

  I guessed that Lisa was giving me a conversational opening, so I took it. “Thinking about what, Lisa?”

  “His very favorite subject in the world,” she went over to the bookshelf and picked up a paperback book from the stack of yellow-paged paperbacks. She handed the book to me and I saw that it was a well-worn copy of Melville’s Moby Dick. “The first editions and research volumes he collected are back in the house. He’d done a number of articles for the local paper and history publications. He’d sketch out his ideas on a pad, and work on the finished product in his study.”

  “Can I keep this?” I said. “It might come in handy in talking to Gramps.”

  “Please do.” She glanced around the cabin. “I thought if you saw this place it might give you a sense of Henry Daggett. His greatest interest was simply in reading and writing about a bygone day. He’d lose himself completely in Melville’s writing. He even named his powerboat after Ahab’s ship. The Pequod II is at the marina, if you’d like to take it out. Keys are in the kitchen.”