Daisy nosed into the room and cocked her head at me as if she took the “doggerel” slur personally. I gave her head an apologetic pat and went back to Hector’s books: Harry Potter, Hunger Games, the Passage trilogy, Milagro Beanfield War. I pulled a paperback copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude. The spine was well-creased, the margins marked up. On a blank page after the end, I read this:
I set the book back on the shelf carefully, remembering that I wasn’t supposed to touch anything, thinking Hector had a point about Marquez. Smart kid. Maybe a little bit of a smart ass. But I liked that about him.
What else? A framed Boy Scout certificate of merit, trophies for football and swimming. The desk held his computer, pictures of him and Carrie, a group shot of the Whalers. An empty bag of potato chips humanized the tidiness, along with a t-shirt on the floor and a Coke can on one of the shelves. He was measurably neater than Carrie—maybe he’d be a good influence. Jane would like that.
Sebastian stepped into the room, and stood behind me, looking past my shoulder to the travel poster. “Hector wants to visit Sumidero Canyon someday. I told him maybe we could take a boat trip down the Rio Grijalva. He said…‘After we’re all deported!’ He was making a joke. It’s not so funny right now.”
“But still, kind of funny.”
“Yes, he is a clever little man. So, did you see anything significant in here, Chief?”
“I think I did. I’m just not sure what.”
I meant it: some detail was fractionally askew. I thought of those “What’s Wrong With This Picture” puzzles featured in the doctor’s office Highlights magazines I read as a kid, waiting for checkups and allergy shots. Something was definitely wrong with this picture.
Years before I had walked into a big house in Pacific Palisades with Chuck Obremski. The place belonged to a big-time real estate developer who had scammed his clients and disappeared with their money. Chuck was sure the wife had gotten ripped off also, but she was adamantly denying anything had happened. Her famous social graces had frozen into a rictus smile and a bizarre robotic hospitality, “Can I offer you juice or coffee, officers?” It was two in the afternoon. Chuck said juice would be fine, just to get her out of the room.
“She’s in total denial, Hank,” he whispered to me. “She’s flat broke and scared shitless.”
I remember looking round the lavishly appointed space. “How do you know?”
He grinned. “Pop quiz, buddy. You tell me.” I took some lame guesses—had she sold her original art and replaced it with reproductions? Had he noticed a “for sale” tag on some expensive piece of furniture?—but I was stumped. “She had to fire the maid, dude. I would say about three days ago, from the dust levels.”
Then I saw it, on the coffee tables and the grand piano, the burled arms of the chairs, the front edge of the bookshelves—everywhere. The glitch in Hector’s room was something as subtle as that film of dust, something you’d always see once you noticed it, like the arrow in the FedEx logo.
But that didn’t make seeing it any easier the first time.
I took a few pictures of Hector’s room with my phone before I left, hoping I’d catch something when I could study them. Still, I noted the sardonic question on Sebastian’s face as I turned for the door. Was I the smart, observant detective I praised in my Rotary Club lecture, or just one more Luddite gasbag blowing smoke? Wait and see, Sebastian.
Time will tell.
Chapter Eleven
The Swift Rock Road Irregulars
Halfway back to the station, I found out Lonnie Fraker had solved the murder.
The text didn’t spike an adrenaline rush—Lonnie and I had been through this before. And of course I’d just pulled a classic “Lonnie” myself the day before. To say Fraker tended to “jump the gun” in his eagerness to close cases didn’t quite cover it. He’d launch from the starting blocks if he heard a cough from the grandstand. But no one was wrong every time. This could be Lonnie’s moment of triumph. I had joined the club, and I was rooting for both of us.
Lonnie was waiting for me in his office, bulging like the boa constrictor who swallowed the bobcat.
“It’s the magic of technology, Henry.”
I sat down in the chair facing his cluttered desk. “I’m not sure exactly—”
“We all make butt calls. I solve cases with them!”
“So this was an accident?”
“I’d call it fate.”
I jammed my eyes shut for a second. Lonnie was still there when I opened them, oversized and tiny-voiced—“a talking bear on helium,” as Jane liked to say.
I sat forward. “Tell me.”
“So yesterday Gary Posner accidentally called me—the architect? He’s turning half our garage into a workshop for my carpentry projects. You know Gary—he runs Nantucket Engineering, Remodeling and Design.” Lonnie tilted sideways to pull his wallet from his hip pocket, fingered through it for a second, and pulled out a card, He handed it across the desk.
I smiled as I passed it back. “NERD?”
“He thinks it’s funny. He wasn’t exactly a football star in high school.”
“Anyway, he butt-called you?”
“Listen up. He has a young daughter by his third marriage, cute little girl named Gemma. She’s twelve years old and she’s doing that kids’ play at the Theater Lab.”
I could tell what was coming. “Refn made a move on her?”
“He walked in when she was changing and made her try on different costumes. There was no screen to stand behind, it’s just an open room with a clothes rack.”
“Did he touch her?”
“Apparently.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“The girl wouldn’t let Gary say a word about it.”
“He’s in the play they’re doing.”
“I know. He quit, and wrote some kind of letter and never sent it, and then when Refn died, a couple of board members, Judy Barsch, and Joe Little, they bought him a drink at the Club Car and apologized and asked him to come back.”
“They couldn’t recast the part?”
“It’s pretty short notice. And Gary’s a big donor to the theater. They didn’t want to lose him. One of those money guys goes—who knows how many of his pals are going to follow him, you know what I mean? Also they’re doing some high-brow English play next summer, with a big part for a little girl. And they more or less promised him that Gemma would get the role. Total bribery, right? But they were on the same page anyway. I mean the two of them hate Refn, they don’t care how good he’s been for the theater, so the next round of drinks it turned into kind of a ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ Munchkin dance party.”
“So, you’re telling me…Gary killed Refn?”
“I don’t have to tell you a thing. Let Gary tell you himself.”
He had his phone hooked up to a little wireless speaker box on the desk, but the sound was still muffled and smudged by traffic noise and the car’s ventilation system—not to mention the fact that the phone itself was stuck in Gary Posner’s hip pocket.
You could make out the conversation, though:
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m telling you, leave me out of it.”
“After what he did to you?”
“I’m moving on.”
“Moving on? Where? Where can you move to? The moon?”
“It’s not worth it, man. Okay?”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Yeah, they do! You bet your ass, they do. When people say ‘Do the math,’ they really mean ‘do the addition,’ and this is what they’re talking about. Two wrongs totally make a right! One cancels out the other, don’t you get that? The second one clears the books. It fixes things.”
“And what about the person who does the fixing?”
>
“What about him?”
“Well…in this case, HE COMMITS MURDER! And probably spends the rest of his life in jail for it.”
“So you’re going to turn me in?”
“What? No, of course not, what are you talking about?”
“I’m saying—you don’t turn me in, you’re going to jail anyway. We talked about it, that’s conspiracy, man. You’re a—whaddyacallit…an accessory. Accessory before the crime. You’re gonna do the time anyway. You might as well do the crime. At least you’ll get some fun out of it.”
Lonnie turned off the recording. “Enough for you?”
“Not quite. Keep playing it.”
“The guy confessed!”
“Lonnie, when did you get this butt call?”
“This morning!”
“So, he’s talking his friend into committing a crime that already happened.”
“Maybe Refn was just the first. You ever think of that?”
I had another theory. “Play the rest of it.”
Lonnie pushed the button.
“I’m not like you, I don’t have the heart for this stuff.”
“It’s not about heart, it’s—what is it?”
“Jesus Christ, Jono! How could you blank on that? It’s the most obvious—”
“Hey, anyone can blank on anything anytime! All right? I blanked on my wife’s name when we did Virginia Woolf! Martha! George and Martha! Who forgets that?”
I reached over and turned off the recording.
“Jon Favreau?”
Lonnie pounced. “Jon L. Favreau!”
That made sense. He must have added the initial when he got his SAG card. They can’t have two Jon Favreaus on the rolls. “J.L.F.,” I said. “Like the monogram on the letter.”
“Yes! That’s it! Haden faxed me a copy. I put it together and—boom!”
My heart sank. I hated to cancel his ticker-tape parade. But at least I could soften the blow. “It’s okay—I made the exact same mistake, Lonnie. But with a different name.”
“What mistake? There’s no mistake.”
“Yeah, uh, sorry…but stationery monograms put the last name in the middle. We’re looking for a last name ‘L’ not ‘F.’ Besides, I saw this Favreau guy rehearsing yesterday. So in the car, on your butt call…he was just running lines from the play. Blair Hollister’s play—Who Dun It. He even flubbed a line. Right at the end there.”
“So…what are you saying? He didn’t kill this Virginia Woolf woman?”
I kept my face neutral, but how the hell could he not know who Virginia Woolf was? Or Edward Albee? What did they teach these kids at Nantucket High School? I sighed. “It’s the title of another play, Lonnie. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They’re actors, not killers.”
“There’s a play called Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I nodded. “Shit. Really?” I nodded again. “Goddamn. Fuck! Who writes a play called Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I shrugged. We stared at each other. “This stays between us?”
I nodded one last time. “Sure, Lonnie. No problem.”
“Thanks, man. So, then…I mean…now what?”
I stood up. “Now we get back to work.”
Lonnie would have appreciated my next piece of work. There were so many different mistakes you could make in the course of an investigation, so many details that could trip you up.
My mother worked briefly for Electric Boat in Groton Connecticut, after a late-life graduation from Harvard’s graduate School of Education. I went to my mother’s Harvard graduation—few people can make that claim. Anyway, her job for the nuclear submarine-builder was fixing the communication problems between managers and workers. One of the first things she noticed at the plant were signs with the word “mistakes” written in the middle of a red circle with a red line cut through it.
Seriously: no mistakes.
With human error forbidden by company policy, people chose not to report their oversights and blunders. Months later when the finished submarines were X-rayed and the bad welds were discovered, the company had to spend millions of dollars in extra work, at taxpayer expense. Mom made the radical suggestion that workers report mistakes promptly, and even get rewarded for it. They tried out this quirky new policy and over the next couple of years, she saved the government so much money, no one in our family should have ever have to pay taxes again.
Mistakes in police work were less costly in dollar terms, but they were just as mortifying and potentially dangerous. More importantly, they impelled the same urge to cover up. No one likes looking foolish.
But I certainly felt that way as I drove past the Lily Pond parking lot on North Liberty Street that afternoon. I had WACK on the radio, and I was listening to JFeld rhapsodizing about a group called The National when I saw the woman herself lifting two dachshunds into her beat-up old Bronco. Jane had missed it, too, which was some consolation—Jennifer Little Feldman taped her radio show. That was obvious now.
She had the right initials for the monogram, and she wasn’t in the control booth when Refn was killed.
So where was she?
I checked the rearview mirror and saw her pulling out of the parking area, heading the opposite direction, toward Cliff Road. The street was empty for the moment—I cranked a three-point turn and started to follow her.
But someone else was following me.
Two big guys in a dirty white Ford Taurus. They tracked me as I tracked JFeld, up North Liberty Street past the State Police HQ. For a second I thought of turning in there, to see if they’d follow me, but a chilling thought cancelled that idea. What if they were following Jennifer Feldman, not me? It was classic surveillance trade craft—putting another vehicle between you and the subject, especially on small, uncrowded streets where you were more likely to be spotted. I drove on.
We caravanned all the way to Madaket Road and then took the quick right onto Eel Point Road, still in an ever-more-obvious procession until we reached Swift Rock Road and the Taurus ran me off the street onto the bike path.
So they weren’t chasing Jennifer Feldman. That was one bright spot in the situation. With the grimy sedan parked across my headlights, I watched her Bronco disappear in a trailing swirl of dust.
The Bulgarian brothers, Dimo and Boiko, rolled out of the car and you could see it lift on its suspension with their combined bulk taken off the axles. They weighed more than a quarter of a ton together, but Boiko looked almost normal next to his brother, who lifted his arm and curled a finger at me in a charmless “come hither” gesture that said “Get out of the car.”
There was no point in procrastination. I knew what was coming. I strolled over to them. Dimo was leaning against the car and for a second I thought he was going to lift it up and beat me over the head with it, like a kid with a plastic yard toy. I set the image aside. “Let me guess. Whoever you work for, and they don’t want you to know exactly who they are, so you can’t tell me or anyone else…they want me to back off the Refn murder case.”
“Uh…”
“And if I don’t, you’re going to kick the living crap out of me and make me regret I ever became a cop. Or something like that.”
Dimo rallied. “Yah! Something exactly like that.”
He pushed off from the car and his brother eased toward me from the other side. I noticed with a mixture of alarm and amusement that Boiko had slipped on a set of brass knuckles. These were black steel, with spikes on the circles. Used properly they were a killing weapon, and not particularly well-regulated. The only law I knew of about them in Massachusetts said you had to be over eighteen to own a set. But using them was a different matter. I had high hopes that these were just for show.
“You need to think about this,” I said.
“Grab him, Boiko.”
Not the best use of brass knuckles, but I felt no obligation to point
that out. Boiko wrestled my arms behind back. I didn’t struggle. There was no point. He could have dislocated both my shoulders like a kid snapping a glow-stick.
“Seriously,” I said, “you’re used to roughing up store owners, people who owe your bosses money, even the occasional private detective poking around on a missing persons case. Am I right? These people can’t hurt you. They can’t retaliate. You’re looking at zero consequences.”
“Unless they don’t look bad enough when we finish!” Dimo added with a loud grunt that was probably some kind of laugh. Not the nice kind, though.
“Right. But I’m the Chief of Police, Dimo. You fuck with me and you’ve got nothing but consequences, especially on an island this small, where everyone knows you and there’s nowhere you can hide. Felony assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, possession of contraband weapons, conspiracy—there are two of you and you must have talked about this first—”
“That’s only if you can tell anyone afterward.”
“Dimo, I’ll be able to communicate in some form afterward, even if all I can do is hold a pencil in my teeth and poke at the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ buttons. You’ll have to kill me to shut me up, and we both know it. That’s murder one, and you’re looking at life in jail, maximum security, most of it in segregated restrictive housing—if they don’t just deport you back to Bulgaria. I’m sure the cops there would love to see you again.”
That jab hit the mark. So he was more afraid of the Bulgarian police than two American decades in solitary confinement? Those boys knew something we didn’t. But that was probably a good thing. America wasn’t a police state yet.
Dimo was squinting at me. “So what are you say, Mr. Police?”
“I was remembering something you said to me when we first met. That I shouldn’t make you feel unwelcome. But how could I really embrace you as a new member of our island community? That was the question. Well, I think I just figured out the answer.”
“What is this? What are you do?”
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