Sylvester strode up to me and lifted me off my feet with a hug that knocked the breath out of my chest. “Thanks for coming, mon.”
“Who does such a thing?” Millie asked after stretching up on tiptoes to kiss my cheek.
“I’m going to find out.”
Millie sighed. “Chicken merry, hawk de near.”
I had picked up a little patois over the years, and I knew what she meant. You’re never safe, especially when you think you are. I couldn’t argue the point—her life was the proof. Instead, I stepped away and approached the side of her house for a closer look.
Byron jogged up to walk beside me. “We got no hard evidence, Chief. No footprints in the dirt, no discarded spray-paint can, no eyewitnesses.”
I stopped, studying the dripping scrawl on the cedar siding. Charlie Boyce stopped, too, and we stood there for a few moments, staring at it.
I turned to Byron. “What do you think?”
“Is this a test?”
“Everything’s a test.”
We stood silently for a minute or two more. “Well, whoever it is, they got the swastika wrong. The Nazi swastika has the arms going left, like—counterclockwise? These go the other way.” He must have caught my curious look. “I’m a history buff.”
“Okay. That’s good. Anything else?”
He shrugged.
Charlie stepped closer. “We started to canvas the neighborhood with a couple of uniforms, and from what I can tell we have some real crazies living around here—survivalists, Second Amendment fanatics, Breitbart tiki-torch types, if you know what I mean.”
“And you think they could have done this?”
“Well…Mr. Graham had words with one of them about a week ago. The Grahams threw a big barbecue, and I guess some of the nastier neighbors didn’t get invited. There were a lot of cars blocking people’s driveways, someone heard this, uh…Pete Hannaford? He said something like ‘You people just don’t get it. We have rules.’ It turned into a shoving match, but friends broke it up before anyone got hurt. I talked to Hannaford just now, and he went into this rant about setting his stuff down at a table on the ferry, and going to the bathroom and coming back to find a whole Jamaican family sitting there. Like they didn’t get that his coat and duffel bag reserved his spot. This happened last summer, and he’s still pissed about it.”
“So you have a suspect?”
“Maybe.”
“Describe him for me.”
“Uh, okay…” Charlie’s face bunched up in thought, then cleared. “About six three, red hair with a bald spot, thin except for a little paunch. Lots of freckles, mean little mouth, blue eyes. Oh, and he had this weird tattoo on his wrist—just numbers. 1488. I figured maybe…his birthday? January fourth? One, four, eighty-eight? He looks about thirty, so 1988 makes sense.”
I shook my head. “It’s a white supremacist thing. The fourteen stands for ‘fourteen words’—some slogan…‘we must secure the existence of our people,’ blah blah blah. You can look it up. And the eighty-eight…well, H is the eighth letter in the alphabet, so…”
“HH. Heil Hitler?”
I nodded. “I saw a lot of this stuff in LA. I didn’t think I’d ever see it here, though.”
“Looks like we have our guy.”
“Except for one detail. Something in your description gets him off the hook.”
He slumped. “You got me, Chief. What?”
“People generally spray-paint from shoulder height.” I lifted my arm in a pantomime. “That would put our perpetrator at around…five five, five six? Way too short. And this is a kid thing anyway, graffiti like this. Hannaford doesn’t quite fit the profile.”
“So where do we go next?” The answer was obvious, so I let him get there on his own. “School?”
“School.”
I called ahead and Superintendent Bissell was waiting for us, blowing hot and loud as a propane space heater when we pushed through the big glass doors.
“I will not have you disrupting the life of this institution.”
“That’s fine. We just want to—”
“You want to accuse me of harboring some sort of sick, violent, unbalanced vandal in my classrooms! You think you can stride in here on no notice with your guns on your hips and lecture me about my own students! Well, let me tell you—”
“First of all, we’re unarmed.”
“That won’t wash here! I will not permit—”
“I don’t want to lecture you, Alan. I just want to ask a few questions.”
“That’s what the brownshirt bully boys always say before the rough stuff begins! ‘We just want to ask a few questions.’”
I went back a long way with Alan Bissell. We’d been through a lot together, none of it good. But this seemed like a new low. I didn’t bother with his hysterical accusations—taking me from zero to Nazi in five seconds flat. He might have had a worse morning than me. “Someone has defaced a local house with racist graffiti. I think it’s probably a kid, and I was wondering if you had noticed anything…”
“What I have or have not noticed within the purview of my authority here does not and should not concern you. We can handle our own problems at Nantucket High School, Chief Kennis. I take pride in that. I don’t call the police after every minor scuffle. That’s the straight path from school to a life in prison, all because of a childish outburst or a thoughtless infraction of the rules.”
“I agree. It’s good to hear you say that. But—”
“So, please. Leave this to us.”
That was my opening, and I pounced. “This?”
“The incident. We have the situation well in hand.”
“What incident?”
“Really, it’s a minor matter.” I stared at him. “One of our African American students, DeShawn Merriman, found an offensive…epithet…written on his notebook cover. He turned the notebook in to the office, and school security staff have been looking into the circumstances of the property defacement.”
“Do they have a suspect?”
“They have several.”
“What does DeShawn think?”
“We haven’t involved him in the inquiry. That would violate school policy.”
“You don’t talk to the victim about the crime.”
“We don’t involve students in the early stages of a disciplinary review. No.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“Not on school grounds. Not during school hours. And I would strongly suggest a policy of official law enforcement disengagement until the NHS administration has concluded its internal investigation.”
I let the lines of bureaucratic jargon march past and released a breath. “Thanks for your advice. Now I want to see this DeShawn Merriman, a school resource officer, and you in your office in five minutes.”
“Or what?”
“Or I will put this whole school under emergency lockdown until I determine whether or not the perpetrator of this hate crime presents an active threat to the safety and well-being of the student body and faculty.”
“That is a ludicrous overreaction!”
“I hope you’re right, Alan. Five minutes.”
I could see some additional bluster churning below the surface of his face, working at his features like fingers. But in the end, he just turned away and stalked off down the hall.
It took ten minutes, but soon enough, Byron and I; along with Bissell; the resource officer, a heavy-set affable woman named Bea; and DeShawn were all gathered in the tight confines of Bissell’s book-lined bat cave.
DeShawn was a painfully thin kid with an ostentatious Afro and a manner that indicated he thought he was about to be arrested.
I tried to ease the tension a little. “Hi, DeShawn. I’m Police Chief Kennis, and this is one of my officers, Byron Lovell.” Byron nodded at DeShawn. “I wa
nted to ask you about this crap someone wrote on your notebook.”
He looked up, cautiously surprised. “Crap?”
“Okay, shit.”
This earned me the flash of a smile. “That shit a’right.”
“Do you have any idea who might have done it?”
He shrugged. “Haters be hatin’. They all the same.”
“But some hate more than others. For instance, some of them take the trouble to write it down.”
“There’s always some Cletus clowning on me, you know? But they just frontin’.”
I turned to Bea. “Do you have a list of possible suspects?”
“We’ve gathered ten names, interviewed various students and staff…but it’s all just talk, Chief. There’s no real evidence against anyone, and I would hate to impugn an innocent young person’s reputation on the basis of hearsay and innuendo.”
I sniffed. “Yeah, well. How about this? Read the list to DeShawn. We’ll see what he thinks. That okay with you, DeShawn?”
“Sure.”
Bea glanced over at Bissell, but he had given up. His hands fluttered in a semaphore that said Do whatever these people want; let’s get this over with.
Bea pulled out her phone, scrolled to the proper file, and started reading names. Tim Honeycutt, Steve Lerner, Andy Boatwright, Kenneth Ames, Chris Contrell.
All white, all local.
I watched DeShawn as Bea ran down the list. DeShawn drew a blank—or so he said. No one wanted to play the rat, even with rats like these. When she was done, I thanked her and Bissell, and apologized to DeShawn for dragging him out of class.
Then we left, taking DeShawn’s notebook with us. The vandal had written “eat shit niger” next to the familiar Nazi symbol on the front page.
Sitting in my cruiser in the school parking lot, I said to Charlie, “Any thoughts?”
“Well—it’s the same backward swastika.”
“And the same spelling problems.”
“So probably the same kid?”
“But which one?”
Charlie shrugged.
“DeShawn tensed up and looked sideways down at the floor for a second when she said Chris Contrell’s name. That’s classic recognition behavior. They must have had some kind of run-in.”
“It’s not much to go on, boss.”
“True.”
But I’d watched my mentor on the LAPD, Chuck Obremski, get a full confession on a lot less.
I showed up at the Contrell house on Essex Road at four that afternoon, alone and out of uniform, carrying DeShawn’s notebook in my hand. The neighborhood was a dreary subdivision, walking distance from the school, most of the houses broken up into rental rooms—worker barracks, to put it bluntly—with four, five, or six cars crowding every driveway. Not exactly the chamber of commerce view of Nantucket, with a rusting washing machine, cars on blocks, and gaudily colored children’s toys cluttering the yards. It occurred to me that long after we go extinct, when there is nothing left but contaminated soil and cockroaches, the Little Tikes Hide & Slide would endure—ugly, indestructible, and mysterious, the last relic of human culture. I could imagine the aliens who found it shaking their heads and saying “Good riddance.”
Which made me think of Shakespeare—the phrase actually originated in Troilus and Cressida—which led to the despairing certainty that no one on this block or in this house was likely to have seen that play or any Shakespeare play, or any other play, for that matter. This brought to mind Winston Churchill’s cold, casually brutal and dismissive response to a newspaperman’s question, after his campaign for prime minister took him to London’s East End slums for the first time. “What did I think?” he asked. “I thought how strange it must be living there. Never to see anything beautiful. Never to eat anything delicious. Never to say anything clever.”
What a snob! And yet—what would he have made of Essex Road? Apart from the newly renovated Apex Academy buildings at the far end of the street, which the new private school had no doubt picked up for pennies on the dollar at a foreclosure sale, it all looked the same—the brown grass and cracked asphalt, the peeling paint and twisted venetian blinds, the torn screens and missing shingles. It might have rendered Churchill speechless. A lot of people would have paid good money to witness a moment like that.
Mr. Contrell, heavyset with his long hair pulled back into a coarse ponytail and still wearing work clothes—steel-toed boots and Carhartt overalls, grimy Patriots sweatshirt—met me at the door. He had a Bud Light in one hand and an American Spirit jammed between two fingers of the other.
“What?”
“Hello, Mr. Contrell. I’m Police Chief Henry Kennis. I need to speak to Chris for a minute.”
“He’s not home.”
From the back of the house: “Who is it, Dad?”
Contrell’s shoulders slumped: busted. “Fuck it. Come on in. We’re about to eat dinner, so make it quick.”
Dinner was pizza from the Muse, Cokes, and a Greek salad in a plastic box. The salad was a hopeful sign.
Chris was glaring down at the pizza. “Shit, Dad! I said sausage, not pepperoni! Are you going senile or something?”
“Sorry, Chris. I guess I just misunderstood what you—”
“Right. Because sausage sounds just like pepperoni. They don’t even have the same letters!”
“Except for E,” I pointed out.
He turned on me. “Shut up, you clueless freak.”
“Clueless? Really? Chris, that’s one thing you should never, ever say to a detective. That hurts. And even if it’s true, it’s never true for long. In fact, I have an excellent clue in my hand right now, thanks to you.”
“Huh?”
I handed his father DeShawn’s notebook. “Your son wrote this, like he wrote on Sylvester Graham’s house last night with a can of spray paint. If he’s going to be a good Nazi, he needs to learn how to draw a swastika. And spelling is important, even when committing a hate crime. Niger is a country in Africa—and a river. Not a racial slur.”
Mr. Contrell drew himself up. “Hold on there! My son would never—”
“Oh, yeah? What if I did, Dad? Someone’s gotta do something around here. We’re turning into the minority, and these minorities are taking over! Those fuckin’ spics were shingling the house next door at eight o’clock last night, banging away. You couldn’t even watch TV.”
“So the problem is they work hard?”
“The problem is they don’t belong here! They’re an army! They’re invading us, and we’re letting it happen.”
“Chris—”
“Come on, Dad. You know I’m right. You can’t bid against these people, they charge nothing, they live ten to a room and pay no taxes. They got no insurance! But when they get sick—Jesus Christ, stop by the emergency room sometime. It’s like Mexico City in there, except all the Mexicans in Mexico City came here instead.”
I wondered if Chris knew that Mexico City was a real place. He made it sound like a generic location, crazyville or toontown, that he might have made up in a xenophobic fugue state.
“So you did spray-paint the Grahams’ house.”
“And that’s not all I’m gonna do. It’s still a free country, last time I looked.”
I was suddenly on high alert. I watched the boy carefully. “What else are you planning to do, Chris?”
“None of your business.”
“But it is my business. It’s the definition of my business.”
“Leave the kid alone,” Mr. Contrell said. “You cops already came sniffing around here, and we got a clean bill of health.”
I had never heard about this. “What cops?”
He shrugged. “Some kid at school filed a complaint, like Chris was a bully or something. Maybe he was. What’s wrong with that? Bullies teach kids to stand up for themselves. It ain’t
all sweetness and light when these libtard snowflakes go out in the real world.”
“Who came to the house, Mr. Contrell?”
“Just some cop. Who knows? A cop’s a cop.”
“You’ve lived here all your life, and you can’t tell one policeman from another? You went to school with half of them. I saw you at a Whalers game with one of my officers last year. Big guy, red hair—ring a bell?”
“Nope. Coulda been anybody next to me. I don’t pay attention to the bleachers at a football game. I’m watching the field.”
“I don’t remember reading a report of the incident.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Like you read every incident report.”
“I proofread every incident report.”
“Well maybe he didn’t bother writing it up because there was nothing worth writing about.”
“Maybe.” I glanced around the messy kitchen—dishes in the sink, unopened mail on the counter, crusty microwave containers sticking up out of the trash—and a Carhartt work jacket draped over some sort of green carton on the floor. I took a step and lifted the jacket with the toe of my shoe.
“Hey—!” Contrell shouted.
You might have thought it was a tackle box if you didn’t know better. But I’d searched enough suspects’ houses to know what that heavy-duty plastic chest was used for.
“Care to open the box for me, Mr. Contrell?”
“You got a warrant?”
“You should listen to the guy who works for you,” Chris blurted out. “He didn’t have a problem with us! I guess some people still believe in the Second Amendment!”
I ignored him and spoke to his father. “I need to know what type of ammunition you’re storing in there, Mr. Contrell.”
“Fine. I got nothing to hide.” He strode to the box, kneeled down, worked the latches, and opened the top. He pulled out a clear plastic hundred-round ammunition container, stood, and handed it to me. “Remington .223.”
I took the heavy plastic square in my hand and looked down past it to the main cache. “Expecting a war?”
“Maybe I am.”
Nantucket Penny Page 6
