Nantucket Counterfeit

by Steven Axelrod

  “And the cab driver—Chris something—”

  “Christopher Felleman. He was at the airport, using the Bank of America ATM machine in the terminal that afternoon, almost exactly when you say he was driving you to Cisco. He has the time-stamped receipt to prove it.”

  “But—”

  “One of my detectives checked the surveillance video. It was him, all right—wedding ring, cracked Timex watch, Patriots cap, and all. What he remembers is taking you to drop off Joseph Little’s cell phone—at six in the morning, a week ago last Sunday.”

  “Joe Little’s cell phone?”

  “Come on, Blair.”

  “What would I want with Joe Little’s cell phone?”

  “You cloned it. So it would look like Joe sent Don Harcourt to the crime scene, and he was the one giving orders to your Bulgarians.”

  He reared back, then snagged his wrist on the cuff again. “Wait, wait, hold it—just stop it. Stop. I never…gave orders to anyone. I don’t even give actors line readings. How could I send anyone to a crime scene? I didn’t even know it existed until two days later! And I can’t clone a phone. I don’t even know what that means.”

  “I couldn’t put together an Ikea bed. That’s what YouTube is for.”

  “I never watched any YouTube phone clone videos! Check my search history.”

  “We will.”

  “Good! And—and…I don’t have any Bulgarians. How do you even ‘have’ a Bulgarian? Are people adopting them now?”

  I stood and walked over to the entry. I saw Haden Krakauer through the small, square wire-meshed glass of the door’s window. He tilted his head; I shook mine. I didn’t need help and I wasn’t done.

  I turned back to Hollister, dropped the bomb. “We found the sim card cloning equipment in your apartment.”

  “Then someone planted it!”

  “And who might have done that?”

  “I don’t know! How should I know? Why do cops ask questions like that? If I knew I could solve your case for you. I’m not a detective, I’m not a criminal. I have nothing to do with this. I don’t have any theories. It’s none of my business! Anyway, it’s nuts—I live in NTL housing, six other people live there, maybe thirty people are in and out every day, everybody has keys, there’s no privacy. It could have been anyone! You get a theory, you figure it out!”

  I let his tirade crumble into the air conditioner rasp of the interrogation room. “No one else had counterfeit hundred-dollar bills in their room. Just you—and Refn and Galassi.”

  “Counterfeit—what does that have to do with anything?”

  “We know about your court case, Blair. We know what Refn did to your mother, or should I say, what Barry Pomeroy did to her, and why Galassi let him off. We know about the casino and Refn’s Columbian counterfeiters, and the money-laundering scheme. All of it.”

  Hollister studied me, putting it together. “You talked to Rob Roman.”

  “He’s on-island right now.”

  “Yeah? Did he tell you I had a chance to kill Galassi and didn’t do it?”

  “Because you realized you were aiming your gun at his twin brother. Galassi himself showing up at the house was just happenstance. Or luck.”

  “Or fate. That’s how it felt to me.”

  “You should have googled him, Blair.”

  He rubbed his eye with the palm of his hand. “That’s what I get for using real life in my play. Nothing’s quite as implausible as real life. People who write bad plays always say, ‘It’s a true story! It happened to me.’ And I always think, ‘I don’t care what happened to you. Your job is to make something happen to me.’ Anyway, coming that close to pulling the trigger was a real wake-up call. It pulled me back from the brink, you know? Like—what the fuck did you almost do? Who are you? What did these fucking people do to your head? You’re better than this. You’re better than them.”

  Silence settled between us. It felt like stepping inside, out of the wind. Hollister thought we were finished. I thought he was giving the performance of a lifetime. “So,” I said finally, “how do you explain the counterfeit money?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Here’s my theory. You stole it from Galassi, but not to spend. You wanted a calling card only he and Refn would understand. A warning. A threat.”

  “No, listen, that’s not—”

  “True or false?”

  “False! Well, I mean…mostly false, all right? Yeah, I took the money, to scare those two crooks—the same reason I wrote the play. To freak them out and maybe…get them to confess? I know it sounds stupid. It wasn’t part of some weird murder plan. I just needed to mess with them.”

  “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

  He looked down. “Something like that.”

  I felt a swift twinge of regret for what I was about to tell him. I was starting to like Hollister, against my better judgment, and the cruelty of the facts arrayed against him seemed intentional, even sadistic. But he had brought this on himself. I set the next jagged piece of reality in front of him. “We spoke to Judith Barsch’s housecleaner, as you suggested. She never saw you the day Rafn died. And Mrs. Barsch mentioned that you had more or less begged her to go along with whatever story you were going to tell. At the time she had no idea what you were talking about. But it’s very clear now.”

  “No, I—she…Judy—I never—”

  “I’m amazed you trusted her.”

  “I didn’t! I’d never say anything like that!”

  “Maybe she misunderstood.”

  “No! She didn’t misunderstand what I said because I never said anything.”

  Time to read him the final number on his winning lottery ticket. Congratulations! You’ve just won a life sentence in a federal maximum security prison. “We found the can of keyboard cleaner in your office.”

  His blank look was almost comical. “What?”

  “The keyboard cleaner you used when you killed Refn.”

  “How—? You’re losing it, Chief. You’re saying I killed Refn with a computer keyboard…and then cleaned the blood off the keys with some kind of spray?”

  “I’m saying you used the spray to torture him before you killed him. There was frostbite on Refn’s face—antemortem. Skin specimens match the tissue samples to the product we found in your wastebasket.”

  “Wait, what? Keyboard cleaner can give you frostbite?”

  “You knew that. You read the label, just like I did.”

  We stared at each other as he tried to gather his thoughts. “I don’t have a keyboard. I use an iPad. What would I be doing with a can of keyboard cleaner?”

  “We asked ourselves that very question, Blair. But you knew Refn was phobic about the cold.”

  “How could I know that?”

  “I assume you did your research. Writers are good at research.”

  “Now, wait a second. If I really used this—thing, this spray can…to torture Refn, why would I throw it away in my own office trash? Why wouldn’t I bury it a million miles away? Or plant it on someone else?”

  “Because you’re cocky. And careless. And crazy. For cops, that’s the trifecta, Blair. That’s Son of Sam’s parking tickets. That’s Ted Bundy driving with a broken headlight.”

  I watched it all sink in. Then he made his final plea. “These people—Carmen and Chris Felleman and that bus driver—they’re all lying. They’re lying! You have to find out why. There must be a reason! Someone made them do that, and he planted that stuff in my home and my office…that’s the real killer. Not me! I’m innocent!” He caught my calm steady pitiless look, and sagged backward in his chair. “What’s the use? You don’t believe me.”

  He was right.

  God help me, I didn’t believe a word he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

 
The Eye of the Storm

  With Blair Hollister in custody, his bail set at half a million dollars, island life resumed its usual pace, like a jogger tripping over an uneven sidewalk and lurching to recover—without even an embarrassed “I meant to do that” for the jaded onlookers. And there were quite a few of them. The story had engaged the attention of the national press, already piqued by a famous actor’s sexual indiscretions at a local restaurant. The island had become a rich fudge of scandal and the public had a sweet tooth for privileged people acting badly.

  Nantucket in the new gilded age could trigger a case of type-two diabetes.

  The publicity helped an odd selection of people. David Trezize, who ran our local alternative newspaper, was once again out in front of the bigger news outlets with a sensational expose. And the Theater Lab was looking at a possible Broadway production of Who Dun It. I received a little of the “reflected gory,” as my father once called it, after he’d spent the afternoon strolling the streets of Manhattan with Boris Karloff. I was being touted as a small town Sherlock Holmes, an activist lawman who refused to spend his days behind a desk issuing press releases. My connection with Jane Stiles spiked the sales of her Nantucket-based cozy mysteries. And Nantucket branded merchandise was flying off the shelves at Murray’s Toggery and the Nobby Shop.

  All was right with the world. The good guys had won. You could feel the holiday atmosphere at the police station and I was happy for the respite.

  I had another crime to solve, and it was strictly personal.

  I was sitting at home on Darling Street one balmy Saturday morning, enjoying a rare late breakfast, the kids roaming the island on their bikes with a blissful lack of parental supervision. My one constraint: “Be home by dinner.” I knew there were many communities where this laissez faire attitude would be considered a misdemeanor if not a felony.

  There was a famous case a few years before, when parents in Maryland had their children taken by Protective Services after Silver Spring Police found them playing unsupervised in a nearby park. Maybe those concerns made sense elsewhere, but Nantucket remained a sanctuary for a different era’s style of child-rearing. I remembered reading an editorial in the New York Times in which the writer described memorizing her daughter’s clothes before she went to school every day so she could provide a useful “last seen wearing…” report to the police. Such concerns seemed tragic but bizarrely remote thirty miles out at sea. I had never flinched—as I might have in a big city—when my kids dashed out of sight around a corner. I knew they were most likely to crash headlong into any one of two dozen adults who adored them.

  That was a luxury, and I was feeling luxurious on this peerless late June day. Jane had taken her second coffee upstairs to her office, where she was determined to get her thousand words written on the new Maddie Clark mystery. Often in my life I had felt a loneliness more acute because I was surrounded by people—bitter wife, disapproving inlaws, tiresome acquaintances. This feeling was exactly the opposite—solitary at my kitchen table, but comfortably tethered at various distances to delightful children, steadfast colleagues, and the brilliant, funny, gorgeous woman upstairs, two-finger tapping her way toward the end of Chapter Six.

  The mild breeze smelled of cut grass and the harbor. I took a deep breath, pushed my coffee aside and took out my phone. I found the pictures I had taken in Hector Cruz’s bedroom and started scrolling through them.

  Walking through a big job at the “punch list” stage with Mike Henderson a couple of years before, he had made a point that came back to me now.

  “It takes at least three people to do a good latex touch-up. You know why? Because people don’t really look—more than that, they don’t want to look. The eye skips over any anomaly. Maybe it’s just laziness—noticing stuff means work. Like the other day, I spent the morning painting trim with wall paint. They were the same color, but still—that meant I was painting over gloss oil with eggshell latex…for four hours! I’ve been doing this job since I was a teenager, Chief. So what the hell happened? I really thought about it and I remember some little twinge in the back of my head, like the tickle in your throat before you cough. But I ignored it because the paint was going on glossy—it was wet, of course it looked glossy—and I don’t make those kinds of mistakes. Except, obviously I do.

  “So I think the trick is to focus on those anomalies, not ignore them…to put the brakes on, and ask—what’s going on here? Which is kind of like police work, don’t you think? I mean, that’s really your whole job, in a way—looking for the little things that don’t feel right, the stuff that people naturally ignore, stopping where the natural momentum of life tells you to keep moving. It’s so counterintuitive. It must be tough to train yourself to think that way.”

  Mike was right, and that was exactly what I had to do now. I had to look for the scuff mark above the baseboard, the faint speckle of paint on the doorknob. There was some anomaly in the pictures I had taken of Hector’s room, and I was determined to find it.

  When I finally did, fifteen minutes later, it felt a big rich cough from the bottom of your lungs, when you finally feel a tenacious cold loosening in your chest. I was on the mend.

  And Hector was off the hook.

  I left Jane a note, slipped out of the house, and drove to Hector’s house. His parents were out, of course. His mother was working double shifts at Cottage Hospital, and Sebastian was charging through the height of his landscaping season, with dozens of lawns to cut, gardens to weed and deadhead against upcoming weddings and fundraisers, hedges to install, stone walls to build, and God-knows-how-many metric tons of fertilizer to lay down before the Fourth of July. He worked side by side with his crew and worked rings around most of them, once famously offering double pay to any pair of guys who could dig as many split-rail fence post holes as he could in four hours. Like all those long-forgotten first-out-of-the gate horses in all those Triple Crown races, they started strong but faded against the relentless energy of a great competitor.

  “Sprinters lose,” was Sebastian’s summary. He had a point. I’d always been a plodder and it paid off for me. Today was a perfect example.

  Hector came to the door wearing board shorts, flip-flops, and a Cruz Land Design t-shirt, his eyes bleary from a lengthy X-Box session. I could see past his shoulder to the frozen image on the big flat-screen TV in the living room—his platoon clearing the rubble in some cyber Baghdad or Fallujah.

  I clamped down on the urge to lecture him about getting off the couch and into the sunshine. Hector got more exercise than most kids his age, if only from the demanding summer practice schedule. Anyway, he wasn’t my kid and it wasn’t my problem. I’d already solved the only problem between us.

  He looked at me warily. “What’s up, Chief?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  He stepped back.

  “I’d like to go up to your room for a second.”

  “It’s kind of a mess.”

  “I’m used to that.”

  He grinned. He knew what a cyclone my daughter was.

  As we walked upstairs I said, “I know that…picture on Carrie’s phone isn’t you, Hector. And I understand why you don’t want you own picture taken.”

  “That’s private, like I said.”

  “Absolutely. And it’s also not necessary.”

  He opened the door to his room for me and I stepped across the piles of clothes, magazines, and powercords to the bookshelf. The Coke can was still there, with the same white cursive writing on the same red background, in the same iconic font.

  But the letters were unrecognizable. To me anyway—I don’t read Hebrew.

  I picked up the can. It was unopened. “This isn’t a soft drink. It’s a souvenir.”

  He looked down, needlessly, absurdly embarrassed. He understood.

  “When was your last trip to Israel?”

  “La
st summer. My big brother is working on a kibbutz in Kalia. On the Dead Sea, forty minutes north of Jerusalem.”

  “So your dad is a Sephardic Jew.”

  “His dad was. Pops wanted no part of it.”

  “But your brother felt differently.”

  “You don’t stop being a Jew, Chief. It don’t work that way. Whatever Pops might think.”

  “Still…you’re keeping the secret.”

  “I go to shul. We have one here, you know.”

  “But under the radar.”

  “I have enough problems on this rock without adding that one, Chief. ‘Hey, the wetback spic is also a kike!’”

  I had to smile. “That reminds me of something Sammy Davis, Jr. once said.”

  “Who?”

  Oh, boy. “Just—an entertainer from way back in the twentieth century. He said, ‘I’m a one-eyed, black Jewish midget—at least I don’t live in the Valley.’ He was talking about the San Fernando Valley.”

  “Where the real housewives live!”

  “Right.” I released a breath. “So your circumcision is none of anyone’s business. Including mine.”

  He smiled. “You get a pass, Chief. You figured it out on your own.”

  He stepped back toward the door, the body language ending the conversation. But we weren’t quite done. “There’s still one question, Hector.”

  He nodded. “Who did it? Who done it, just like that dude’s play. My dad says the two most important questions in his life are ‘When are they coming?’ and ‘Did you send the check?’ For him it’s all about the customers. Their schedules and their bank accounts. But ‘who done it’—that’s your number one question. Am I right?”

  “Actually, most of the time, it’s more ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ Like a Coke can with the wrong script on the can. So what do you think? Who did this? Any theories?”

  He leaned against the door casing. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “How about…someone with access to your phone? Someone with a crush on Carrie. Someone jealous of your position on the team. Someone raised wrong—single parent, latch key kid, lots of booze in the house. Someone with a chip on his shoulder and a bad attitude. A shoplifter, a joy-rider, a bully, a braggart, a cheater. But insecure and scared. Cocky like a coward. Sound familiar?”