There was another schooner next to his. I had a split second to wonder who was drinking it as I moved into the big room. The bouncer was a burly bald guy refereeing a fight between the Lomax brothers, Danny and Eric. Living on trust funds, spoiled, smug and useless, they presented themselves as a classic cautionary tale about the toxic effects of unlimited money and privilege. Delusional yuppy puppies were common as seagulls in the summer but these boys were a year-round nuisance. They were going at it hard, Danny applying a brutal choke hold on his brother as I touched his shoulder.
“That’s enough, Dan.”
“Fuck you.”
He released Eric, who reeled backward choking and gasping. Then he squared off against the new opponent. It took him a second to realize it was the chief of police.
“Shit,” he said.
I lifted my hands in a pacifying gesture. “Don’t make things worse with an assault charge against a police officer.”
“Afraid to fight me, pig?”
He was obviously too drunk to care about my warning. He charged. I sidestepped, took his wrist and twisted his arm back into a simple hammer lock. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that I had caught Ed Delavane’s attention. The big ex-Marine was watching the new turn in the action with a mean little smile. For people like Ed, it was all about who they could beat up and who they couldn’t. Ed knew he could take the Lomax brothers, and the bouncer. I remained a question mark.
The girl on the barstool also looked amused by the proceedings. She had her shirt tucked in now, and her jacket back on. The bruise on her neck would be there for a while, though. I reached around, pulled Dan’s other arm behind his back and cuffed him.
“Hey…come on, Chief!”
“You’re under arrest, Dan. You have the right to remain silent. I suggest you use it.” I turned to Eric. “You, too, son. Let’s go.” He followed us as we moved to the door. I turned back for a second, addressed the now restive crowd. “This is over. Drink responsibly.”
I could only have meant that last comment ironically, but no one smiled. A young cop named Jesse Coleman came out of the bathroom, headed for the pool table, and corrected course toward the bar. He did it smoothly, but he wasn’t even close to smooth enough.
I pushed Danny out into the bitter night, pulled Eric after us. The icy air sobered them up a little.
“Come on man, don’t do this to me,” Danny said.
“Dad’ll be batshit,” Eric added.
Too little, too late, I thought. I said, “I’m taking you in tonight for disorderly conduct. I’m sure your Dad will take care of it in the morning, Until then you can discuss your folly in jail. Maybe by morning you’ll come up with some real solutions. I’d suggest AA and an anger management class. And try to avoid chasing the same women.” I jammed them into the back seat of the cruiser. “I’ll be right back. Fuck with my car in any way and I will personally kick both your asses and let Teddy take the credit.”
I slammed the door and walked back inside. Jesse Coleman was at the bar, without his drink.
I crooked a finger at the bartender. “That kid was underage. I could close you down right now. Next time I will. Watch these people. Because I’m watching you.”
“Sorry, Chief, you’re right, I know, I should have, I will, I really will, thanks,” he sputtered.
But I had already turned to the girl. Just looking at her, I knew why there’d been trouble. Girls like this were always trouble. Everything in her posture and her chilly smile seemed to say “I’m out of your league and we both know it.”
She extended a hand. “Thanks, Chief. I’m Tanya Kriel. Good to meet you. You’re a regular White Knight.”
I took the strong dry hand and shook it once. “This can be a rough place, Tanya. You should be more careful.”
“Don’t worry. Danny was defending me from that terrible Eric.” She smiled. “Or was it the other way around? It’s so hard to keep track. Anyway I wasn’t the victim, I was the prize. The the extra portion of pie a la mode. Everyone likes pie a la mode, right Chief?”
I glanced at her neck. “If you want to press charges you should come down to the station tomorrow.”
She smiled as if we both knew that relying on the police was a joke. “I don’t think so, Chief. But thanks anyway.”
Finally I turned to Jesse, my voice sharp but quiet. I didn’t want anyone to hear us over the music. Someone had cranked the jukebox and the Decembrists were blaring out of the speakers.
“You should have handled this.”
“Hey, Chief, I was off-duty.”
“You’re never off-duty, Jesse. Figure that out or get another job.”
I turned away, gave the bartender a last scary look, nodded at Tanya Kriel and walked back outside.
The Lomax boys didn’t say a word on the way to the station. I handed them over to the watch officer and went back to my cruiser. I could organize the paperwork in the morning. I thought about going home. But I wasn’t tired. I climbed into the warm car and continued on my rounds. I took Orange Street back, rolling past the sleeping hive of Marine Home Center, then down Washington Street into town. I turned up Main, bumping and undulating along the cobblestones toward the red brick Pacific National Bank building, I couldn’t help smiling at the lines of small gaudy Christmas trees lit up on either side, decorated by school children.
There was something horrific about Christmas in Los Angeles, with the fake snow in the windows of Rodeo Drive stores air-conditioned against the eighty-degree heat. The season was boiled away to its mercenary bones, the grinning skeleton of commerce. Christmas was gentler here, or at least more picturesque.
The street seemed wider than usual since there were no cars slant-parked against the curbs. I noticed that Nathan Parrish, our local real estate mogul, was working late again. The light shone in his second floor office. Parrish had some big deal going on, but no one seemed to know what it was. He spent a lot of extra time in the office, though. I found it hard to believe that even the most elaborate piece of Nantucket business could require such long hours. I had slowed almost to a stop as Parrish’s silhouette appeared in front of the shade. A second later another shadow joined him: a woman. They embraced and the shadows merged.
Well, that explained it.
I hit the gas and turned up Orange Street. Parrish was married, but the woman in the office was at least three inches taller than Carla. It shouldn’t have shocked me. “Everyone will be dishonest,” my assistant Chief Haden Krakauer had pointed out just this morning, adding, in a cruel mockery of earnest innocence, “You just have to give them a chance.”
He had a way of turning platitudes inside out.
I drove out past the rotary and along Milestone Road toward ’Sconset. I was moving fast when I came up behind a Range Rover going sixty and weaving. I called it in, hit the flashers and pulled them over onto the grass between the road and the bike path.
A woman in her forties with a lot of red-tinted hair was driving, with a twenty-year old boy in the passenger side. They were both flushed. It looked like they’d been arguing. The fight had started in the middle of something else: the kid had lipstick smeared on his mouth, cheeks and neck, his fly was half-unzipped and several buttons were loose on the woman’s blouse. There was no smell of alcohol or marijuana. The woman was lucid when she handed over her license and registration.
“This car is registered to Preston Lomax,” I said, examining the registration with my flashlight. I glanced at the license. “You’re his wife?”
“That’s right. And this is Kevin Sloane. He’s working on our house. He’s a painter, he works for Mike Henderson. I’m just giving him a lift home.”
I leaned in.“Working late?”
“Big deadline,” Kevin deadpanned.
I addressed the woman. “I can see you’re not drunk. But if you’re stressed or upset—”
; “I’m fine. We’re fine,” Mrs. Lomax said.
I took a breath. “I arrested your sons Eric and Daniel less than hour ago, charged with drunk and disorderly. I also have Danny for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. If the woman involved files charges, those boys could be looking at ten years for felony assault and sexual battery. I don’t know what to tell you, Mrs. Lomax. There’s a couple of twenty-somethings that still need your care and attention.” I bent down to get a better look at Kevin Sloane. “And neither of them are this kid.”
She studied the steering wheel. “I know that, Chief.”
“All right. Take this boy home and get off the road. You have a big day tomorrow.”
I walked back to my cruiser. I could feel the social claustrophobia of small town America—all the little scandals and drama rubbing up against each other. The real estate broker with his hanky-panky on Main Street, the troubled boys and their even more troubled mother, the bad marriages, the drinking and the bankruptcies, all over-lapping in piles like the clothes on a kid’s floor. At least the city was anonymous. There was some separation between lives. No one knew what you were doing because no one cared.
I had met Preston Lomax the summer before, and watched on local TV when the tycoon was trying to get his house design approved by the Historical District Commission. Those hearings were often dull, but Lomax had brought them to the level of a cheesy reality TV show. They had initially refused his proposal. The structure was too tall, it had too many dormers, that kind of thing. Lomax said he was building it anyway and the town could sue him if they wanted to. “I have an entire law firm on retainer for the sole purpose of litigating small towns like this one into bankruptcy. I’m looking forward to it.”
He had gotten his permits. The commissioners could see he wasn’t kidding. And I had thought, when I read about it in the paper the next week, there were definite advantages to being crazy. You scared people and you got what you wanted. Of course Lomax was rich too, but that was probably how he got to be rich in the first place.
I watched his wife’s car’s taillights disappear around a bend, then climbed back into the cruiser and took Nobadeer Farm Road toward the airport, then back to the station by Old South Road—circuit complete.
The lights were on at the office of The Nantucket Shoals, and I decided to stop for a cup of coffee. The editor, David Trezize, always worked late. He seemed to put out the little newspaper single-handed, and he always had a pot of Jamaica Blue Mountain going. David covered police business in The Shoals. His writing was sharp-witted and he told the truth. His editorials were lucid, his tiny staff was dedicated but he could never seem to fill his ad pages and the paper was always on the brink of going under.
I found him lying on the floor under a desk, taking apart a hard-drive tower. “I can’t fix this thing and I can’t afford a new one. Time to fire someone I guess. What the hell, they’re all useless anyway. I just made coffee. Grab yourself a cup.”
I poured myself some and took a sip. Perfect as usual. “Congratulations on the prizes,” I said. The Shoals had just won various awards from the New England Newspaper Association: best editorial content, best single editorial, best political coverage and a few others.
David shook his head. “Thanks anyway, but they don’t mean much. My category is newspapers with circulation under five thousand. You can imagine what the competition at that level. It’s not the Olympics, Chief. More like the Special Olympics.”
I had to laugh. “Hey, it was still front page news in your paper last week.”
David poured himself more coffee. “I’m shameless. What can I say?” He took a sip. “So you pulled Lomax over tonight.”
“I ought to confiscate that scanner.”
“It’s legal, Chief.”
“I know.”
“So was it a DUI?”
“It was his wife. She was speeding.” I put the mug down on a paper-strewn desk. “How did you know it was them? I never mentioned the name.”
“You called in the license number.”
I shook my head. “You’re obsessed.”
“And you arrested the two boys tonight, also. I heard you telling Barnaby Toll to get a pair of cells ready. Quite an evening for the Lomax clan.”
“It’s pathetic. All the money in the world …”
“Money is like gout—or syphilis. The eating and the sex are fun, but too much of them make you sick and the disease is fatal if it goes untreated.” He took another swallow. “Kathleen’s all right though. The daughter? At least so far. She worked for me summers when she was at college. That’s how her dad found out about Nantucket in the first place. Yeah. I guess it’s my fault. She’s a hard worker, smart and funny. She was cleaning up the mess around here one night—paper plates and takeout coffee cups and frozen burritos. She said, ‘I don’t want to come to work tomorrow in the middle of yesterday.’ That stuck with me. I guess there’s one kid in every fucked up family who turns out okay. Though with Preston Lomax for your father…I don’t know. It seems like a miracle.”
“You have to ease up on that guy, David. Seriously.”
“Actually, no. It’s just the opposite, Chief. I should be much tougher on him. Your problem is, you deal with stupid people and violent people and greedy people all the time and so that’s all you ever look for. You don’t expect to see evil and you don’t recognize it when it’s right in front of you. That’s how Hitler came to power. No one could quite believe it.”
“So Lomax is Hitler?”
“Give him an army and a political agenda and yeah. But all he cares about is money. Smart guys know taking over the world is more than trouble than it’s worth. A leveraged buy-out is so much easier.”
“Well, until he commits an actual crime, you’ll have to settle for the occasional speeding ticket.”
“Fully prosecute all minor infractions. Sounds like a philosophy of life.”
“Well, until I can single-handedly correct the moral balance of the universe, it’ll have to do.”
He shrugged. “Fair enough.”
We finished our coffee and I left. Driving home, I saw a car with its lights out. I flashed my high beams at them and their headlights came on. It reminded me of a trick the street gangs were playing for a while in Los Angeles, just before I left the city. They would drive dark, and if some helpful person flashed their lights, they’d shoot him.
It was good to be away from that madness, the constant expectation of random violence like a cut high tension wire, snaking along the street, vomiting sparks. I was finally starting to relax. When I got home I paused for a moment on the doorstep, listening to the breathing silence of the tiny island, thirty miles out at sea.
The overture was over.
The show was about to start.
Chapter Four
Poor Relations
Nathan Parrish was rich and he looked it. He was smart and he knew it. He was smug and he didn’t care. He enjoyed annoying people. At the moment he was annoying his wife, who was sitting as far to the other side of the front seat as she possibly could. She had been lovely once, but after four kids she was starting to let her looks go. Nathan loved to needle her and she invariably provided him with opportunities. Today she seemed to be lobbing them his way.
“I think Sally Trusdale looks fabulous these days,” she offered, as they turned off the Milestone Road onto a dirt track that twisted through dense brush toward the center of the island. “She’s lost so much weight.”
Nathan laughed. “You kill me, you really do. Women. You all rag on the beauties. You know: Kate Moss is too thin, Cristy Turlington is so gangly, Cindy Crawford is losing her looks—”
“Well, she is.”
“Right. And she could lose more looks than most women ever had and still have plenty to spare. And both of us know it. But you talk about someone like Sally Trusdale who could have finan
ced a Third World country with what she’s spent on fad diets and plastic surgery, and she still looks like a pig eating pizza, and you say, ‘Ohhh, she’s looking so good these days.’ And I’ve finally figured out why.”
“I can’t wait to hear.”
“You don’t like the setup. You hate the fact that the beautiful ones get it all and the dogs get dog food. You try to even it up with comments like that bullshit about Sally. As if your opinion could make everything more democratic and fair. So just stuff a sock in it, Honey. Because it doesn’t work, all right? No matter what you say and how nice you are, ugly is ugly and doesn’t make it. Gorgeous is gorgeous and everyone knows.” He stamped on the brakes. “We’re here.”
Nathan climbed out into the frigid air. Carla stayed inside. He pulled the map out of his pocket, along with the antique deed and the Indian quitclaim, as he climbed to the top of the rise. He could see the car below him, its exhaust snapped away by the wind. He could see the ocean on all sides and the spires of town in the distance. The map rattled in the gusty wind. Just there, about fifty yards away southwest, that would be one border. No bogs, no wetlands, no problems. Just forty sweet acres of prime Nantucket real estate. Right now it was conservation land, purchased through the Land Bank. But he had the documents to prove that the old geezer who sold it to the conservation foundation hadn’t really owned it. The title had been clouded even then, but old man Bradford was threatening to sell it to someone else, so everyone had moved fast and hoped no one would look too closely into the history of the parcel.
Unfortunately for them, that was what Nathan Parrish did for a living. He poked into things and he looked very closely at what he found. In this case he had found the last living relative of the original Indian owners, and documented the connections. Then he offered the man a hundred thousand dollars. The day before, the poor bastard hadn’t even known he owned property. The guy had been contemplating bankruptcy. So he had taken the hundred thousand in cash and left Nathan with his notarized quitclaim and a deed that five lawyers had assured him would stand up to any attack in the Boston land court. It had taken two years and about ten times what he had paid for the actual property in time spent and legal fees and deals he had turned down to do it. But so what? He owned a piece of the rock. Forty acres of it, to be exact.
Nantucket Sawbuck Page 4
