“Of course not! Why should you even ask such a question?”
I took a breath, and chose the formal approach. Law enforcement jargon often calmed people down. “We have reason to believe foul play may have been involved.”
“Nonsense. Ted killed himself. Simple as that.”
I set my spoon down, push away the bowl of half-finished soup. “Why would he commit suicide?”
“Despair? Bi-polar disorder? Drugs?”
“Please, Mrs. Coddington. Everyone says he was cheerful. He wasn’t seeing a psychiatrist at the time of his death. And he had no outstanding prescriptions of any kind—not even blood pressure medication.”
“Very well. Suppose he was having an affair with my sister and was terrified that the truth might come out? Terrified with very good reason, I might add. The scandal would have destroyed all of us. That’s why I have never discussed this with my daughter and I never will. There isn’t much in this life I can shield her from. But I’m happy to include the foibles of her departed father on that short list.”
“Are you just speculating about the affair, or—?”
“Oh, it’s true, Chief Kennis. I’d known about it from the start. Ted was never much good at keeping secrets. Especially from me.”
“But…you never said anything to him?”
“Really, my dear, how old-fashioned! The situation worked out very well for everyone.”
“Until someone else found out.”
“Or his conscience just got the better of him. He was even more old-fashioned than you, I’m afraid. Though still ruled by his…nether regions. I’m sure that created quite a conflict.”
“Your husband was buried, Mrs. Coddington. What does that suggest to you?”
“A good Samaritan?”
“Coming across a body in the moors, burying it, and never reporting anything to the police?”
“A crazy person, then. Why not? We have plenty of those.”
“The soil was mixed with chewing tobacco to keep animals away from the grave. Your good Samaritan with the handy shovel in his car didn’t want that body found.”
She finished her drink, and signaled to the waiter—one finger curled down toward the empty tankard, eyebrows raised. “So it was murder, then.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And you suspect me?”
“The wife is always considered the most likely perpetrator. Statistically.”
“And you investigate…statistically?”
“No.”
She smiled. “Well, thank you, Chief Kennis. But then again…if you were indeed ‘looking at’ me, as the television detectives like to say, you’d be foolish to let on.”
“True.”
“Excuse me for not wilting under these innuendoes. I know I’m innocent. Ted and I had gone our separate ways by the time of his death. But we were still good friends—boon companions. He could always make me laugh. I still miss him.”
“So who do you suspect?”
“My sister? Irena left the island soon after Ted disappeared.”
“The jilted lover, the moment of passionate rage?
“I suppose.”
“Do you think she was physically capable of burying him?”
“In a panic, I imagine…”
“Did she own a gun?”
“No. Well, not that I knew of.” The waiter brought her third drink and she took a delicate sip. “It could have been my father. There were outstanding debts, and no love lost. Father felt that Ted represented all the worst elements of my adopted country: entitlement, weakness, arrogance, ignorance, sloth. I suppose he was right. But I liked those things about him.”
“Did your father ever visit America?”
“He never left Lithuania. But he was a powerful man. He could have made a phone call, wired some money…the deed would have been done. And at modest expense. Murder is quite a bargain in the demi-monde. So I’m told.”
I watched her as she took a healthier slug of the fresh Navy Grog. “But you don’t believe that.”
“Let’s stop dancing around it, Chief Kennis. We both know it was Jackson Blum. And neither of us can prove it.”
“Did he own a gun?”
“I have no idea. Probably. He did keep a shovel and a tow rope in his car. It’s the law, if you want an over-sand driving permit. But of course you know that. Being a lawman.”
I nodded. “So he had motive and opportunity.”
“And no moral compass at all.”
I pulled a twenty out of my pocket and set it between us. “That should cover my half of lunch.”
“You’re leaving so soon?”
“I have a wasp’s nest to poke.”
She drained her mug. “I can guess which one.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Be careful, Chief. These little creatures can be astonishingly vindictive when you rile them up. And they move fast! I saw a swarm chase a carpenter for fifty yards once. He barely made it to his truck.”
I pushed my chair back, and stood up. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
But Jackson Blum’s house that squalling December afternoon seemed more sad than threatening. It was unlocked when I tried the knob, a lapse that seemed more careless than indifferent—as if no one could be bothered to keep track of ordinary household details anymore. Stepping inside, the place reminded me of nothing so much as a long ago-smoking-permitted truck stop motel room in eastern Pennsylvania.
I know that sounds strange. Blum’s mansion displayed brass table lamps with Fortuny shades, gleaming cherrywood floors, and elegant furniture upholstered in striped silk, while the motel room offered nothing more than a chipped desk, overhead lighting, and a lumpy mattress. But I didn’t recoil from the shabby furnishings in that distant exhausted evening, halfway through some ancient cross-country drive. No, it was the smell. It was the raw, invasive tang of nicotine. It steamed off the walls, draped the air like poisonous cobwebs. I remember staggering back and slamming the flimsy door, grabbing a cup of coffee, and hitting the road again.
But I had to step into the miasma that smothered Blum’s house. It was my job. Still, I almost fled. It wasn’t a smell, there was nothing you could touch, not even a film of dust, no sound, nothing to see. The house was silent and buffed, ready for an Architectural Digest photo spread. But toxic—something awful had happened there, you could feel it. Then I understood: it was like my own house, before my divorce, when the unspoken animosity between me and Miranda slimed every surface, as dangerous for the children as peeling lead paint.
I had checked with Milly Graham before I arrived, looking for her take on the state of the household. But she had been given the month off with pay. “They don’t want me around there, Chief,” she had said on the phone that morning. “They don’t want nobody there.”
And yet the house was almost supernaturally clean and tidy. Milly was more casual. She’d fluff the couch but not line up the throw pillows with such precision. The books, too—they were pulled out to the edges of the shelves, soldiers on dress parade. This was a vindictive housecleaning.
I remembered Miranda avoiding me by banging around in the kitchen, scrubbing the stove as if to scratch any evidence of me off the ceramic surface, refusing my help or suffering it as a pathetic charade of solidarity.
But there was more. Blum’s older son was spending a few days home from college with a friend. I knew because Haden Krakauer had run into them at the airport when he went out to audit a TSA orientation session, and mentioned it in passing. He had always liked Martin Blum, though he had no such warm feelings for Martin’s younger brother.
College kids were messy. Even the neatest ones left scat behind—rings on the counters from cups and glasses, coats draped over chairs, magazines on a coffee table, crumbs on a couch. I saw none of that. The kids were gone, earl
y, abruptly, mid-weekend, Saturday morning.
“Hello?” I called out. I got no response, but I heard domestic sounds from the kitchen—a kettle placed on a burner, the rattle of cups, a cabinet door closing. I moved through the broad living room into the dining room. The long dark oak table was set for five. The fire in the fieldstone hearth had burned down to ash.
“So you’re just going to read the paper?” Marjorie Blum said.
“Why not?”
“I can’t stand this.”
I stepped forward. She turned off the fire under the kettle and started for the door at the fire side of the big sunny kitchen.
“What about your coffee?”
“Jackson.”
“I could bring it up to you.”
“Stop. Just—stop.”
She walked out.
I stepped into the doorway. “Mr. Blum?”
He set his paper on the kitchen table. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“The door was open. I need to talk to you.”
“The children’s day with Santa went very well, despite all the desertions. Thanks for your interest.”
I moved into the room, leaned my forearms on the chair back across the table from him. “I’m here to ask you about Ted Coddington.”
“He was my partner. He was a good man. His disappearance was a mystery that haunted his friends and family for decades. We’re all glad to finally have closure.”
I smiled. “Does that conclude your prepared remarks?”
“I resent your tone, Chief Kennis. Ted’s suicide was a tragedy that—”
“I think he was murdered.”
“You—”
“Someone shot him and buried him in the moors. Have you ever purchased or registered a twenty-two caliber handgun?”
“Certainly not!”
“Not even for home protection?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. This is Nantucket.”
“The island is changing.”
“Yes, well—but this is twenty years ago you’re talking about. The Irish were establishing themselves, the hardworking Brazilian carpenters and painters had just started to arrive. We had not yet been overrun with the swarm of immigrants we see today. The social fabric of the town was still intact.”
“So, no gun?”
“Certainly not.”
“A search of your house would reveal nothing incriminating?”
“You’d need a warrant for that.”
“I can get one in an hour.”
“Do I need my lawyer? Am I under arrest?”
I pulled out the chair, stepped around it and sat. “Let’s calm down. You’re welcome to have a lawyer present. You’re not under arrest. I’m just trying to figure out what happened to Coddington. It was a long time ago and there’s not much to go on.”
“So you’re poking around a twenty-year-old cold case. Don’t you have any real work to do?”
I ignored that remark. “I understand you and Coddington had been fighting in the days before his death.”
“We argued. We were partners. If we agreed on everything, that relationship would have been meaningless—a mere financial arrangement. A leader and a silent partner.”
“So, Ted wasn’t silent.”
“No.”
“The patrons at 21 Federal certainly attest to that.”
He blew out a contemptuous breath. “Ancient gossip.”
“Not really. More like—eyewitness reports of a near fistfight in a crowded restaurant. Apparently, it was quite a memorable evening.”
“I argue with many people, Chief Kennis. If I murdered them all, I’d be Ted Bundy or the Zodiac Killer.”
“Are you?”
He glared at me. “I won’t dignify that with a response.”
“Sorry. Let’s back up a little. You don’t smoke, do you?”
“Excuse me?”
“In fact you campaigned against public smoking all through the uh-ohs.”
“The what?”
“That’s what I call the first decade of this century.”
He tried to smile but gravity won the battle and his face settled back into resting arrogance. “Very clever. Very apt. In fact, I did lead the crusade against that vile habit. And we won.”
“So maybe you could tell me why you bought out every shop that sold the stuff in December of 1997. Four stores, something like thirty or forty cans of it.”
He stared at me, carefully expressionless. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Think.”
“I don’t see the point.”
“Snuff can be very useful—keeping rats away from a newly dug grave. And we just happened to have one of those that week, out on the old Coddington property in Madaket.”
“Of course,” he said. “I remember now.”
“Tell me.”
“It was for one of the parties.”
“Burial parties?”
“Very funny. No, Marjorie and I used to throw theme parties—scavenger hunt parties, costume parties. Once instead of flowers we staged the house with dozens of different kinds of sausage. Genoa salami, sopressata, ciauscolo, fegatelli, fellino—Vermont farm sausage, Greek sausage, chorizo, linguica, yun chang—that’s a Chinese duck liver sausage—Vietnamese lap xuong…a virtual trip around the world. Of course we had a house full of the stuff afterward. And we ate it all. We speculated about how long a healthy human being could survive on a diet of nothing but cured meats!” He chuckled. “Quite a while, as it turned out. Another time there was a collector’s item baseball card at every place setting. And I recall now once we decorated the house with cans of chewing tobacco. The labels are little masterpieces of midcentury design.”
I had to admire the audacity of his lie. “You bought the chaw for a party.”
“Everyone laughed. They all knew my views on the subject, of course. Someone said, “It’s like a Baptist buying booze!’ The alliteration was memorable. How could I have forgotten that?”
“Good question. How could you?”
He stood and carried his plate to the sink, rinsed it, and slipped it into the dishwasher before he turned back. “I see you don’t believe me.”
“Someone added tobacco to that grave. It looks like you cleaned out the town. Where did this other person find it?”
“Figuring that out is your job, not mine.”
“Any guesses, though?”
“Amazon?”
“All they sold was books back then.”
“Chief Kennis, we’re talking about premeditated murder. One would assume premeditation includes procuring the necessary supplies before committing the act. The ‘chaw,’ as its devotees call it, could have been purchased anywhere, over any period of time, by this diabolical creature you’ve conjured up.”
“Still, it’s quite a coincidence.”
“I can give you the names of a couple of party guests. Would that help settle the matter? Some of them are still kicking around. Clifford Marks, Rafe Talerian.”
“Do you have contact information?”
“I’ll e-mail it to you at the station.”
I stood. “I guess we’re done, then. For now.”
He inclined his head, in a dry parody of hospitality. “Thanks for dropping by. You can see yourself out.”
I walked back through the house and out into the late autumn drizzle, pulling on my coat against the wind. Marjorie Blum was waiting for me. She sat behind the wheel of her Range Rover, parked at the curb. She gave the horn a single bleat to catch my attention, lowered the passenger side window and said, “Get in.”
The inside of the SUV was warm and dry and perfumed with scent of leather. Marjorie Blum looked haggard and red-eyed. She obviously hadn’t slept, and she could have used that cup of coffee
she’d been preparing.
“My husband is worse than you think. Worse than you can imagine.”
The windshield wipers, set on intermittent, swept the rain-speckled glass and came to rest again.
“I have a pretty good imagination, Mrs. Blum.”
“Is that so?”
“I’m not sure what—”
“You’re looking in the wrong place. Talking to the wrong people. If you want to know what happened. Back then.”
“Of course I do. But—”
“The truth is in the laundry hamper, Chief Kennis. You’d be surprised how often that’s true. Talk to the person who does the laundry. That’s my advice.”
“Milly Graham?”
“Milly Graham was living in Jamaica twenty years ago.”
I took a breath. “Look, Mrs. Blum…if you have some information that could be pertinent to a murder investigation you are obliged by law to come forward. You can be charged with obstruction of justice, and compelled to testify in court under penalty of perjury. You could be charged as an accessory. Whoever committed this crime may have killed again, may be planning to kill again right now. If you have evidence that your husband—”
“No! No, stop it. I don’t know anything, I shouldn’t have said anything. That was a tasteless remark about dirty laundry. One thing my mother always taught me was don’t wash it in public. And there I was, one breath away from showing you every stain! I don’t know what came over me. My family is in serious trouble, Chief Kennis. But it has nothing to do with the law. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have errands to run.”
“But—”
“Please. I’m very late. And I have nothing more to say.”
I climbed out into the windy drizzle, watched the car cruise down the narrow street and disappear around the corner, thinking, laundry, laundry. What might a housekeeper have discovered in the laundry all those years ago? Blood stains? Gunshot residue burns? Tobacco crumbs?
Or the most obvious possibility. Would a housecleaner have shared that discovery with the lady of the house? I doubted it. A comment to her husband that night over dinner, perhaps—with an eye-roll about the craziness of rich people. But that was it.
No, it had to be Marjorie Blum herself. Either they didn’t have help in those days or the murder happened on a day off and a tedious afternoon’s busywork turned into a revelation which Marjorie had kept to herself for decades. She had almost spilled it today, though, out of sheer spite. She was angry with her husband. But not quite angry enough. And all I had to work with were some deniable and virtually meaningless comments.
Nantucket Red Tickets Page 23
