Nantucket Sawbuck (15 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Full Disclosure

David Trezize arrived at the party just before ten. He had been drinking, which was a bad idea, and he'd been driving, which was worse, skidding on the icy roads and rehearsing what he was going to say. Words were his weapon. He had to use them for maximum effect.

He had approached the intersection of Vesper Lane and Joy Street too fast and slid right across it, brakes stuttering uselessly. He was stuttering himself by then, losing his nerve.

At the Eel Point house, cars were parked up and down the side of the road. It was a long walk in the cold, and the frigid air sobered him up. He slipped on the deck and landed on his elbow. He sat down in the snow, fighting tears of pain and frustration. But the fall turned out to be a good thing. It made him angrier. It got him moving.

He pushed into the warmth and the noise of the Great Room. He saw Lomax, squat and dissipated like some diseased Roman emperor just before the fall of the empire, standing by the French doors to the back deck. He was talking to Patty and Grady Malone. So he was going to have to confront Lomax in front of his ex-wife? Fine, fine, what did it matter? This concerned her anyway. David launched as soon as he and the tycoon were face to face.

“I hope you're proud of yourself, you miserable shit.”

Lomax smiled. “Excuse me?”

“I read that piece about you in the
Wall Street Journal.
They called you a ‘far-sighted financial strategist.' You're not a far-sighted financial strategist! Unless you call destroying helpless people a strategy. You find companies in trouble, you buy them out cheap, fire everyone, sell everything, and move on to the next victim. You're a scavenger. A repo man! You're a vulture. You think you're larger than life? You're smaller than life! You've got no style—what are those fucking plaster mermaid sculptures holding up the mantelpiece? You've gotta be kidding.”

“Are you finished?”

“No! You want to wreck my newspaper, fine. But you leave my family alone. Fuck with them again and I'll kill you. And I'll get off because every member of the jury will be so happy to see you dead.”

“Sad, bitter little people keep saying that to me. But I remain happily alive, and immensely popular. This isn't funny anymore, David. I want you off my property.”

“Yeah, it's all about the property, isn't it? This territory is sacred because it's been sprayed with your money. Well fuck you. Fuck all of you. I wouldn't give a Nantucket sawbuck for the whole useless bunch of you.”

He pushed someone aside, knocking their glass, and walked out the door, slamming it behind him. Gradually two dozen conversations began to fill the reverberating silence. Lomax handed a napkin to a guest whose drink had spilled.

***

Across the room, Bob Haffner was stealing caviar when Mike and Cindy started to argue. The caterer, Annette Sprague, was an old girlfriend of Bob's. She had come full circle, from pushing him away and saying “I love you…but like a
brother
,” through a tumultuous love affair, a screaming, plate-smashing break-up and then the slowly accumulating affection growing back like wildflowers in a burned forest. At this moment she actually felt like Bob's big sister, attached to him for life whether she liked it or not. So she gave him quick hug when he came into the Lomax kitchen and turned away while he shoveled the Sevruga into a plastic bag. She had to smile: the combination seemed to sum up her old boyfriend perfectly.

Just beyond the kitchen, Mike and Cindy Henderson were facing off, and Bob stepped to the door to listen.

“No wonder you didn't want me to come to the party,” Cindy said. “You knew she'd be here. I mean, my God! It's so trite. She's a home-wrecker straight out of Central Casting.”

“She's a pretty girl, Cindy. Should she wear a burka so you won't feel threatened? Because that's going to be a tough dress code to enforce six months from now, when half the pretty girls between Coral Gables and Prince Edward Island show up here for the summer.”

“They're not working for you every day.”

“Some of them will be. I hope. And my dress code is shorts and a T-shirt. What do you want me to say? That I have eyes only for you?”

“So what's the truth?”

“The truth? The truth is that I want every good-looking woman I see every day—the girls at the coffee shops and the landscaper girls and the rich women driving Range Rovers. So does every other man you've ever known, including the sainted Mark Toland, who's living in Hollywood making movies with his own casting couch, that is, his
bed—
where he and today's special wind up after a few drinks for a ‘private read-through' of whatever script he's flogging that week.”

“You don't know anything about Mark Toland.”

“But I'm supposed to believe he's the big exception. Well, we have one piece of evidence. He wasn't interested in you.”

“I don't want to talk about Mark.”

“Great, because I don't want to talk about Tanya Kriel. If there's anything else on your mind I'd be glad to hear it.”

Cindy looked away.

“I'm pregnant,” she said.

“What?”

“I'm pregnant, Mike. I took the test three times.”

“Cindy—”

“I think it happened the night we had to stay over in Hyannis, just before Halloween. Remember that night? We had dinner at Bangkok Kitchen and we missed the eight-thirty boat.”

“I remember.”

They stood silently for a long moment. The band started up again—raucous bluegrass with a badgering banjo solo. Mike felt like they were using his nerves for the strings.

“How do you feel about this, Mike? Are you happy? Nervous? Pissed off or freaked out or all of the above or…what? Just tell me what's going on in your head because I feel really horrible right now.”

“I don't know.”

“Not good enough. Not even close.”

“So what am I supposed to say?”

“You're not supposed to say anything! You're supposed to grab me and hug me and howl with joy because we're finally going to have a baby together.”

“It's a shock, Cindy. I don't know if I'm ready for this. I mean, it's—how long have you known?”

“A couple of weeks. I didn't want to say anything because…frankly? I was afraid we'd have a conversation like this one. Which I wasn't ready for.”

“Do you want the baby?”

“Of course I want the baby! What kind of a question is that?”

“It's practical. We're on the edge financially, we're fighting constantly, I'm not sure this is the right time.”

“There's no such thing as the right time.”

“Yeah, that's what everyone says.”

“You wish this hadn't happened.”

“Well, I—”

“If I have this baby, you'll have to really settle down. You'll have to really make a commitment. We'll be a family then. You can't walk away from a child, not the way you can from another person. You're stuck. It's not a vow or a promise or some abstraction. It's a
whole other human being
and you're its world and you have to make that world a safe place. So screwing the cute girls on your crew really isn't an option anymore.”

“Wait a second! I didn't—”

“Don't lie and make it worse, Mike. I heard her bragging to her friends while you were upstairs. Apparently you two invented a whole new use for drop cloths.”

“Cindy—”

She was watching his face the way a fox watches a bush, waiting for any tiny movement that will reveal its prey. She saw it and pounced. “So it's true.”

“Listen, it was only one time and we—”

I don't want to hear about it Mike.”

They stared at each other. The music jittered on. Mike shook his head. “I don't understand how she could have said that.”

“She didn't.”

“What?”

Cindy allowed herself a cold, thin little smile. “She didn't say anything, Mike. You fell for the oldest trick in the book: tell one conspirator that the other one confessed.”

“But the drop cloths—”

“There's been a rumor going around about those drop cloths for weeks, but no one knew who was using them as a love nest. Until now.”

“Christ. Cindy, you have to—”

“I don't have to do anything! I certainly don't have to have your baby and I really, really don't want to at this moment. In fact just the thought of it makes me sick.” She eyed the room. “I'm taking the car and going home. Call yourself a taxi if you want. Or get a ride with your girlfriend.”

She pushed past a little clot of people who were actually clapping their hands to the relentless, machine-like bluegrass, and she was gone. He stood there until the song ended. Bob Haffner dodged out of the kitchen behind a waiter. Mike saw him and he held up his bag of caviar for an explanation.

“I didn't hear a thing,” he said edging himself through the crowd in the slip stream of the waiter. “I got stood up and I'm outta here.”

Mike stepped back and leaned against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. He didn't want to run into anyone else, or make conversation. He certainly didn't want to go home. Maybe this could be his new home. On Nantucket, painters often lived in the houses they were painting, at least until the caretaker found them or the owners came up for an unplanned weekend. He glanced at the kitchen door casing. The thin edge against the wall needed another coat. He resented his mind for noticing crap like that at a time like this. When he was standing in front of the judge for his divorce hearing he'd probably be critiquing the finish on the bench. He closed his eyes. There was a rustle of movement near him and the nerve-sharpening smell of a familiar perfume. He could feel the little hairs stiffening on the back of his neck.

“Hi, Mike,” Tanya said softly.

He couldn't speak; he couldn't even look at her. Two out of five senses were more than enough. And then there was taste, you can't leave out the information transmitted on the tongue.

She stroked his arm. “It looks like we're busted.”

“Yeah.”

“But the good part about that is, we don't have to worry about getting caught anymore. And I counted, Mike. There are at least six available beds in this house. Getting naked will be easy because I'm not wearing anything under my dress.”

She took his hand and placed it on the thin silk at her side. She led it down to where he could feel for himself that she was telling the truth.

The touch was like a drug that changed his body chemistry so all his desires were condensed into one and he craved nothing but the needle. Every cell in his body was raging for the next fix. How could you possibly fight that? He pushed the words up his throat: “This is wrong.”

“I don't care. And neither do you.”

She led him upstairs as the band started their next set. They avoided the master bedroom this time. It was jinxed. Everyone got caught there. In the guest bedroom on the third floor they could barely hear the music. Tanya's dress came off in a single gesture and she stripped him slowly, kissing him all the time. She pulled him down on the narrow bed. Once again Mike had the astonishing sensation of every sexual fantasy he'd ever imagined coming true.

And it proved to him, once again, just how puny and pedestrian his imagination really was.

Chapter Nineteen

Conspiracies

Mike and Tanya lost track of time. They even fell asleep briefly, before waking up and making love again. When they finally started to pull their clothes on, the party was over. They opened the door softly, listening. Even the caterers had left. The house was silent. They straightened the room up and started to creep downstairs.

On the first landing they heard Lomax talking. They couldn't make out the words, but his nasal growl was unmistakable. They glanced at each other and tiptoed down a few steps.

He was with his wife in the living room. The high ceiling caught and amplified his voice.

“I don't suspect anything, Diana. I don't make guesses. I had you followed and I had you photographed. You still have enough residual notoriety from your modeling days to make those pictures very interesting to a lot of unpleasant people. I ran into Larry Flynt at LAX a couple of years ago. He told me that a good shot of you would double his newsstand sales. You should be flattered.”

“You don't have to threaten me, Preston. I just want to know where I stand.”

“Where you stand? I would say…on the edge of a cliff, Darling. So step back, before you fall. Since you seem so fascinated with my will, I should tell you I've rewritten it. In the new version everything goes to charity. You get a small allowance, just enough to live on. Not enough to peel off a Nantucket sawbuck every time you want someone to help carry the groceries; sorry. And you're cut off if you're ever seen with another man. Which doesn't mean you can't carry on your little romance. But it will have to be furtive and tawdry, just like your late night phone calls. It's ironic: there's actually more money in the will for your surveillance than for your support. I'm sending the new will to the estate lawyers on the first of the year. That gives you less than three weeks to kill me, if you think you can get away with it.”

“Preston—”

“In any case, I suggest you recruit a new accomplice. That little house-painter doesn't have the balls. Not that I think you're really capable of murder No, I just want you to count down the time until I legally foreclose on your future. Happy holidays.”

Mike looked over at Tanya. She tugged his arm, but he shook his head. He wanted to stay.

“Preston, please…what will I do now? Where will I go?”

“Read your pre-nup. You get nothing if you commit adultery. But I wouldn't put you out in the cold. When I got rid of the Hilton Head estate, I made sure you had life residency rights to the guest cottage.”

“But that's just two bedrooms! And that tiny kitchen! I can't cook in that tiny kitchen!”

“You've never cooked in any kitchen! I bought you a thirty-thousand-dollar six-burner Aga stove, and you never used it for anything but the teakettle. The kitchen on Hilton Head has a micro-wave. You can heat up whatever you want. You can get mail under the name of Hodgson, and the phone in the cottage is in their name, too. It's an excellent hideout and you're going to want one, believe me.”

“But what about all the people here, the designers and architects and decorators and tradespeople? The plumbers and painters and electricians? Are you just going to run out on all those bills? Just—leave all those people high and dry?”

“I wouldn't say ‘high and dry.' There's something obscurely comforting about that phrase, don't you think? I prefer soaked and buried.”

“And then what? You vanish without a trace?”

“A trace would spoil everything.”

Mike and Tanya stared at each other. He grabbed her wrist like a lamppost in a hurricane. But this wind was too strong. Mike needed that final check. His mortgage, the IRS payments, his truck loan, the workman's comp money, the overdue credit card bills…the whole preposterous balancing act was anchored by one thing, now, the twenty-three thousand, six hundred and forty one dollars from the Lomax job. He had assumed it was already in the mail. He'd been checking his post box with increasing nervousness for the last few days.

Without that money he was finished.

He felt a wash of animal panic. They'd foreclose his house, repo his truck. He had written a big check to the Mass Department of Revenue, gambling that the Lomax money would arrive in time. That one was going to bounce, and up into five figures which is felony fraud in this state.

Could he leap downstairs and grab Lomax, put a kitchen knife to his throat until he wrote the check? No, no, no, it would have to be cash. With this guy even cash was suspect. He probably had counterfeit bills stashed away. And he knew what came next. Lomax would charge him with assault-and-battery not to mention grand theft and trespassing.

It didn't matter. Lomax had hollowed him out. He was weak and nauseous. He had no strength to attack anyone.

At the far side of the giant living room, at the door to the little study Mike had repainted so many times, he noticed a flicker of movement. Someone else was eavesdropping. He recognized the tangle of red hair, the pale white face: Kathleen, the daughter. Their eyes met across the sixty feet of tainted air. For a second, Mike was sure she was going to bust them, jump out, point a finger, start yelling. She moved her hand, but it was only to cross her lips with a conspiratorial finger. She was scared, too. She had no more business being here than Mike and Tanya did.

The difference was, they could escape.

Tanya's voice was a harsh whisper. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

They crept down the stairs, darted past the wide entry to the living room, in plain sight for a second or two. But no one was looking. They found their coats in the foyer and a minute later they were closing the massive front door behind them. They stood in the deep breathless cold of the winter night.

“I came here to kill him,” Tanya said.

He could barely hear her over the roaring panic in his head, like the snarl of a job site air-compressor, building pressure. When it finally shut down, the silence meant the carpenters could use their nailguns again. They could get to work. Until then they were stalled. He faced Tanya, with nothing to say.

“He killed my sister,” she added. She could see he couldn't grasp her words. She shrugged. “It's a long story.”

They stood silently, haunting the night with their breath.

“You want a ride home?,” she asked.

He pulled his social self around him, buttoned it like a coat. “Yeah,” he managed. “If that's okay. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. You've got a lot of thinking to do. Lomax put you in a bad spot. But you're smart. You'll get out of this. People do.”

Yeah, he thought. Except the ones who don't. They're called homeless people. He might have been able to handle living in a box and eating out of soup kitchens. But he had a wife and she was pregnant.

They didn't talk at all on the drive home. Or maybe Tanya said something. He didn't notice. He was pawing through his circumstances, his jobs and customers, his family and friends, debts he could cash in, obligations he could stall, looking for a solution. It was like rummaging through the kitchen junk drawer for his car keys. The only real question was, how many times would you dump it out and sort through stamps and corkscrews and defunct cell-phone chargers before you accepted that the keys weren't there?

So he kept searching. An advance on the Keller job? But that wasn't supposed to start until Spring. Or the Silverstein job? But they were living here and they'd expect him there every day. That was fine—he wouldn't be working for Lomax anymore. But the money wasn't enough. He'd have to start at least three jobs and lay off people at the same time. He couldn't afford to pay anyone anything. He could conceivably get first checks from Foley and Landau but the Foleys were here all winter, too—and the Landau's caretaker was Pat Folger. Pat would be checking up daily, and he'd be delighted to bust Mike with the owners if he wasn't on the job.

Mike stared out at the dark trees streaming past the passenger side window. He couldn't make this work. He couldn't be on all those jobs simultaneously, with just him and Haffner. Maybe he could keep Briley, but everyone else had to go. He added it up: if he got all the checks this week, or next week at the latest, if he could convince the Kellers to let him start early, that would just cover his outstanding obligations. No, he'd still be about twenty-five hundred shy. And that was only until the first week's wages were due; and he'd have no more money from anyone until he got to the halfway mark. He was up to the limit on his charge at Marine; how was he supposed to buy the materials for three new jobs at once? That was around fifteen hundred bucks right there. He added it up. He needed six thousand dollars to survive this siege. Not even to survive it, just to get to the next onslaught. But if Bob and Derek would agree to wait for their checks until Mike got the next checks from the owners, and everyone agreed to let him start, and paid him quickly…no, no good, with the materials and the mortgage, he was still four thousand dollars in the red. And he needed some money to live on—food and gas. A grand? Would that do it? Say it would: that meant he had to find five thousand dollars by tomorrow.

Tanya pulled into his driveway. Lights were on in the little house. Cindy was up. He glanced at the dashboard clock: 11:45. It wasn't even that late.

“You're home.”

“Thanks.” He unfolded himself into the cold night air. He stood in his driveway, watching Tanya's truck back out into the deserted street and the answer came to him, discovered like those keys in the junk drawer. There was only one place to go, only one person he could turn to at this moment.

He climbed into his own truck and started the long drive to Billy Delavane's house in Madaket.

Mike had known Billy Delavane all his life. They had grown up together, building forts in the national forest with Strong Wings, sledding Dead Horse Valley on snow days. They had combed the prized sections of Madaket harbor together, with push rakes and dip nets, when family scallop season began in October, opening their one bushel a week at the Delavane shanty on North Wharf, cooking them at big family dinners on autumn nights.

They had learned to drive battered, family pickups on the rutted grass at Tom Nevers, done the parties at 30th Pole, and the Madequecham Jam every year, before the cops started breaking it up; chased the same girls, drank the same cheap beer, bought the same weed from the same sleazy high school entrepreneurs.

Both of their parents were in the trades; Mike's Dad had painted behind Danny “Duke” Delavane since the mid-seventies. They had each learned their skills on a thousand job sites; they had eventually inherited their family's companies, customers, and crew. But Billy had hated being a general contractor, sucking up to imperious customers, arguing with crazy subs and chasing money. Working for Pat Folger was easier.

After his parents died, Billy didn't have to work anymore, but he liked it. He could hold all the calculations for a seven-foot bar or a three-story staircase in his head, and rout a newel post by hand while he watched a Red Sox game. So Pat Folger kept him around. Pat had a ruthless knack for making the most out of his employees. He said if you want to survive on Nantucket you have to know how to get limited use out of limited people. Some of his guys were drunks; he didn't expect them at work until ten in the morning. Some of them were only happy banging shingles or running baseboard; he made sure he had enough shingles and baseboard going to keep them busy. Billy surfed and Pat didn't expect him at work when there was a south swell running and an offshore breeze to smooth it out.

Billy's family had lived on the island much longer than Mike's—six generations. They had held onto their property not out of some shrewd investment strategy but simply because they loved it. Now Billy and his brother probably owned twenty-million dollars' worth of undeveloped land and crumbling nineteenth-century houses around the island. Occasionally they sold off a one-acre tract or a beach cottage to pay the taxes.

Mike had helped Billy clear out his parents' house after they died. It was packed with thirty years' accumulation of pack-rat trash: collections of animal skulls and fishing lures, mold-rotted books and antique jam jars, bales of twine and barbed wire, lobster pots and scallop boxes, checkbooks and unopened bills from the 1960s, lampshades and chair cushions, broken radios, and unraveling wicker. After a week of ten-hour days they were able to see the floor. When the Thomas Tompion grandfather clock and the Tony Sarg puzzles had been taken to the auction house and everything else had been carted to the dump, the cleaning had begun. The once-white walls were stained a toxic amber from decades of cigarette smoke; they were black from mold where the roof leaked. Mike and Billy wore vapor masks and rubber gloves and scrubbed the place for another week. Ed never volunteered to help; neither did anyone else.

It made sense: Mike and Billy had always been the real brothers. There was a ten-year gap between Mike and his big sister, so it was natural for him to invent his own siblings. There was rivalry, mostly over women. But when Billy got a local jock's girlfriend pregnant, when he was broke and desperate, Mike had pulled six hundred dollars out of his college savings, along with another four hundred for travel expenses (it was already pretty clear that he wasn't going to college), so Joyce Thayer could go to Boston and get an abortion.

Joyce had stayed in Boston. Apparently she met someone that year at BC and wound up having the baby. She never said anything to Billy and she never came back to the island. Billy tried to reach her. He wrote several long letters, but never got an answer. As Mike reluctantly pointed out at the end of a long drunken night, that itself was an answer—an emphatic one.

Billy had eventually paid Mike back the money, and he was a rich man now, generous, always glad to help Mike with short term loans—a thousand here or there until a check cleared or a job started. But this was different. He had never borrowed this much money from Billy before. More importantly, he had never asked for a loan without knowing when he'd be able to pay it back. And he'd never been this desperate, driving too fast with rage and dread self-loathing climbing his throat as he took a turn too wide and the wheels shuddered against the jumbled dirty snow on the shoulder. These curves were deceptive. He eased back to forty miles an hour. Soon he was crossing Millie's bridge, turning onto the ruts and craters of Maine Avenue.