Nantucket Grand (25 page)

Chapter Twenty-nine

Blue Heron Estates

We settled ourselves on the big wicker couch, and he began. “Remember I told you about the Thayer land parcel, how the family was fighting about selling it, and your ex-wife was in a twirl about the real estate commissions?”

“Yeah, but—nothing happened with that.”

“Not yet. Because the family couldn't agree. Edna's will stipulates that the decision has to be unanimous among the beneficiaries.”

“Andrew was the holdout.”

David nodded. “Most of the family doesn't even live on-island. Joyce and Debbie moved back last year, but the other two brothers live in…Chicago and L.A., I think. The property is just a lottery ticket to them. But here's the thing. None of it added up, Chief. Like—the plan on the table was selling the whole property to the Land Bank.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing, it's the right thing to do. That chunk of land is the heart of Nantucket. But that's what I didn't get—the greedy twins off-island shouldn't have wanted that sale—you never get full market value from the Land Bank.”

“So Andy should have been in favor of the sale.”

“Exactly. Something more was going on, and that's even more interesting to me than snooping on my ex-wife.”

I smiled. “Journalist first, stalker second.”

“It's like I told you, Chief, I'm over it. Anyway…I talked to Todd Macy. He practically ran the Land Bank, and he was dead-set against the sale also. He wouldn't say why, though. He didn't want to talk, even off the record. ‘You'll know everything soon enough,' that was what he said. Something like that. But then he got killed.”

I nodded. “He tried to call me the day before he died.”

“So he thought it was a police matter.”

“I guess. I don't know. He sounded agitated in the voicemail.”

“I tried a couple of other leads—Dan Taylor, he knows everything that's going on; a couple of other Selectmen; Charlie Forrest, who worked with Todd at the Land Bank. But I came up with nothing. There was a potential sale, one of many, negotiations were ongoing, blah blah blah. Then Chris Macy shows up at the
Beacon
office. He just got a poem published in
Ploughshares
, how does that make you feel?”

I let a bitter little laugh swivel my head. “It pisses me off. What do you think?”

“Spoken like a true writer. Chris showed some of your stuff to the editor there. The guy said he thought it was charming—a police chief writing bad poetry.”

“Now you're baiting me.”

“Sorry, I thought it was funny. My opinion? The kid's stuff sucks. I hate my daddy, in villanelle form with some foreign words and fancy references. Big deal. But it turns out he didn't totally hate his dad after all. He respected Todd. At least—he respected Todd's work at the Land Bank. Chris is one of those turn-the-island-into-a-national-park types. Anyway, he had some documents to show me, stuff he'd taken out of his father's home office.”

“What kind of documents?”

“The main one was the plan for a giant subdivision in the moors. Come on, I'll show you.”

I followed him into his office where he pulled a folded square of paper off his desk. He carried it into the dining room and laid it out on the table.

“Check it out.”

I looked over the blue-inked plot markings. Most of it seemed to be three- and five-acre zoning but there were smaller footprint lots at the eastern edge of the property. The big sheet covered most of the table. The development was huge, spreading over more than a two square miles.

“That's about thirteen hundred acres, Chief. Three hundred homes, counting the affordable housing units.”

“Holy crap.” I stared at the giant sheet of paper. It represented the death of Nantucket as I knew it. The new roads, the new sewage lines, the cars, and the moors themselves, the pristine heart of the island…gutted like an old house, and turned into some hideous gated community out of Summit, New Jersey. It didn't seem possible. “Have these plans been filed?”

“Nope. I couldn't even find the official surveyor's report. This was all done under the radar. This sheet of paper is the only evidence that anything's even happening.”

The thought struck me like a panic attack—the moment when you realize you left the oven on or the skylight open to the rain. “What an idiot I am.”

David looked like baffled owl behind his glasses. “Excuse me.”

“The surveyor's report.”

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my pictures, into the set that Mark Toland had sent me, the area around Andrew's cottage, particularly the one with the birds on the ground, which I'd never gotten around to showing Haden Krakauer.

Red birds—cardinals.

Well, they were out of focus—and more importantly, out of context. But it was no excuse. I handed the phone to David. “Recognize those?”

He gaped at the screen. “Jesus Christ. Surveyor's flags. When was this taken?”

“The day before the fire.”

“So it's real.”

I bent to study the western section of the subdivision plan. “This is the area designated for the Moorlands Mall. But the Thayer property…”

“Look again. It's both. The parcel covers both properties.”

Nathan Parrish, a local real estate lawyer now serving five to seven at Cedar Junction, had finessed the property from the down-at-heel owners of an Indian quitclaim land deed and gotten a ruling from the Land Court allowing the mall to be built. When his partnership with Preston Lomax went south and the thieves fell out and Parrish had Lomax killed, everyone assumed the deal was dead. Well, that deal was dead.

But this deal was much bigger, and far worse.

“The Lomax property reverted to LoGran Corporation,” David said. “But they seem to be out of it, now.” He pointed to the logo: the top loop of the capital ‘B' turning into a graceful bird's head. “This is the owner. Blue Heron Estates.”

Blue Heron. Blue Heroin.

That was what Alana had heard Howard McAllister and Charles Forrest arguing about. It had nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with real estate. But then, real estate was the drug of choice for people like Charles Forrest. I told David what Alana told me.

“Todd was against this,” he said.

“So Forrest and McAllister had him killed.”

“Or someone did.” David blew out a tired breath. “Someone who'd commit murder over a piece of land.”

“This is quite a piece of land. It's probably the most significant parcel to come up for sale on the Eastern seaboard in the last fifty years.”

“Still.”

“Hey, in L.A. I saw kids who'd commit murder over a pair of sneakers.”

“I guess I've lived a pretty sheltered life.”

“Here's what I don't understand. The Thayers were fighting about selling to the Land Bank. Where does the Blue Heron bunch come in? Can the Land Bank flip a property like that?”

“That's what I wanted to know. So I started digging. Turns out there's this obscure Land Bank charter provision that allows the bank to re-sell the property for commercial or residential use. They also utilize rule 40-B that allows them to build as much and as densely as they want with as much clustering as they require, so long as they provide some percentage of affordable housing…which in fact, they never plan to build. All it takes is bribes to people on the Planning Commission. It's not about zoning, which would require a full vote from Town Meeting. It can all be done behind closed doors. Their lawyer writes the covenant papers so he can slip in even more loopholes regarding sewers, gutters, paving, tree cover, lighting, et cetera. These concessions will net Blue Heron millions of dollars, cumulatively. It's quite a racket.”

I nodded. “There have to be kickbacks. The Thayers must get some equivalent of market value after the sale to Blue Heron goes through. That's the only explanation for the greedy ones wanting to do it.”

“And Andrew being dead-set against it.”

“So they burned his house. And when that didn't work, they killed him.”

“But who are ‘they'? That's the real question.”

“Who runs Blue Heron Estates?”

“That's what I wanted to know. Turns out, it's a dummy corporation owned by another dummy corporation owned by a shell corporation out of Delaware. Which is owned by some other company, which itself is some subsidiary of a holding company in the Seychelles Islands. It just goes on and on. It would take years to unravel it and track these people down.”

“But you have a theory and so do I.”

“LoGran.”

I lifted both hands in a flicking little twist, with a mean half-smile and a cock of the head—universal sign language for ‘it's obvious.'

“And Pell.”

I nodded. Daisy's “he” and “they.”

David stood up and walked over to the bookshelf that covered the whole wall facing the windows. “LoGran's a big company, Chief. Twelve people on the board of directors. A COO, a CFO.”

“But only one of them docks his boat at Straight Wharf.”

He took down one of his two volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories. “Elementary, my dear Watson?”

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth, as Holmes liked to say.”

“But not even Holmes could prove this one. Believe me, I tried. There's no paper trail, no documentation, nothing. I left a trail, though. I got a cease-and-desist letter from Blue Heron. No more document requests without a court order.”

“And that scared you off?”

“If they really are owned by LoGran, I was right to be scared off. Lomax practically ruined me and all I did was report on him bullying a waiter at Topper's.”

“You were going public about the Moorlands Mall.”

He shrugged. “That, too. Listen, I'll get in the ring with them, but I have to have to be ready for the fight. This would be a first-round knockout. I can afford a lawsuit these days, thanks to Kathleen. But neither of us can afford to lose one. Plus—I could be wrong. You don't have to love Nantucket to cash in on it. Larry Thayer, the one in L.A.—he doesn't give a shit about this place. It's just the opposite, actually. Pell cares about the island. Why would he want to trash it? And that's assuming LoGran even owns Blue Heron. It could be anyone, Chief. Take away my grudges and my prejudices, take away your guesswork and intuition…we have nothing. It could be an Arabian sheik, or a Russian oligarch—they love real estate. It's the best trick in the world for laundering money. Or a dot com billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg, why not? Or that guy who owns PayPal. Or fifty other guys we haven't even heard of yet. I get exhausted just thinking about it.”

I felt myself coming down from the investigative high, hitting the hard ground with a thump. “You're right.”

“Besides, anyone who reads the
Wall Street Journal
knows that LoGran is having some trouble lately. I'm not sure they have the capital to pull this off. They need leverage and they need liquidity and they don't have much of either. There's a bad stretch between buying the property and selling it. Ask Bruce Poor—he lost his shirt developing Woodbury Lane. I remember that development back when he had sold, like, two lots. It was bad timing. Look at the place now. Take a left at the Lily Pond and stroll up to New Lane. It's a gold mine—but not for Bruce. Other people made the money. That could happen to whoever makes this supposed Land Bank deal, too. People get greedy and they overextend themselves and they go down.”

“But LoGran is a corporation.”

He did his best breathy Mitt Romney impression. “Corporations are people, friend. Greedy people who can overextend themselves, just like anyone else.”

***

I left the house in a funk, and my subsequent meetings with Charles Forrest—also out on bail—and Grady Malone at his architectural office on lower Main Street, didn't improve matters much. Forrest was outraged and impervious: he knew nothing about the plans I described and knew of no deals pending with any corporate entity, Blue Heron, Red Herring, or anyone else. And even if he did, such agreements were perfectly legal and in fact an essential part of the Land Bank's structure. They sold some properties in order to have cash on hand to buy other, more significant ones. Every prospective purchase was judged on the long-term merits of the property itself and its significance to the creation of a sustainable Nantucket, with as much area kept undeveloped and forever wild as possible. That was the charter and the goal and the moral responsibility of the Land Bank, and to suggest anything else was insulting and very possibly slanderous.

Et cetera.

I thought of my Shakespeare—
Hamlet
, in particular: “The Lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Perhaps I should have staged a play myself—not
The Murder of Gonzago
but
The Selling of Pout Ponds
, and see how Charles Forrest reacted to his character's self-righteous screed. But I didn't have time for that and I wanted to avoid an ending like
Hamlet'
s, the stage “littered with corpses” as my mother once put it. I was trying to dial down the melodrama.

***

Grady Malone made that easy. I could tell he really didn't know anything except the basics: there was a potential development going in, where all the houses would be designed by him.

“I never really expected it to happen,” he said, over coffee at The Bean. “Those giant projects usually fall through for some reason. And I wasn't even sure I wanted the job, quite frankly. That's five years of work at least, and I hate to commit that far ahead. You wind up having to turn down something much more cool. You're asked to submit plans for the Frick renovation, and you can't do it because you have another Nantucket McMansion to build. Just an example. The Frick rejected my design two years ago. Not grandiose enough. I hear they've abandoned the whole project now, for the moment at least. Just as well.”