Nantucket Counterfeit

by Steven Axelrod

  My interrogation of Hector himself hadn’t gone well. He remained unhelpfully wedged into surly denial mode. When I’d made the awkward but obvious suggestion that he allow a private and confidential (law enforcement eyes only) photograph of the region in question, he had clamped down even harder. “Never,” he said. “I’m sorry, Chief Kennis. But no way. There’s got to be something else you can do.”

  Maybe there was, but I hadn’t found it yet. After dinner that night, I scrolled through the pictures I had taken of Hector’s room—something still snagged at me there. But I couldn’t see it.

  I felt the same way later that night, when Jane and I watched Fred Hamburger’s video on NTV. Maybe it was the oddity of Judith Barsch’s purchases at the grocery store, but I had started to suspect her of every unsolved crime in my career. (Had she spent time in Los Angeles when the “G.I Joe” veterans murders were going on? And how about those Ventura County dog-nappings? One of them was a pit bull!)

  As Hamburger’s video team tracked through the shiny modern opulence of Barsch’s house, complete with sycophantic running commentary (“Did you study interior design or you just a natural?”), Jane, tucked into the crook of my arm on the bed, poked genial holes in my newest harebrained theory. Barsch had been one of Refn’s biggest supporters, she had no motive, and since she had called the dog officer from the Pat Gardner Land Bank property as she hunted for her pit bull, she had a better alibi than the Callahans, for instance, who had basically bragged about the lack of witnesses to their supposed horseback ride on the afternoon of the murder.

  “Do you see something odd about that closet?” I asked at one point.

  “It’s not a closet. It’s a studio apartment for clothes. That’s odd enough for me.”

  “No, I mean…” I rewound the video and watched the camera pan the rows of dresses and jackets, the regiments of shoes and racks of glasses. I gave up. “I don’t know what I mean.”

  “Sorry about that ‘harebrained’ comment,” she said later. “You’re much smarter than the average rabbit.”

  “I’ve never intentionally run in front of a moving car, give me that much.”

  She rolled over on top of me for a kiss. “Absolutely. I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  By ten o’clock the next morning my concerns and theories didn’t matter anymore. Karen Gifford walked into my office with her research completed. She had a cocky little smile on her face when she set the file folder down on my desk, and before I turned the first page I understood why.

  Quietly, all by herself, using nothing but her cunning brain, our out-of-date computers, and the available law enforcement databases, she had broken the case wide open.

  Part Four:

  Open and Shut

  Chapter Fifteen

  Barry and Blair

  I looked up from the file. “Barry Pomeroy?”

  “That was his real name, Chief. I traced it back all the way to Providence Family Maternity Hospital, Portland, Oregon. There’s a copy of the birth certificate in there. He spent K-12 in the Portland Public School TAG program—Talented and Gifted. Graduated from Benson Polytechnic in 2000, after a couple of speed bumps. An affair with a teacher. She got fired, he got a two-week suspension. Cheating allegations that no one could prove. Also he was supposedly dealing weed and Adderall, but they couldn’t make a solid case against him. He never sold to a narc, and they had guys undercover at the school for more than two years.”

  “You’re sure it’s him?”

  “Check out the yearbook picture. It’s at the back of the file.”

  I lifted the pages, glanced at the photo. It was Refn, all right. Thinner, with glasses and longer hair, but definitely the same guy.

  I closed the manila folder and pushed it to the side of my desk. “I’ll use this for reference later. Right now I want you to tell me the story. How did you find him? Where did you start? Where does Hollister fit in?”

  She took a deep breath, anchored her hands on her knees. Her smile warmed the angles of her face like a wood fire in a Danish modern living room. This moment alone on stage in the glowing cone of the theatrical pin spot, was exactly what she needed and I was more than happy to oblige. I always found a little something extra in the way a person told their story—the moments of confidence or hesitation—that you couldn’t glean from a report, no matter how well written.

  “I started with Hollister,” she said. “He had no police record, no prints on file, no military service, no hospitalizations. Kind of a clean slate. Or he would have been in the days before social media. I’m now his eight hundred and tenth follower on twitter. I like his tweets, by the way.” She leaned over, pulled the file off my desk onto her lap, and sorted through a few pages. She lifted one, scanned it for a few seconds. “Here we are. ‘Rain outside? No, just the kettle rumbling. Coffee time!’ Or check this one out—‘Norwalk California. Sun pounded stucco, fast food architecture, a broiling crapscape under an unblinking sky longing for the Chumash.’ The Chumash were—”

  “The Indian tribe who used to live there. I’m not sure what—”

  “No, no, hold on, this last one set me on the track. ‘Clearing out Mom’s storage space. Letters, pictures, files: ephemera. But they persist and my mother is gone. Sad news. We’re the ephemera.’”

  “Okay, he’s a good writer, but—”

  “I checked the dates. His mom was born in 1967. Hollister was born in 1983. That makes her sixteen years old, a teenage mom. She kept the kid and raised him, apparently all by herself, though she ran through a series of part-time stepdad figures. Mom died in 2014. The tweet about the storage space was from two years ago. Hollister can’t seem to let go. Which is a point worth remembering. It must have been tough—Claire Hollister was forty-seven years old when she died. That’s young, Chief. I checked hospital records, Medicaid documents, insurance claims. As far as I could tell she was a healthy middle-aged woman. The strongest drug she ever took was Advil. No psychiatric records, or suicide attempt 911 calls. No nasty gossip. Friends say she was ‘supernaturally’ happy and upbeat. She volunteered at a food pantry, taught English as a second language to Mexican kids, played the bassoon, of all things. They had a little chamber group.”

  “Okay. So…?”

  “So why did she go to Thompsons Guns & Ammo in September of 2014, sign the paperwork to accept the waiting period and the background checks, then pay cash for a brand new Beretta PX4 Storm compact ‘G’ model 9 mm autoloader, take it home, leave her son a note telling him to call 911 and not look behind the garage, and then go back there, sit down in her favorite lawn chair and blow her brains out with one shot to the temple? That’s the best way to do it, by the way. She knew that because she did her homework. They pulled the search history off her computer during the discovery phase of the trial.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “The trial?”

  She nodded, shifting the papers in her folder. “Criminal action was brought against one Bartholomew James Pomeroy in Pierce County Superior Court, Tacoma, Washington, on July tenth, 2015. Charges included grand theft, extortion, fraud, mail fraud, racketeering, and second-degree murder.”

  “And the Complainant was Blair Hollister.”

  She nodded, still reading. “According to Hollister’s testimony, Pomeroy seduced, blackmailed, cheated, and defrauded Claire Hollister, ultimately stealing every dime she had saved for her retirement, leaving her penniless, homeless, heartbroken, and suicidal. There was a co-complainant, Judy McAndless. Apparently, Pomeroy had worked the same con on her older sister, who wound up divorced with no custody of her three kids and quadriplegic when she totaled her car on the way to confront Pomeroy. She had an unlicensed gun in her purse and she blew .108 on the breathalyzer. So her life was wrecked, and Judy McAndless was just as angry as Hollister.”

  “How did he find her?”

  “Well, he wound up hiring a detective, local
guy named Robert Roman. Roman put them together, found a good criminal lawyer, did all the footwork, tracked down witnesses, helped with the depositions. The case looked like a slam dunk but the whole thing went south about halfway through.”

  “Let me guess. Judy dropped the charges.”

  Karen looked up from her papers, startled. “That’s right. How did you—?”

  I shrugged. “Refn—Pomeroy, whoever he was—got off and wound up here, so something strange must have happened. Probably a carrot and stick deal. Money and lots of it, if she backed off, and ending up like her sister if she didn’t.”

  Karen turned a page, and then another one. “The biggest problem was Hollister opted for a bench trial. He wanted quick results, and he was afraid a jury would make mistakes, get the facts wrong, misunderstand some of the more arcane details…whatever. A lot of this was on his Facebook page. I downloaded his whole time line. But it didn’t work out quite the way Hollister was hoping. The judge heard all the testimony on both sides, listened to the cross examinations, studied the evidence…then took ten minutes and acquitted Pomeroy on all charges. Closing arguments wrapped at eleven-fifteen, they were done by lunch. Hollister wanted to appeal the verdict, but…”

  “Double jeopardy,” I supplied.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was the judge Victor Galassi?”

  She stared at me. “Why do I bother? What’s the point if you know everything in advance?”

  “I don’t! I make little leaps. You bring me the pieces, I snap them together like Legos. The question is, can we build anything with them?”

  “I think we can. In fact, I think I already have. But let me take things in order. Like you said, Galassi was the presiding judge in the case—his last case before he retired. Hollister wanted to bring ethics charges, investigate him, get him disbarred, but that was never going to happen and everyone told him so—even Roman, the detective. Galassi was a country club guy, super popular, deacon of the church, on the board of every charity, big wheel in the local Democratic Party, huge fund-raiser, you name it. Thirty years of service and not a single blemish on his record. No one wanted a scandal and no one believed there was a scandal out there, anyway. All Hollister could do was turn himself into a pariah.”

  “So he gave up?”

  “Not exactly. He hired Robert Roman to investigate the judge.”

  “Did he find anything?”

  “Nothing he could take to court. He followed the guy for a few days, went through his trash, that kind of thing. Finally he ‘let himself in’ to the judge’s house.”

  “How did he get past the alarm? There must have been an alarm.”

  “He waited until Galassi was home—in bed and sound asleep. Most people disarm their systems once they get inside.”

  I remembered Hollister’s play. He had taken a least one detail from real life. “What did he find?”

  “A home office in the basement. Bundles of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills, plus ledgers, tax information, and correspondence that linked Galassi to a small casino called the Double Down, outside of Spokane. The way Roman put it together, Galassi held a part ownership in this place and they were running counterfeit money through it, trading chips for real money, paying out in fake bills, and giving a skim to the counterfeiters. It’s a win-win, and the bad currency spreads all over the country as people fly home with their winnings. Almost impossible to trace.”

  “And whose idea was this?”

  I had a candidate in mind. The devious kink in the plan felt familiar—the kind of person who’d force a lesbian to undress by threatening to lie about it to her partner if she didn’t. Karen smiled at me. “Don’t mess with me, Chief. You know very well whose idea it was.”

  I lifted my hands palms up in genial surrender. “Okay, but I don’t believe Refn had the skills to make good counterfeit money.” And it was good, very good. Otto Didrickson said so.

  “He was fronting for a group of Colombians. All the good counterfeit money comes from South America these days.” If Otto was right about the Columbians, too, they weren’t giving Refn their top product. Whatever works. The last person to inspect their cash is a casino winner.

  We both sat back, letting the information settle on us like confetti. Ironic confetti—we had nothing to celebrate, just a lot of post-parade clean-up. I always felt bad for the sanitation crews after one of those giant celebrations.

  Finally I said, “What did Roman do next?”

  “He told Hollister, and that was about it. The information was gained illegally. They couldn’t get a warrant, much less an indictment or a conviction. But at least Hollister knew why the judge had let Refn walk.”

  I nodded. “So this is where he takes the law into his own hands. He decides to kill Galassi, follows him home, not knowing that the judge has been having lunch with his twin brother, and he’s following the wrong guy. He’s about to blow poor Arthur Galassi away when Victor shows up at the door.”

  She just stared at me.

  “I checked out Galassi and his twin brother. Everything else is straight out of Hollister’s play. I swear! Seriously—he wrote it just like it happened. I went to a rehearsal, I saw them acting the whole thing out. Well, more or less—the Hollister character was a little tougher in the play. But the real question is—how did you figure this all out? Hollister would never admit to it.”

  “Roman told me. He was following Hollister that night. He was worried. He tracked Hollister to the house, saw the whole thing go down. He was about to intervene, when the brother showed up.”

  I stood and walked to the big window overlooking the parking lot and Fairgrounds Road. A lot of traffic, everyone headed out to the beach, at last. You can only spend so much time shopping. “So Hollister comes here, Refn gets killed and it looks like Judge Galassi could be next. What does your Robert Roman think about that?”

  She smiled. “You can ask him yourself, Chief. He’s sitting in your outer office right now.”

  “Jesus Christ, you brought him all the way from Seattle?”

  “He wanted to come. He wanted to pursue this. And I could afford the ticket.”

  I shook my head. “Get him in here.”

  She got up a little awkwardly and hurried across the office and out the door. Ten seconds later she was back, leading a pudgy balding genial-looking middle-aged man in khakis, running shoes, and a Seahawks t-shirt.

  He extended a hand. “Hey, Chief. Robert Roman, good to meet you.”

  He had a soft open friendly face with dog-like brown eyes. His grip was firm but not aggressive.

  I dropped his hand, crossed my arms over my chest. “You know how police departments like mine feel about private detectives.”

  He shrugged. “Uncooperative private detectives. Information hogs. Investigation impeders. Justice obstructors. Pains in the ass.”

  “And that’s not you.”

  His face seemed to expand. It wasn’t quite a smile but he suddenly seemed absurdly, gratuitously friendly. “Cooperative, information-sharing. I never impede, I never obstruct. Maybe I’m a pain in the ass sometimes. But I make my own donuts—yeast and cake, glazed and jelly. And I share. Seattle cops always liked that.”

  “Past tense?”

  “I’m pretty much done with Seattle. Or Seattle is done with me.”

  “I have friends in the Seattle PD.” This was a lie, but people always believe cops know each other, as if law enforcement was a fraternal society like the Elks or the Kiwanis. Maybe it is, but with almost eight hundred thousand of us nationwide it’s a little hard to keep up. “Is there anything they could tell me about you?”

  “Well…let’s see. Assistant Chief Terry Oberfelder with the Special Operations Bureau would probably say to stick with yeast-risen cinnamon donuts. Very sad, since he doesn’t even eat wheat or sugar anymore. And that’s two out of the four main food groups. Cut ou
t popcorn and coffee and he’ll have to start eating vegetables or something.”

  “So what happened?”

  He met my serious gaze. “Missing persons case. Rich husband, runaway wife. I found her, fell in love with her. She dumped both of us, took the divorce loot and joined the Peace Corps. Spousal abuse voided the pre-nup, lucky for her. Now she’s setting up water purification systems or some shit in Namibia, and hubby got me blackballed with every other client in the Pacific Northwest who could afford my services. I’m seriously considering moving to Namibia, myself, I hear the food is great, when this lady here walks into my office talking Blair Hollister and Victor Galassi and Barry Pomeroy. Who, I understand, is recently deceased. And I thought…Nantucket? It’s not Namibia, but it’s on the way.”

  “So what’s your take on Hollister?”

  “As your murder suspect? I don’t buy it. But then again, every serial killer has a flabbergasted neighbor or two. So what the hell do I know?”

  “We’ll have the answer soon.”

  “Yeah…well, anyway, my real interest was Pomeroy. He’s been getting away with you-name-it for years. Money-laundering, blackmail, assault, felony trespass, confidence games. Then the counterfeit money deal blew up in his face—the Spokane PD busted the casino and those boys were cutting deals left and right. Galassi had kept himself clean. His stake in the club was buried under a half dozen nesting doll dummy corporations, and Pomeroy handled all the face-to-face meetings, all the daily stuff. No one could tie the great and mighty Judge Galassi to anything illegal. Not so much as a jaywalking ticket, and this guy never saw a red light he cared about. I’m serious, we’re talking Mr. Magoo here.

  “Well, anyway, Galassi denied everything and threw Pomeroy to the wolves. Or under the bus. Or maybe a bus full of wolves, whatever. Point is, Pomeroy disappeared. I heard the Columbians were after him, too—he must have had a ton of that counterfeit cash waiting to move through the casino, and he wasn’t the kind of guy who gives back. The police showed up at his house with an arrest warrant, but nobody was home. The neighbor told them he’d split less than an hour before. They put out an APB on the car, but the neighbor never noticed that Pomeroy had switched license plates with him. I guess he switched cars a few times, too. The neighbor’s plates finally turned up on some contractor’s F-150 in Ojai, California.”