And my day was just beginning.
Chapter Six
Weeding the Garden
“Weeding the garden.” That was what Chuck Obremski, my old boss and mentor in the LAPD, used to call getting rid of the false suspects, and “persons of no interest,” as he called them, trimming back the little plot of land that constituted your case to find the foxglove or the water hemlock you were looking for.
“Lots of deadly plants out there, Hank. But those weeds’ll confuse you. Make sure you wear gloves when you pull them out. Lots of prickles and thorns. They’ll cut you up good if you’re not ready for them.”
I remembered that advice, so I was ready when I drove out to Almanack Pond Road to meet the Callahans. Good thing. Chuck Obremski was on the money, as usual.
Almanack Pond Road is a winding dirt track that meanders away from Polpis Road into the moors. I often wondered why the immensely rich people whose houses were tucked away among the pine woods and brambles never paved the narrow lane. Its ruts, washboard sections, and “thank-you-ma’ams—deep craters usually filled with standing water that you edged past with one wheel in the mud, the lip grazing the undercarriage—had probably wrecked quite a few expensive suspensions. As usual, when it came to the habits and peculiarities of Nantucket’s ruling class, Jane had the answer. “They like the bad road. It discourages the riffraff.”
That would be me, I thought as I pulled into the Callahans’ winding driveway and approached the massive, columned, gray-shingled pile at the end of it. I saw a “guest cottage” the size of a normal house to the left, and a horse barn with a split-rail-fenced paddock behind the mansion to the right, screened by a line of beech and holly trees.
When I killed the engine on the cruiser, the silence settled on the car like fog. I could pick out tiny individual sounds—a bird calling twitter-twitter-twitter-twee somewhere deep in the woods, the ticking of my cooling engine, a horse harrumphing at my arrival—but they defined the silence, the way a lone figure gives perspective to an empty landscape. That’s what money buys in today’s world—this dense abiding quiet I could feel in my pulse. Of course, what money really buys is isolation. People make noise. There were no raucous shouts, no braying laughter, no radios blaring “House” music. How much land separated the Callahans from their nearest neighbor? Five acres? Ten? And a mile and a half of rutted dirt road.
A car suspension you can replace. Nothing could replace this.
As for the Callahans themselves, they fit the mold perfectly—A Victorian copper mold, no doubt like the fish, lions, and scallop shell examples that hung on their kitchen wall.
I checked off the standard inventory when they came to the door. Walter, a whale in Nantucket reds and white polo shirt, white-haired and well-fed, with a broad suspicious brick of a face set off by scholarly black-rimmed glasses. Marge, a small smart smiling little smelt, the perfectly poised pilot fish, at least twenty years his junior. Second wife? Third? I thought of Jane dismissing women like her as “professional wives.” Marge Callahan looked like a seasoned pro, complete with a set of formidable equestrian skills. No doubt she had some second- and third-place eventing ribbons, along with her squashed Olympic ambitions, stashed away somewhere.
Walter scowled at me. “Will this take long?”
I scowled back. “Let’s hope not.”
“Please come in.” Marge said. Of course the tactical application of her expert social graces was part of her job description.
When we were seated in the wide sunny “Great Room,” with the required clipper ship model and the flock of wooden herons and gulls crowding the tops of the built-in bookshelves, Walter came right to the point. “Are we under suspicion?”
“Should you be?”
“I resent your tone, sir. It was a fair question.”
I took a breath, let it out slowly. “Everyone who had dealings with Horst Refn is of interest to the investigation. At this early stage, we really don’t—”
“Refn was blackmailing my friends. Are you saying he was blackmailing us?”
“I’m trying to understand exactly what—”
“Are you saying my wife was having an affair with Horst Refn?”
“Walter,” Marge attempted.
“Let me handle this! I want an answer.”
I glanced over at the hideous sculpture of Queequeg heaving a harpoon at the picture window from the white brick mantelpiece. The whale’s over here, buddy, I thought. Though it occurred to me that Walter would give anyone chasing him quite a “Nantucket sleigh-ride.” All you could do was hang on tight and let him exhaust himself.
“I’m not ruling anything out yet, Mr. Callahan.”
“Well you can rule that out. We’re happily married and have been for a decade. I have six children and fourteen grandchildren. I’m a pillar of this community. I’ve donated more money than you’ll see in your whole lifetime to the new hospital fund, the Boys and Girls Club, the NHA, and a thousand other charities which I have no interest in disclosing. We fully fund ten college scholarships for Nantucket High School students every year. We saved the Theater Lab when it almost went under a few years ago. That’s what we do. When we are called, we serve. When we are asked, we give. When we promise, we deliver. If your baseless allegations damage my reputation in this town, where I have lived and prospered for more than forty years, I will sue you and your police department for slander and see that you are fired and never work in law enforcement again. I will make you a pariah. I will break you in pieces and step on the pieces. There will be no second chances for you. Not like last time.”
I let the storm of words buffet me. But the final blow hit home. “Last time?”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, squeezing his left fist in his right hand. “Oh, yeah, I know all about you, Kennis. I did my research when the town wanted to hire you. I was against it.”
“I appreciate that, but—”
“I dug up the copies of L.A. Weekly where your little ‘true crime’ story ran before the LAPD yanked it, and slapped you with a lawsuit and kicked your ass into the street. Main Street, as it turned out—our Main Street. That piece of scurrilous gossip-mongering told me a lot about you, Kennis. Apart from the fact that you’re a lousy writer. You don’t begin every sentence in a paragraph with the word ‘I’, all right? I, I, I—I did this, I did that, I found this, I said that. It’s boring. And it’s all about you. A man’s career was ruined, a fine police department was thrown into scandal, but all we get to read about is Henry Kennis, the hero of the story, the white knight in shining armor. And you’re still out-maneuvered and outsmarted at every turn by a junior FBI agent—some little girl, basically a trainee, as far as I can understand—who walked in out of nowhere and turned your whole case upside down. She made you look like a fool.”
He was talking about Frances Tate, my old flame, now a powerful figure in the DHS. She had helped me solve a major bombing case on the island a few years before, but I knew at the time she’d never stick around to help me oversee the summer specials and process the parking tickets. Nantucket kills ambition and Frannie had more ambition than anyone I’d ever met, including me. For the record, Callahan was right about the Los Angeles murder case. Frannie solved it all by herself, though she wound up giving her boss the credit.
“Frances Tate was a full-grown woman, Mr. Callahan,” I said. “She was a special agent, not a trainee. You should have read the paper a little more carefully.”
“I was more interested in you. My take? An arrogant insecure headstrong insubordinate punk with father issues. Is that reading carefully enough for you?”
“Well…I had the arrogance beaten out of me, and insecure plus headstrong turns out to be a pretty good combination for police work. I don’t worry about insubordination anymore, since I run the NPD. Having kids cured the punk problem, and I worked things out with my dad.”
“So you’re
perfect now.”
“I’m improving.”
“Lucky us.”
I stared him down. “Where were you yesterday afternoon?”
“We were out riding in the moors. We saw no one and no one saw us.”
“Who takes care of your horses?”
“We do.”
“No stable hands? No one to help you muck out or tack up?”
“These are Irish quarterhorses, Kennis. I brought them over from County Cork myself. I wouldn’t let some ten-dollar-an-hour barn rat anywhere near them.”
“So you have no way to verify your whereabouts?”
He grinned at me as if he had just taken my Queen for checkmate. “None at all.”
“Neither of us killed anyone, Chief Kennis,” Marge said. “We’re not killers. I think you know that.”
She was right, much as I would have liked her husband to be guilty. But you can’t pick your suspects. I decided to try a different tack. “Do either of you have any idea who might have killed Refn?”
This got Callahan’s back up again. “Why would you ask us a question like that?”
I shrugged. “Most people are killed by someone they know. The faceless assassin, the anonymous hitman…that’s mostly a fantasy. Outside of the movies.”
“A killer who appears out of nowhere with no apparent motive or connection to the victim, does the deed and vanishes again,” Callahan mused. “That guy would be almost impossible to find, unless you caught him in the act.”
“True.”
“So, in fact, any unsolved crime could be a hit.”
“I suppose. But I’m going to make my best effort to solve this one before I give up and blame thugs—or the thugee.”
He nodded at the reference. “Good thinking, since we’re not living in nineteenth-century India.”
“So? What do you think?”
Marge shook her head. “You never really know people.”
“No suspicions? No one acting strange?”
‘I worry about Bessie Kohl.”
“Jesus Christ, Marge! She couldn’t harm a fly! I mean that literally. She made her husband take back one of those sticky strips for killing flies he bought for a backyard barbecue.”
“We’ve already spoken with the Kohls.”
“Did she tell you what she was doing while someone was killing Refn? Binge-watching Game of Thrones, gobbling Ambien and Ativan. That’s her version of AA! Refn destroyed her. She may never recover. She’s a husk, Kennis.”
“She’s very, very angry,” Marge said.
“And she’ll hold it in until she gives herself a stroke. I think you should look at this Blair Hollister. The writer? He shows up with a murder mystery play and a month later the Artistic Director of the Theater Lab is dead. He has a grudge of some kind. He’s a creep. He made some comment about life imitating art—”
“—more than art imitates life. It’s a quote from Oscar Wilde.”
“Fine, but Hollister’s ‘art’ just happens to be about murder. He’s a killer.”
“Why broadcast it then?”
“That’s what these psychos do, Kennis. You should know that. They brag, they strut. They think they’re better than the police. They taunt the authorities. They hide in plain sight. ‘How could I be a killer? Do you think I’d confess in a play and go public with it?’ Well, that’s exactly what I think. When he walked into this house, he looked around and said, ‘I guess money can’t buy taste.’ Can you imagine? He’s a troublemaker.”
“This house is very tasteful,’ Marge said. “Nantucket Interiors helped us. They’re the best.”
“And the most expensive,” Callahan added.
“We’ll look into Hollister,” I offered. He was on my list anyway. I’d had my own run-in with him the week before and I was not impressed.
“Do that.”
“And check out Judy Barsch also,” Marge said.
“The president of the board?”
Marge crossed her arms and squeezed her ribs, “She’s cold. A very cold person. We were driving with her the other day and we saw a deer in the road. It must have been hit by a truck. There was a lot of broken glass but the impact would have totaled a car. Anyway…it was horrible. The poor animal was still alive and sort of—twitching? Traffic was blocked and one of your officers arrived. He pulled out his gun to…you know…put the deer out of its misery. But he couldn’t do it. Traffic was lining up in both directions. People were starting to honk. I realized the policeman was just a boy, really. No one knew what to do. Then Judy made this kind of snort of disgust, piled out of the car, took the boy’s gun and shot the deer. She handed the gun back and said, ‘Now do your job and get this thing off the road. There’s good meat on the undamaged side.’ Does that seem normal to you, Chief Kennis?”
“I suppose it depends on what part of the country she comes from. It certainly seems practical. At least she took some action. No one else was able to, including my officer.”
“I suppose.”
“Refn wasn’t killed with a gun, Margie,” Callahan pointed out.
“No, that’s true.”
“I’m going to have to talk to Ms. Barsch anyway,” I said. “I’ll keep what you told me in mind.”
Judith Barsch owned a house in a new development off Hummock Pond Road called the Nanahumacke Preserve. The subdivision was marked by a giant stone with the name chiseled into it. I turned into the winding road thinking that there were too many of those on the island. They were everywhere. Did a boulder with your name on it make you feel more substantial? Maybe it was a question of status, a way of getting one up on your friends: “Nice wooden sign, guess you couldn’t afford the boulder.”
Like the couple in Madaket, who had their house redone with aeronautical paint, always handy if they happened to be flying their house six hundred miles-an-hour at forty thousand feet. But mere yacht paint, at a hundred and fifty dollars a gallon, wasn’t exclusive enough anymore.
Barsch’s house was set above what the brochure no doubt referred to as a “private lake”—in fact a sad little pond that reminded me alarmingly of a cesspool. A half-hearted fountain sent a plume of water up from the middle of the turbid surface. The big undistinguished mansion looked just like all the others around it—a cliff of gray shingles with a column-lined porch, dormers squinting from the second floor. I had heard that the Martha’s Vineyard building codes allowed for more eccentric and even outrageous structures. Nantucketers sneered at their sister island for that architectural fiesta, but this was worse. The homes on this new road had all the cheer and excitement of the identical SUVs lined up at the Don Allen Ford dealership.
There were quite a few of them lined up at the curb here as well, along with Fred Hamburger’s big van, with its eye-staring-out-of-the-Nantucket-map logo. He had started running real estate promos on his little TV station. Were people trying to unload some of these houses? I doubted a thirty-second video would help much. Fred was what Jane Stiles called a “major avoid”—someone she’d back out of the Fast Forward parking lot to dodge. These weren’t people she disliked, necessarily. “Catching up” with acquaintances was a dreaded ordeal for her, and Fred made me understand what she meant. Short and wiry with a totally bald head and a dense tightly trimmed black beard, he had a relentless canine energy and always wanted to involve me in some harebrained media project that never came to fruition—a ride-along with my detectives, a program where I’d recite my poems.
My ex-wife, Miranda, was at the party where Fred made that suggestion, and her eye-rolling look of dismayed contempt brought back the worst of our marriage. Her head shake, with a swipe of her finger across her throat, made me smile, though. I knew she wanted to spare me an embarrassing moment. Fred’s fulsome praise and fawning demeanor could make Dylan Thomas look like a pompous drunk. I stood no chance with him.
Seeing Fr
ed meant ducking one more idea—would I narrate a history of the NPD, judge police recruits on a local reality show, wear his brand-new body camera for a week?—so I glanced around quickly when I climbed out of my cruiser. The street was empty.
I crossed over to Barsch’s house, stepped across the porch and saw the door was open. I took a tentative step inside. “Hello?”
No answer. I moved through the mansion, all glossy beadboard walls, pickled oak floors, and pale expensive furniture. It looked like the Callahans’, right down to the ubiquitous ship models and wooden herons. Maybe she used the Callahans’ very expensive decorator—I wondered if they also designed high-end hotel suites. At least Barsch had books. There was a wall of shelves across from the big wall of French doors that overlooked the rear patio and the pond.
I found her in the garden, deadheading flowers while Fred Hamburger’s three-man video crew tilted reflectors, swiveled the boom mike, and adjusted the camera. Her black pit bull lounged on the sun-warmed fieldstone.
Barsch was a short, squat fireplug of a woman in expensive sweats, her dense helmet of graying blond hair tightly cropped to her jawline. The jaw was still sharp. She either had great genes or the best face work that money could buy. She could certainly afford it.
“…so really it’s my garden that keeps me sane,” she was saying.
I stepped back into the house and let them finish. I strolled the big sunny rooms looking for some clue to Barsch’s past or her personality, but the place was purely generic. The paintings on the walls showed lighthouses and rose-covered cottages, whaling ships and cranberry bogs. There were no family photographs. No quirky collectibles. The end tables featured cut flowers and bowls of fruit, lamps, and coasters with real estate logos. It struck me that the house might be rented. The library had a rental feel to it—Nantucket history and picture books, the usual Elin Hildebrand, Nancy Thayer, and Nathaniel Philbrick tomes, along with the standard best sellers and thrillers. I noted several of Jane’s Madeline Clark cozy mysteries among them. I gave the owners points for that. The shelves looked impeccably dusted, the volumes lined up as evenly as row houses on a city street. Barsch was either compulsively neat or she just didn’t read.
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