Today was a good example.
He trotted up to us, pudgy and disheveled in khakis, an untucked blue shirt, and a flapping cardigan. “Hey, Chief!” He slowed down to a walk beside us. “That’s Armando Morales—new kid on the block. Trying to make his bones with the Tres Vatos gang. He’s hermanos de frontera with Ramon Cruz—second cousin or something. But he’s fallen in with Miguel Alfaro, the young Turk who’s trying to take over. Nasty little punk. He dropped by the paper to tell me not to write anything about them.”
“Did you agree?”
“Fuck, no.”
“I haven’t seen anything in the paper so far.”
David’s face clenched for a second. “I’m waiting until I have the whole story. There’s two groups here that I know about—the Tres Vatos and the Malditos Azteca. The Malditos are new. Supposedly they’re trying to corner the opioid market, and they’re nasty—just like the young Vatos kids. So far, Ramon Cruz has kept the peace, but he’s on the way out, and they’re sick of his old-school rules—not selling to kids, no unnecessary violence, treaties with the other gangs, that kind of stuff. Old man stuff. They’d all love to get rid of him. My guess is they were trying to scare Ramon off today. Send a new kid to rough him up. Some kind of initiation, maybe? I can’t think of any other reason to use a punk like Armando Morales for a job like this.”
I knew most of what David was telling us, but I let him talk. He always knew a few extra details—like the facts about this Morales kid—and I didn’t want to miss anything.
Haden said, “How did you know Ramon was here?”
David shrugged. “The 911 call described a tussle with a middle-aged Hispanic dude. He knocked the kid down, walked over to the gas station, and drove off in a Nissan Murano. Sounds like Ramon to me. That’s his ride.”
I could see Haden starting a slow burn. “How do you know about our 911 calls?”
“Contacts in the department, Assistant Chief Krakauer. Friends of the free press.”
“I want those names.”
“I never reveal my sources.”
He grabbed at David, who danced away with surprising agility.
“Haden.”
He heard the warning in my voice and dropped his arms to his sides with a tight exhale and bitter head shake. I knew he disapproved of my professional relationship with David and his scrappy little newspaper, The Nantucket Shoals, but I didn’t care. It was true I gave the chubby little reporter special privileges, but he’d earned them, and he never abused my trust.
We reached the threesome in the middle of the lawn.
I nodded at the junior partner. “Jill.” Then I turned to Ham. “Break it down for me, Officer Tyler. What happened here?”
“We took the call—”
Jill stepped forward. “Actually, Patty and Byron were closer. They grabbed it, but Ham—”
“We were ranking patrol, and I wanted to check it out for myself. Maybe teach Jill something about dealing with the illegal population. The others showed up anyway. Plenty of backup now that you’re here, Chief.”
As he spoke, a big black Ford F150 jumped the curb and rolled across the grass toward us, digging up the turf when it stopped. State Police Captain Lonnie Fraker, my longtime frenemy, colleague, rival, and now landlord, bounded out onto the field. A big man with a small head and a high-pitched voice, he moved with an athlete’s easy grace. He’d been a star tight end on the Whalers football team back in the day, or so he liked to boast—seventeen catches and two hundred sixty-five yards in his best season. He had the stats and would gladly show you the pictures.
“Everything under control here, Chief?” he squeaked.
“We’re good, Lonnie.”
Haden was looking past him, pulling his phone from his pocket, scrolling to the camera app. I followed his gaze. A long green snake was slithering down from the tailgate of Lonnie’s truck, along the tire and into the grass. Haden got a few good pictures before it undulated away. He shook his head, slipping the phone back in his pocket. “A smooth green snake! Amazing. Guess we know where you’ve been today, Lonnie.”
“I was fishing at Sesachacha Pond.”
“Right.”
“I was! Caught some gorgeous perch. Looked like record-breakers.”
“Can I see?”
“Catch and release, buddy. That’s my philosophy.”
They stared at each other. This afternoon was going off the rails. I turned back to Ham Tyler. “Lay this situation out for us.”
“Well, so, when we got here the scuffle was over. The second individual was running toward the gas station. Jill stayed to question this kid.” He tilted his head at Morales. “I pursued the perp on foot. He drove off before I got out of the park. Gray Nissan Murano, license plate NJL249, registered to Ramon Cruz.”
“Uh, I think it was a white Murano,” Jill put in tentatively.
“It was dusty.”
“I don’t know…”
“You have to learn to look at what you’re seeing, Officer Swenson! A gray car is a gray car. A white car that’s dirty is a dirty white car.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Somehow it irked me to have her calling Hamilton Tyler “sir.” In fact, her mistake had confirmed my own theory of what had actually occurred in the airport park. But that was none of anyone else’s business. Right now, I needed to break the tension and get things moving again.
I turned back to Ham. “Good catch on the plate number.”
“Thanks, Chief.” The praise emboldened him a little. He stood up straighter. “The way I see it, the kid was threatening Ramon over some internecine gang dispute. This is a good place to meet—kind of in plain sight but still invisible? Word on the street is, the newer members of the Tres Vatos gang are trying to push Ramon out. But whatever the argument was about, it ended with Ramon knocking the kid on his ass and taking off. It could have been worse.”
David Trezize cleared his throat skeptically. It had something to do with the cocked angle of his head, but he looked like a baffled dog. “I don’t see what Ramon was doing here in the first place.”
“This is police business, Trezize,” Ham snapped. Then to me: “What is this hack even doing here?”
“Well, for one thing—asking smart questions. Go on, David.”
“I just meant…Ramon is super careful, always was, but especially now, with everyone gunning for him—not just his own upstart members but also the Maltidos Azteca—mostly, he stays home. He makes his living buying and selling Mexican collectibles on eBay—”
Ham snorted. “Launders his drug money, you mean.”
“Whatever. Anyway, he’s supposedly on the computer all the time bidding for Saltillo blankets or Talavera pottery. Which suits him because the outside world has gotten kind of scary for aging gangbangers. So why come to the airport park today and put himself in the crosshairs? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe we should ask him,” Ham said.
I nodded. “I’ll follow up with Ramon. You talk to the gas station people. Maybe they saw something helpful.” I took a step toward young Armando Morales. “Anything to add?” I asked him.
“Who, me?”
“You were here. You have the bashed-in face to prove it.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“You didn’t commit a crime, Armando. It is Armando?” He nodded. “You’re the victim here, as far as I can see.”
“I still want a lawyer. Quiero un abogado.”
“So you did commit a crime?”
“I dint do nothing. But when the cops put you in the shit you gotta have the big boots, comprende?”
I nodded. “Lo entiende. Quién te golpeó?” Who hit you?
“Cómo dijo—Ramon Cruz. Ese es un viejo hombre malo, si?”
I laughed. “Si.” Ramon was a mean old man. So was his brother. “Wh
at was the fight about?”
“You tell me. He was pissed, though. Tell you that much.”
I took Armando’s cell number and let him go. We could reach him easily that way if we needed to. Ham and Jill were still hovering. “You two go back to the station and write this up. Everyone else needs to be out on patrol. Let the others know. Coffee break’s over.”
Back in my cruiser, Haden said, “What?”
“What do you mean ‘what’?”
“Come on, Chief. I know you.”
I had to smile. Haden’s intuitions were on target, as usual. I wished his small-arms results were half as good. He had failed to requalify on the range this year—his hands were shaking too hard for an accurate shot. Whether it was a bad hangover or the aftereffect of a cold-turkey dry-out, I couldn’t guess—and didn’t want to. Haden’s demons were his own problem, and as long as he didn’t bring them to work, I let him alone. He was a good cop. He had joined AA—he had told me so, and a friend confirmed it. That wasn’t supposed to happen, of course, but it always did. Some wag had called Alcoholics Anonymous on Nantucket “Alcoholics Notorious.” Sad, but true.
Haden continued to study me as I drove. “You didn’t buy a word of that bullshit back there, did you?”
“What makes you say it was bullshit?”
“Your face, Chief. Not a great poker face. Go Fish, maybe.”
“Naaa. I was the worst at Go Fish. Everybody always knew exactly what cards I was holding.”
“So give.”
“Okay. Armando’s injuries were all on the right side of his face. That implies a left-handed hitter. Sebastian is left-handed.”
“Sorry, but how would you know that?”
“He wrote a play a couple of years ago—Sinistromanual. Ever see it?”
“I’m not sure what—”
“The word means left-handed. It was a satire about all the left-handed people being rounded up and put into camps. ‘I love your jodido language,’ he told me.”
“Jodido?”
“It means—fucked up. He said, ‘English! You manage to get sinister in there somehow, in case we lefties wondered what you really thought about us.’ And it’s not just the left-handed thing. The brothers look alike. And Sebastian drives a gray Murano.”
“Not a dirty white Murano?”
“Those boys keep their cars immaculate.”
“So maybe it was a mistaken identity thing. The kid thought he was confronting Ramon.”
“Yeah.”
We drove along quietly. I turned off onto Tomahawk Road and wound my way through Nantucket’s newest and ugliest industrial park to the Billy Built garage. We sat in the car and let it idle. “Still,” Haden said, “Ham saw the license plate number.”
“From that distance? You’re the bird-watcher.”
“You’re saying he knew the number off the top of his head?”
“I’m saying he knew it.”
“So…”
“So Ham knew it was Sebastian and covered for him. I can’t help wondering if all this has anything to do with the break-in at Sebastian’s house last week.”
“Why would it?”
“I don’t know. But things work that way. Incidents close together tend to get tangled up—like power cords in a closet. It reminds me of something that happened in LA about a year before I left. My boss, Chuck Obremski, was using this lowlife movie producer, Dale Phillips, to gather evidence on the Russian mobsters who were financing his movies, using them to launder their drug profits. Phillips managed to get himself arrested for cocaine possession the day before a crucial meeting to which he had agreed to wear a wire. So Chuck took him out of jail, tore up the arrest report, and had the GND detectives who made the arrest transferred out of the Guns and Narcotics Division and attached to Customs Enforcement in San Pedro, a lousy job and a punitive commute. He told them maybe they’d think twice next time before they crapped all over someone else’s sting.”
Haden frowned. “I’m not really following this.”
“Chuck wanted Dale Phillips on the street, free and clear. It’s the same thing today. Ham Tyler wants Sebastian Cruz on the street. But why? What does he want Sebastian for? That’s what I don’t get.”
I went to see Sebastian later that day, but he had no answers for me. He had gone to the airport park to pace it out for a bid. He was hoping to secure the town landscaping contract for various public spaces, and he liked to walk the land before he agreed to work on it. Of course, he had never set foot in the park before.
“Armando must have followed me,” he said. It had to be a case of mistaken identity—both car and person. “We do look alike. And those Muranos…”
Why had Ham Tyler let him go and then covered for him? No idea. As for Ham, I already knew his views on the interchangeability of Hispanic faces.
As for Ramon, he had time-stamped eBay bids plus conversations with the carpentry crew that was patching his deck to verify his whereabouts. He was dismissive about Armando. “Lucky for him he braced my brother.”
“Lucky for you, too. You could have wound up in jail for felony assault. I might not be able to keep ICE off you again. I might not even try.”
I ended the day with suspicions and misgivings, and not much else. I put off Rob Roman and his investigation until Wednesday and went home.
My mom was sitting at the kitchen table, having a cup of her chamomile tea with Jane.
“It’s always been the same in this country,” she was saying. “Socialism for the rich—free market capitalism for the poor.”
I stepped over, kissed the top of her head. “Are you trying to radicalize my fiancée?”
Jane smiled up at me. “Too late.”
“I’m just so angry about everything that’s happening now,” Mom said. “And people are losing their outrage. That’s the worst part. You have to keep your sense of outrage.”
I nodded, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “But it’s so exhausting.”
Jane said, “The plumber came today, but the sink is still dripping. It’s like Billy Delavane always says, ‘There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it twice..’”
I moved to the sink and twiddled the faucet. One drip bulged out and then another. I shrugged. “Good enough for Nantucket.”
Jane laughed. “You’re finally starting to sound like a local.”
Mom said, “There was beautiful catfish at 167 today. Bill saved me a piece. I thought I’d make it for dinner.”
This was odd and yet typical. My mom had been on-island for less than a week, but she’d already discovered Nantucket’s best fish store—Bill Sandole’s, at 167 Hummock Pond Road—and somehow become good enough friends with the proprietor to get special treatment. Apparently, one of the women who worked there was having trouble with her brother-in-law—there were constant arguments in the small house they shared over everything from politics to house-cleaning.
“I told her, don’t say ‘You’re wrong, you’re bad.’ Tell him how you feel, instead. He can say, ‘I’m not bad, I’m not wrong.’ But if you say ‘What you did hurt my feelings,’ he can’t really say no, it didn’t. It opens up the conversation. It’s non-threatening. So many things people say make the other person stop listening. They don’t hear a thing after you say some terrible thing that makes you feel better.”
“So what happened?”
“I guess they sorted things out.”
“And you get the special catfish.”
“Well, we all do. And Bill’s going to show me the best places to get mussels. Remember that wonderful mussel chowder we made at Sands Point that summer?”
I nodded. “That was great.”
“Well, Bill says the best mussels are under the rocks at the jetties. He said he’d take me.”
“Mom. You have Parkinson’s! You’re no
t going to go scrambling around the jetties with Bill Sandole!”
“Maybe when I feel better.”
“Maybe.”
She had recently launched into an exercise program that put my own sporadic calisthenics to shame. If a person could beat back an incurable illness with optimism and sheer force of will, she would be the one to do it. She liked to say “The crazy thing is, I’m in perfect health except for this stupid disease.”
Coming from her, it almost made sense.
We were in the middle of making dinner, and Jane was pitching a crazy new story idea, when I got the call from Dr. Conrad Parrish, Cindy’s father.
“My publisher is giving me a stand-alone book,” Jane was saying. “Kind of a break from Maddie Clark—and I woke up this morning with the wildest high-concept premise ever.”
I looked up from chopping onions. “Tell us.”
“Okay. Here it is. What if…” She seemed to think better of it.
“Go on,” Mom urged her.
“Maybe it’s too crazy.”
“We’ll be the judge of that,” I said with a stern finger wag.
“Okay, okay. So—what if every rock-and-roll death since the late fifties was the work of one serial killer?”
“Too crazy,” I agreed.
Mom laughed out loud. “I love it!”
“How would that even work?” I asked.
“I don’t know…maybe some retired detective sees the same weird face in too many photographs. Or it’s a writer, and he’s doing, like, a history-of-rock coffee-table book. This weird guy was on the ground crew next to Buddy Holly’s plane—and delivering room service to Elvis’s hotel room.”
Before I could answer, my phone rang. I picked up, opened the line, and heard an angry bellow. “My son is dead! What are you going to do about it?”
“Excuse me?”
“You put him in jail. You painted the target on his back! Now the shot has found its mark, and his blood is on your hands.”
“Who am I speaking with?”
“Conrad Parrish. Dr. Conrad Parrish. Nathan Parrish’s father.”
“How did you get this number?”
Nantucket Penny Page 9
