I patted his shoulder. “No problem, O’Donnell. Now you know.” I tipped my head toward Haden. “This is Assistant Chief Krakauer. He’s allowed to be here, too.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
We moved past him into the kitchen. I turned to Lonnie. “What have you got?”
Lonnie pulled his heavy-framed, Buddy Holly-style glasses from the front pocket of his uniform, extracted his wallet-sized spiral blue pad, and flipped a couple of pages. With his high-pitched nasal voice and a hunched posture that tried to minimize his awkward height, he could have been a geek at ComicCon, haggling over a mint condition Steve Ditko Spider-Man comic.
“Okay, so, the forensic team reconstructed the incident this way. Front door was open, the perp knew that, and they’re thinking it had to be someone who knew Refn. No sign of struggle. Two coffee mugs out on the kitchen counter—nice friendly chat. Eventually Refn and the perp go down to the basement.”
“Any idea why?”
“Well, clearly it’s pretext, not ‘reason,’ you know what I mean? This individual had a plan. Refn had lots of stuff stored down there—art books, vintage clothing, plaster maquettes, antique quilted pillows—he had put a lot of the merchandise up at the ReUse exchange website. Seems like he wanted to unload a lot of personal baggage fast. Maybe he was planning to make a move? Which is weird because the Theater Lab just renewed his contract for three years. Anyway, we’re taking his computer and we’ll track the e-mails, see if anyone was in touch about the stuff he had for sale. So, let’s see…they go downstairs, there’s a struggle, we have signs of blunt-force trauma. The perp knocks him out, then jams him into the meat freezer. There’s serious pre-mortem frostbite on the face.”
“Cause of death?”
“Looks like strangulation, as the perp held him in place. Nasty way to die.”
“Time of death?”
“We lucked out there, Chief. The next door neighbor was listening to the Red Sox game and heard sounds of struggle right after a Pablo Sandoval home run. And, hey, if you follow the Sox, you know any home run is a big deal this season. Am I right?”
“We could sure use Ortiz right now,” I offered. I didn’t really follow baseball but you couldn’t help absorbing the basics, here in Red Sox Nation.
Lonnie flipped over a page. “The body was found by Donald Harcourt, he’s on the NTL Board, some kind of industrial packaging big shot, WASP, big money, house in Shimmo.”
“What was he doing here?”
“He says he got a call from Joe Little. They were supposed to meet at the house. Some kind of big pow-wow with Refn. But Little was a no-show. Or he split before Harcourt arrived.”
“Joe Little…” I was trying to place the name.
“Joseph Frederick Little, Lotus Capital Management? Loaded, like all the rest of them. He’s on the NTL Board.”
I put it together. “Yeah…he had a big fight with Harcourt at some charity cocktail party a couple of weeks ago. One of them pushed the other into an antique hutch that turned out to be a replica from Pottery Barn. The owner was going to sue until the decorator confessed—a perfect Nantucket story.”
“I never read about it,” Lonnie said. “Were you there?”
“Right. I always get invited to these fundraisers because they know I’m an easy touch.”
“Okay, okay, so how did you find out about it?”
“Jackson Blum told me.”
“You’re all chummy now?”
“Actually, we are. He turned out to be a pretty decent guy.”
I had arrested Blum for murder last Christmas, on the night he found out he’d driven his gay son to suicide. It was a horrific one-two punch, but we dropped the murder charge and the son survived. Still, the night Blum spent in jail and the ecstatic family reunion the next morning had scrambled his brain chemistry like a course of electro-shock. Here, I thought only a lobotomy could redeem him! Seriously, though, Blum had become so humble and friendly, I suspected an ulterior motive, but the wolf really had transformed into the wolfhound. If only I could pull the same trick on people like Donald Harcourt and Joseph Little. As it stood right now I might have to console myself with arresting one of them for murder.
“Is Harcourt still here? I need to talk to him.”
Lonnie grinned. “He’s in the Great Room. Pissed as hell. This dead guy is ruining his whole day.”
“Let him wait. Did you talk to the neighbor?”
“We talked to all the neighbors. Or, I mean—we are talking to them. The canvass is ongoing. They all hate each other and they all hated Refn the most. Parties late at night. Police call-outs—you can dig up the records. Cigarette butts in the yard. Apparently, he smoked outside, and the wind blows those butts all over the place.”
I shook my head. “It’s hard to believe anybody still smokes.”
“Yeah,” Lonnie grinned. “It could seriously shorten his life. Though four out of five doctors agree it’s not quite as dangerous as being strangled and stuffed into a meat freezer.”
“That’s catchy. You should write ads for Big Tobacco.”
He shrugged. “There was more. Refn let his hedge grow too high and never trimmed it. The homeowners’ association was bitching about that as far back as last summer. And he built his fences wrong-side out. That had the abutters screaming. This guy definitely puts the ‘butt’ into abutter.”
“Inside out?”
“It’s a rule. I thought it was one of those unwritten rules, but it’s also a bylaw. You build a fence on the property line, the structural part of the fence, the cross pieces, have to face your property. The neighbor gets the good-looking side, the slats. Refn ignored the law, and the—you know, the custom, the neighborly agreement—and put up the fences so the neighbors have to look at the bad side. Best part is, it’s not even his house! The Theater Lab owns it and the Artistic Director just lives here. Like the President in the White House.”
I nodded at the casual way Refn had trampled the community’s mores. “He seems more like the President in the White House all the time.”
“Hey! Refn was good looking—and smart, supposedly. With actual hair. Anyway, the Theater Lab was pissed off at him, too—but they wouldn’t pony up the dough to take down the fences.”
“Is that all?”
“Are you kidding? Not even close.” Fraker flipped another page. “Let’s see…he parked his car blocking other people’s driveways and he had a car alarm that went off at all hours. People love that! Someone was flattening tires with a knife and everybody suspected Refn. No one filed a complaint; there was no proof—but it gives you the idea. Next big hurricane they’d have been looking for the wind machine in his basement. He’ll be off the hook for that now. And they have to admit he didn’t commit this murder. Unless he killed himself—to frame one of the neighbors!”
Lonnie laughed. I held up a hand. The gallows humor was necessary to vent the tension of the crime scene, but we were getting off track. “Down, boy. Where’s the one who heard the murder go down?”
“That would be Paula Monaghan. On the other side of the mega hedge. Seventy-two years old, founding member of the Garden Club and probably everything else around here. Deeded her pile on Baxter Road to the kids last year, and moved into this place.”
“I’m going to talk to her first.”
“Be my guest. She’s at home. I have Wylie and Steinkamp in there with her.”
“In case she makes a break for it?”
“Just following procedure, Chief.”
“Whatever. Keep this place buttoned up until I get back.”
Paula Monaghan was a perfect Nantucket type. I could have picked her out of a lineup: slim, regal, white-haired, sharp-eyed, dressed down in grass-stained khaki trousers, untucked blue Brooks Brothers shirt and well-worn espadrilles. This was old money personified. My girlfriend came from the same stock
. She had educated me on the particulars of the Social Register set and their ostentatious hatred of display. Paula’s tarnished Tiffany silver service would be treated like Walmart flatware; her toilet paper would be one-ply, her reading glasses straight off the drugstore rack.
“Well, well, well,” she stood in her doorway, shaking my hand in an alarmingly solid grip. “Our poetry-writing police Chief. Quite a rarity! I suspect you’re the only specimen extant on the length of the Eastern Seaboard.”
“I hope not.”
“Optimism—that must be an essential shortcoming for a police officer.”
I smiled, “You may be right.”
“How agreeable you are! Please, I’m being terribly rude, come in. I was just having a cup of tea. Would you like one?”
“No thanks.”
She stepped back and I saw Wylie and Steinkamp, two crew-cut tubs of testosterone, lurking uncomfortably by the door into the living room, big guns on wide leather holsters bristling with mace and ammunition, perpetually longing for a declaration of martial law that never came. They made me nervous—I couldn’t image how Paula Monaghan felt.
“Okay, guys,” I told them. “I’ve got this one.”
“But Captain Fraker said—”
“This is my case and my witness.” I flicked a dismissive wrist toward the door. “Scat.”
I stared them down and saw Mrs. Monaghan fighting a smile as they shuffled out.
She closed the door behind them with a sigh of relief and I followed her into the kitchen. The big sunny room distinguished itself from the average Naushop setup by a few key details—the hanging rack of All-Clad pans (“A wedding gift”) and a block of Wusthof knives (“You need a good knife to cook properly.”). She maintained a small garden in her small tidy backyard—herbs and shallots, heirloom tomatoes.
“There’s no room for much of a flower garden here,” she said. “But I do have a weakness for hydrangeas. And some marigolds in the window box. Have you seen the window boxes in town this year? So overdone, so awful. The plants at that Graydon House look like they’re about to eat the hotel! That whistling sound you hear is generations of New England Quakers spinning in their modestly unmarked graves. But excuse me. You have much more serious matters to discuss.”
“No problem, Mrs. Monaghan. This kind of crime makes people talkative—like whistling through the graveyard.”
“My father made us hold our breath.”
“That works.”
We sat down at the kitchen table. She sipped her tea. “I’ll tell you exactly what I told those awful State Police people. I was weeding my garden, I actually do it myself, unlike some of the ladies in the Garden Club who have their gardens—I don’t know how else to say it—installed by very expensive landscapers, down to the last speck of mulch. Anyway, it was very quiet, the occasional car going by, birds jabbering as they do. I had my faithful old transistor radio on for the ballgame, of course, softly. I love my Red Sox, but I don’t like to annoy the neighbors. So, let me see…the first strange thing I heard was a dog whining—some miserable little creature forced to walk around on the leash, no doubt. Then a few minutes later a man walked up to Mr. Refn’s front door. Walk outside and check for yourself—you can see it through the hedge. Rather a short, stout man. He knocked, but the door was unlocked, and he went in. A little later I heard some sort of scuffle and shouting from the basement—the casement window in the foundation was open. I stood up, I wasn’t sure what to do. And that’s when I heard the gunshot!”
No one had mentioned any gunplay, and Fraker hadn’t mentioned blood spatter, shell casings, or ballistics. But I didn’t want to interrupt Mrs. Monaghan. I made a mental note and let it go for the moment. “Did you see anything else?”
She nodded. “I saw a woman.”
“I’m sorry?”
“She was running away down the street.”
“When was this exactly?”
“I—wait a moment. I…yes, when I stood up after the shot, I was holding my breath listening. I was standing as still as a rabbit in the rosa rugosa. I saw something out of the corner of my eye—someone running. It was a small person. My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, this is the killer.’ Why I didn’t think about the weapon she was carrying, I don’t know. I suppose I couldn’t imagine being gunned down in my own front yard. Anyway, I got to the street just as she disappeared around the curve in the street to Kittiwake Lane. I could tell it was a woman then.”
“Do you remember what she was wearing?”
“Blue jeans, and a long-sleeved t-shirt. It was light blue. And she had sneakers of some kind. Running shoes, I suppose you’d call them now.”
“How about her hair?”
“Shoulder-length, frizzy. Oh, and she was wearing a red hat with a visor. One of those baseball caps. I couldn’t see any insignia on it, she was too far away, and she was moving too fast.”
I felt a momentary chill, and it wasn’t just Mrs. Monaghan’s air conditioning. Her description sounded ominously like my girlfriend, Jane Stiles. The thought was absurd. I shook it off, changed the subject. “Did you notice anything else unusual on the street?”
“Well, yes, actually. There was a house painter working two houses down, painting the front clapboards. I had noticed him because it was unusual—one person, obviously a local, instead of a big…diverse…crew. We have tremendous diversity on Nantucket now, as I’m sure you know. Especially in the building trades.”
“And that was all—that he was working alone?”
“No, no, no—the strange thing was that he was gone. I mean…it must have been what? Two-thirty, two forty-five in the afternoon on a spectacular summer day. And suddenly he was nowhere to be found. It struck me as quite suspicious.”
“But the woman with the gun—”
“I didn’t see her carrying a gun. She might have thrown it down. I’d check all the bushes if I were you.”
“I’ll make a note of it.”
“She could have handed the gun to the house painter. They could have been in it together! There’s something shady about those people anyway. I mean, we pay them to loaf on our property, they’re poking around inside our houses when we’re not home. I heard one of them was arrested for stealing last year.”
She was talking about a friend of mine, and I had to set the record straight. Rumors spread on Nantucket faster than poison ivy. “That was Mike Henderson, and it turned out that Sheriff Bob Bulmer was stealing from the houses Mike had open in the winter, figuring Mike would take the blame when the owners arrived in the spring.”
Mrs. Monaghan stared at me. “That’s diabolical!”
“Well, it wasn’t very nice. But he made quite a few mistakes, fortunately, and we caught him quickly. So really, it didn’t—”
“Henderson! That’s his name!”
“Excuse me?”
“The painter. I remember now. His name is right there on his truck.”
This was getting worse by the second. Next, it would turn out that my ex-wife was showing a house in the neighborhood, and Billy Delevane was building a deck next door. The hammer was a classic murder weapon, and a missed swing that connected with something hard could easily sound like a gunshot.
Enough. I felt a pang of nostalgia for the rough dirty world of Los Angeles. In my eight years on the LAPD I never turned up anyone I knew at a crime scene. A city is lonely and isolating and full of strangers—and that may be the best thing about it.
Clearly, I needed to interview Mike Henderson before Lonnie and his goons got a chance. But that would have to wait. I wasn’t finished with the crime scene yet. First, I needed to get a look at the body, brace Donald Harcourt, and talk to the neighbor on the other side of Refn’s house.
As I was brushing past Wylie and Steinkamp on the driveway, Mrs. Monaghan offered a parting shot. “It’s not surprising.”
I
turned. “Excuse me?”
“The murder. It doesn’t surprise me, at least. Refn ran a nonprofit.”
“So?”
“Over the years, I’ve served on the boards of the Dreamland, the Nantucket Historical Association, and the Basket Museum, Chief Kennis. I know the nonprofit world quite well. Too well. The rage and hate and backstabbing and slander would turn your hair white. I think it may have done mine! Honestly, it’s like the last days of the Nixon White House in those boardrooms. Or the first days of this one. Anything’s possible.”
“Including murder?”
“They say the second time is easier.”
Wylie and Steinkamp exchanged a look of skeptical contempt. But there was steel in her voice.
“You’re saying that one of these people has killed before?” She met my gaze calmly. “Perhaps you should look into that.”
“If you have information pertaining to—”
“I have no such thing. What I do have is a boundless faith in human nature. Roughly ninety percent of all the people you’ll ever meet are unredeemably bad, young man, greedy and selfish and cruel. Most of them would commit the most heinous crime you could possibly imagine, if they knew for certain they could get away with it. I sometimes think the fabric of society is held together by nothing more than the daunting awareness that it is, in fact, quite difficult to get away with murder.”
I had no time for her preening nihilism. “Thanks for your thoughts, Mrs. Monaghan. If you remember anything else that might aid the investigation, please call the station.”
The forensic team was finishing up in Refn’s basement when I came downstairs. Our own forensic tech, Monica Terwilliger, fat but remarkably graceful and light on her feet, stood as I came down the plank stairs. She had cut her thick blond hair short and once again it struck me that she was forty pounds away from being a dangerously beautiful woman. But she seemed to like the distance.
Carl Borelli was leaning over the body. Short, balding, dumpy, nearing retirement age and counting the seconds, he worked for the State Police out of Barnstable. As he pushed off the edge of the freezer to straighten up, I could tell he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be on Nantucket. As I recalled, he hated flying, and they would have had to jam him onto one of those Cape Air Cessnas to get him here this fast.
Nantucket Counterfeit Page 2
