Nantucket Sawbuck

by Steven Axelrod

  I had nothing more to say. I turned to leave.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked me.

  I paused at the door.” I don’t know.”

  And then I walked out.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The Verdict

  I drove through the drab mid-island clutter, past the gas stations and the Stop & Shop, around the rotary and out the Milestone Road, my cruiser aimed at the east end of the island. People slowed when I came up behind them. No one could drive properly with a police car in their rearview mirror. No one wanted to be pulled over. Everyone was guilty about something. They weren’t inspected or they weren’t registered or they weren’t insured. They all had unpaid traffic tickets and parking tickets jammed into their glove compartments.

  A Range Rover Discovery was right in front of me now, with sand in its tire-treads and no beach permit sticker. Probably no rope or boards in the back, either. I wanted to arrest them all, revoke their licenses, impound their cars, and lock them up.

  I finally put my flashers on, stamped on the gas, and snarled past a long line of SUVs crawling behind a front-end loader. It was heading for a job site, probably one of the new lots out on Rugged Road. More forest leveled, more suburban sprawl, more properties for real estate brokers to sell each other. I kept the flashers on and drove fast until the procession was no longer visible behind me. Several people pulled over, adrenaline spiking sourly no doubt, hoping to be let off with a warning for whatever it was they knew they shouldn’t have been doing. Good. Let them sweat. Let them fear the law for a few seconds. They might learn something from it.

  I turned on to New South Road. It only stretched for a couple of hundred yards, and high school kids routinely used it as a drag strip, pushing the speedometer needle as far as they could before Milestone Road at one end or the chain link airport gate at the other forced them to slow down. It was a tempting stretch of dead-end asphalt, and I gave in to it now, hitting eighty before I had to touch the brakes, just another scofflaw. Part of me wanted to keep the gas pedal pressed to the floor, drive through the fence and keep on driving, until I buried the big cop car in the sea.

  Instead I took a left onto the rutted dirt road that led into the Madequecham Valley. It was almost impassable at this time of year; they wouldn’t bother to grade it again until the wealthy homeowners showed up in the spring. The Crown Victoria bucked and undulated over the gullies and craters. It took me almost twenty minutes to reach the turn-off that led to the beach.

  I thought of Fiona on the Squam Road, the night Lomax was killed. This kind of driving took patience. She had probably rushed, leaving the party, racking the suspension on some of the deeper furrows of frozen mud. She would have taken her time on the way back, though, her mission accomplished and her plan all figured out, with the porringer, her little trophy, on the seat beside her. All she was going to need was a few seconds unobserved to reset the clock. Everyone was drunk by then. It would be easy. And it had been. Everything had gone perfectly. The fall guys had taken the fall. The trial was set to begin just after the New Year.

  This line of thinking wasn’t getting me anywhere. What was done was done. The mistakes were permanent. The consequences were non-negotiable. Rehashing it all could only distract me and I had to think clearly now.

  I parked in the dirt lot and walked the narrow beaten path through the brambles and bayberry to the edge of the cliff. I loved this view. The bluff was only twenty feet above the sand but it seemed higher. You could see the broad beach in both directions and the wind-scoured ocean stretching away to Portugal. The waves were big today and the water was an unwelcoming gray under the milling sky. There were no picnickers, no surfers, no one clamming or fishing. The few houses I could see were closed for the season, boarded up against the northeast wind. It was a harsh place this time of year, solitary and abandoned. I was the only living presence, the single ember of human consciousness at the edge of the world.

  I thought about Parrish and Fiona. I could turn them both in, give the new evidence to Ken Carmichael, send them to jail and disgrace them. They certainly deserved it. I could let Carmichael and the Lonnie Fraker take the credit. They’d owe me big-time then, and if Ken Carmichael rode this case into the governor’s office the value of that debt would be multiplied a hundredfold, for me and for Nantucket. We’d have a little savings account of goodwill in the State House for as long as Carmichael held office.

  It was one of those rare moments when duty and self-interest coincided, and you could actually be rewarded for doing the right thing.

  But arresting Parrish and Fiona wouldn’t help the people Lomax cheated, or protect the island from the Moorlands Mall. I was in a unique position at this moment. I could do much more than attend to the formalities and complete the paperwork of punishment in triplicate.

  I could dispense justice.

  I had earned the right by working the case harder than anyone else. They had settled for the easy answers, I hadn’t. Closing was all they cared about, getting the conviction, putting the notch in their belts, beefing up the solved-case statistics. One more in the plus column, as they inched closer to their end-of-the-year bonus. But it wasn’t just that. The courts performed the simple tasks they were designed for—indict, convict, sentence…and eventually parole. It wasn’t enough. The law was designed to punish perpetrators, that was the real problem. And it was useless now, because the perpetrators didn’t matter anymore. This wasn’t about them, it was about everybody else. It was about this town and the people who lived here. My job was to take care of them. And I was going to do it. That was all I cared about.

  Everything else was covering your ass and smiling for the cameras, the easy way out and the route of least resistance.

  I watched one more massive wave reach up until it was concave. The thick gray ledge thundered down and the white water churned toward the shore.

  It was time to find Nathan Parrish.

  It took me a while. Parrish was with a surveying team at the south east edge of his parcel in the Shawkemo Hills, deep in the Middle Moors just east of the Pout Ponds. These vast expanses of rolling heath made the claims that Nantucket had been overbuilt and developed to death seem absurd, ignorant, arrogant. This was truly wild land. Even the narrow dirt roads seemed always on the verge of being swallowed by the dense bushes that crowded them and scraped the sides of your car, if you tried to avoid potholes. I had the “Nantucket pinstripes” on my Jeep—now the moors were going to mark my police cruiser, also.

  I was still driving too fast. One particularly deep gouge in the dirt slammed my head into the roof as the big car bottomed out. I slowed down, and skidded a little on a patch of ice.

  Parrish was standing in a froth of bearberry and false heather in a cleared section of brush near the eastern tip of the smallest of the Ponds. Spray-paint marked this corner of the property; the surveyors had their tripods set up and were taking laser scan measurements. Cars were parked tilted sideways off the narrow road. I found a spot behind a new Jeep Grand Cherokee. Everyone looked busy and professional except Parrish, who was hovering behind the surveyors and probably just annoying everyone.

  Parrish saw me and waved. I walked over.

  “Chief Kennis,” Parrish bellowed. “Good to see you. The stuff you’re walking on is called poverty grass. Fitting name for it, don’t you think? The first thing we’re going to do is plow it all under. You see what I’m saying? It’s a symbol, Chief. You know, the Indian lore says these ponds were made by some mystical giant. They’re his footprints, filled with water, supposedly.” He waved his arm to include a vast swath of land. “Well, this is my footprint. I’m the new giant. And I’ll have a new legend. That’s what progress means, my friend. My footprint is going to be filled with money.”

  I stared at him. “Like your friend’s throat?”

  “What?”

  “That was your idea wasn’t it? I d
on’t give Delavane that much credit.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that, Parrish. The crime scene was described in the newspaper. Everyone on this island knows what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes, but you seem to be implying—”

  “Wrong. I’m not implying anything. I’m stating the facts.”

  “Wait one moment. You can’t just show up out of nowhere and start—”

  “Of course I can. Let’s take a walk. You’re going to want the privacy.”

  I started back along the packed dirt, away from the parked cars. After a few seconds, Parrish followed me.

  “Fiona told me everything,” I said. “But I still have a few questions. Why did a mortgage button clinch it for you that Lomax was running?”

  “You talked to Fiona?”

  “Her alibi didn’t hold up. Possibly for the first time ever, it was actually in her best interest to tell the truth. So she did. But there are still some gaps, some things she couldn’t tell me. Why the mortgage button?”

  “I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “But you are. You’re talking to me, Parrish. Because you think there’s some way out. And maybe there is. But first I need some answers.”

  Parrish stopped walking. “You’re wearing a wire.”

  I coughed out a contemptuous laugh. “Don’t be paranoid. I’d need a court order to record this conversation. It would all be on the record and there’d be no point in having it. No, this is just between you and me. At least for now.”

  We started walking again, eyes on the rutted path in front of us, walled on either side by the dense, thorn-spiked bushes. You didn’t see too many tourists out here. Once was usually enough for them. Well, that was going to change, if Parrish had his way: this whole area was set to be cleared and paved for the Moorlands Mall parking lot.

  “Come on,” I said finally. “The mortgage button. Explain it to me.”

  I wasn’t watching the other man but I could feel him shrug. I knew this moment; it happened in every successful interrogation. The subjects gave up.

  “That button meant a lot to him,” Parrish said. “Maybe he had started to buy his own bullshit, lord of the manor, country squire with the account at The Pearl, and the Hummer in the driveway. Like he had arrived finally. It was a trick, a con game. I know that. He knew it, too. But the place had started getting to him. It gets to people, Chief. They come for a weekend and never leave. That button was who he wanted to be. Listen to this. A year ago, he paid some hotshot genealogist more than fifty thousand dollars to research his family tree. He didn’t like the results so he fired the guy and stiffed him on the last payment. Sound familiar? He was a vengeful little prick and the biggest fucking snob I ever met. I knew he wouldn’t leave here without that button. Maybe I was wrong. But he’d been giving me the runaround all night, and the way he lied about the scrimshaw and all that bothered me, too. It was so slick. He’d worked it all out. You see what I’m saying? Why bother? If it wasn’t important. So I gave Fiona her marching orders, and you know the rest.”

  “How did you know I was still on the case?”

  Parrish raised his eyebrows inquiringly, then nodded. “Oh, the phone call. I was talking to Rafael Osona…one of those ‘it used to be nice on Nantucket’ conversations. He used you as an example. He couldn’t imagine the police going through his auction records in the old days. I knew what you had to be looking for. I saw you at the VFW Hall. When I found out Fi had taken that porringer, I lost it. All right? I screamed so hard I went hoarse. But she came right back at me and it was all just talk anyway because we couldn’t put it back. But you were sniffing around. So I thought I’d throw a scare into you. Make you back off.” He shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

  We walked in silence for a while. I watched a pair of ringtail hawks, circling above us.

  “So what’s the deal?” Parrish said at last.

  I said nothing. I had been on some kind of high when I conceived this plan, but I was coming down hard.

  “It’s okay,” Parrish said. “I have a pretty good idea. This is the end-game. There aren’t too many options left, for any of us. So how about this—I pay off the people Lomax stiffed, and drop the Moorlands Mall and we all walk away happy.”

  I was startled into silence.

  Parrish read my look perfectly.” Come on, Chief. I’m not psychic. What else was it going to be? I’m a businessman. I know how to do business. So, anyway, as far as the case goes—it looks like a classic ‘he-said-she-said’ between me and Fiona, but I have a motive. I wrote it into contracts myself. I knew about the alarm changeover. And Delavane might recognize my voice. Not to mention your testimony. Even if I got a great lawyer and managed to walk, I’d still be ruined. I mean, let’s face it, this is America, where you’re guilty until you’re proved innocent. And even after you’re proved innocent. DeLorean was acquitted of those narcotics charges. But everyone remembers him as the creep who sold drugs to finance his car company. They’d know I did it, too—and they’d be right. If it comes to trial, I’m fucked either way. So how about it? We do this deal, nobody gets hurt. Fiona walks. All the little people get rescued. No Moorlands Mall. And you get the pleasure of seeing me in bankruptcy court. But I can start again, which might be tough from a prison cell. And don’t believe what you hear about those ‘country club’ prisons, Chief. It’s impossible to get a decent tee time and they’re letting in just about anyone these days. Kind of like the Nantucket yacht club.” He grinned at his little joke, and stuck out his hand. “Do we have a deal? Cause if we do, let’s shake on it. I’m busy today and you’ve got me running behind.”

  We stood like that for perhaps twenty seconds, facing each other across the dirt path, the air between us dense and cold, grained by the thin snow. I saw myself in the mirror of the other man’s smile. There was an assumed understanding there: we were both part of the same casual fraternity of corruption, above the law or just beyond it, writing our own rules.

  This was business as usual for Parrish, but I knew then that I couldn’t go through with it. These things didn’t stop. They multiplied, they colonized you like a virus. For instance—I would have to destroy the incriminating photograph. I would have to get the negative and all the other copies from Helen Sandler. It would be easy to do under some official pretext. But lie would follow lie, a murderer would go free and when he murdered again, it would be partly my fault.

  This was impossible. I wasn’t above the law—just the opposite. I was below the law, toiling away like an ant at the base of a pillar. I was just a cop who performed his duties and filled out the forms in triplicate, exactly as I had thought so dismissively on the cliff an hour ago.

  I was a humble minion of the law. And I was proud of that.

  For one fevered moment, I had imagined that I could do anything I wanted. In fact I could do nothing. I couldn’t prevent the murder, or stop Fiona’s betrayal, or even make myself see her clearly. I couldn’t fix anything, even my own judgment.

  I was over-matched. I couldn’t perform these labors and I wasn’t supposed to. The law would do it for me. It was so obvious. The Moorlands Mall couldn’t survive Parrish’s indictment. The people Lomax had defrauded would get paid with no help from me. They all had liens on the house. The executors would have to sell it to settle the outstanding liabilities. The process would take time, but there was more than enough money to go around. As for Fiona, what had my plan been there? Was I going to save her, help her redeem herself, marry her, and live happily ever after?

  It was laughable. I laughed at myself, a short bark of self contempt.

  “Well, Chief? Yes or no?”

  “What?”

  “Do we understand each other?”

  I shook my head. “I understand you. That’s what matters.”

  I turned and starte
d walking. Parrish trotted after me, grabbed my arm. “Hey! Stop! Where are you going? Chief! Hold on a second. What do you think you’re doing?”

  The answer was easy. “My job.”

  “Listen, Chief, we have to—”

  I pulled his arm away. “Get a lawyer, Parrish. You’re going to need one.”

  ***

  I met with Ken Carmichael the next morning, in the temporary cubicle he had set up on the second floor of the police station. Two folding screens gave the illusion of privacy. It was quiet: just the occasional ringing phone and the heat pipes grumbling. I laid out everything. It was more than enough to indict, and Carmichael was sure he could get a conviction. He’d strike a deal with Fiona. She’d get immunity from prosecution for her testimony but she’d be extradited back to Ireland. No more green card, no rich husband. She wouldn’t be able to do anything for her family. She’d be returning in disgrace, probably facing at least five years’ probation over there.

  “Is that a problem for you?,” Carmichael asked

  I met his level stare. “Not at all.”

  “Okay then.”

  He took a sip of his takeout coffee and winced. It was cold. He set the cup down. “So why are you giving me all this?”

  I shrugged. “It’s Christmas, Ken.”

  “Seriously.”

  “I don’t want it. And the town doesn’t need it.”

  “But you figured this out on your own. Take some credit. You deserve it. We’re not making quilts here.”

  I smiled. “First of all, I’m not sure any of that’s true. And I certainly don’t want people thinking about me that way. This job is a lot easier when people assume you’re a little slow.”

  “Yeah, right. Good luck with that.”

  “Just remember Nantucket when you get to the State House.”

  “Hell—when I get to the White House I’ll declare Nantucket a National Park and make you attorney general.”