Nantucket Sawbuck

by Steven Axelrod

“Yeah but…I mean, what do we do with that piece of information, Chief?”

  “Remember it.”

  I set the cigarette down on the floor again. “Bag this. Finish up with the Lattimers. And get me the paperwork by this afternoon.”

  I checked the dining room, but didn’t see anything useful. I looked into the kitchen one more time on the way out.

  “Mr. Lattimer?”

  David and Philippa were sitting at the round table by the window, finishing their tea. David looked up.

  “Who’s your caretaker out here? I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Pat Folger. But he’s not posted on guard duty. He saved the pipes from freezing twice last winter. That’s what we pay him for.”

  “Of course. I’m not blaming him for this. But I’d like to get his thoughts.”

  “I’ll tell you his thoughts! We should get electronic locks and surveillance cameras and alarm systems tied into the state police headquarters. We should barricade ourselves in here and live like fugitives! Those are his thoughts. But I won’t do it. That’s not the Nantucket I love. If it comes to that I’ll sell this house and move away and never look back. I’ll live in the city and enjoy my memories.”

  I had nothing to add. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Lattimer, Mrs. Lattimer. I’ll keep you informed on the progress of the investigation.”

  I took the long Polpis Road loop back to town, through ’Sconset and then out past Sankaty Light, through the old golf course and then skirting Sesacecha Pond, which was now open to the ocean again. It was the tourists’ route, with the cranberry bogs and the moors opening up on my left and the glimpses of Polpis Harbor past the big houses on the right. It took longer than Milestone Road and the sharp curves meant you had to pay attention to your driving. But I was in no rush and the big Ford took the turns with easy precision.

  I was headed around the rotary when I got the call.

  It was one of my best patrol officers, Sam Dixon, on the line. Chief Selectman Dan Taylor’s kid, Mason, had barricaded himself inside his room with one of his father’s guns, and he was threatening to commit suicide. At least he hadn’t done it yet.

  The big problem was Dan Taylor himself. That was why Sam called me. Dan had run the Board of Selectmen since long before I arrived on the island and he acted like he was the mayor and Nantucket was Chicago and the year was 1893. Well, with the island caught up in the new Gilded Age, at least that part made sense. In addition to authorizing new stop signs and illegal parking zones, Dan spent most of his time ingratiating himself with people like Preston Lomax. Dan did caretaking for half of them and he was working on the rest. Like most professional suck-ups, Dan turned into an insufferable bully with anyone ranking lower in the social pecking order. That included most of my officers, the other town employees, and his own son. I had always pitied Mason, being raised by that petty tyrant.

  But it turned out the suicide standoff had nothing to do with Dan.

  Mason Taylor was killing himself over a girl.

  It wasn’t so strange; I’d researched the phenomenon after a couple of teen suicides the winter I first got to Nantucket. The synapse in the brain that helps us understand our own mortality is still under construction with teenagers. They don’t get it that impressing the girl you love with the seriousness of your passion by killing yourself ultimately won’t do you much good, since you’ll be dead afterward.

  The Taylors lived in Nashaquisset, a subdivision off Surfside Road, walking distance from the high school.

  On the second floor, Dan was trying to break down Mason’s door. I took the stairs two at a time, bounded half the length of the hall and caught Dan’s shoulder just as he started another charge. Randy Ray stood by, haplessly looking on, side by side with Sam Dixon, who should have known better. He’d been smart enough to call me, but “call the chief” shouldn’t be the default response to a crisis. What if there were two crises going on at once?

  I took the Head Selectman off balance and spun him around. He staggered a few steps as he turned to face me.

  “Stay out of this, Chief,” he snarled. “This is none of your goddamn business.”

  I watched him, waiting for a movement. “Your boy has a loaded firearm in that room, Dan. That makes it my business.”

  “The hell it does.”

  “Step away. Let us handle this.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off

  “I’m going to have to ask you to vacate the premises,” I hoped the official-sounding jargon would calm him down. Nice try. He launched himself at me, throwing a big sloppy roundhouse punch at my head. I stepped outside of it and gathered his arms together from behind in a tight bear hug.

  “Stop it,” I said. “Don’t make this worse than it is.”

  He relaxed a little and I let him go. Then he was charging the door again. I tackled him at the waist and we both went down on the hardwood floor, as my two officers stumbled back to stay out of our way.

  I landed on top. Dan’s breath exploded out of him. I yanked his arms behind his back, cuffed him, pushed myself up, stepped away and turned to Sam. “Get him out of here. Take him to the station. Lock him up but don’t book him.”

  I helped Dan to his feet. “I have you right now for felony battery, assaulting a police officer, and resisting arrest, Dan. But I understand the extenuating circumstances. I feel bad for you, okay? This sucks. So shut up and behave and you’ll be back on the street, no charges filed by this afternoon. Sound fair?”

  He nodded, sullen but defeated.

  I jerked my thumb over my shoulder and the boys got the message. They hustled Dan downstairs and out of the house. I was alone with Mason Taylor.

  I knocked on the door. “Mason?”

  “Go away!” The voice was high-pitched, muffled through the door, clotted with tears.

  “It’s Chief Kennis, Mason. Remember me? You stood up during the Q&A at my drug lecture last year and said, ‘When I say no, the drugs think I’m playing hard to get.’ You made me laugh.”

  “I got in trouble.”

  “Well, yeah. Smart-mouthing the chief of police in front of the whole school. But I remembered it.”

  “I got suspended.”

  I played a hunch. “Did you impress the girl, though?”

  “How do you know about Alana?”

  So: Alana Trikilis, daughter of a local garbage man. Sam Trikilis was a good guy, one of the few authentically happy people I had ever met. He enjoyed his customers and the drive to the dump and even the dump itself. The trash pile was his archaeological dig site.

  I had seen his daughter’s drawings in Veritas, the NHS student paper. The most recent one, which showed the members of the Conservation Commission and the town Selectmen dressed as clowns, clambering out of a tiny circus car, featured an especially cruel and accurate caricature of Mason’s dad. Alana probably got in a fair amount of trouble herself. Maybe she and Mason were kindred spirits.

  “Hey,” I said. “I read Veritas for Alana’s cartoons. She’s brilliant.” Silence from the other side of the door. “Mason?”

  “She doesn’t even know who I am. But now she will.”

  “What? She’ll come to your funeral?”

  “She’ll be crying at my funeral. Then she’ll realize. Then she’ll know.”

  I took a breath. “There has to be a better way.”

  Another silence. I waited, heard the front door open and close; footsteps on the stairs. Haden Krakauer appeared in the hallway. I put a finger to my lips. Haden crept forward, cocked his head in a question. I shrugged. Not much progress yet—the kid was still in there and he still had the gun.

  “I wrote her a poem,” the kid said. “She likes poetry. Yeats and Eliot and Billy Collins.” I smiled. The ex-poet laureate would be flattered to be placed in that company.

  “Was your poem any good?” />
  “It sucked. I couldn’t even finish it.”

  “So you don’t know what Alana would have thought about it.”

  “She would have hated it,”

  “Not if it was any good.”

  “Whatever.”

  That might be the worst possible word to hear from a suicidal kid—the essence of giving up, in three descending syllables.

  “I write poetry,” I said. “We could work on yours together.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Give it a try. Girls love a good poem, written just for them. It could turn things around.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was wavering. “Put the gun down. Pick up a pen. Actually, that’s a pretty good philosophy of life.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “It’s what I’m doing right now. Come on, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  “It’s bad.”

  “That’s why we’re working on it. Writing is re-writing.” Another silence. “Mason? You still with me in there?”

  “Okay I have it. But—it’s just…I can’t—the idea is I don’t know what to say, or that, I don’t know…I want words to do more, you know? More than they really can. Like if I had the right words…like a spell, like Harry Potter or something.”

  “That’s good, that’s a start. Like what?”

  “I don’t know—massage her neck or put cold towels on her eyes? She gets really bad headaches.”

  “There you go—that’s a beginning. Start a list. It can be a list poem. Use all the senses. What do you want—words to make her taste? Just wing it, whatever comes to mind.”

  “Raspberries? And chocolate? The first sip of coffee in the morning.”

  “That’s great! The first sip of coffee. That’s definitely the best one. How about smell? What do you want words to make her smell?”

  He was getting into it now.“Old books? Cut grass? Roses? Not the ones you buy in the store, they don’t even have any smell. I mean the ones that grow here in the summer. Real roses.”

  “Fantastic, that’s a cool distinction. And it’s kind of a metaphor, too—she’s the real thing. The Nantucket rose.”

  Another long silence. “This won’t work. Words can’t do anything and this stupid poem won’t do anything either. It’s just a stupid waste of time.”

  I could feel him reaching for the gun.

  “But that’s the whole point,” I blurted. “That’s what the poem’s about and that’s your ending, that’s how you wrap it up.” I was already writing it in my head. “I’ll tell you what. I have an idea for the last quatrain. If you like it you can have it, you can write up to it, and know you have a strong finish. What do you say?”

  “What is it?”

  “Okay …. Something like—this is tragic, this is why I rant. I want words to do magic. And they can’t.”

  A pause. Haden stared at me. I knew he wanted to break down the door, just like Dan did.

  Then, from Mason: “That’s pretty good, Chief.”

  I let out a breath. “Then use it, go for it, write the hell out of it. It sure beats a suicide note. Can you do that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then let us in and give me the gun. You’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Walking away from the house a few minutes later, Haden said, “Nice work, Cyrano. You’re going to be ghostwriting poems for that kid forever.”

  “I think he’ll do okay on his own. The first sip of coffee? That was a nice line.”

  We paused at my cruiser. Randy and Sam Dixon had cleared off the lookie-lous. “Who’d ever think a cop could use poetry on the job,” Haden said.

  “It’s happened before. Back in L.A we had some gangbanger in a hostage situation in Compton. I knew the kid, I knew he was a rap battler. So I got into a rap battle with him.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Okay, Eminem, what did you say to him?”

  “I don’t exactly remember…a lot of black-white trash talk.”

  Haden grinned. “I have to hear this. Come on, you must remember a little of it.”

  “Well…let’s see—the last part went, ‘Yeah I’m cool, I went to high school, and I graduated, fool, that’s why I rule your black ass now, check it out how, Mr. Fish Belly, Mr. Ofay, Mr. Pig, and you’re the jig, bingo nigger I know the lingo, too, and I’m bigger than you, I’m not frontin while you hunting for a word, drop back and punt runt, them drugs is stunting your ass, you flunk this class you been tested and bested now your ass is arrested.’ Something like that.”

  Haden was laughing.

  “Hey, it worked. Like my old captain used to say: bullshit baffles brains. The kid was working on his response, you know? Figuring out what he was going to say against me. And before he knew what was happening someone had a gun at his temple and they were taking the nine out of his hands. On the way out he said. “I would have whipped your ass you wigger motherfucker.” Wigger—that’s a white boy trying to be black. Hey, whatever works.”

  Haden patted my shoulder. “No wonder you were a legend in the department.”

  “Yeah, right—a legendary fuck up. But not that day.”

  We got into our separate cars and drove back to the cop shop. I was hoping Mason would get the girl, and thinking about poetry in general. Of course, I hardly ever used it directly in my police work, but the type of thinking poetry requires, that willingness to follow an idea when you don’t get where it’s going, or trust a connection that occurs to you out of nowhere, that odd giddy sense of being not quite in control of your own thoughts, had always been essential for me when I confronted the aftermath of unexplained violence or the mystery of a crime scene. Haden would demand examples and I couldn’t think of any offhand. It didn’t matter, though. The most sensational murder in Nantucket’s history was about to make my case for me—if I could find some way to solve it.

  Chapter Six

  Tanya Kriel

  Tanya Kriel hated Nantucket. She had sworn never to come back, but here she was, struggling through another winter on the rock. Well, at least she had a good reason, the best possible reason: revenge.

  She wasn’t one of those people with an “It used to be nice on Nantucket” bumper sticker. It was easy to imagine Nantucket with fewer SUVs, more open land, no ugly trophy houses, all of that. It was easy to imagine it with no electricity, too, but so what? It was probably worse in the old days, before the Irish and the Jamaicans and the eastern Europeans arrived: all white bread old money wasps, adding up their stock portfolios and drinking martinis in those hideous pink pants. The island had obviously been a haven for rich people at least since the twenties. They might have changed, but they didn’t change much. Tanya actually preferred the ostentatious new millionaires. She found the moneyed biddies who insisted on driving rusty Hondas and getting their clothes at the dump even more pretentious, more insidiously smug, than the red-cheeked dot com scavengers in their Humvees.

  Her own ’92 Ford Ranger had a homemade bumper sticker. It said:

  Consider Privilege.

  Checking her rearview mirror, she was pleased to note that it made the occasional tiny woman in a massive gas-guzzling truck suitable for industrial towing or wartime troop transport, wince uncomfortably. Maybe she was making them think, but probably not.

  She was happy to make them nervous for a few seconds. She picked her battles carefully.

  She had returned to the island with a mission and it was easier to concentrate on that mission in the winter. Apart from a brief flurry of conspicuous consumption in December, the place was fairly quiet from November to May: just the slaves driving from the barracks to the job-sites, making everything perfect for the perfectionist housewives who had nothing to do but redecorate. She knew the word “slaves” was highly charged. She had gotten into
arguments about it. Plasterers and housepainters had gotten furious with her at the Box or the Muse when she described them that way. They felt free. She understood that, but it was an illusion. They made just enough money to pay for the necessities of their lives. It was a lot of money, but Nantucket’s economy was precisely calibrated to leave them with nothing at the end of the month. No health insurance, no savings, no prospects—just a rented room, a leased truck, and an ever-increasing debt load.

  Tanya didn’t have any debt. She didn’t have any credit cards. She didn’t have a credit rating. She owned her battered old pickup outright, stayed with friends or took house-sitting jobs and tried her best to stay under the government radar. She had never been arrested or fingerprinted. She didn’t own a computer, and had never been on the Internet. No “cookies” defined her tastes and predilections for the benefit of large corporations. She paid cash at Stop & Shop; she didn’t have a Stop & Shop card. She wasn’t on their database. People thought she was paranoid. That was fine with her.

  She was standing in front of a wooden stepladder, not painting the window sash set up on two nails driven into the ladder’s legs to make a crude easel. Her mind was wandering. Slaves. Yes, she had re-entered the slave economy, but there was no other way to do what needed to be done. She needed access, and housepainters got it. They were supposed to be inside people’s houses when no one was home; trespassing was part of their job description.

  So she had driven by the Lomax job site on Eel Point road last June, hoping to find out who the painting contractor was. It had all happened faster than she expected. She’d met Mike Henderson that afternoon and he had hired her on the spot. He was short-handed and she was experienced. He was attractive and she was beautiful—that had something to do with it. The difference between them was, she knew the effect her looks had on people, and he had no idea about his own. She could tell he saw himself as an awkward lug in need of a shower, with a big head and a small bald spot, shy despite his size, hen-pecked and stinking of thinner. But she loved his looks instantly. She loved the lack of vanity in his disarrayed hair and paint-spattered Nantucket Whalers sweatshirt. She loved the natural authority with which he ran his crew, showing a new kid how to smooth the paint with the flat of the brush, doing it gently, saying “Here’s a little trick—it’ll make your life easier,” helping another kid who had spilled some paint onto a drop cloth on the new deck. The kid had no idea how fast the paint would penetrate that thin cotton, but Mike did. He bundled it up and was rubbing the cedar planks with dirt a few seconds later. Tanya had grabbed a handful of garden soil and joined him. He grinned up at her.