“So he was back on island?”
“He has a crumby little garage apartment in towney-ville. You know—off Bartlett Road? Near the high school. Dad pays the rent. I mean—the company does. LoGran? Eric gets an allowance, too. He’s just a tax write-off, that’s what he always says. Eric’s always kidding like that—kidding on the square, that’s what my grandmother called it.”
“Kidding on the square?”
“Yeah…like it’s a joke—but you really mean it. Except…not totally, Just—”
“Somewhere in between.”
“Yeah.”
“Kidding on the square. I like that.”
She fell silent again. I backed things up. “So Eric didn’t want to go to Riggs.”
“It was horrible. They were screaming. Eric was like, ‘Why aren’t you going? This is your fault, I learned this shit from you.’ He called Daddy a hypocrite and—and other things. As if Daddy was some kind of crazy drug addict or something. And that was the last time they ever saw each other. Daddy didn’t even know he was back. Eric was hiding out but—now he…he’ll never be able to say he’s sorry. He’ll never be able to say anything to him ever again and he— he…” She started crying again.
I reached out to squeeze her shoulder. “Kathleen, I’m sorry. But I have to ask. Do you know his whereabouts last night?”
Her face pulled tight around wide eyes. “Oh no. He could never—he…the boys used to joke around about killing Daddy, but there’s no way…I mean, they couldn’t kill anyone. Except maybe each other. It was just—”
“Kidding on the square?”
She smiled nervously. “Exactly. My grandmother was tough. ‘Doing does it’, she always used to say.”
I sat back. “All right. Let’s do this, then. Can we go back to last night, just for a few minutes?”
She looked up, pushed the tears down her cheeks with the heels of her palms. “Okay.”
“So…you came inside,” I prompted.
She looked up. “What?”
“Last night. You came into the house. Did you—?”
I could see her starting to focus again. “The desk was missing,” she said. “This kind of slant top desk where we put our keys when we walk in? It was right under that painting of the black lab with the tennis ball.”
She flicked her head in the direction of the front door. I took out my spiral pad and made a note. “So you thought there had been a robbery?”
“I didn’t think anything. I just…I started losing it. I was calling Daddy, but I knew he wasn’t going to answer. You know when you’re on your cell and you’re talking and the other person’s phone cuts out, like they’re going through a bad reception area or something? You don’t notice at first, you keep talking but you have this funny feeling because there’s no response at all, and then you figure it out and you’re embarrassed because you’ve been talking to yourself even though no one heard you, I mean obviously, since no one was there, but…anyway. That’s what it was like. But a thousand times worse. Like the whole world had cut out. Like there was no one anywhere.”
“So, you went upstairs?”
“I—yeah. I was sure I was—I don’t know, like someone had slipped me some bad drugs or something at the party. I figured I’d wake Daddy up and he’d, you know, I could …”
“Tell me what you saw in the bedroom. Take a few breaths, Kathleen. There’s no rush. I know this is hard. But anything you tell me may help us catch the person or people who did this.”
“I knew he was dead. Does that sound crazy? I knew it. The whole house felt dead. The air felt dead. And there was this smell. I got to his door but I couldn’t go in. I called out again. I knocked. The door opened a little when I knocked on it and I thought, Everything will be okay if I don’t go in there, if I just pull the door shut and go to bed, this will all be gone in the morning. But the smell was worse. I realized I was breathing through my mouth. I just stood there for, I don’t know. A long time. Finally I went in, though. I mean, I had to. I couldn’t just…”
I reached over and pressed her shoulder. “Do you need more time? Because we could…”
“No, sorry, I’m okay. I need to…I have to get this over with. He was on the bed. There was blood everywhere and there was some kind of…tool. It was in his chest and his mouth was stuffed with money. Someone had—his eyes were wide open, they were bulging out like he was trying to say something, like he was trying to talk with his eyes. No one had even shut them. Don’t you think they could have at least shut his eyes?”
“These people, Kathleen…”
“I know, I just…it seemed so…” She exhaled a long tired breath. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just babbling. I’m sorry, I wish I could be more helpful.”
“You’re helping. But I have to ask, did you touch the body or move anything in the room?”
“I never even really went into the room. I just ran out of there and called the police. I could never…ugh. No way.”
I tried a different approach; lingering over the horror she had just witnessed wasn’t doing either of us any good. “Did your father have any enemies that you know of? Anyone who might have—”
“—been willing to kill him? To do—that…what I saw? To just—”
“Kathleen. Listen to me. There was a lot of anger in that room. It wasn’t some cold-blooded contract killing. And it wasn’t a heat of the moment outburst, either. Whoever did this came prepared.”
“So who had a motive, is that what you want to know?”
“Well—”
“Who didn’t have a motive? That’s the real question.”
“Kathleen, maybe we should—”
‘No, I’m fine. This is good. Get it all out there. No more secrets.” She gave me a crooked little smile “Let it rip.”
“So you believe that there may have been—”
“Do you have any room left in that pad? You’re going to need it.”
I tipped the notebook at her by way of invitation.
“Fine,” she said. “First of all there’s my Mom. Dad was going to change his will in January. He was cutting her out. He practically dared her to kill him before New Year’s. He knew about her boyfriend and he was pissed.”
“He said that to her?”
“Right after the Christmas party. I was there—snooping. In the den.” She twisted around to point out an unobtrusive door at the other side of the fireplace. “I wasn’t even hiding. They were so oblivious. I could have been dancing over there.”
“Did you know about the boyfriend?”
She stared at me. “I caught them together. He was—I thought…”
“Kathleen? If you’re not—”
“He was my boyfriend, too. At least, I mean…I thought he was. Until last night.”
“Busy boy.”
She laughed, then clamped down before it turned into a sob. “I’ll say. His name is Kevin Sloane.”
Of course; I’d seen her mother with the kid. I’d pulled them over on Milestone Road, a couple of weeks ago. It was a small island and that made it tough to do anything unobserved. People worry about our new “surveillance state.” The social panopticon of Nantucket made the NSA look puny by comparison. Half the island probably knew about Diana Lomax’s love affair. “So you think they might have done this?”
“Not my Mom, not directly, not stabbing and that stuff with the money and all that. She’d get Kevin to do it for her. She always gets someone else to do her dirty work. I bet he jumped at the chance.”
I scribbled Kevin’s name, circled it and added a question mark. “You indicated that there might be other people who—”
“I wasn’t the only one eavesdropping last night.”
Charlie Boyce closed his phone and started toward us. I held up a hand to stop him. He met my eyes, nodde
d and faded back to his position by the front door. Whatever he had to say could wait.
“Who else was there?” I asked Kathleen.
“The paint contractor, Mike Henderson. And he was with that girl.”
“Mike is married.” I said it automatically, but it sounded foolish even to myself. So Mike Henderson was cheating on his wife? Well, who wasn’t? Extramarital sex was the island’s primary indoor sport. I might as well have gotten huffy at people letting their dogs off the leash.
“He’s not going to be married for long,” Kathleen said. “Not when his wife finds out.”
“Who was the girl?”
“Her name is Tanya Kriel.” She must have caught my startled look. “You know her?”
“We’ve met. Your brothers were fighting over her at the Chick Box a few nights ago.”
“That sounds right.”
“And you think she’s a suspect?”
Kathleen took a deep breath and let it out with an exhausted shudder. I knew that particular fatigue: the dread tedium of explaining the obvious. How often had I said to one of my officers, “I shouldn’t have to tell you this. You should know this stuff! You tell me!” That was the vexed impatience I heard in Kathleen’s sigh. Maybe I was pushing too hard. Maybe we should continue this later, at the station.
But she forged on. “Her sister used to work for my family. I was away at school so I wasn’t sure what happened. But there were fights about her. She got pregnant. Then she went away. Anna Kriel, that was her name.”
“Did she quit or get fired?”
“She died. I heard Dad say, ‘She went to the wrong abortionist.’”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was creepy. But that’s how things happen in this family. You cause a problem and then you’re gone. I could have told them it was crazy having her around. Dad was too rich, and she was way too pretty, especially in those little maids’ outfits. She looked like a porn star. Seriously. And there’s a word my dad invented, he was pretty funny sometimes. Nonogamy? He was like, ‘I don’t do nonogamy.’”
“I’m not sure …”
“It means being sexually faithful to a woman who’s not…you know. Who’s not interested.”
“And your mother wasn’t interested?”
Kathleen looked down. “She was interested in Kevin.”
I had to get her back on track. “So the sister gets knocked up and dies and then Tanya shows up. What? A year later?”
“Six months.”
“Quite a coincidence.”
That got a laugh out of her. “Right. What are the chances? She wasn’t even trying to hide it. I heard her talking to Danny and Eric about how to kill people. She knows all the techniques. Poisons and stuff.”
“But your father was stabbed. So it was more likely to be Henderson.”
“Oh yeah, sure. That makes sense.”
“But why would he do it?”
“Well—Dad was going to stiff everyone—take off without paying. He was gloating about it after the party. We all heard him. Henderson freaked out. So I don’t know. That’s a pretty good motive. If Dad was dead, the estate would have to settle the outstanding bills.”
“Not in time to help anyone. If they were living paycheck-
to-paycheck.”
“I guess.”
I flipped a page in my notebook, mostly for effect. The message was, we’re moving on. “Was there anyone else who might have held a grudge? Your father seems to have made a lot of people angry.”
She nodded. “You know how some people need to have harmony at any cost? I’m like that. I hate confrontations. But my dad was the opposite. He loved to fight. He loved pissing people off. He never lost an argument. He always had one more fact, you know? One more little piece of information. Even if he had to make it up on the spot.”
“So who was he fighting with?”
“Lately it was mostly the tradespeople. Pat Folger? Do you know him?”
I knew Pat, and I’d seen him rip into Lomax at the same Christmas party. That was one argument the tycoon didn’t win. I nodded, scribbled the name. The notes made some people nervous and I used them that way when I needed to. But they were calming Kathleen down. She needed to know what she said was important.
“Pat has to pay all his sub-contractors, so I guess money is pretty tight for him right now. But some of the worker people are independent. Mike Henderson, and the plumber, and the electrician. They had to go to Dad directly. He was bragging about it at dinner one night—not having to pay Pat Folger his percentage, cutting out the middleman. Dad hates the middleman. I feel bad for those guys, asking him for money directly. I could barely get my allowance out of him. The electrician, Tom Danziger? He’s a total sweetheart, despite the ‘I stand with Arizona’ bumper sticker and all his second amendment blah blah. It just goes to show—politics don’t mean anything. Some of the ickiest people I know are Democrats, sorry. Anyway, Tom helped me change a flat tire one day, in the rain no less, and the next time he saw me he said ‘you’ve cut your hair’. I took like two inches off. No one else even noticed.”
“He sounds like a good egg.”
“He told me, ‘If I don’t get paid soon your Dad’s going to own my company.’”
“Did he seem angry?”
“He seemed sad. He said people do this stuff all the time, they brag about not paying the final bill. I guess the idea is, like, all the tradesmen are ripping them off and over-charging, and the final bill is pure profit.”
“Right. Can’t have mere tradesmen making a profit.”
That earned a quick brittle laugh. “Exactly. The plumber was really mad one day. I saw him slam the door on the way out but I don’t even know his name. He’s kind of scary, though. Can you tell who might have committed murder by things like that?”
“Not really. I wish we could.” There was a pause, then. She squinted in thought, like she was trying to remember a line from a movie or the tune of a song. “What?” I said.
“Speaking of scary guys …”
“Go on.”
“A big mean-looking guy came to the house last week and then drove off in this big black pick-up truck. I’d never seen him before.”
“He wasn’t working on the house.”
“No,”
“Would you recognize him? Pick him out of a lineup?
“Oh yeah. Totally.”
“I may ask you to do that later. He won’t be able to see you.”
“Okay.”
I was done. I closed the notebook. Charlie Boyce hoisted his phone and said. “Fraker’s ten minutes out, Chief. More like five minutes, now.”
“I think I need a glass of water, or an aspirin or something,” Kathleen said. “Percocet would be good. No, seriously. Would that be all right? My Mom has some in her medicine chest.”
“That’s fine. But I’d go easy on the Percocet, if you’ve been drinking.”
“I had like one glass of wine. And that was hours ago. I wish I had been drinking. I could use a drink right now.”
“That’s probably not the best idea.”
“I know. I’m just going to get the stuff, okay?”
“Sure. But I’m going to send one of the officers up with you. If that’s all right.”
“Sure, fine. Whatever.”
She pushed herself off the couch. I nodded to Charlie and he started upstairs behind Kathleen.
Kyle Donnelly came inside and walked over to a hutch with beveled glass doors. Various pieces of silver were displayed inside. “You’d think a burglar would take some of this stuff, Chief.”
I got up and walked over. “Tough to fence.”
“Still. Looks tempting to me. And no one says these boys were especially bright. You know what I mean? Chief?”
I was staring into the hutch. Something bothered me a
bout the collection of silver pieces. They were laid out on four shelves: tankards, a tea service, bowls and spoons, little engraved boxes. The arrangement wasn’t quite symmetrical. It was as if someone had shifted things around and failed to put them back properly.
“Something wrong, Chief?”
“I don’t know. Make sure all this stuff gets printed.” I turned away from the hutch. “Let’s see what else we’ve got here. I want to be ready when the state police show up. Any sign of Barnaby?”
“Not yet. But we got the break-in site. In the basement. Come on. I’ll show you.”
We went down the basement steps. All the lights were on. At the bottom there was a small landing, with a storage area to the left and a big garage on the right. There was a window on either side of the garage door. The one on the left had a broken pane in the top sash, in front of the lock. “One of them could have gotten in here, a thin one.” It was a small window. “Then run upstairs and opened the place up for the others?”
I shook my head. “Where’s the broken glass?”
“He picked it up?”
“Maybe.”
I hit the garage door control and it started grumbling up on its metal tracks. I pulled a flashlight off my belt and ducked outside. The light hit the shards of broken glass on the brown mulch below the window.
“I don’t get it,” Charlie said.
“Sure you do.”
It took another moment, but finally Charlie nodded. He was a little sharper than Kyle Donnelly. “Oh. Yeah, okay. That’s why the alarm didn’t go off.”
“Talk to the girl. Get the mother on the phone. I want a list of everyone who had access to that alarm code.”
“Maybe it was just off for the night.”
“It’s the most expensive system Intercity sells. It’s wired with Cat-5 networking, motion detectors, glass break monitors, and they just got it hooked into the station. You don’t have a system like that and not use it.”
Charlie shrugged. “I got a four hundred dollar a month gym membership and I don’t use it.”
I stopped myself from making the obvious uncharitable reply. Instead I said: “I don’t watch much cable TV, either. But this is different. Get me the names.”
Nantucket Sawbuck Page 2
