“I’m offering you a position, Dimo. You and Boiko.”
“What is this mean, this—position?”
“You’d work for me.”
“Doing what?”
“Spying. Sound good?”
“He grinned, showing giant teeth. “Sounds extreme of good.”
“Think you can handle it?”
“With easily.”
“Sounds like this is turning into a job interview. So let go of my arms, Boiko. You don’t have to prove anything that way—I don’t need your muscles. I need your ears. And your brains.”
“You hear that, Boiko? He thinks you have brains.”
“Fuck you! I have big brains.”
“So what we do?”
I shook my arms. They had started to go numb. “First of all, you tell me who hired you.”
He offered his wrists, as if I was going to handcuff him. “I wish I knew.”
“What was your arrangement?”
“Boss sends text. Leaves money for us outside in plastic bag.”
“Where?”
“At the windmill park. There is bench with little metal sign for man who walked his dog there. ‘In all weathers’ it say. All weathers! Let’s see if he walk that dog in all Bulgarian weather! February in Varna! That would make him think twice.”
“So the money is on the bench?”
“Taped under it. We text back when job is done, he tell us when to get money.”
“How long does that take?”
“Sometimes one hour, sometimes one day. Sometimes is there before.”
“This boss must trust you.”
“Yah—or maybe not. Maybe boss not want to meet there. Very tricky. Not to predict.”
“So when you text back today, the payment could be there already?”
“Could be.”
“And when the boss finds out I’m still working the case?”
“We get fired! But, okay, we work for you now!”
“They’re going to want the money back.”
He shook his head, pondering this bizarre idea. “Hard to get money back from Dimo.”
“I bet.” I thought for a second. “Let me see your phone—scroll to the last text you got.”
Dimo dug in to his pocket, poked the screen, skimmed his finger over it and handed it to me. The text came from 508-280-2294. I closed my eyes for a second, committing it to memory: five-oh-eight, two-eight-oh, two two nine four. Could it really be that easy? Probably not, but I had to try.
I was done with the boys for now. “Listen up. You do odd jobs for a lot of rich people. Someone was murdered here three days ago, and I think one of your clients—or more than one of them—might have been involved with the killing. They won’t talk to me, but they talk around you because…well—”
Dimo pressed a fist to his teeth. “I know what you say. I like that you don’t want to be say it. We are nothing to these people, yes? Like the animals. Who keeps a secret from his dog?”
“They don’t even know we are speak English,” Boiko added.
“We may not talk good, but we understand good enough.”
“That’s right. That’s what I’m trying to say. And that’s what I want you to do. Listen to them. And report back to me.”
He peered at me with sudden suspicion. “You pay?”
“If the information is good.”
“American money? Like the boss?”
“No, Dimo, I’ll pay you in Lev—the exchange rate’s about sixty cents on the dollar these days. Good deal for me!”
“You kid with Dimo.”
“Yes.”
“And you know Bulgarian money.”
“I know a lot of things.”
“You know how to get out of big beating, that’s for sure!”
“So we have a deal?” I stuck out my hand.
He shook it. “I am hire?”
“Both of you. And I’ll pay you off the books—so no taxes.”
“Taxes? What is…taxes?”
“You’re sounding more American all the time, Dimo. Now get to work. And wash your car! You’re an employee of the Nantucket Police Department. Show a little pride.”
I watched my new Swift Rock Road Irregulars driving away back toward town and considered my next move. First, I checked the number from Dimo’s phone: Joseph Little again. Or whoever cloned his cell. The theory had seemed far-fetched when he floated it, but I had just made a small, probably trivial, perhaps irrelevant connection that gave the idea some traction.
Dimo said the payoff money was left under the bench in Dead Horse Valley. I’d seen Blair Hollister walking there a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t exactly a common stamping ground for tourists who didn’t know the island. And he’d been in a rush. He had also been at Ventuno the day Little’s phone disappeared, standing by the table when the drink spilled and Joe Little got sick.
The coincidences were piling up. I thought of my kids when they were little, building towers out of the single-serving containers of Smucker’s jam at The Downyflake. You could always tell when one more packet would send the whole flimsy structure tumbling to the table.
Hollister was teetering. One more scrap of evidence and he was going to fall. But I didn’t want to bring him in yet. I’d put someone on him, see where he went and what he did. If he had in fact stolen Jennifer Feldman’s stationery and written the letter, that meant he was still hunting Refn’s partner and his killing work was unfinished. I turned it over in my mind. Blair Hollister, cold-blooded assassin? I couldn’t quite buy that concept. And I didn’t have enough to charge him with, anyway—not yet.
Meanwhile, I still had to deal with Jennifer Feldman. I looked up the empty strip of asphalt. She could be anywhere by now in the snarl of paved and unpaved lanes that twisted off Eel Point Road. I could have called in a description of her car or staked out her house, but I wasn’t sure I even wanted to arrest her yet, and I’d made enough mistakes for one day. Besides, I had a better idea. Her girlfriend worked at The Nantucket Theater Lab, and could probably tell me everything I needed to know.
I climbed into my cruiser and headed back to town.
Chapter Twelve
The Smell of Marshmallows
Kelly Ramos was re-painting the walls of the set when I got to the theater, turning the judge’s den from a cheerful off-white to a somber forest-green. I walked down the steep steps between rows of seats, caught in the seductive thrall of empty theaters, the night’s illusions still under construction, the mundane and the mysterious side by side.
I watched Kelly work for a minute or two, a tall, strikingly pretty girl with a crew cut, wearing paint-spattered overalls and a white t-shirt, barefoot on the drop cloth. She was pushing expertly into the cut-in, making big Xs with the loaded roller, and spreading the latex up and down from there. Finally, she sensed my presence and peered up into the shadows.
“Hello,” I called out. “Looking good.”
“It’s going to take two coats to cover and I’m almost out. We don’t have another gallon in the budget, so I’m gonna wind up buying it myself. Out of my generous eight-dollars-an-hour salary.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Yeah, right?”
“Do you have time to talk?”
“Chief Kennis?”
“You recognized my voice?”
“Anyone who’s been to a movie at the Dreamland would recognize your voice, Chief. From that don’t-litter-the-beaches, leave-only-footprints public service announcement.”
“Right.”
“Leave only footprints? That’s kind of corny.”
“I didn’t write it. It’s not strict enough for me. I don’t think people should even leave footprints. Make them sweep behind themselves with a broom!”
She laughed. “Good idea. And they could pick up their dog p
oop while they’re at it.”
I climbed onto the stage, as she set the roller in the pan and her brush in the working pot. I felt the backdrop surrounding me—the bookshelves and the fireplace, the worn leather chairs and the big couch, the paintings in their heavy frames, the dark windows—the judge’s den, the alternate world.
“It’s quite a set.”
“It’s the last one, with Marcia and Harry gone. It’s all going to be ‘black box’ now. ‘Conceptual’ stage dressing. That’s what Refn calls it. I love that. He wants nothing on stage, that’s his concept—nothing.” She caught herself. “Was his concept, I mean. Sorry. They say don’t speak ill of the dead.”
“I think they’ll make an exception in Refn’s case. Whoever ‘they’ are.”
She smiled. “I’ve always wondered that myself. Anyway, Tim might be different, if they let him stay on. Tim Hobbes? He’s the Acting Artistic Director.”
“I met him.”
We stood quietly for a moment or two. “So…is this about the murder?”
“I’m actually trying to find Jennifer Feldman.”
“She’ll be at work in an hour. Just go to the station.”
“I may not have to. You told my officers you were at Squam Beach with some friends at the time of the murder. Was Jennifer one of them?”
“Fortunately. I mean—that lets her off the hook, right? The rest of us, too—unless…we all did it together, and we’re all covering for each other.”
“Sounds far-fetched.”
“You don’t know how Refn treated us.”
“I’ve heard about the sexual harassment.”
She frowned. “I wouldn’t call it that. Sexual harassment—that’s, I don’t know—weird flirting? Or long hugs and playing grab-ass, or at worst, using your position to force people. Like they’ll get fired if they don’t do…you know. Whatever creepy thing you want them to do.”
“And Refn didn’t do that?”
“No, he did. But not with me. That would have been too easy. He enjoyed his mind games too much for that.”
“Mind games? What kind of mind games?”
“He’d get to know you, figure you out, and then use things against you. He was a smart guy, I’ll give him that. He could have been a shrink.” She must have read my puzzled look. “Okay, here’s an example. He knows I’m gay and he sensed or found out somehow that I’d been bisexual for a long time, really until Jenny. And he knew she was paranoid about it, like I could go back any time.”
“How did he know all this?”
“I have no idea. He sniffed around, he got people talking, he may have gotten Jenny talking. It’s not too hard after she’s had a few beers, and she came to all the Theater Lab parties. Anyway…so Refn called me into his office one afternoon and told me to undress, and said—get this, this is how twisted he was—if I did it, he’d make sure it stayed our secret, but if I didn’t do it, he’d tell Jenny that I did. That I seduced him. Can you follow that? ‘She’d believe me,’ he said. ‘And you know it.’ And I did know it. That’s what I mean by mind games.”
“So you did it?”
She nodded. “I had plenty of motivation to kill that miserable prick.”
“But you didn’t.”
“And neither did Jenny. She still doesn’t know what happened, by the way. He kept his word.”
“So, he could do it again whenever he wanted.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, now you have a lovely anecdote to share at Refn’s memorial service.”
That tricked a small laugh out of her. “Sounds like fun. But I think I’ll skip it.”
An awkward silence settled between us. I broke it. “Do you mind if we sit down for a few minutes?”
“No problem.”
I wasn’t particularly tired, in fact I was feeling restless, but settling into the darkened front row would commit Kelly to our conversation, and—just as importantly—give her the option of not looking at me head-on as we spoke; the formalized impersonal intimacy of the confessional booth. I was no priest, I wasn’t even a Catholic, but I was onto something. Kelly physically uncoiled a little once we joined the phantom audience, stretching her legs out and sliding down to rest her head against the seat-back.
“I’ve been here since five in the morning,” she admitted.
“It’s a lot of work.”
We studied the half-painted set, a haunted house waiting for its ghosts to return—Hollister’s ghosts. “You must see a lot, being here so much.”
“My home away from home.”
“Isn’t the landlord supposed to repaint?”
“Yeah, and I’m supposed choose the colors. But this is the Theater Lab. So I just do what I’m told.”
“This isn’t your first season, is it?”
“It’s my fifth.”
“So you know how the place works, the rhythm of it, the routines.”
“Yeah—mess and chaos and panic, right until the lights go down opening night. There’s a song Marcia Stoddard used to sing…‘Three weeks, you rehearse and rehearse, two weeks and it couldn’t be worse.’ Something like that.”
“‘Another Opening, Another Show.’ Cole Porter. From Kiss Me Kate.”
“I know, Marcia told me. She was pissed off that I’d never seen it.”
“All theater people should see it. They should do it at the Theater Lab.”
“Yeah, well.”
We looked quietly into the set. Marcia’s rolling stick, which she had propped against the mantelpiece, started sliding. It moved slowly at first, then faster until it slipped off and clattered to the floor. The roller sleeve bounced a little but no paint spilled.
Still, Kelly squeaked in alarm. ”Jesus! This place is haunted. I swear.”
That caught my interest, and not because I believe in ghosts. “So—odd things have been happening lately?”
“Yeah, we should get the Ghost Walk dude in here.”
“What kind of things?”
“I don’t know…like stuff disappearing from the fridge all the time, and there’s this one pair of shoes that supposedly belonged to Eugene O’Neill. Howard Anderwald brought them with him from New London, years ago. The story is, ever since they did Long Day’s Journey back in the nineties, the shoes keep disappearing. They vanish, they turn up. They vanish again. The last time anyone saw them was 2012. Just before my time, before Refn—they were doing Summer and Smoke. I guess the shoes approved of Tennessee Williams. It’s probably bullshit. I’ve never seen them myself.”
“That’s wild.”
“Yeah.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, there was one thing. Just the other day.”
I stayed still and looked straight ahead. “What was that?”
“Well, there’s an office in the theater for the visiting hot shots—directors mostly. Or writers, if there’s some visiting author who wants to use it. The Lab put it in when the church did that big renovation a couple of years ago. It’s no big deal—two desks and an old armchair someone scrounged from the thrift shop. A wireless modem, a Mister Coffee. That’s about it.”
“And something went missing from there?”
“Almost no one ever uses it. I don’t think Mark Toland has spent fifteen minutes in there the whole time he’s been here. There’s a window with a fan, so people use it for smoking. It’s kind of a clubhouse for the interns. I clean it up every day. Well, I mean, I clean this whole place every day, you can’t believe the mess people leave.”
“And something went missing recently?”
“Something appeared recently. And then disappeared, like O’Neill’s shoes, and nobody has any idea what happened.”
“Tell me.”
“This sounds dumb. But anything could be important, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“And that struck you as strange?”
“Kind of. Since Mark never brings his computer here, and Blair uses an iPad. No keyboard.”
I thought about it for a few seconds. “Probably some well-meaning staff member bought it and then when they realized no one needed it, they threw it away, or dropped it off at take-it-or-leave-it.”
“I thought of that. I asked everyone. Even Homer Boyce—the fabric store guy? He volunteers part-time now. Sort of like caretaker, handyman, whatever. He helped me clean up after the last cast party. The toilets overflowed, it was gross. But Homer’s been in such a good mood since he got his store back and stopped drinking. It’s almost scary. Anyway…I asked him about the keyboard cleaner—it’s the kind of thing he might pick up at the office supply store. Kind of a super nerd’s impulse buy. But he knew nothing about it. Neither did the Reverend or his wife. I even talked to Pat Folger—his crew did the renovations, he’s been around doing punch list things since then. Nothing. He looked at me like I was crazy.”
“That’s just Pat.”
“I checked with the garbage man—Sam Trikilis? He’s a big snoop. He didn’t remember anything either. He would have, too. He would have been pissed off. That stuff doesn’t belong with the regular trash. You try to burn those aerosol cans and they explode. That’s what he told me. After that, I was stumped.”
“So…ghosts?”
“Why not?”
“Well…it’s not the go-to solution in most criminal investigations.”
“Yeah, but there’s nothing criminal about a can of keyboard cleaner.” Her face lit up with a new idea and I thought of those cartoon light bulbs popping on over animated characters’ heads. “Unless…what if someone was using it to get rid of fingerprints?”
“Now you’re thinking.”
“The ransom note was typed on Hollister’s computer!”
“But there was no ransom note. And Hollister uses an iPad, you said.”
Nantucket Counterfeit Page 17
