“Well, technically…”
“He’s right,” I pointed out. “All we have is a hysterical letter from an angry woman. Who weighs like a hundred and two pounds. I don’t see her forcing Refn into that freezer.”
“Not alone,” Haden said.
“So it’s a conspiracy?”
“It sure could be. Refn pissed off a lot of people—not just Marcia Stoddard.”
I set the letter aside as Haden started going through the list. “Right, so…first of all, there’s Donald Harcourt and Joseph Little, both board members, both with grudges against the guy, one on the scene, the other one summoned him there, no alibi…but we ought to be looking at all the board members. There are six others who really make the decisions. Judith Barsch is the board president—we should touch base with her, in any case. She hasn’t lived here long but she knows everyone, she hears all the gossip, she’s up to her neck in all the nonprofit trench warfare. She’ll want to weigh in on the case, and she may have some ideas of her own. The other board members…the names are in your folder. Talking to them is more or less of a formality, but this is a big blow for the Theater Lab, and a little small-town hand-holding would go a long way.”
I nodded. “Right, good point. Do you have Harry Bowman on your list? Marcia Stoddard told me they fired him. Could be some bad blood there.”
Charlie scribbled a note. “Thanks, Chief. I’ll check him out. We also have Sebastian Cruz, who got into a couple of shouting matches with Refn. He has anger-management problems, couple of misdemeanor beefs, and an assault charge that got dropped over some tussles at the Chicken Box. Could be a political thing with him. His play is crazy—some over-educated immigrant guy just like him kidnaps all these rich Nantucket summer people, tortures and interrogates them. ‘What have you done to deserve this wealth,’ kind of thing. I could see him killing Refn just to advertise his play. No alibi, of course. The other writer is worth looking at, also—Blair Hollister? The Lab is doing his play Who Dun It this summer and he’s here for the season.”
I squinted down the table “That makes him a suspect?”
“It’s a play about a murder, he shows up and a real live murder happens? You’re the one who doesn’t believe in coincidences, Chief. Besides…people who write about murder all the time…it’s on their minds, it’s normalized. It’s a plot point. Take it one step further and there’s no turning back.”
“Somebody made that same point about Jane yesterday.”
“Hey, listen, sorry! I’m not—I didn’t mean—”
“Forget it, Charlie. We’ll talk to him. I’ve already talked to Jane. Who else are we looking at?”
Charlie shuffled his papers. “There’s Joe Stiles, fired for no reason, hated Refn and couldn’t keep his mouth shut about it. Your friend Mike Henderson was in the neighborhood, someone swore they saw your girlfriend, but we’re pretty sure it was Marcia Stoddard, and that crazy letter speaks for itself. Three interns say he harassed them sexually, let’s see…Kelly Ramos, Terry Poole, Dana LeBreux, all blond, all cute, all of them together supposedly yesterday afternoon. But no one saw them. Kelly says she showed them her ‘secret beach’ in Squam. The whole point is no one ever goes there. You can have it to yourself even on the Fourth of July. It’s true. The steep drop-off means no waves, and it’s pebbly. Lots of seals in the water. Not a great beach. But private. Who else? Kelly is gay and her lover is kind of a prominent person around here. Jenny Feldman, you know her. Or you’ve heard her, anyway. She’s the main DJ at ACK radio.”
I drew a line through her name. “She was working yesterday afternoon. We heard her when we were driving over.”
“Right. Well, that’s a relief.” He turned a page. “Next, we’ve got Fred Hamburger, the NTV guy. Says he was at home editing tape all day. Saw nobody, nobody saw him. Of course. So, he did some big promotional video about Refn and never got paid. He sued and won, but at the time of his death, Refn still hadn’t paid him a dime. We have the usual public shouting matches and death threats. Refn really brought out the best in people.”
He turned a page. “Onward. Next is Tag Reemer. He got pushed out when they hired Refn and he’s been seething about it ever since. No death threats or fistfights, but no alibi, either. He’s been seen at the Island Home, visiting Barton Anderwald and Miriam Talbot. They started the organization; they wrote letters of protest at the time; made a ruckus at a few board meetings. You could have a conspiracy there. Reemer’s acting career fizzled after he got sick and the MS diagnosis could give him a who-gives-a-shit attitude about murder. Same with Anderwald and Talbot. They’re almost dead anyway, so there’s that. Reemer says he took his boat out to Coatue yesterday. Of course no one saw him.”
“Don’t forget Otto Didrickson.” I said. “It’s possible Refn was blackmailing him.” I explained the grave-robbing, sex-in-the-graveyard scenario, as Jane had laid it out for me. That earned a moment of silence.
“Speaking of blackmail,” Kyle said, “we have to talk about the Kohls.”
I heard a collective sigh, like the moment when everyone realizes that the last warrant article at Town Meeting is unexpectedly controversial and the debate might go on for another hour.
I blew out a tired breath. “Tell us.”
“Howard Kohl is on the board. He used to act, but not since Refn took over. No, no, it’s not that! I wish. Refn was having an affair with the wife—Bess Kohl, you know the type, professional trophy wife, Pilates and yoga, jogging with the Labradoodle, picking out new faucets for the guest bathroom at Housefitters. And sleeping with the Artistic Director, it turns out. He filmed the sex, and extorted her. She paid him a lot, but she eventually ran out of her own money. Refn confronted the husband, and then started pumping them both for a total of something like thirty thousand dollars, as of last week. They were terrified of the scandal. They cracked when I braced them. It was almost like they wanted to talk about it.”
Karen nodded. “That could be the ‘thirty racks’ in Refn’s notebook.”
Haden eyed her. “Thirty racks?”
“What notebook?’ I asked.
Karen hitched her chair forward. “It’s a moleskine, there were about twenty of them on his desk. Most of them had notes for productions, budget estimates, daily diaries. One recorded his food intake. He’d started on the paleo diet. One was all catalogue item numbers. I matched them up with the Nordstrom, Orvis, Neiman Marcus, and Williams Sonoma catalogues scattered around the house. He hadn’t bought anything, as far as I could tell, but it added up to almost twelve thousand dollars’ worth of aspirational retail porn. Pardon my language.”
I shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I was married to a real estate agent.”
“Anyway, the one that matters was tucked in there, kind of hiding in plain sight, using the other notebooks for camouflage. That’s how it seemed to me, anyway.”
“What did you find?”
“Well, so, there were these kind of nonsense words or phrases with notations next to them—two racks, three racks. One had two racks crossed out and replaced with three racks and that crossed out and replaced with four. My dad works for Citibank. He uses the term all the time—it’s the packets of hundred-dollar bills, sealed into ten thousand-dollar bundles.”
“What are the ‘three rack’ notations?”
“I have two of them. One says ‘Amok halo.’ The other one is ‘Eat crab’.”
Kyle blew out a breath. “Well, that’s useful.”
“No—they’re anagrams,” Haden said.
I was already working them. Oklahoma and Cabaret.”
Karen grinned. “Laurie and Sally!”
She was ahead of me. “What—?
“The female leads. That was his code. Laurie, from Oklahoma.”
And Sally Bowles, from Cabaret. That would be Sally Howe.”
“How many racks had Sally paid him?”
&nb
sp; “Just one.”
Haden pounced. “Laurie Little!”
I nodded. “We have confirmation on that one.” I filled them in on my conversation with Donald Harcourt—his suspicions, the sighting at Faregrounds, the fight at the fundraiser. I turned to Karen. “How many more names on that list?”
“Four.”
“Christ, Refn was a busy boy.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I take a look?” She passed her list over to me and I saw what I was looking for right away: ‘Spongy Beards.’ Porgy and Bess…That would have to be Bess Kohl. And the Kohls had paid out three racks, thirty thousand dollars, just as they had described it to Kyle. Everything snapped together like Lego pieces. But what exactly were we building? I handed the sheet back to Karen. “Decrypt the other names. That will give us a total of six more suspects.”
Charlie sighed. “Great.”
Karen closed her folder. “Maybe it really was all of them. You know what I mean? All that psychic energy mounting up, like gas fumes in a closed garage. Then boom. Like Mao and Stalin. They both got mysteriously sick…Stalin basically died in bed. They say it was a stroke, but nobody knows. It could have been all those wounded angry bereaved people just hating him so much. That could kill you.”
“But it couldn’t stuff you into your own meat freezer,” Haden pointed out. He despised what he referred to as woo-woo thinking—Ouija boards and astrology charts.
Karen shrugged. “I guess not.”
I’d heard enough. “Okay, everyone, spread out, talk to these people. Bring them in if you have to. I want full reports, transcripts, and documentation on my desk ASAP. Meanwhile, let’s get photographs of every suspect at every counter in the airport as well as the FBO/General Aviation terminal, the Steamship, the Hy-Line, with copies for the Harbormaster’s Office and all the Boat Basin personnel. None of these people leave the island until we’ve cleared them.”
“They’re not going to like that,” Karen said.
“All the more reason to sort this mess out quickly. So get moving.”
Back in my office a few minutes later I paged through the file on Refn that Kyle had gotten from Nantucket Theater Lab—W-2 forms, performance evaluations, and his original application. I needed some contact information. I had to inform the next of kin.
Rudolf and Maria Refn, 2024 Woodland Avenue, Ojai, California. 805-632-9948. I poked in the digits and got a grating three-note electronic fanfare: the number had been disconnected. I checked the address: the house was for sale.
On a hunch I called the local police and talked to a detective named Ed Trank. “Yeah, they’re gone,” he told me. “Moved to Florida, that’s what I heard. They just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Take what?”
“Well, their son disappeared five years ago. Went for a drive and never came back. We never found the car, we never found the body. Guy just vanished off the face of the Earth. We figured he was running away from something. Dude was a vet, PTSD issues, hassles with the VA, couple of DUIs. Not a happy camper. I mean—living with your parents at forty? That’s a red flag right there. Good riddance, far as I was concerned. But they wouldn’t leave it alone. Hassled us constantly, put signs up everywhere, like the guy was a stray cat or something. They finally hired a detective, he nosed around for a while, but I guess he gave up. Or maybe they just ran out of money. A PI can run up a big tab fast. Anyway, they left. That’s what I know. Check the listings in Florida.”
They were living in Sarasota. Rudy picked up after the second ring. I explained who I was. “I have some bad news for you, sir. Your son passed away yesterday. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I’m—excuse me?”
“That’s what the Ojai cops were trying to tell us. But we hired a detective and we tracked Horst down—we found our son! It wasn’t even that hard to do, Chief Kennis. He was using his credit cards again. We got the billing address and wrote him but he never wrote back—or, at least not yet. Horst is his own man, he goes his own way. He’ll get back in touch when he’s ready. That’s what Maria says, and I think she’s right. He’ll come home. He has our address here now. He knows he’ll always be welcome.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen, sir. Horst was murdered here on Nantucket Island yesterday afternoon.”
“It wasn’t our son. There’s been a mistake.”
“I wish that were true, but—”
“I’ll prove it. I’m sending you a picture right now. It’s five years old, but it’s him, people don’t change that much. Wait. All right. Here it is. I’m texting it to you now.”
“Mr. Refn, I really think we should just—”
My phone chimed. “There it is. Check your texts. Just look at the picture.”
The resolution on my flip-phone wasn’t great, but it didn’t need to be. The Horst Refn in the family photograph was huge, red-haired with a prominent wart beside his nose and a prosthetic arm. He dwarfed the piano he was leaning against, and his crooked smile showed a full mouth of dentures. A scar from the IED that must have taken out his teeth ran up from his chin to his temple. He was attempting a smile, but that was a mistake.
I stared at the picture. I was absolutely speechless.
Rudy couldn’t stand the silence. “Your murder victim—it’s not our Horst, is it? Is it?”
“No, sir. It is not. I’m sorry I troubled you this morning.”
“Don’t be. This dead body of yours not being my son? That’s the best news I’ve had in years.”
“All right, then. Thanks for talking to me. You’ve been a huge help.”
I hung up, cravenly eager to end the conversation before Rudy figured out that our corpse had been using their son’s credit cards for the last five years. The real Horst Refn hadn’t needed them because he was dead. Not disappeared, not AWOL, not in the Witness Protection program—dead. My murder victim had played the real Refn’s family perfectly, after making sure the body was never found—allowing them the toxic kernel of hope that would keep them away from the police. They wanted to believe their son was alive and they still did. They had all the answers they needed. Not me.
All I had were questions.
They kicked up at me like highway slush from an eighteen-wheeler—my windshield smeared, the cleaner fluid tanks dry, the wipers working full tilt, but still losing the battle. I was driving blind. Time to find a rest area, pull over, and call it a night. But the questions kept spewing at me.
Who was the man who’d called himself Horst Refn? Why had he come to Nantucket? And more troubling—had someone followed him here? Where had they come from? Why had they killed him? And was he the only intended victim?
I set my elbows on my desk and rested my forehead on my palms. This was getting out of control. I thought of Marcia Stoddard, saying, “Nothing good ever comes around the point.” Many people thought that included me, that I had brought the curse of big-city crime with me when I moved to Nantucket. I used to scoff at that idea.
But maybe they were right.
Part Two:
Who Dun It
Chapter Five
Conspirators
I pulled myself together, stood, and pocketed my phone. Maybe I was some kind of Typhoid Mary of urban crime and corruption. All the more reason to get the situation under control and set things right. That meant finding Refn’s real identity.
I took the elevator to Monica Terwilliger’s domain in the basement.
She literally danced across her lab when I knocked on the frosted glass door—two steps on tiptoe, a leap, and then another one where she scissored her calves together, landing in a perfect turnout with her hands reaching out, palm upward.
She grinned. “An entrechat, a jeté, finished off with a cabriole, Chief!” She took a modest bow. “I’m studying b
allet!” I couldn’t help thinking about Fantasia, and Ponchielli’s Danza delle Ore from La Gioconda. Monica moved with startling poise and grace…but then so did Disney’s Hyacinth. “It’s just for exercise, but I love it.”
“Looking good, Monica.”
“You should try it.”
“I’ll stick to poetry. There’s less chance of killing myself.”
“Two left feet?”
“Two right feet, actually. Which is only a marginal improvement.”
She half sat on one of the lab tables and allowed herself a couple of deep breaths. “So what brings you down here this morning?” I told her about Refn. “So you want me to run the fingerprints by IAFIS.”
“That would be great.”
“And you want the results ASAP.”
“Well…”
I knew what she was going to say. The FBI’s Automated Integrated Fingerprint Identification System was a miracle of modern technology—as long as your subject had a clean police record…and a set of prints in the system. No matches, no “human intervention”—that is, no actual person has to do any work. You can get those results back in a couple of days, depending on the number of requests working their way through the DOJ biometric database, navigating the complications of the M40 algorithm, with all its Galton points ridge extraction-analysis and matching protocols.
The delays come when the prints belong to an authentic criminal.
That’s when actual people get involved. It seems odd, like visiting a big city newspaper and finding wizened old guys setting the type by hand. But there are still some things that computers can’t do as well as people can. The DOJ technicians have to pull records and rap sheets, contact various police departments, talk to booking cops, detectives, district attorneys, prosecutors, court clerks, probation officers. So I was fully expecting the standard “delay notice” and the usual estimated time for a full response: “indefinite.” The important thing was to set the process in motion.
I had plenty to do while I waited.
Nantucket Counterfeit Page 7
