I nodded. “It sounds pretty good.”
“You’ll see for yourself. Let me just call Sal. He’ll meet us at Jackson Point. Normally, he charges a hundred dollars for the trip, but he’ll take us for free.”
“Because I’m the police chief?”
“Uh, no. Because he has a crush on me. Sorry.”
It was windy and cold at Jackson Point—officially named the S. Byron Coffin Boat Landing—and a thin sleet had started spitting out of the northeast. Sal kept us waiting for ten minutes and I wandered around the dirt circle that faced the boat ramp with Madaket Harbor gray and milling beyond it and the houses that dotted the shoreline trailing east beyond that. The summer moorings had been pulled, the scallopers were finished for the day, and the houses were boarded-up for the winter—a bleak vista. I said as much to Karen and got one of those spectacular smiles for my trouble.
“Heaven,” she said.
A dark spot on the dirt caught my eye. “Do people park here?”
“No, that’s another sore spot. The Pereiras don’t like to see cars here and none of us want people staying overnight on Tuckernuck. It’s not a campground.”
I was still studying the patch of dirt. “I don’t recall any complaint calls.”
She coughed out a little laugh. “We don’t call the police. We deal with these things ourselves.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“Just bring a can of fix-a-flat if you plan to leave your car here. Or make that a jack and a spare. We cut the sidewalls.”
“‘We,’ Sergeant Gifford?”
“By ‘we’ I mean ‘they.’ And by ‘they’ I mean ‘the alleged perpetrators,’ which, by the way, I always thought would be a great name for a street gang.”
“A Tuckernuck street gang?”
“Right. All we need is a street.”
I pulled my Swiss Army knife and an evidence bag out of my coat pocket, and kneeled down over the stain on the dirt. A useful law enforcement tip: always carry a Swiss Army knife and some evidence bags—and not just when you’re dropping in on a suspected drug dealer. You never know when some evidence is going to turn up.
“What is it?” Karen asked.
I cut around the stain. “It looks like an oil leak. So somebody was parked here for a while. And drove away with their tires intact.”
I slipped my hand under the loose pancake of dirt and nudged it into the plastic bag. As I stood up, sealing it, Sal’s battered but sturdy scallop boat nudged up to the landing. I scrambled aboard as Sal offered his hand to Karen. He was a short stocky tree stump of a man in an old barn jacket, jeans, and heavy rubber boots. When we were headed back out to open water, he looked me over and shrugged dismissively. “Washashore.”
“I’ve lived here for almost ten years,” I protested.
“Rounding up from seven,” Karen smiled. “Salvadore Pereira, this is Police Chief Kennis.”
“I know who he is, girl.”
We shook hands. His grip was crushing. “Ted McGrady had a real handshake.”
Ted was a favorite topic among the old Nantucketers I ran into. I gave Sal the consensus before he could deliver it himself. “I’m sure he was better than me in every other way, too.”
I got a grudging smirk, as if he was tasting some new food he wasn’t quite sure about—quinoa or seitan. He kept hold of my hand, squinting genially. Maybe all this newfangled food didn’t taste so bad after all.
“I dunno. You did all right rounding up them bombers. I knew Fizzy Krakauer didn’t have shit to do with all that. And you put away Eddie Delavane. Good riddance to that prick.”
“Fizzy” Krakauer. I was definitely going to use that one on Haden, the next time I saw him. Fizzy. Did he drink too many beers as a kid? Or dump Alka-Seltzer in the Summer House pool? I needed to investigate this.
Sal jabbed a finger east. “See that channel between Jackson’s Point and Little Neck? That’ll take you to Hither Creek and just past it to the Madaket Ditch. My grandfather caught herring in the ditch right up through the fifties. The Indians dug it with the first settlers, believe it or not. The Wampanoags got to fish in it, so them fucking English thought they were giving the redskins the deal of the century. Funny, but Indians didn’t see it that way. Thanks for letting use our own land, assholes. It was a great spot, though, back in the day. Herring used it on their spring spawning run, saltwater to fresh. No herring anymore. No Wampanoags, either. Them days is dead as driftwood.”
He settled in to steering the boat and Karen walked me to the stern. Barely audible over the growl of the engine, she said, “He must really like you! I haven’t heard him talk that much since he delivered his father’s eulogy. And that was ten years ago.”
Sal navigated around East Pond, past the seven rocks, gliding over the shoals. The tide was high and the trip was easy, but the rain picked up and we were all soaked to the skin by the time the Pressman house on its little bluff drifted into view.
As we approached, someone appeared in the backyard, sprinting for the trees. He must have seen us coming and fled out the back door—a man of middle height, with an awkward running style, wearing a gray hoodie with the New York Giants football team NYG logo on the back in dark blue. Brown pants, running shoes of some kind, no visible wristwatch, Caucasian, slightly overweight, late thirties or early forties—that was my best-guess inventory in the six-second window before he disappeared. I glanced over at Karen.
She shrugged. “It’s the uniform.”
I nodded. “Profiling goes both ways.”
“Except they can’t stop and frisk us. Or shoot us.”
That struck a nerve. “My cops don’t do that. I have zero tolerance for that crap. I can fire anyone for any reason at any time without consulting anyone and I will. But I haven’t had to because my cops know they’re here to help and I don’t hire bullies.”
“Okay, okay—sorry, Chief. But that guy looked scared.”
“Yeah—because he was doing something wrong and we were about to catch him.”
The house had its own dock. Sal tied up at the dock and we walked ashore over the weathered planks, then across the hard-packed sand, to the swath of dune grass and that fronted the house. Pressman came out and stood waiting for us on the big back porch, looking slim and Brooklyn hipster in skinny jeans, basketball sneakers, a lumberjack shirt, and an unbuttoned striped cardigan. He was sporting a perfect stubble, wire-rimmed glasses, and a pork-pie hat. Sitting next to him, banging his short tail on the weathered cedar decking, was a Portuguese water dog. Except for his big stubby head he looked like an unclipped poodle. But I knew better. Water dogs weren’t as smart as poodles—some people I knew weren’t as smart as poodles—but they were a hell of a lot nicer.
“Stay right there,” Pressman said. “Bailey is a trained attack dog.”
“No, she isn’t,” I said.
Sal laughed. “Are you kidding? She licked a burglar to death a few months ago.”
“Hey, Sal,” Pressman said. He nodded to me. “Chief Kennis. And Karen Gifford, throwing a perfectly good education to waste.”
“You sound like my mother.”
He grinned. “Girls always say that. I should start sounding like their fathers.”
“You’ll have to get a PhD in Linguistics to pull that one off, Gary. And it wouldn’t work, anyway.” She shrugged. “No issues. Sorry.”
He shrugged. “I’m out of my league. What the hell, come on in. It’s a little rustic out here, I know. My father installed a gas generator and a composting toilet, but until the sixties, the family got by on a kerosene stove, hurricane lamps, and an outhouse.”
I couldn’t resist. “So—no cable?”
He looked at me as if I’d inquired about an ant infestation. “No. We don’t have cable television on Tuckernuck. Thank God.” He pushed open the door and swept his arm toward the house. “
Come in and get dry. It’s freezing out there.”
I stepped into the big high-ceilinged living room and walked over to the moor-facing picture window at the far side. Bailey followed me and shoved her muzzle into my open palm. Quite the attack dog. I roughed her up behind the ears and got her tail thumping again.
The house looked out along the rocky coast of the little island. Pressman stepped next to me and pointed toward the water. “Nice fishing on the striper flats, Chief. Good entertainment if you don’t have a TV.”
Closer by, I took in the Tuckernuck moors, cut with dirt roads, dotted with gray-shingled unpainted houses, most of them at least a hundred years old. No power lines, no construction crews, no cars; at this time of year, no people. Just the sandplain grass, the huckleberry, and scrub oak. And, according to Haden Krakauer, the owls.
“It’s a time machine,” I said to Pressman.
“No. It’s the big island that’s the time machine—a straight shot into the future. H.G. Wells would have had a good laugh—the Morlocks and the Eloi. Of course, our Morlocks work above ground. And they haven’t started eating us. Yet.”
“I seem to recall the Eloi were weak and feeble-minded.”
“Touche. But they didn’t have to deal with our problems—development, immigration—”
“And drugs?”
“Oh, yeah. Drugs are the worst of it.”
“Poor Eloi. Well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Right, Gary?”
“Excuse me?”
Time for my LBJ move: threaten, flatter, and ambush and deceive. I put my arm around his shoulders and pulled him close to me. Unfortunately, I didn’t tower over him as Johnson would have. But the abrupt physical intimacy would still be weird and unsettling.
“Your family goes back a long way around here, Gary. The name means a lot. You’ve got it all—memberships at the Yacht Club and Sankaty, two-digit box number in the Main Street Post Office. House in ’Sconset, this place. You’re on the board of the Basket Museum and the Theatre Workshop. It would be a pity to lose all that. Disgrace your family, turn yourself into a pariah, not to mention the jail time. You’d be catnip to those lifers at Walpole.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Threat and flattery were working well.
I turned him loose. He was rattled. I decide to ambush him next.
“I think we saw one of your customers leaving the house when we arrived.”
“He—I…what? No—that wasn’t—he’s just a friend.”
“So he came all the way out here just to chat.”
“I’m starting a business. I’m looking for investors.”
“Really?”
“I have some land in town, I want to open a bowling alley. We haven’t had one on-island since 1983. I was born in ’82, so I missed out.”
Sal had walked over to join us. “It never made any money, kid. Robert Young kept it open for years out of pocket. Like—community service. And that was in the days before kids sat around with their video contraptions all day long.”
“We have Wii bowling now,” Karen added helpfully.
“It’s a lot of square footage for not much return. You really think people are going to give you money for that?”
“Invest money. It’s an opportunity.”
“Right. Opportunists always talk about opportunities.”
“Who said that?”
“Me. So who’s your investor?”
“I think he’d like to remain anonymous for now.”
“Well, he’s one of six Giants fans on the island. He shouldn’t be too hard to track down.”
“Good luck. He got that sweatshirt from the take-it-or-leave it pile.”
“He gets his clothes at the dump? That sounds like kind of a red flag for an investor, Gary.”
“Then you don’t know New England, Chief.”
“He’s right about that,” Karen said.
This was going nowhere. Time for some deception and persuasion.
“Let’s cut to the chase, Gary. I know what you’re doing out here. I have a signed confession from Mike Stoller sitting on my desk and he’s willing to testify against you. I hit one number on my speed dial, you’re going back with me in handcuffs and you’re going to be sitting in jail until your trial.”
“Bullshit. I’m not going anywhere and if you did arrest me I could make bail in five minutes.”
“No, you couldn’t.”
I parked myself on the windowsill, my back to the view. I inventoried the big room while he absorbed my answer.
The place hadn’t been touched since the seventies—barrel-back lounge chairs, wicker magazine racks stuffed with old issues of Time, House Beautiful, and the Orvis catalogue; nubby sectional couch with some kind of leather patchwork pillows; walls hung with mirrors and nautical paintings and ugly rectangular multi-frame picture holders with family beach snapshots turning pink in the oval displays. I could see into the dining room, dominated by a Danish modern glass table and steel-tube chairs. There was even a bean-bag chair in the corner. It looked like someone had thrown a leather sheet over a cross-legged Buddha with a tiny head.
Karen stepped over to sit in its lap.
“Don’t do that!” Pressman barked at her. She straightened up as if she’d broken a vase. “Sorry,” he said. “But that’s a collector’s item. A Sacco beanbag designed by Piero Gratti and Cesare Paolino. 1968. They have one in the permanent collection at Museum of Modern Art!”
“Sorry.”
“No problem. I just—I feel like a curator here sometimes. Or one of those guards who won’t let you take pictures.”
We were drifting off-topic. “Too bad it’s not a paying job. You’re out of money, Gary,” I said. “No donations to the NHA or Maria Mitchell this year. The Boys & Girls Clubs came up empty too. And I know why. You dumped all your money into the stock market just before the crash, and pulled it out before the bull market began. You’ve been running on fumes ever since. You got cut out of your father’s will and you signed a pre-nup with your ex-wife. That’s a perfect storm. There’s just this house and it goes to the Land Bank when your grandmother dies.”
“How—how do you know all this?”
“It’s all in the public record, Gary. And you live on Nantucket, which, as far as I can see, makes the NSA surveillance program look like a pair of kids with two Dixie cups and a string.”
“I don’t have to put up with this! You don’t have a warrant.”
“No, but I could get one in ten minutes. You don’t want that, Gary. Just show us where you keep your stash and we’ll work something out.”
“Stash? I have no stash.”
“Really? You want to do it this way?”
“Search the house. Forget the warrant. Do what you have to do and get out.”
So we did.
Bailey followed us around as we unzipped the couch pillows, pulled up the rugs and tested the floorboards, looked behind the picture frames and the mirrors, checked every closet, drawer and cabinet in the house. He had a dusty old wide-body TV—I opened up the back and checked inside—ditto the toilet tank, oven, and every decent-sized container in his refrigerator. I searched the chimney flue with a flashlight, tapped the beams to make sure they were solid, pulled the curtains and the curtain rods. We opened every book on the shelf fat enough to hold drugs in a rectangle of cut-out pages, and probed the interiors of his stereo speakers.
While Karen tossed the attic, I went outside, opened up the generator housing, searched the bulkhead doors, and worked my way down into the basement. I opened every trunk, tackle box, and paint carton down there, along with every rust-rimmed can of paint and five-gallon tub of joint compound. I poked behind the furnace and the boiler, investigated the heating ducts, tapped the walls for hollow spaces. All I got for my trouble was a face full of cobwebs an
d a nasty chill.
Back inside, Karen’s face told the same story. The house was clean.
Except, I knew it wasn’t.
There was nothing I could do about my hunch, though. Pressman had already extended himself well beyond the requirements of the law and, after this fiasco, no judge would even consider issuing a warrant.
“Anything else I can do for you folks?” Pressman asked. He knew I knew the drugs were in the house somewhere, and I knew he knew it. But I was stumped. He’d beaten me, at least for now.
“No thanks,” I said. “I appreciate your cooperation.”
He offered a cordial fake smile. “Any time.”
“I may take you up on that.”
“I look forward to it.”
Enough. I turned to Karen. “Let’s go.”
Bailey followed us out of the house and down the porch steps. “Bailey!” Pressman shouted. The dog ignored him. I stopped and got her to sit. I kneeled down and she licked my face. Pressman stormed out with a collar and a leash. “What the hell?”
I set my cheek against her big warm jowl. “We’re putting our heads together on this one, Gary,” I said.
“Very funny.” He attached the collar, clipped on the leash, yanked Bailey away and dragged her inside.
Karen watched them go. “You just made a friend.”
“Yeah.” Sal stared at the house. “And an enemy.”
Chapter Eleven
Surfsliders
“Know your enemy,” Sun Tzu suggests in The Art of War, and though I had no particular desire to be pals with Gary Pressman, a little more information on the guy couldn’t hurt. There were some facts I couldn’t retrieve from county records or the Internet. For instance—was he using the name “Surfslider” on the HackAck website? If so I’d have one more scrap of evidence for a possible indictment.
To find out, I decided to check with my own favorite surfslider, Billy Delavane. Stepping onto dry land at Jackson Point, I was right in Billy’s neighborhood. I asked Sal to drop Karen off at the town dock and climbed into my cruiser alone. The big SUV undulated over the dirt road puddles and deep “Thank you, Ma’am” craters of Maine Avenue. I had almost arrived at Billy’s low-slung shack when I had to back up and go around the other way. The last bend of the road had disappeared, washed into the sea by the recent storms. Billy would be afloat himself in another year or two if he hadn’t bought the parcel behind his house. He could move the structure another acre away from the sea and buy himself another ten years at least.
Nantucket Red Tickets Page 14
