I nudged him back on track. “What’s a gobo?”
“Ah, it’s—the word stands for ‘goes before optics.’ It’s kind of like a stencil? For lighting effects. I wanted leaf shadows on the porch, and Refn fought me about it. Not in the budget—and then he buys himself a brand new Ducati motorcycle! What a turd.”
I turned to Jane. “So…you wrote a book about Refn?”
“Not exactly. I mean—he was the murder victim. Well, not him exactly. I made the character as different from him as I could. But Refn heard about it and he still went crazy. Sued me, sued my publisher. It cost a lot of money and I had to totally rewrite the book.”
“I don’t remember reading that one.”
“It was the one with the paraplegic black transgendered Basket Museum guy.”
“Oh, right. Where the wheelchair got pushed down the steps at Steps Beach, Battleship Potemkin-style.”
“Mmmmm, Eisenstein. And everybody thought I was ripping off Brian DePalma.”
I nudged the conversation again. “So…are you saying you’d kill Refn over something like that?”
Jane shrugged. “Somebody might.”
“How about getting fired because some New York critic praised the lighting and didn’t give Refn credit?” Joe asked.
“Sounds flimsy.”
“I also demanded a raise.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, he said I was already overpaid, it was just a part-time job. I told him I was leaving and I was taking my light board with me and he said he’d have me arrested if I did that, and I told him I’d shove the board so far up his ass his eyes would light up and he said ‘Are you threatening me?’ and I said what kind of clueless dipshit doesn’t even know when he’s being threatened? And he said, ‘I could have you arrested just for that,’ and I said ‘Don’t worry. I wouldn’t wreck my lighting board for a grand gesture. Unlike you, it’s functional.’ The whole cast was there, Chief. They heard it all. Put ’em on the stand, they could send me straight up to Shirley for life.”
He was talking about the maximum security Sounza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Mass. The question was worth pursuing. “So, tell me, Joe—do you have an alibi?”
“Rock solid, Chief. I was in Madaket, helping Hugh Billings with his website. We had the ballgame on. Hugh was standing over my shoulder. I remember we high-fived after the Sandoval home run. I remember feeling lucky I wasn’t driving in town right then. I’d already missed part of the game, on the way to Hugh’s house.”
“How so?”
“I like to listen to the Red Sox in the car, but sometimes you get stuck under those power lines and you totally lose reception.”
“It’s true,” Jane added. “The worst is the hill going up Orange Street. You can’t hear anything but static. Someone should map those areas for dedicated AM radio sports fans.”
Joe grinned. “I already did.”
She sighed. “Why does that not surprise me?”
Sam piped up. “Can I go inside? I just got Lego Star Wars on my PlayStation. I’m already on the Battle of Takodana!”
Joe waved at the house. “Go on in. Take the left corridor, destroy everything you see. And watch out for Imperial Storm Troopers.”
“Thanks, Dad!” Sam scampered away.
“Listen, Janie…could you take him tonight? I just got a couple of computer house calls. They pay cash and I could really use the money.”
Jane looked at me. I shrugged. A solvent Joe Stiles was in everyone’s best interest. “Well…”
“Otherwise he’ll just be here eating cornflakes, and playing video games by himself all night.”
“That’s child abuse.”
“My point exactly.”
“I can’t believe you let him play those games.”
“I love that stuff. I spent two years working my way through all the Ages of Myst. Remember Myst?”
“How could I forget?”
“Ah, she just hates non-linear storytelling.”
Joe looked like he expected some comeback from his ex-wife—this must have been a vintage argument, fermented to an intoxicating refinement of acrimony over many years. But Jane’s mind was elsewhere. She touched my arm. “Remember that woman I pointed out to you last Christmas—when the kids were caroling at Sam Trikilis’ house?”
“Uh…”
“My supposed look-alike? Marcia Stoddard?”
“Right, but she didn’t really look like you.”
“I know that! Because people don’t pay attention. Still, I can’t tell you how often people come up to me and say, “Marcia, how’s Ken?’ or ‘Marcia, so sorry to hear about the operation.’ I have no idea who Ken is and I’ve never had an operation in my life! I still have my appendix. It’s infuriating. She’s so ugly.”
“But you just said—people don’t really notice things.”
“People used to say you looked like Philip Seymour Hoffman.”
“Before he got fat.”
“And before he died. Did you like that?”
“No, but nobody likes being compared to anyone else, even if the other person is much better looking. Everyone thinks they’re better looking than they are. Except you.”
“I always told her that,” said Joe. We touched fists. “For all the good it did.”
“Anyway,” Jane cut in, “the point is, Marcia Stoddard is the production designer for the Theater Lab. Or she was. I heard she quit. I don’t know why.”
“She wasn’t happy,” Joe said. “She had all the responsibility and none of the power, you know? She wanted the official title—production designer. And that useless prick wouldn’t give it to her. Refn’s like, ‘These are my concepts!’ whatever the hell that means. Just like the lighting. It was all about him. Which was hilarious, because that douchebag couldn’t tell a gel string from a diffusion filter. His idea of a blacked-out mansion was some kind of blue LED luminaire that made everyone look embalmed. I mean, Jesus Christ, are you fucking kidding me?”
“So this Marcia Stoddard was angry.”
“She was furious. I mean, she was…you should have heard the things she said she wanted to do to that fucking guy. She’d get drunk at the White Dog and just go wild.”
“Did that include stuffing him in his own meat freezer?”
“I’m not sure she mentioned that idea.”
“It’s just talk, Joe.” I put in. “The people who actually commit crimes don’t talk about them. That’s how you know the Bad to the Bone guy isn’t really bad to the bone. He’s just singing about it. If he were really bad to the bone, he’d be kicking the crap out of someone because they looked at him funny.”
“I guess.”
“Except for one thing,” Jane said quietly. “Marcia Stoddard was seen running way from Refn’s house a few minutes after he got killed. It had to be her. She’s my look-alike, Henry. Someone mistook her for me.”
I called in to the station and asked Haden Krakauer to pull Marcia’s address. She had rented a cottage in Codfish Park for years, a five-minute walk from the house where my ex-wife was living with her fiancé, Joe Arbogast.
It occurred to me that I could pick up the kids while I was out there, and trade nights with Miranda, which would give Jane and me a free night tomorrow. These ad-hoc custody arrangements needed fixing, anyway. The way it stood, Jane and I had one night alone every week, without either Sam or my kids at the house. We hadn’t gotten around to reorganizing the schedule, and it was based on extinct priorities. I had Tim and Caroline on Monday nights because of Miranda’s yoga class, which she hadn’t attended in years; she took them on Wednesdays because I had taken a midweek night shift when we first got to the island. Today’s simple exchange, if it became permanent, would give Jane and me an extra night alone together every week. It was worth a try.
I called Miran
da on the way out to the east end of the island and she was happy to get rid of “The Bickersons” as she called them, referencing one of her grandmother’s favorite radio shows, featuring relentless verbal warfare between a combative married couple played by Don Ameche and Frances Langford. My kids made them look like the Coach and Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights.
It made me think of something our genial divorce lawyer, Moe Rinaldi, had told us when we were arguing over custody. “In two years, you’ll be fighting over who doesn’t have to take the kids.” Miranda was outraged at the idea. Moe said, “This is your first divorce, honey. It’s my four hundred and sixty-third.” And Moe was right, though it would be cruel and—more to the point—futile pointing that out to Miranda, who was basically incapable of admitting she was wrong on any subject.
Years before, during a bizarrely memorable homework session, she had denied that “pterodactyl” was spelled with a “p”. Following our sensible family rule “Don’t Argue Over Facts,” Tim looked up the word in the dictionary—first under “T”, out of deference to his mother. When he finally found the word in its proper place, Miranda shifted without missing a beat to “Obviously it starts with a ‘p’. Everyone knows that.” I’d been reading the kids 1984 at night and Tim whispered, “We are at war with Eurasia, we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.” Caroline giggled. I shot him a murderous look, but, luckily, Miranda missed the reference. Her reading in those days was limited to biographies, fashion magazines, and Diana Gabaldon.
Given all that, it was unlikely that she’d be willing to confess that she and Joe enjoyed their nights off as much as Jane and I did. Anyway, Miranda was stuck with the kids for a little longer. I was determined to see Marcia Stoddard before I picked them up.
Marcia’s little cottage, steps away from the beach, was a rare and precious year-round rental, but she was obviously preparing to abandon it. Marked moving boxes (“Linens,” “Dishes,” “Sketchbooks”) crowded the floor, presided over by empty bookshelves, windows without curtains, and pale squares on the walls where her pictures had been hanging, probably for years. Paint fades slowly, especially in a dark little shack in the shade of the ’Sconset bluff.
The door was open, but I knocked as I stepped inside. “Hello?”
Marcia glanced up from a box. She held an aluminum saucepan in her hand. She wore paint-spattered khaki shorts and a horizontally striped “French” t-shirt—one of Jane’s favorite outfits. No ballcap today and the frizzy hair was another point of similarity. Slim, five-four or so, curly hair—was that all it took to trick the inattentive eye? Apparently.
“Hi, Chief.”
“Going somewhere?”
“My parents left me a little house in Rhode Island, outside Providence. It’s not much bigger than this but it’s not like I have a family. So…”
“Can we talk for a minute?”
She set the pan in the box and stood. “Would you like a coffee? I’ve got nothing here but we could walk over to the mark-up.”
“The mark-up?”
“It’s what locals call the ’Sconset Market. A term of endearment. A family tease. We would band together and soundly thrash any tourist who called it that!”
“Me and my brother against the world.”
She smiled. “Exactly. Come on, let’s go. I need to get out of this house for a few minutes.”
As we approached the old town pump in its little square off Shell Street, I said. “I have to ask…what were you doing near Horst Refn’s house this afternoon?”
“He had offered me a going away present. Can you imagine that? When Harry Bowman left, he got a NTL mug. Thanks so much for twenty years and more than two hundred shows as TD—don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”
“TD?”
“Harry was the technical director. He built the sets, in the old days when the Lab cared about sets. He had just gotten divorced and he wanted his kids with him for the summer. All he wanted was housing for them. Instead, they took away his own housing and he wound up quitting. The lesson was pretty clear—don’t stick your head up, don’t ask for anything. Don’t give them a reason to notice you. Just go along, doing all the work for slave wages and be happy you have a job.”
“But you didn’t learn the lesson.”
“No.” We walked along. “I could have run the Theater Lab, you know,” she said suddenly. “I could have. I’ve been part of the place for thirty years. I don’t care. I’m out of here. I’m gone.”
The market looked busy, with cars in all the slots in front and facing the little park, and people hovering around the bulletin board in tennis clothes. All the activity made Marcia flinch. “Do you mind if we just keep walking for a while? I’m hating people right now.”
We skirted the rotary and strolled downhill to the beach, under the pedestrian bridge. “I wanted more money and a little recognition after a decade of eighty-hour weeks. The money was just a token. I live pretty simply. But I wanted the title. They promised me. Then they said no. The Theater Lab is like an abusive boyfriend, Chief Kennis. You keep thinking they’re going to change, but they never do. Finally, you just have to leave.”
“For some reason I’m thinking about The Burning Bed. Did you ever see that old movie?”
“I read the book. Faith McNulty. Wonderful writer. She was on staff at the New Yorker for many years. She wrote children’s wildlife books. One was called When I Lived with Bats—that’s a much more appropriate title for my time at the Theater Lab. At least, since Refn showed up. You know, I remember at the time, so many of us old-timers kept asking how did this even happen? Where did he come from? How did he wind up in charge? It’s so crazy. I’ve been with NTL since it started. Harry, too.
“Barton Anderwald was like a father to me. I applied for the Artistic Director job three times. I never even got an interview! No, they’d rather do one of their ‘nationwide searches’ and turn up a creep like Refn. Heaven forbid they should ask a local. No, it always has to be someone from around the point. From away. From anywhere but here. But nothing good ever comes from around the point, Chief. That’s what I’ve learned.
“They keep looking, though—and this is what they get. Junk plays and low attendance and running in the red. And now they have sleaze and scandal and murder to deal with. It serves them right. I’d say I was feeling schadenfreude, but there’s no schaden, only the freude. I hope this murder brings the whole crummy corporate mess down around their ears and we can start all over again and build ourselves a real community theater.” She shrugged. “Fat chance. The talk when they hired Refn was they wanted someone cool and hip to revitalize the Lab. With old Neil Simon chestnuts and a production of Jersey Boys? Seriously? It’s pathetic.”
“So…you despised him. But you didn’t kill him.”
“Of course not.”
“And you never threatened to kill him.”
“No.”
“And you never said ‘Don’t attack the king unless you know you can kill him.’”
“Who told you I said that?”
I shrugged. “Just a rumor.”
“It’s a figure of speech. I meant if you try to get Refn fired and fail, you’re worse off than before. Obviously. But I mean…killing people? That’s crazy.” We started up the steep hill to Front Street. “Do you believe me?”
“For now. But I’m going to have to ask you to stay on island for a while.”
“I have boat reservations.”
“Change them.”
“You think I’m running away from a murder charge?”
“Let me clear this case. Then you’ll just be running away.”
“Until then, I’m…what do you call it? A person of interest.”
I smiled. “I imagine you’ve always been a person of interest.”
“Well, thank you for that. I try not to be boring. But it’s hard when you spend most
of the day feeling sorry for yourself.”
“Go home. Unpack. With Refn gone, things will be different at the Theater Lab. There might even be a place for you there again.”
She pressed her lips together. It wasn’t quite a smile. “Another motive.”
“Everyone I’ve talked to has a motive. Suspects and motives—they’re everywhere, like ticks in the moors.”
“Don’t get bitten, Chief. Not everyone involved with this business is as harmless as I am…if you really are convinced about me.”
I was. But I hadn’t read her letter yet.
It was waiting for me at the station—my senior detective Charlie Boyce had found it in one of Refn’s desk drawers when he was working the crime scene. Lonnie Fraker’s Staties had stayed on the obvious path of the perpetrator, from the front door down into the basement, every inch of which they were studying like archaeologists at a dig site. They had all the bells and whistles a hefty state budget could offer, from the Omnichrome blue light filter cameras that revealed subcutaneous bruising to the new Faro 3-D laser scanning system that captured the whole crime scene in perfectly rendered three-dimensional images.
I preferred the old school low-tech version of police work, and encouraged my men to poke around and follow their hunches. Charlie’s curiosity had led him to Refn’s home office, and his desk drawers, which the victim had left unlocked and accessible.
He found the letter and texted me:
M. Stoddard murder threat on paper.
evidence on your desk this pm. C
I thought briefly about swinging by the station on the way home—of course it wasn’t actually on the way home—but Miranda’s voice in my head stopped me. “You upend everyone’s night to take the kids and then spend the whole time doing police work? I guess nothing ever changes.” Her theory of “false urgency” in law enforcement had always irked me during our marriage, but now that there was no catastrophic power shift in losing the argument, I could admit that she, most of the time, had a point. Whatever evidence Charlie had found wasn’t going anywhere tonight, and neither was Marcia Stoddard.
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