Like a rat. Jesus Christ. Rats!
He was maybe a mile and half from the dump here. Nantucket had more rats than people, and ninety percent of them lived in that trash paradise. They’d smell the decomposing body. They’d come for the fresh meat. That was what they did. That was their job. This grave wouldn’t last a month unless he could keep them away.
The endlessly multiplying complications overwhelmed him. He thought he might scream, or break down crying, or vomit. Or all three. And the complications assaulting him now were just the ones he had happened to notice. What about all the other ones he hadn’t thought of? This was impossible.
He stood still, letting the icy north wind buffet him.
Rats. He caught some stray scrap of memory about rats. A family of them had taken up residence in his father’s vintage Buick Roadmaster while it was in storage at a local garage. They chewed through the wiring, shredded hoses and belts, nested in the engine block. What had Dad done about it? Peppermint oil? Blum remembered something about peppermint oil. But that hadn’t worked. How was Blum supposed to remember this stuff? He’d been…what? Maybe nine years old at the time? That was thirty years ago. They were still living in Schenectady, in the old house on Union Street. The place probably didn’t even exist anymore. Still, his dad had figured something out. Some Old World folk remedy.
But what?
Blum felt like a green recruit in an old war movie, holding onto an enemy grenade, paralyzed, waiting for it to go off in his hand.
Throw it, get rid of it, think!
“Even rats know this crap is poison!” That’s what his dad had said. Poison, poison—what could be such a terrible poison? What crap was he talking about? Blum could feel his brain bulging with thought, pressing against the smooth walls of his skull like water freezing in a full bottle. Something was going to crack.
Then he gave up, sagged, opened his eyes—relaxation that was somehow a final exertion of the will. And the answer snapped open like a jammed window.
Tobacco!
That was it. And not just any tobacco—chewing tobacco. The smell kept the rats out of the engine block. It would keep them away from the grave. So Blum needed chewing tobacco, cans and cans of chewing tobacco. Ten cans? Twenty? As many as he could find and as fast as he could find them.
One more item on the to-do list.
First, the suicide note. Then the snuff. What an appropriate term! Then back here—mix the shredded leaves in with the loose dirt, get back into town and start making up a good explanation for how he’d spent his afternoon.
Details, details. The Devil was in the details, that was what everyone said. He was never sure what that meant, but now he knew. The Devil was hiding in the details, physically hiding, camouflaging himself like a ferret in a leaf pile, fangs bared, ready to strike.
Blum strode to his car, javelined the shovel into the back. Thinking of the tobacco gave him hope. He had a good eye for detail. Nothing got past him. That was how he had nailed Coddington in the first place.
***
It hadn’t been just a matter of analyzing the business ledgers—some routine act of forensic accounting that any bean counter could have managed. Blum had also noticed the tiny details of behavior—the irregularities in conversation and hand gestures and eye contact. But everything was connected—the odd uncomfortable pause, squeezing the thumbnail with the fist, eyes flicking sideways…they were far more revealing than some small discrepancy between absorption costing and cash flow.
Blum had gotten the feeling that there was more to Coddington’s resistance to the Winthrop deal. Coddington seemed nervous, not cautious—jittery and scared, when he should have been calm and prudent.
Gradually it had dawned on Blum: Winthrop wanted to audit the business before the closing, and Coddington didn’t want them examining the books.
What was it? Tax-dodging, embezzlement, fraud? What was he hiding? Drugs, hookers, gambling debts? And how was he doing it? Claiming withdrawals as advertising expenses, overstating net income? Or was there a whole other set of books to conceal the profits he was skimming? The possibilities were endless and Coddington had the necessary skills for fraud—he had studied to be a CPA, though he never passed the exam.
Blum was no accountant but he knew where his money was going and where it was coming from. He knew their vendors and their customers, their creditors, and their charge account customers. He knew who paid late—mostly the richest of them. One noted orchestra conductor who had inherited a giant house on Cliff Road and married a copper heiress, still hadn’t paid for a set of Callaway Big Bertha irons he’d signed for at the beginning of last summer.
The point was the ledgers would be full of familiar names. They were as close as Coddington would ever come to an autobiography, measured in accrued interest and invoices paid. Best of all, Blum could poke around all he wanted and no one had to know. Whatever he discovered could stay private.
He had gone into the store early that Sunday morning, and pulled the ledgers. The store used a computer spreadsheet program, but Blum insisted on keeping hard copy double-entry books. He no longer trusted computers, after losing a year’s worth of data with one crash.
The accounting tablets were a pleasure to read, and his cramped little office was warm and cozy on an autumn morning. The ledgers sat on a wooden filing cabinet tucked under shelves that rose to the ceiling piled with ski sweaters and shoe boxes. One desk held the desktop PC. Blum pulled a chair up to the other one, a scarred antique walnut keyhole printer’s desk he’d purchased years before at one of Rafael Osona’s auctions.
The store was quiet; the town was quiet. The only sound was the dull thunder of the old furnace and the occasional car rattling up the Main Street cobblestones.
He found what he was looking for in the first five minutes.
The company was called Spindrift LLC, and Coddington had been authorizing monthly payments of seventeen-hundred dollars into their account for the last eight months. The first entry dated from March tenth.
Blum rocked his old wooden chair on its back legs, pushing against the edge of the desk. What happened in March? Had Coddington purchased some small property? This could be a mortgage payment. Or installments on some debt. How did it work with book-makers? If you got in over your head, could you arrange some sort of installment plan, like with the IRS? Could this be back taxes? Or was there some windfall Coddington had been hiding, some giant cash haul he was laundering through this dummy corporation one month at a time? If so, he hid it well—no ostentatious purchases, not even a new car. Coddington was famously stingy—a voracious reader, he didn’t even buy books. He would happily tell anyone willing to listen that he was outraged by the price of hardcovers and happy to wait a month to borrow any title he wanted from the Atheneum.
No, no—Anna would have mentioned a cash real estate transaction or a trifecta win at Suffolk Downs. She would certainly have upgraded her wardrobe. So no sudden influx of cash. Anyway, real estate sales were listed in the newspaper, filed at town hall. And the gambling idea was far-fetched, too. Coddington had never shown any interest in the gambling sports. He thought horse-racing was cruel. And he hated casinos. After one business trip to Las Vegas, he had memorably called it “the vampire city”—sleeping in its own dirt by day, and rising at sundown to suck the blood of its victims. So no gambling wins to hide, no gambling losses to pay off.
Blum stood and stepped out of the office into the shadowy store, pacing between the shelves, straightening the displays. The merchandise made good company.
What other vices could Coddington have? Drugs? But he couldn’t imagine that dealers used payment plans, and anyway, didn’t the prices always go up? But maybe Coddington was using prescription drugs—Percocet or Vicodin. That would be a price-stable monthly purchase. How much of that crap would seventeen-hunded a month buy you? Way too much, that was Blum’s guess. Coddington didn’t
act like he was doped up, but Blum’s father had never seemed drunk, either—despite the fifth of cheap Scotch he drank every day. He proudly referred to himself as a “functioning alcoholic” until the day the booze killed him. Maybe Coddington was the same way. But prescription meds required a doctor, and doctors needed a reason to write a script like that. Had Coddington hurt himself last March? Thrown out his back, taken a fall, suffered an accident of some kind? Nothing came to mind. In fact, Coddington had always been fit and agile, insisting pompously on the benefits of his dirt-road bicycle excursions, and gloating over his skills on the paddleball court. He had even started “juicing,” reducing various vaguely nauseating combinations of vegetables into muddy sludge and gulping it with a lip-smacking glee that Blum found implausible at best.
But he was nimble, you had to give him that. Just the other day, Blum had taken Coddington and Anna out to lunch at Boarding House with Anna’s sister, Irena, and the girl had tripped over an uneven spot on the sidewalk. She pitched forward and, before anyone else could even register the physical event, Coddington had caught her arm and saved her from a nasty fall. It was almost as if he’d been watching her, expecting an accident, waiting for it. Or maybe he was just studying her for more obvious reasons.
Irena was a stunner, far better looking than her older sister, as so often happened, at least in Blum’s experience. But she was clumsy and careless, which might explain Coddington’s wary eye. She had caused three fender-benders since arriving on the island last January, and she was always knocking into things, dropping things.
“I am having a war with the inanimate objects,” she had told him once, after slipping on an unpadded rug and tipping over a lamp. “I think the objects are winning.”
You couldn’t be annoyed when she flashed that lovely smile. Coddington had mentioned it more than once. “It lights up a room,” Blum had admitted. Ted went further: “I would say it lights up the world, dear boy. Sunrise over ’Sconset Beach.” But so what? Outlandishly beautiful things naturally provoked comment.
Still, thinking back, something had struck Blum as odd that afternoon, walking away from the restaurant. Coddington had held on to Irena’s arm for a little too long, as if he was reluctant to let her go. It was probably just an extra measure of concern, but there was something else, something about the date. The timing of it all snagged him, like brambles on his sleeve.
Irena had come to Nantucket just after New Year’s, and three months later, the money flow began—the perfect incubation period for a romance, especially a forbidden one. Irena had come to Marjorie’s birthday party early in January, single and shy, barely able to speak English. Coddington had chivalrously set himself the task of stage-managing her entry into local society, finding her a job and an English tutor, a car and a place to live, coaching her on the written section of the driving test.
“Everyone else has the right of way!” she had laughed. “It sounds just like Lithuania.”
Blum had race-walked back into the office, reached the desk in two strides and yanked open the ledger. He wanted to see the entries again, in black and white. They were so obvious—the amounts and the schedule of the payments told the whole story.
Coddington was paying rent, and he was doing it in secret. He was leasing himself a little love-shack, meeting Irena there for “late lunch” afternoon delights. The upstanding Catholic family man was cheating on his wife, and he was doing it with her sister. Could it be? Was it even possible, from a practical point of view, in a town this small? Would Coddington take the risk? He preened himself as an upright “pillar of the community,” a church deacon no less, proudly intolerant of other peoples’ foibles, casually assigning slots in hell to an acquaintance caught drinking on a Sunday or taking a payment in cash to hide money from the IRS.
Could he really be committing adultery? It was almost incest, too—that made it so much worse. At least, it felt like incest, banging your sister-in-law. Incest-in-law? Something like that.
Blum shook his head, amazed and amused. He’d had to find out for sure.
The surveillance had taken one week. He followed Coddington for a couple of days before he located the house, tucked away at the end of a dirt road in Tom Nevers, an area far from the social hive of the island. Coddington was famously oblivious when he was driving, and routinely offended friends and colleagues who waved to him as their cars passed in the street, so Blum had no problem trailing him, up Milestone Road to the old naval base turnoff, but had to watch and drive past as the big Volvo station wagon hooked a right onto an unpaved side road. Even Coddington might notice another car chasing him down some dead-end dirt track.
Blum came back the next day and started scouting the houses. He found no obvious clues—he couldn’t identify a car by its tire tracks, for instance, and there was no telltale scraping of paint where Coddington might have brushed against a fence post. The houses themselves were blank and anonymous—gray shingles, weathered cedar trim, semi-attached garages. Some had curtains, others had shades, but there was nothing distinctive about the window treatments, at least from the outside.
Blum eliminated three of the ten houses—there were toys in their yards. He couldn’t imagine that Coddington had a whole other family going out here. That was too crazy. Another house featured at Ford F-350 pickup and a pair of sawhorses in the yard, straddled with three-by-five planks. So, some carpenter. Coddington was anything but.
That left six houses. One of them was being used as a barracks for construction workers—he counted seven cars in the dirt in front of the place and saw several young guys going in and out, different ones each time—sawdust-caked, paint-spattered, figure-piped with plaster. Maybe they worked for the contractor with the Ford pick-up.
There were five houses left, and short of actually stepping up and knocking on the doors, Blum was stumped.
That changed the following Sunday. He drove by in the late afternoon. At the last house on the road, he found a prayer card from St. Mary’s Church floating in a muddy puddle near the split-rail fence. It was easy to imagine how it got there: a windy day, a forty-mile-an-hour gale honking out of the northeast, the card on the dashboard, lifted out of an open window.
And Saint Mary’s was Coddington’s church.
He glanced at his watch—almost four o’clock on a blustery afternoon. The neighborhood looked deserted—no kids playing in the street, no one working in the yards. Coddington’s secret house was tilted toward the others, which meant you could park in the back without anyone seeing your car. Was someone parked there now? He couldn’t tell, but the narrow dirt road allowed no other hiding places. To investigate further without being seen, Blum would have to drive around, himself. Coddington spent Sundays with his family—there was no chance of running into him. What about the girl, though? Did she live here? It was a waste of a solid rent check if she didn’t. But the place felt deserted, almost abandoned, in the late afternoon sunlight.
Blum drove to the back. He saw spaces for three cars but the yard was empty.
He killed the motor and listened to the wind. It pushed at the car like an animal, a cat rubbing itself against a chair leg.
He sat still for a moment, hands on the wheel. He was no thief; he didn’t even like the idea of trespassing. But of course he was already doing that, with his car parked on the property. And the fact remained: the inside of this little bungalow could contain all the leverage he needed to get Coddington on board with the Winthrop deal.
Blackmail, in other words. But Blum refused to see it that way. Knowledge was a commodity and so were secrets. The truth remained pristine. If you possessed a fragment of it that others did not, you could build a fortune on it. Think about the Comstock Lode. It had started out as a gold mine. Prospectors found it difficult to wash out the fine gold because of this peculiar dense sludge that clogged the rockers. Very annoying! Until one man grasped the fact that the sludge was silver. Pure sulphuret of sil
ver! And that’s where the vast wealth of that enterprise came from. Not the silver, but the ability to identify the silver. This was no different.
Whatever Coddington was doing out here, those actions constituted the truth. Blum hadn’t contrived or manipulated that truth, any more than Comstock had transmuted base metal into the seventy thousand tons of silver of the Ophir Bonanza. You didn’t create the truth. You discovered it. You recognized it.
And you exploited it.
Blum pulled himself out of the car on the surge of resolution. He found the house key under the welcome mat—that was a good way to make him feel welcome!—and let himself in. He knew what he was looking for, a short catalogue of incriminating items. It didn’t take long to find them.
The front door opened onto a big kitchen—no front hall, no mudroom. Fake wood cabinets, rusty electric stove, old GE fridge. No cooking smells, no dishes in the sink. The place presented as impeccably tidy, but the clean counters made it seem vacant—a stage set. He snooped the shelves, found cans of beans and boxes of instant rice, a tin of oatmeal, and a jar of Nescafe instant coffee—the first item that matched Blum’s inventory. Nescafe was Irena’s brand—how often had she claimed it tasted better than the real thing?
The kitchen widened into an open plan, under-furnished living room. An old couch and two worn leather armchairs pointed at a big Sony Trinitron TV; generic Nantucket art fair pictures on the walls—cobblestone street scenes, Sankaty Light, sailboats. A vase of dying irises on an end table.
Irises—Irena’s birth flower.
He checked the bathroom next—nothing there except the plush toilet paper favored by new money and the poor. Old money people bought the single-ply Scott tissue that demonstrated thrift and common sense, scorning ostentation and display. This small item was consistent, if not conclusive—Irena was an immigrant striver, drawn to any hint of luxury—from the fancy car (Range Rover was her ride of choice) to this tacky triple-ply “facial tissue.”
Nantucket Red Tickets Page 2
