Nantucket Five-Spot
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Authors: Steven Axelrod
Nantucket Five-spot
A Henry Kennis Mystery
Steven Axelrod
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 2015 by
First E-book Edition 2015
ISBN: 9781464203459 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
Part One: Rock Blunts Scissors
Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Years Ago
Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Months Ago
Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Weeks Ago
Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Days Ago
Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Hours Ago
Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Minutes Ago
For my Mother, Gloria Goforth (1920â2012)
Who always knew this would happen.
Thanks to Nantucket Police Chief William Pittman for his continuing advice and support; to Rob Dunbar who gave me the first title; to Jim Berkley, Ginger Andrews, and Karen Palmer, whose shrewd early readings caught many embarrassing mistakes; to Annette Rogers whose editorial letters always make me cringe because she's always right; to Annie Breeding, who always had the right word through the hole in the ceiling; and finally to Domenic Stansberry and Diane Lefer, who helped shape this book when it was my MFA creative thesis at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I'll never forget Domenic reading those original first hundred pages and asking “Are you planning to start the story any time soon?” People ask what's the practical use of an MFA degree. As far as I'm concerned, you're holding the answer in your hands.
“Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a
revenge that is worthwhile.”
âAmbrose Bierce,
The Devil's Dictionary
“An effective campaign must be sensible in its
planning and reckless in its execution.”
âBrigadier General Prescott Trainor, USMC
“Rock blunts scissors, scissors cut paper,
paper covers rock.”
âRules to the Han Dynasty strategy game
Arrivals
Finally, I was having dinner alone with Franny Tate. It was a mild summer night, we were dining at Cru, overlooking Nantucket harbor. I was leaning across the table to kiss her when the first bomb went off.
A hole punched into the air, a muffled thump that bypassed my ears and smacked straight into my stomach, like those ominous fireworks that flash once and leave no sparks. The blast wave hit a second later, shaking tables and knocking over glasses, rattling windows in their frames. Franny mouthed the word âbomb,' her lips parting in silence and pressing together again, not wanting to say the word aloud, or thinking I couldn't hear her through the veil of trembling air.
I pushed my chair back, pointing toward the Steamboat Wharf.
We ran out into a night tattered by running feet and sirens. Our romantic evening lay across the stained tablecloth behind us, tipped over and shattered with the restaurant stemware.
Something bad had arrived on my little island, an evil alert, a violation and a threat like a dog with its throat cut dropped on a front parlor rug. It was up to me and my officers to answer that threat, to make sense of it and set things right.
I didn't explain this to Franny. I didn't need to.
She was running right beside me.
***
At that point, I thought it all began with the first bomb threat, two weeks earlier, but I wasn't even close. It takes a long time to make a bomb from scratch. Lighting the fuse is the quick part.
I can tell you the exact moment when the match touched the cord, though.
It was a bright humid morning in June. An eleven-year-old girl named Deborah Garrison stepped off the boat from Hyannis and skipped ahead of her mother down into the crowded seaside streets. As it happened, I was at the Steamship Authority that morning, picking up my assistant chief, Haden Krakauer. We actually saw Debbie in her pony tails and Justin Bieber t-shirt. She didn't seem special, just another adorable little girl on a holiday island crowded with them.
And Debbie didn't actually do anything. Nothing that happened later was her fault. The simple, irreducible fact of her presence was enough. Even years later, the consequences and implications of Debbie's arrival seem bizarre and implausible, far too weighty to balance on those thin sunburned shoulders.
It was like setting off an avalanche with a sigh.
The next time I saw Debbie, it was a week later and she was holding hands with my friend Billy Delavane when he came to the station to report a stolen wallet. She'd been tagging along with him everywhere, since the day she came to Nantucket. They had met in the surf at Madaket when he pulled her out of the white water after a bad wipeout.
“She'd launch on anything, but she kept slipping,” Billy told me later. “She couldn't figure it out. No one told her she had to wax the board.”
She was happy to let Billy get everything organized and push her into some smaller waves and even happier to share a cup of hot chocolate with a few other kids at Billy's beach shack when hypothermia set in.
They'd been inseparable ever since.
Barnaby Toll took Billy's stolen property report and then buzzed my office. He knew I'd be pleased that Billy had shown up at “Valhalla” as he liked to call it. Billy had been one of the more vocal opponents of the new police station, dragging himself to several Town Meetings and fidgeting through all the boring warrant articles to take his stand against the giant new facility on Fairgrounds Road.
I understood his point. I had been against the construction myself, initially. But, like driving in a luxury car or eating at good restaurants, I adapted to the change shockingly fast. Now I couldn't imagine working in the cramped crumbling building on South Water Street.
I found the two downstairs in the administration conference room.
Billy tilted his head as I walked in. “Nice place. Lots of parking. In America, where nothing else matters.”
I ignored him, looking down. “Who's this?”
Debbie spoke up without waiting for him. I liked that. “Debbie Garrison.” She extended her hand and I tipped down a little to shake it.
“Police Chief Henry Kennis.”
“Glad to meet you, Chief Kennis. Can I have a tour? I think this place is awesome.”
“Absolutely. How old are you?”
“Eleven,” Billy volunteered.
“I'll be twelve in September,” Debbie corrected him.
“That's my son's age,” I said. “You should meet him.”
“Most eleven-year-old boys are extremely immature.”
I let that one go and offered Debbie my arm. “Shall we?”
“Yay!” She grabbed my hand and led me into the corridor. “Can we see the jail cells?”
“Sure.”
The place was buzzing on a June morning. We had Girl Scouts gathering in the selectman's meeting room and people milling in the front lobby, complaining about the neighbors' noise violations and picking up over-sand stickers. Last night's DUIs, the unlicensed, uninsured, or unregistered drivers (a couple of them always hit the trifecta).
On the way down to the booking room I asked Debbie what she thought so far.
“Well, the upstairs where we came in reminds me of a mall. That hole in the ceiling where you can see up to the second floor? I was likeâis there a GAP store up there? This part is more like my school. But nicer.”
“Well, it's new.”
“New is good,” she announced decisively and I thought, you've come to the right place.
“So are you spending a lot of time with Billy?” We pushed through into the booking room. It was crowded, phones were ringing. A bald geezer who looked like he was constructed out of sinew and tattoo ink was being hustled inside from the garage. Debbie stared at him. He was obviously sloshed out of his mind at ten in the morning.
I took her hand and led her around the big horseshoe-shaped desk toward the holding cells. “Debbie?”
“Itâwhat?”
“Billy? You're spending a lot of time with him?”
“That guy is creepy.”
“He's sad. His kid was killed in Afghanistan. He drinks a lot, that's all.”
“Ugh. Those tattoos.”
“They're bad.” She'd probably have one herself by the time she was sixteen, but you can always hope.
She moved on. “Billy's great.” Then, “What's behind that door?”
I followed her gaze to the corner. “That's our padded cell.”
“For crazy people?”
“Wellâ¦for people who might try to hurt themselves.”
“Cool! Can I see it?”
“Sure.”
We went inside. “Padded” is a slight exaggerationâthe beige walls and floor have the consistency of a pencil eraser. “Billy's not like I expected.” She pushed the walls, bouncing tentatively on the balls of her feet. “I mean, he's not crazy or dangerous or anything.”
“Who told you he was dangerous?”
“Oh, I don't knowâ¦justâpeople.”
“They were probably talking about his brother, Ed, who actually is crazy. And dangerous. But he's going to be in jail for a long, long time. So I wouldn't worry about him.”
“Billy is so the opposite of that. He wouldn't hurt anyone. I mean, he's sad about all the changes here, but he knows he can't stop them. He's not like some kind of terrorist or anything.”
I put a hand on her shoulder to stop the bouncing. “Debbie.” She looked up at me. “Someone's been calling Billy Delavane a terrorist?”
“I don't know. I guess so. It's justâpeople talk. People say stupid stuff all the time. Gossip and stuff.”
“I guess. But you've only been here a week, and you're already hearing hardcore gossip about Billy Delavane? I don't see how that's possible. Are the kids talking about him?”
“The kids love him.”
“Then who? Your mother? Your mother's friends?”
“Yeah, right.”
The idea of her talking to her mother's friends was obviously so crazy only a clueless grown-up could entertain it.
We went to the jail cells next, three for the women and six for the men, simple rooms with built-in stainless steel sinks and toilets and a blue cement slab bed. The men's side was full, so I walked her into the women's block which was empty for the moment.
Debbie pointed at one of the slabs. “How can anyone sleep on that?”
“We have special bedding, but people don't usually stay here overnight.”
“What's that for?” She was looking at the stainless steel rail than ran along the length of the slab, eight inches off the floor.
“That's called a Murphy barâit's for handcuffing people.”
“Oooo.” She shuddered.
“We don't use them much.”
“That's good. That would be scary, being handcuffed in there. Is that a phone? It looks like a phone.”
It wasâwe have a metal plate set into the wall with touch tone buttons and a speaker, so prisoners can have their mandated phone call without any complications. It might seem like an unnecessary luxury, but it beats trying to wrestle a cell phone away from a two-hundred-fifty-pound PCP addict at four in the morning. Someone inevitably gets hurt and the town can only absorb so many seven figure lawsuits.
Debbie was fascinated with the phone. “That is so cool. It almost makes up for the handcuffs. Can you call long distance?”
“No. Local calls only.”
“So you take people's cell phones away?”
“Oh yeah. We take their iPods, too. And their PlayStation portables.”
“That's so mean.”
“Actually most criminals don't have PlayStation portables.”
“Billy hates cell phones. He refuses to text me. He was watching me yesterday and he said, everything is opposite now. In the old days being âall thumbs' was a bad thing.”
I smiled and she pounced. “See? He's really funny. I've never heard of a terrorist with a sense of humor, have you?”
“No, I guess not.”
We walked to the last cell and turned around. “Soâyou have no idea who's saying this stuff about Billy?”
“No, but if I hear anything else, I can tell you. Plus I can snoop around. Like an informant.”
I led her back out to the lobby where Billy was waiting. On the way I asked her what else she planned to do on the island this summerâshe couldn't spy for the police full time.
She shrugged. “Nothing. I guess I'll go to that stupid whaling museum, or the oldest house or whatever, or just sit on the beach.”
I had an idea. “You should tell your mom about Murray Camp. It's fun. My kids go.”
“Really?” She sounded dubious.
“It's great. You meet all the island kids and there are kids from all over the world whose parents stay here for the summer. They have tennis and kayaking and windsurfing and biking and cook-outs, andâ¦I don't know. You name it. They explore the island. You really learn about this place. My kids love it.”
“Okay.” I could see she wasn't convinced. I made a mental note to call her mother.
I said my good-byes and went back up to my office. Two big windows showed a view across the parking lot to Fairgrounds Road and beyond. It was a big improvement over the sub-street-level closet I'd worked out of for my first few years on the island.
I hooked my chair and sat down.
***
The arrest reports on my desk were a standard summertime array. The fat Midwestern couples who insisted on riding mopeds down Wauwinet Road, taking blind turns side by side. The tradesmen who ran them into the bushes after too many beers for lunch at the Chicken Box. The girl caught stealing earrings from The Souk. The boy caught stealing a sweater from Murray's. I had no leads on the oxycodone suppliers plaguing the island, and nothing new on the underground prostitution ring I'd been hearing rumors about. For the moment all I had was the strong suspicion, developed through too many years of too many after-work drinks with the hardened cynics of Administrative Vice in L.A., that the two were connected somehow.
Then there were the angry yuppies to deal with. For instance, one Tyler Gibson, who bullied himself into my office a few minutes later, brandishing a handful of parking tickets like a magician starting a card trick.
“What am I supposed to do with these?”
I stood up. “Good morning. I'm Chief of Police Henry Kennis. I don't believe we've had the pleasure.”
He was a slender man with lots of well-groomed blond hair framing his hawkish face, blue eyes set tight together, sharp nose, thin lips clenched around his indignation, sucking it like a sourball. He spoke with a slight southern accent. I stuck my hand out as I walked around my desk.
He shook it. “Tyler Gibson.”
“Good to meet you, Mr. Gibson. Why don't you sit down and tell me the problem.”
We settled ourselves and then he launched. “I'm not going to pay these tickets. It's outrageous.”
“Wellâ¦all the streets are marked, Mr. Gibson. If you keep your car in a thirty minute spot for an hour, someone will probably ticket you.”
He stared at me, features pinched in the effort to control his temper. “I am a resident of this island until Labor Day, Chief Kennis, and I am paying dearly for the privilege.”
“I appreciate that, butâ”
“So I demand to know why I wasn't given a resident parking sticker.”
“Where are you living? What's the address?”
“On Deacon's Way. 10 Deacon's Way. Off Cliff Road.”
I shrugged. “There you go. Those stickers are issued to homeowners within the core historic district. There's a big sign in the lobby explaining the rules. Take a look at it on your way out.”
“This is absurd. You're telling me I have to pay these tickets?”
“I'm sure you can afford it.”
He jumped to his feet and brandished the tickets at me. “I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to sue this town, and the Board of Selectmen, and you personally. You're going to lose and you're going be giving back all the money you've extorted from people like me for decades. It's going to be expensive and I'm going make a point of seeing that a good chunk of it comes out of your pay check. Maybe then you'll think twice about biting the hand that feeds you!”