I had to move.
I took a breath and then swung around the corner of the house in a single step, crouched low, with the gun in front of me.
Standing ten feet away in a patch of rosa rugosa was a huge and stately white-tail buck, complete with nine point antlers. It looked like it weighed at least a hundred and fifty pounds. The deer was staring at me with feral indifference. I stood still, watching the big animal, feeling the adrenaline crash of relief and self disgust.
So this was the gang of hit men from the big city. The only big city creature in these woods was me, standing with slack-jawed urban awe in front of this beautiful animal, who had clearly sized me up perfectly. Despite the gun in my hand, I was no threat at all.
We stood ten feet apart, our breath condensing on the icy air. I slipped my gun back into my coat pocket. The deer cocked its head slightly at the movement. I took a step forward and the deer pawed the ground with his foot. It was like a dance. I had a piece of a Fast Forward oatmeal cookie wrapped in plastic next to my wallet, left over from a hasty lunch a few days before. I had been intending to feed it to the ducks at the Union Street pond. This was better.
I reached under my coat, took out the cookie and unwrapped it. My fingers were stiff and numb from the cold. The buck seemed content to watch me at first. But when I extended my hand, I broke the fragile intimacy between us. Maybe I moved too fast. The deer tossed his head once, as if he had caught more interesting scent, twisted sideways, launched himself off his hind legs and bounded away into the woods. There was a diminishing clatter of branches, and then silence.
I was alone. I leaned back against the side of the house, let the frigid air burn my lungs. I pushed my parka sleeve back easily, having dropped my gloves as I approached the house, and checked my watch again: 5:15. I jammed my hands into my coat pockets and looked around.
There were no footprints, no surveillance litter, no cigarette butts or take out coffee cups, no sign of human life at all. The woods breathed in the winter night as they had for ten thousand years. No one was here and no one was coming. All I had to show for my vigil was a near case of frostbite and a funny anecdote to tell at the cop shop. “How I almost shot a deer out of season.”
It would be dawn in another hour. If I moved fast I could get home, have a hot shower, and see my family off at the airport.
I found one of my gloves, and gave up on the other one as I trudged back to the car, shivering and annoyed with myself. The cold had finally eaten through my clothes. The gun banging against my hip made me feel absurd. I half expected to get lost on the way back to my car. But I found it all right. The drive home was uneventful, the shower was hot and long, the farewell predictable: Tim begged me to come with them, Caroline told me she was proud of me for working so hard. Miranda looked at my still-wet hair, red nose, and bloodshot eyes, shaking her head with weary fatalistic contempt.
“Where have you been all night?” she whispered to me as the bags were being weighed and tagged at the Cape Air counter. She held up a hand as I started to speak. “Please. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
I hugged the kids and watched the plane take off, feeling bereft and relieved at the same time. There was more air on the island with Miranda gone; but watching my children sealed into a metal tube and vanishing into the cloud-wracked December sky weighed me down.
I turned away from the window. Everything evened out.
I had breakfast at Crosswinds, chatted with my Bulgarian waitress and took a second cup of coffee to go. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting at my dining room table, with the Lomax case binder open in front of me.
I pulled the rings apart, took out the interview transcripts and stacked them on the table. The problem was here, in the things people said, the way they described what had happened on the night of the murder. Someone was lying. There was a contradiction and I was going to find it. I had all day.
You searched differently when you knew the thing you were looking for had to be there. A missing wallet, car keys, an incriminating statement, it didn’t matter. Questions made you falter. When you were sure, you didn’t give up. And I was sure. That was the one unintended benefit of last night’s wild goose chase. Someone thought I was close enough to try and scare me off. That was a fatal miscalculation. I might have actually walked away from the case if I had never gotten that phone call.
I took the first page and started reading.
It took me three hours to find the answer. I had shuffled the pages, hoping that reading them in random order might trick me into seeing something fresh. If Bob Haffner’s deposition had come up on top of the pile, I would have been done in the first five minutes.
It was so obvious. When I finally saw it, I felt like a fool. I had highlighted the passage with a yellow marker and still missed it. I arranged the rest of the pages in their proper sequence and slipped them back into the binder.
Then I read Haffner’s statement again:
Hey I was totally out of it that night. I went to the benefit but I had dinner at the strip first and I was sick as a dog. That’s all I was thinking about, okay? Bad clams. I actually got to the benefit, though. They gave me something to make me puke at the emergency room and everything was cool. I’m like a dog, man. I barf and I’m fine. Hey, at least I don’t try to eat it like my dog does. I got to the party late, someone was watching Leno’s monologue in the back room. But the place was still jumping, so that was cool. You should check out the guest list, man. Everybody was there.
I rummaged through the photographs, found the one I wanted and set it next to the sheet of paper with Haffner’s statement.
I had felt this before, when cases came together and everything was suddenly clear. It was a triumph and a letdown at the same time. Mysteries seemed so obvious and banal once they were solved. And at the same time, you knew your leaps of perception were partly luck; and you had to wonder if you’d ever get lucky again.
But there was something else, this time. It was like watching the film of a shattered vase in reverse. I kept running the film forward and backward—the ball smashing the vase into a million pieces and then retreating, pulling the cloud of fragments in its wake, the shards sealing themselves together, creating the seamless reality of how things looked before. This is what happened. This is how it happened.
And this is who did it.
I knew everything now except the details. But there was no exhilaration, no thrill of victory—just the opposite. I felt trapped and defeated and sick, achy and nauseous as if I had actually caught pneumonia sitting in the snow all night. I was shivering. My hand was shaking. I lifted it off the table and watched it tremble. I was dizzy when I stood. I should call in sick, go to bed, sleep for the rest of the day. But I was perfectly healthy. And I had to finish this thing.
I pulled on my coat and left the house, slamming the door behind me.
Chapter Thirty-three
The Whole Truth
I drove to the hospital, to see the emergency room records for the night of the murder.
I had to do my job. I held onto that lifeline as I always had before. That was what kept me going. Miranda had never understood that—to her it was the job itself that poisoned my life. Maybe she had been right, after all. I spent every waking hour trying to find the truth and the truth was toxic. It was ugly. It ratified your suspicions and justified your fears. It made your most cynical moment look naive. People didn’t hide the pretty parts of themselves.
“I prefer the surface of things,” Miranda had told me once. But not me. No, I had to dig things up and turn them over and see what was squirming in the crumbling filth on the underside.
I didn’t need a warrant at the hospital. They were glad to print out the material for me. In L.A. it would have taken an extra three hours, finding a judge and convincing him to issue a court order.
“Are you sure you don’t want to see a doctor, Ch
ief?” the duty nurse asked me.
“I’m fine. Thanks.”
The records verified Haffner’s story, but I had known they would.
I walked back out into the frigid late morning, climbed into my cruiser and set the papers on the seat beside me. I was reluctant to start the car. There was a finality about turning the ignition key. Once the engine was on, I was either driving or idling. I couldn’t idle now and there was only one destination, once I started to drive.
When I got there, I parked in the dirt and walked around to the side door. Various pieces of snow-clad lawn furniture cluttered the deck, and a muddy track led to the sliding door. It opened into the big sunny kitchen. Fiona was at the table with her ledgers and her adding machine, writing up the month’s invoices for the cleaning company. She was wearing blue jeans, heavy wool socks and a Rory Gallagher t-shirt (“The First Irish Rock Star”), which a friend of hers had designed when Gallagher died.
I watched her for a few seconds before she looked up. She smiled and pushed her chair back, stood and opened the door. I could feel the warmth of the house, the smell of recently toasted bread billowing out toward me invitingly. But I wanted to stay on the deck. I wanted to do this in the cold. It was childish. I dreaded going inside, like a kid in a Grimm’s fairy tale. I jammed my eyes closed for a second. There was no gingerbread here, just shingles and peeling white paint. Fiona was no witch. There was nothing to be afraid of. But still I hesitated.
“Henry? Are you all right?”
That voice, that lovely accent, broke the stasis.
“I know what you did,” I said. “And I know exactly how you did it. But I don’t know why.”
“Henry, what are you talking about, what are you trying to—”
“We can do this here or we can do it at the police station. It’s up to you. But if we do it there, you won’t be leaving for a long time. I won’t be able to help you. If I even decide I want to. Once you’re in custody it’s out of my hands.”
“I—”
“It’s over, Fiona. Just tell me the truth.”
She stepped back and I followed her into the house. She walked with her arms crossed in front of her chest, fingertips pressed to her elbows, binding herself together. We wound up in the living room. Neither of us sat down.
“I’ll go first,” I said. “So there won’t be any misunderstanding. You disabled the alarms at the Lomax house on the night of the murder. It took longer than you thought because Kathleen came back from dinner and you had to wait for her to leave. When you got back to the benefit you set the grandfather clock to 10:55 and made sure you were photographed in front of it. That was a shrewd idea and it would have worked except that one of the people in the picture with you didn’t get to the party until eleven thirty. I have the emergency room records to prove it. None of the other people in the picture had access to the alarm codes, and two of them got into a fight while you were gone. That’s what I know. What I think is this. You were having an affair with Nathan Parrish. You lied about it and I believed you. He tried to scare me off the case last night, but it backfired. He wanted Lomax dead and he paid those punks to pull the trigger. He got you involved and now you’re looking at an accessory charge in a first-degree murder indictment. How am I doing so far? Pretty close? Because we’re talking twenty years to life if you’re convicted. I’d love to hear you say I’m wrong, but we’d both know you were lying. And one more lie is all it would take to end this conversation and this conversation is all you have left.”
I stared at her. She looked away. An ambulance passed on Bartlett Road, heading for the hospital. We listened to the diminishing two note wail. Someone was sick, someone was dying. And inside me, the final doubt fell, like the last frail tree in a fire-gutted forest, tipping soundlessly into the ash. Even hectoring her just now, I had half-expected a flash of that Irish temper, an angry rebuttal that would have set things right.
But her voice was quiet when she spoke. “I don’t know where to begin.”
“Start with Parrish and Lomax. They were in business together. What was the problem?”
She looked up at me at last. I could see she was going to talk now. I had seen the look before. I had no tape recorder. I hadn’t Mirandized her. She hadn’t availed herself of an attorney and no attorney had been appointed for her. Nothing she said could be used against her in a court of law.
That was all right, though. I just wanted to hear it.
“Nathan knew Lomax was in trouble,” Fiona began. “He had to do something about it. Ten years ago, Nathan was about to close a major deal, a hotel chain that was supposed to be fronted by a famous quarterback. The deal hinged on this athlete, but he died in a plane crash and the deal went down with him. Nathan lost millions. Or so he says. Anyway, he was determined not to repeat that catastrophe. “Only new mistakes,” that’s one of his favorite expressions. Once I told him, “There are so many mistakes, you could make a dozen a day and never repeat yourself. I was right about that.”
She shrugged. “This conversation proves it.”
“Go on.”
“The deal he wrote insured that if Lomax was dead or incapacitated, the Moorlands Mall project would revert to LoGran’s corporate control. If Lomax was arrested, if he was a fugitive, the deal would have collapsed in the blink of an eye. LoGran has stockholders to answer to. Well, something Lomax said at the party set Nathan off. I don’t know what it was. You’ll have to ask him. He slipped upstairs “for a little recon,” that’s how he put it, and indeed all the bags were packed. The mortgage button that Lomax was so proud of, the one that was supposedly being inscribed with the family crest? It was in one of the suitcases, in a jewelry box. That tore it. Lomax was about to bolt. And if he escaped we were finished.”
“We?”
“Henry, please. Do we have to—”
“Just tell me, Fiona. No, no, forget it. I’ll tell you. Parrish was your ticket out. He was going to save you and your whole crazy family. But he needed the Moorlands Mall money to do it. Then I came along and that was inconvenient. Whatever you felt for me, you knew I couldn’t pay off the debts and pony up the legal fees. I wasn’t going back to Ireland. I had my own family to take care of. I was the wrong guy. Maybe you loved me, but it didn’t matter. You had one shot to get what you wanted, and that shot was Parrish. You were in too deep to say no. He needed some muscle and one of your girls was dating a crooked cop. Jesse was part of Delavane’s gang and you’d overheard enough in the last few weeks to know that Lomax owed Delavane some serious drug money. Everyone who knew Delavane knew he was capable of murder. It was a perfect match. You hooked him up with Parrish. Let me guess. Lomax owed Delavane twenty thousand dollars.”
Fiona sat down at the edge of the couch. He voice was so quiet I could hardly hear her. “No. It was ten. Nathan paid him double.”
“Lomax must have told Parrish about hooking the alarm into the police station. It’s rich guy chitchat. My alarm is bigger than your alarm. So he knew it had to be turned off. And you had the codes. You took the porringer that night, but that didn’t screw things up. You knew the only person who cared about it would be dead by the next morning. And if anyone noticed it was gone, you had your cover story all worked out. It was a neat little story. I believed it.”
“Because you wanted to. That’s the clever liar’s trick, don’t you know? Be sure to tell people something they want to hear.”
I pushed on. “So, you and Parrish worked out the plan on the fly, but it was pretty good. If Jesse had quit smoking like he kept swearing he was going to, and Bob Haffner had ordered a burger instead of clams that night, you’d have gotten away with it. Then when the Moorlands Mall deal closed, it would have been off to Ireland as Mr. and Mrs. Parrish. That would have been quite a homecoming. The Prodigal Daughter returns, with the rich white knight in tow. They say money doesn’t solve problems, but you know better, don’t you?”
“I—”
“When you disabled the alarm that night, you knew you were helping to kill a man. How could you do that? What goes through your mind? I don’t get it.”
Fiona looked up. “People die every day, Henry. And this one won’t be missed.”
The urge to slap her pulsed through me like a wave, rising and subsiding. I stood very still. “Yes he will. He will be missed. His daughter misses him. You’re a daughter. How tough is that one to figure out?”
“He hurt her, he would have hurt her again. Lomax wasn’t ashamed. He bragged about it. He was a bad man, Henry. The world is better off without him.”
“Really? Well, that’s exactly the logic Lomax would have used. That’s the way his mind worked. Welcome to the club, Fiona. Your fellow members have been turning this world to shit since the first Neanderthal killed the last Cro-Magnon, just because he could.”
Fiona pushed at the tops of her thighs, squeezing the knees of her jeans. She seemed to be trying out answers and discarding them. Twice, three times, she looked like she was about to speak, but she said nothing. I felt the walls closing in on me, the mustard yellow paint starting to flake around the windows, the white shades closed against the winter sunlight and the constant buzz of traffic from Bartlett Road, the shelves of shabby romance paperbacks with their lurid artwork, their simplicities and shameless, pandering happy endings, the air of tired melodrama and contrivance they exuded along with the smell of old glue and yellowing paper; the bad paintings of whaling ships and seascapes hanging slightly crooked, always. It was suffocating. It was giving me asthma. Maybe there were mold spores under the rug. The place was old. You could keep it neat but you could never get it clean. The dirt was ingrained. The silence was impacted.
Nantucket Sawbuck Page 28
