Chapter Nine
Stray Humans
“They’re coming,” said Pat Folger.
It was the most dreaded phrase on Nantucket, worse than “You are called for jury duty,” “You’re number sixty-five on the stand-by list” or even “The airport will be closed indefinitely due to fog.”
It contained all the frustration, anxiety, and despair of working in the trades in what Elaine Bailey like to call a “Premiere destination resort community.” You were at the mercy of spoiled petty demanding people, pampered into a new infancy—adult toddlers, pointing and screaming at the baubles and treats they craved, stamping their Manolo Blahniks and jamming their perfectly manicured thumbs into their collagen puffed mouths at the slightest delay. Dealing with these new millionaires was like working in the king’s nursery, where the young prince could have you beheaded if you denied him an extra cookie.
Most of the time it didn’t matter. These owners were working in New York, or traveling in Europe. The only evidence of them was the occasional whining phone call or fax. But they always showed up eventually, generally when the final payments were due, and the richer they were the more reluctant they were to part with their money. A few years before, Pat Folger had built an eighty-thousand-dollar custom kitchen for a fast food franchise tycoon. He arrived on the island owing Pat sixty-thousand dollars. He was happy to write the check if the kitchen “passed the test.” Pat had no idea what he was talking about, but it became horribly clear when he dumped a bag of marbles onto the counter. If they didn’t roll, he would consider the counter sufficiently level. But of course they did. Not even NASA built things to that tolerance, but Pat had to spend three weeks tweaking and shimming the kitchen, which everyone knew was never going to be used anyway.
That goblin was a Woody Guthrie-like friend of the working man compared to Preston Lomax, whose perfectionism and malignant eye for detail had resulted in numerous lawsuits, and occasional fistfights, as he accumulated houses all over the East Coast, from Hilton Head Island to Woodstock, Vermont. Everyone knew he would be stalking through the house, looking for reasons not to pay. And everyone was pretty sure he’d find some. Perfection was hard to come by in the building trades.
Especially in the painting trade; and most especially, on Mike Henderson’s paint crew.
They were an odd bunch, castaways and drifters, losers who really couldn’t make a living anywhere else. “Stray humans,” Cindy called them. She said Mike collected them like stray dogs, but Mike knew he was one of them himself. So were all his friends. The island was a forgiving place. The people who actually lived there, the year-round residents who had come from somewhere else, had generally come to hide out and regroup and start over.
Bob Haffner, for instance. He was Mike’s foreman. Bob was a skilled painter. He was highly organized and he knew where all the putty knives and nail sets and pot hooks were on any job site; he knew how to get things done and how to get people to do them. He could get a Sunday’s work out of Derek Briley during World Cup finals weekend or an extra hour’s work on a Friday afternoon out of a jaded slacker like Kevin Sloane. He was good with people, because they knew he had made every mistake they would ever consider and possessed every flaw and weakness they could ever imagine. All he really cared about was finding new and ever more elaborate ways to avoid working and get stuff free. Painting was a temporary expedient that had somehow become the major part of his life for the last fifteen years. Most painters as good as Haffner would have started their own company long ago. But Bob didn’t want to commit to the business. He was sure one of his schemes would pay off any day now. This was a man who saved everyone else’s receipts so he could go head to head with the tax auditors after he had written himself off as a loss for the third year in a row. This was a man who got his clothes at the dump and stocked his larder out of the church food pantry. This was a man who would convince cancer homecare workers that he was dying just so he could get hot meals delivered to his house for free.
At least he wasn’t drinking anymore. But he couldn’t stay away from the twelve-step programs. It wasn’t just AA or Overeaters Anonymous or the Gulf War syndrome groups. He was in several combined groups, too: co-dependent phobic liars with obsessive compulsive Gulf War syndrome and adult children of overeating masturbation addicts with recovered memories of same-sex child abuse. There were times when he couldn’t remember what meeting he was at and what kind of insane shaggy dog story he was going to have to invent to maintain his good standing with the other victims.
That was when he realized he was addicted to twelve-step groups.
“Is there a group for that?” he asked Mike. “It would be so perfect.”
He was cutting in the big living room ceiling and Mike was rolling it when Pat Folger walked in. They ignored him. He turned off their radio and said it again.
“You hear me? They’re coming. Next Tuesday. With three moving vans full of furniture.”
“Just three?”
“Are you gonna be ready?”
Mike set the roller in the pan and turned to face the squat red-headed contractor. “How about you, Pat? I can’t paint stuff that isn’t built yet.”
“There’s plenty for you to paint.”
“How about the mantel? Or the cove molding upstairs? Or the loft baseboards? Half your guys are at the Chicken Box, Billy Delavane is out surfing, your son quit last week. Costigan is the only guy you have working. My whole crew is here and we’re painting ourselves out of a job.”
“No. You’re talking yourself out of a job.”
“Then fire me. And good luck finishing this place by Tuesday.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
Folger stumped out of the room.
“He’s always complaining that he gets no loyalty,” Haffner said, going back to work. “I feel like telling him, Pat—that’s because you’re a toad and everyone hates you.”
“That would go over well.”
“Shall I do it? I could do it right now.”
“Actually, I’d prefer it if you waited until we all got paid.”
A few minutes later, Billy Delavane poked his head in the door. “Stop painting and do something you’re good at,” he said, “like drinking coffee.”
He extended the paper tray from Fast Forward. “Black for Mike. Cream and sugar for Bob.”
“It’s more than that,” Haffner corrected him. “Fuck the coffee. It’s just a vehicle for my cream and sugar.” He took his cup.
“Don’t worry about Pat,” Billy said, taking a first sip. “The last few weeks on a job, Pat goes insane. Just like your dad used to. He fired his own son yesterday.”
“Hey, Dad never fired me.”
“He came close. Like at Butler’s, when he said ‘take down the ceiling’—he meant scrape it, but you ripped the whole thing out, right down to the strapping. Or when your dog walked all over the stenciled floor? That was a good one. I thought he was gonna have a seizure that time.”
“Okay, okay. He should have fired me but he didn’t.”
“Pat’s even worse, though. He’ll scream at anyone. He threw the Lomax kid off the site yesterday, just because he asked you a question.”
“He wanted to know if we were using eggshell paint on the walls. So what?”
Billy hiked his shoulders. “Hey, I have no idea. Avoid Pat this week. That’s my advice. And if you can’t avoid him, just say ‘yes.’ He likes it when people say ‘yes.’” Billy glanced at his watch. It was a gold Patek-Phillipe, out of place on a job site, but he wore it everywhere. “My break’s over,” he said. “See you guys later.”
On the second floor of the house, Tanya Kriel was painting trim with Lu-Anne Dowling. Lu-Anne was a lesbian, so feminine and charming that Haffner had flirted with her for weeks when she was first hired, until he caught her with the tile girl in the upstairs bathroom. Lu-Anne had no political or philosop
hical mission; she just liked women. She had a little crush on Tanya but she knew it was hopeless. She was talking about a party she’d been to the week before. She didn’t know who was straight and who was gay, which had resulted in a few drunken embarrassments. Tanya was nodding, but she was thinking about other things.
Primarily, she was thinking about murder.
She had come up with some good ideas for dealing with Preston Lomax recently. The best one involved using his own vices to cover her tracks. He was a smoker, Eric had told her that. During her sister’s time he had quit—no patch, no gum, just cold turkey—he had been insufferable on the subject of his peerless self-discipline. But apparently he was back to three packs a day now. So much for the captain of industry and his iron will. Tanya smiled: this was an opportunity. Nicotine in pure form was one of the most poisonous substances on Earth. All she had to do was drop a crumb of the stuff into his drink and he’d be dead in less than a minute from cardiac arrest brought on by the overdose. She could just hear the doctor saying, “Extraordinary, Mrs. Lomax. Your husband smoked himself to death in the most blatant way I’ve ever come across in thirty years of practicing medicine.”
Which begged several questions: how to get the stuff into his drink, for one thing. Also she had no idea what it tasted like. Would he notice it? If it acted fast enough, that wouldn’t matter. She was starting to catalogue other poisons—she had been reading on the Internet about some stuff called brucine—when the clamor of an argument broke her concentration.
Haffner had come upstairs and he was yelling at Kevin Sloane. Tanya hadn’t said a word to Kevin all day; she could hardly bear to look at him after what he’d done. The idea of him just standing there, watching her with Mike, seeing everything and just sort of soaking it up into his gonads like some hideous carnal leech made her literally sick to her stomach.
Mike had avoided Kevin, also, she’d noticed. They’d barely spoken all day.
“You call this sanded?” Haffner was shouting. “This isn’t sanded!”
“Hey, bite me, man. I sanded it.”
“No! You moved a piece of sandpaper over it. But that doesn’t matter because it’s not smooth and it can’t be painted until it’s smooth. Get it? That’s why we sand things. Not so we can say we sanded them. Not for fun. Not for the exercise. We sand things to make them smooth. So we can paint them. Is that really too much for you to grasp? Is that too tough for you? Do you need a little chart with stick figures?”
Mike had climbed the stairs and Kevin turned to him.
“Did you hear the way he’s talking to me, Mike?”
“I heard him.”
“He’s being a dick, man.”
“This kid isn’t a painter, Mike,” Haffner said. “I can’t talk to him. You give it a try.”
Kevin looked calmly at Mike.
“I don’t think he should be allowed to talk to me that way.”
“I tried being polite. That didn’t work,” Haffner said.
Kevin’s eyes were steady. He wouldn’t look away.
“I think he should apologize.”
“The hell I will!”
“I think you should exert your authority, Mike. Things can get way out of control when the boss is afraid to exert his authority.”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Shall I tell him?” Kevin asked. “I’ll be glad to tell him.”
Mike turned to Haffner. “Apologize, Bob. You were out of line.”
“Out of line? You’re paying this little turd eighteen bucks an hour to get in everyone’s way, he’s acting like he owns the place and I’m out of line. This is bullshit.”
“So let’s patch it up and put it behind us.”
“You patch it up, boss man. I’m outta here.”
He stalked down the stairs. They heard the door slam. Kevin smiled at Mike.
“You could apologize. That would be okay.”
Mike fought down the urge to punch that smug grin into bloody pieces. Kevin had the power and he knew it. Pretending things were different wouldn’t change them. He looked at Tanya. She looked away.
“Sorry,” he said.
“That’s it?”
“I’m very sorry Bob was rude to you. All right?”
“I don’t know. I detected a little sarcasm there. Am I right? Was there a little irony in your tone?”
There was a gagging silence. Mike couldn’t bring the word up his throat.
“Mike?” Kevin prompted him.
“No.”
“Well, good then. I guess we can all get back to work.”
He walked to the next door casing and started sanding it in the most cursory way possible. Tanya looked at Mike. Her look said Is this how it’s going to be?
Mike looked down. He had no answer for her.
Which meant yes. Mike’s future was firmly in Kevin’s hands. He was holding Mike’s marriage hostage and that gave him power and power felt good; better than good. It was like snorting amyl nitrate. It obviously gave the little creep a major head rush.
Mike started back down the stairs. He had created a monster, and the monster was having the time of his life.
***
Across the raw mud of the Lomax compound, on the second floor of the main house, the remaining member of Mike’s crew, Derek Briley, was finish-painting window casings, eavesdropping on another local monster. Lomax and his friend Nathan Parrish were chatting away, not ten feet from him, exchanging confidences of various kinds, primarily business related, and Derek was soaking up every word. All he had to do was keep on working. He was nothing to them. He might as well be a dog lying in the sun with his head on his paws, tame and witless.
Derek was anything but. He had a mean streak and he was clever, with a cockney shrewdness that was far more useful than the educated intellectual clog dance his boss went through before every decision. Derek had most things decided in advance. One good example: he’d never diddle the help, no matter how cute they were. He’d warned Mike about it jokingly one day when he’d seen the boss making goo-goo eyes at Tanya Kriel. “This for thinking, that for dancing,” he’d said, pointing to his head and his crotch. But Mike didn’t listen. Scratch that. He listened all right; and he thought about it long and hard. Oh, yeah, he did the full clog dance, then he went ahead and did whatever stupid thing he was going to do in the first place. Mike’s thinking was like the Circle Line tube. A lot of noise and jumble to get back to where you started from. It was different with Derek. When he was thinking he was working things out, figuring the angles. His kind would always get the better of a Mike Henderson. End of the day, bullshit baffles brains. That was Derek’s philosophy.
So Derek knew exactly what to do with the information he’d picked up this morning. These men were talking secrets, and the best way to kill a secret was to let it out. That meant the newspaper, and that meant The Shoals, because Derek seriously doubted the other paper would even run the story. Derek liked The Shoals. He liked its attitude; the editorials gave him a laugh. So that was that; he’d swing by the newspaper office after work, stir things up a bit. Derek wasn’t particularly soft-hearted, but he loved Nantucket.
And he wasn’t going to let these fat cats wreck it without a fight.
Chapter Ten
High School Confidential
The intercom buzzed as I walked into my office Tuesday morning.
“They’re bringing in the Snoopy kid, Chief. He’s got his lawyer and they want to talk to you. Apparently your drug speech at the high school got him thinking. Not cleaning up or going straight. Just thinking.”
“Hey, he’s innocent until proved guilty, Jesse. Remember?”
“Snoopy tells no lies, Chief.”
Snoopy was the drug-sniffing dog the Nantucket police had purchased three years earlier for seven thousand dollars. His actual name was Westcott, but Snoop
y stuck. He was a perfectly friendly pure-bred beagle, but was supernaturally good at his job. I didn’t really approve of using drug dogs, but as Haden Krakauer had pointed out when he first brought up the subject, “Snoopy has seniority on you, Chief.”
Of course, the individual who really had seniority over me was Haden himself. He’d been up for the job when I was hired. He should have had a built-in grudge, but he had decided to like his new boss anyway. “Maybe I’m not as ambitious as I thought I was,” he had explained. “Or maybe I’d rather deal with criminals than the Board of Selectmen.” He was handling the drug bust. I could leave him alone for awhile. He was good with kids.
I was going to have to check in with Simon Bissell, the superintendent of the school, before I inspected the car where Snoopy had found the drugs. It wouldn’t take long, but I would have preferred to avoid Bissell. As an authority figure who went out of my way not to abuse my position, I detested Bissell’s tyrannical posturing; as a parent with two children in the school system, I dreaded it.
This was the man who wanted to paint traffic lines in the hallways to make sure the students walked from class to class in an orderly manner. He had suspended one of the editors of Veritas because the student wrote a story trying to find out why the school pool had been built a foot short of regulation length. Exactly how that had happened was still a mystery, but the kid had managed to dig up the fact that the contractor was Bissell’s brother-in-law.
The teachers all hated Bissell because he had completely restructured the high school curriculum into an elaborate MCAS prep session. Snoopy had been his idea. He had bullied the drug dog concept through Town Meeting with great fanfare. But there had been no results yet. Maybe this was the first one, but somehow I doubted it.
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