NANTUCKET COUNTERFEIT
The Fifth Henry Kennis Mystery
“The narrative flows along at a good clip, with eddies of philosophy and humor. The witty dialogue perfectly matches the multifaceted characters. That Henry believes in an ‘old school, low-tech version of police work’ allows the reader to readily follow the clues.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The fifth in Axelrod’s clever series casts a cynical eye on Nantucket’s decidedly diverse denizens. Only the most careful readers, undistracted by his satire, will figure out whodunit.”
—Kirkus Reviews
NANTUCKET RED TICKETS
The Fourth Henry Kennis Mystery
“Nantucket’s many charms fill the pages...”
—Publishers Weekly
“Axelrod and his protagonist bring an amused, judicious, and ultimately tolerant eye to the foibles large and small of a mixed Santa’s bag of characters.”
—Kirkus Reviews
NANTUCKET GRAND
The Third Henry Kennis Mystery
“Nantucket Grand has everything I look for in a crime novel—tight, vivid prose, a sharply-drawn setting, an intricate plot with lots of unexpected twists, well-crafted characters, and an appealing protagonist in the person of Police Chief Henry Kennis, a dogged investigator you’re going to enjoy following on all of his adventures.”
—Bruce de Silva, Edgar Award-winning author
“Using his screenwriting background to good advantage, Axelrod packs plenty of layers and surprises into this intelligent, twisty tale. Henry’s wry humor as well as his affection for the residents he serves exude warmth and will appeal to fans of Bill Crider’s Sheriff Dan Rhodes.”
—Amy Alessio, Booklist
“Axelrod’s characters span the spectrum from homey and nice to proudly nasty. Fans of Spencer Fleming’s Russ Van Alstyne and Frederick Ramsay’s Ike Schwartz will enjoy Henry’s literary leanings and dogged determination to protect his island and its residents.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A beautiful island made ugly by class warfare makes a convincing backdrop for Chief Kennis’ third case.”
—Kirkus Reviews
NANTUCKET FIVE-SPOT
The Second Henry Kennis Mystery
“Axelrod crafts an enjoyable, fast-paced read.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In the second Henry Kennis mystery, the summer tourist season on Nantucket is under way when a threat to bomb the Boston Pops concert disrupts the holiday feeling, although the poetry-writing police chief suspects this may be a distraction to cover up a much bigger and more dangerous conspiracy.”
—Library Journal
NANTUCKET SAWBUCK
The First Henry Kennis Mystery
“Nantucket Sawbuck is a rare delight—a well-written small-town mystery that feels like life, complete with suspects who are the sort of people who commit murders and a police chief who’s capable of catching them at it. Read this book.”
—Thomas Perry
“Axlerod is a full speed, powerhouse of a writer.”
—Domenic Stansberry, Edgar Award-winning author
of Naked Moon
“Kennis is an honorable small-town cop whom readers will root for.”
—Karen Keefe, Booklist
“...this is a promising start for a new author.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Axelrod has a gift for characterization and a strong lead in Kennis. Nantucketers might bristle at the cynical portrait of their home, but his mystery debut gives the island as much personality as its varied inhabitants.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Nantucket
Counterfeit
A Henry Kennis Mystery
Steven Axelrod
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Steven Axelrod
First Edition 2018
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940611
ISBN: 9781464210396 Hardcover
ISBN: 9781464210419 Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9781464210426 Ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Poisoned Pen Press
4014 N. Goldwater Blvd., #201
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
www.poisonedpenpress.com
[email protected]
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Nantucket Counterfeit
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Part One: Around the Point Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Two: Who Dun It Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Three: Washashores Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Four: Open and Shut Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
More from this Author
Contact Us
Dedication
For Annie Breeding,
who puts Jane Stiles to shame.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to William Pittman and his superb Nantucket Police force. As usual, all of Henry’s mistakes and poems are my own. Thanks also to The Nantucket Theatre Workshop, which would never allow a rat like Refn in the door. A great Nantucket institution, sixty-two years old and still going strong.
Epigraph
I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim’d their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak…
—Hamlet, Act Two, Scene Two,
William Shakespeare
Part One:
Around the Point
Chapter One
D.R.T.
The day we found the Artistic Director of The Nantucket Theater Lab murdered in his basement, I was too busy to respond.
Haden Krakauer, my Assistant Chief, and I were in the middle of busting a cockfight on Essex Road—thirty-two thousand dollars in the kitty, eight birds in cages, two more in the dirt, thirty men, six extra cops, and three translators working five languages in the angry crowd.
Haden sighed as the ringleaders were cuffed and hauled away. “This isn’t my Nantucket.”
“Really?” I said. “Wasn’t that your old pal Nick Folger, calling the fight?”
“Don’t remind me.”
Back at the station, I could see it was going to take hours to untangle the mess, with advocates and family members and a team of veterinarians for the birds. Just sorting through the confusion of dialects—Belarus, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Jamaican patois and, this was a new one, Vietnamese—slowed the process to a crawl.
At one point Haden leaned across the interview table where we were dealing with the five Ec
uadoran brothers who owned the cockfight property, and said, “Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
I nodded at the Biblical reference. “But the point of the Tower of Babel was to stop this kind of shit. Humans all talking the same language was the whole problem, right? ‘They have all one language and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’ God didn’t like that idea—people imagining stuff to do. Mostly bad stuff.”
“Wicked stuff.”
“Yeah. So he made everybody speak different languages.”
“And yet…we still have cockfights on Essex Road.”
“At least He made the effort.”
“How about just, like, making people nicer? That would have worked. We could all speak Esperanto and help each other. But, no. He’d rather just sit around like Tolkien, making up those weird languages and writing in Elvish.”
I smiled. “God as a crackpot English academic. I like it.”
The Ecuadorans stared at us. Their lawyer continued texting. He knew his clients would be back on the street in an hour, once the bail was set.
We stood and stepped out into the main hall. I felt a tug at my shirt. It was Barnaby Toll, out of breath. He must have taken the stairs to the basement booking room, deserting his dispatch desk. He knew better, after four years on the job, so something big must have happened. His round pale face confirmed it. I could see the excitement in his eyes. Some authentic crime had brought out the animal in him, that fight-or-flight jolt straight from the adrenal gland. I could feel it, too—the clutch of danger, the thrill of the hunt—when he whispered, “Chief! Chief! Somebody killed Horst Refn!”
Haden was already on his cell phone. “Charlie Boyce is out there. Fraker and the Staties got the call. They beat us to the house and sealed it. The vic is D.R.T., head-first in his meat freezer. Charlie rallied the troops, talked to the neighbors. Looks like the T.O.D. was less than an hour ago.”
D.R.T.—dead right there. Haden had picked up the term from me, but I hadn’t heard anyone use it on a crime scene since I left the LAPD. A witness with a solid Time of Death report would be a huge help. My boys were already canvassing the neighborhood, just as I’d taught them to do. Maybe the NPD was turning into a real-life police department, after all.
I scanned the milling crowd of mostly Hispanic cockfight aficionados. They would all be processed by the end of the day, placed in holding, released or turned over to ICE if they had criminal records. Our work was done. I nodded to Haden. “Let’s go.”
On the way out the door I recognized a face and almost turned back. But there was nothing I could do for him at that moment, and my singling him out would only make trouble for him with the others, marking him as an informant or a rat. As far as I knew, he was neither. He ran a big landscaping company he’d built from scratch and wrote agitprop plays about the Nantucket class war. His name was Sebastian Cruz, father to Hector Cruz—my daughter’s new boyfriend. It was a small world on Nantucket.
And getting smaller all the time.
The last time I saw Sebastian, he was having a shouting match with Horst Refn on Main Street.
“Same Time, Next Year? Good Vibrations? What is this? Jupiter, Florida, dinner theater? At least those audiences get to eat!”
“We have a great season,” Refn sputtered.
“You have crap! Who Dun It? A ‘black box,’ no cables, bring-your-own costumes Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark? Why bother? Aida with a papier-mâché pyramid and six kids in Babar costumes left over from Halloween?”
“That’s not fair! We’re doing a great job with—”
“With what? I give you a serious piece of theater and you shit all over it.”
“Yeah! Because it was bad!”
“No, because you are bad! Because you are an ignorant, gutless, low-class punk! You’re useless. You’re a suit from Walmart. You’re a chicken nuggets Happy Meal!”
“I’m the Artistic Director of The Nantucket Theater Lab!”
“You’re a corporate stooge! Everyone hates you! You think the girls like it when you come on to them? You’re pushing fifty and you’re getting fat!”
“Say that again”
“Fat! You’re fat! Your fat piggy face makes them sick! You’re ripping the seams of that fancy jacket. Look in a mirror! You’re an overstuffed sausage.”
“Shut up!”
“Make me.”
Refn shoved him. That was where I stepped in.
I blocked Refn, twisted around to flat-hand Sebastian’s chest. “That’s enough, boys.”
Refn glared at me. “Did you hear what he said?”
“I don’t care what either one of you said. Break it up right now or I’m locking both of you up for disturbing the peace.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever—”
“Show some dignity, Horst.”
Sebastian laughed. Refn lunged again and I had to grab his arms. I turned to Sebastian. “Go. Now.”
Sebastian looked past me at Refn. “You ever lay a hand on me again, I’ll fucking kill you, culero.”
He turned and walked off down Main Street. “What did he say? What did he just call me?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Literally, the term meant “ass salesman” but “asshole” was the most useful translation. The small crowd that had gathered started to disperse. The show was over. But Refn still struggled against me. “You’re just letting him walk away? He threatened my life! That’s assault in this state.”
“And you pushed him. That’s battery. And this is late June on Nantucket, going into the biggest holiday of the year. So we’re all going to live and let live.”
But someone obviously had a different plan in mind for Horst Refn.
As we pulled into the driveway of the Killdeer Drive house, I felt relieved. Sebastian’s arrest was one piece of good news—if the coroner’s report confirmed witness statements for the time of death, his presence at the cockfight would be an unbreakable alibi.
I killed the engine, just as the WACK disc jockey who called herself J. Feld was about to identify the song she’d been playing. The imagery of the “bargain-priced room on La Cienega” had made me briefly homesick for Los Angeles. The repeated line “You, or your memory” was probably the title. I’d look it up when I had time.
I stayed in the silent car for a moment or two, studying the house. It exuded a bristling sense of danger, cruel but sluggish, like the giant yellow-jacket nests you found so often under the eaves of Nantucket mansions. Police and crime scene techs moved in and out like insects, bound on inscrutable random business of their own.
Neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk, curious but keeping their distance. Local alternative newspaper editor David Trezize was interviewing one of them, scribbling intently in his spiral-bound notebook, glancing up occasionally through his thick glasses, looking like an intelligent otter, reaping the first quotes for his front page story. I looked around for someone from the Inquirer and Mirror, but David had beaten them to the story, once again.
Past the yellow crime scene tape, Lonnie Fraker had his troops fully mobilized, working crowd control at the perimeter, guarding the doors and loitering with squinting intensity inside. They reminded me of the paint crews Mike Henderson had pointed out a few weeks before, with one guy on a ladder scraping listlessly at a window casing, another one standing at the base of the ladder for no particular reason, a third guy dabbing at the fence as if he were touching up a self-portrait, with the rest of the crew pointing up at the second floor, studying each car as it drove by or staring at their smartphones. “How do those crews make any money?” he had asked me. “I actually work, and I can barely make ends meet.”
The answer was easier for Lonnie’s storm troopers. Malingering in the most threatening way poss
ible was their basic job description. The real action was happening in the basement, where the Boston crime scene techs were working.
We climbed out of my cruiser and started up the driveway. Just inside the front door, a new hire I’d never seen before blocked the hall. “This is a restricted area, sir. I’m going to have to ask you to vacate the premises.”
I wasn’t wearing my uniform—I rarely did. Still, he should have known better. I had participated in an orientation day for the new State Police recruits less than a month ago. But I’d been wearing my uniform that day.
I shook my head at the stilted jargon. “Is that like ‘leaving the building’?”
Haden laughed, but the kid didn’t see the humor. That’s my cross to bear. The kid moved a step closer. “Don’t make me ask you again, sir.”
I decided to speak his language. I pointed out the open door to where my official Ford Explorer with full police markings and big antennas was parked at the curb. “I’m the operator of that vehicle. Get it?”
“Let him in, O’Donnell,” Lonnie called out from the kitchen. “He’s Chief of Police Henry Kennis.”
O’Donnell’s face pulled tight and his eyes opened comically wide. He reminded me of an L.A. burglar pinned by the floodlight from a police helicopter.
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