Nantucket Sawbuck (29 page)

I had just started going through the reports on the crime scene and the interviews with neighbors when my landline phone rang. I let the machine pick it up. After the familiar sound of my own voice saying, “This is Henry. If I'm home, I'll pick up. If I'm out, I'll be back. If I'm late, I'm on my way. Leave me a message,” I heard a voice say:

“I know what you're doing. Drop it, if you want your family to stay healthy.”

I pushed my chair back and leapt across the room, grabbed the receiver. There was nothing to hear but a dial tone.

Chapter Thirty-two

The Missing Piece

I was sitting in the snow between Miranda's house and Polpis harbor, on a waterproof sheet with my back to a pine tree. The wind blew steady off the water. After countless Nantucket winters, the spindly trees in this little forest had permanently bent to the south. Clumsily through my heavy gloves, I pushed back the sleeve of my parka and pressed the button on my watch. The face glowed blue: twenty to four.

I exhaled and watched the breath steam away from my face in the moonlight. The coffee in my thermos had run out two hours ago. Miranda's lights were out and nothing moved in the woods. They were catching an early flight to Boston. They'd be gone for the whole Christmas vacation which meant spending the holiday alone. We'd have another celebration when they got back. I'd gotten Billy Delevane to build Caroline a gorgeous dollhouse, complete with dormer window and strip oak floors. This might be the last Christmas when there was any chance of her still believing in Santa Claus and I wanted to keep the myth alive for as long as I could. The gorgeous inexplicable dollhouse would help. For Tim I had bought a new iPod, loaded with all the music my father had loved and passed on to me: The Beatles, early Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jackson Browne. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and, Paul Simon. Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads and The Mountain Goats could wait for another season. I knew he'd have no problem believing the music came from the North Pole. Elves didn't make electronic equipment, but everyone else outsourced their manufacturing jobs—why not Santa?

I checked my watch again. Another two or three hours and it would be over. I could make it. I was dressed warmly and it wouldn't even be that cold if the wind let up. I felt the comforting weight of the Glock nine-millimeter in my coat pocket. There was something absurd about packing heat in this Christmas card town. But someone had conspired to commit murder here, and whoever it was had just threatened my family.

Lots of bad things had happened to me in Los Angeles: I'd been punched and sideswiped and shot at. But never anything like this. Big city cops were anonymous. I'd felt like a faceless cipher so often back then, just a threat behind a badge. I'd hated that, but it was starting to look pretty good around about now. You might take your work home with you sometimes; but it didn't show up at the door uninvited. It didn't stalk you.

I shrugged. Nostalgia was funny. I even missed my wife sometimes. I had thought about calling Miranda and warning her, but decided against it. She would have laughed it off and dismissed me, either as paranoid, “We're not in L.A. anymore, Henry,” or as manipulative, an excuse to sneak back into her life.

The wind picked up, sending a whirling cloud of snow against my face. I tucked my head into the hood of my parka. I might have actually succeeded in scaring Miranda, but that would have been even worse. Caroline seemed to absorb through the pores of her skin any emotion her mother felt. The fumes of ordinary bitterness and anger were bad enough. I didn't want a smog-alert of gratuitous panic to wreck their vacation. No, this was better: a quiet vigil that affected no one but me. I had left the crime binder open on my dining room table and I was longing to get back to it. But that was all right. A little extra distance might help me focus.

I glanced at the house again and turned away from the wind. There was no change. I could imagine them all: Miranda, lying at the very edge of the bed on her right side, with her neck-support pillow and the Lanz flannel nightgown she'd been wearing since high school. Tim would be thrashing and snoring and talking in his sleep (“Americanos!” he had said in a weird Mexican accent one night recently. “Always bring gifts! Shirts.”) Caroline would be surrounded by her stuffed animals, the Gund monkey and the Steiff lion were her long-standing favorites, probably wearing the Coldplay t-shirt I had paid thirty dollars for at the Fleet Center at Thanksgiving. And heavy wool socks. Her feet froze no matter how many quilts and comforters she had on the bed. Miranda kept the heat low. She said it was for political reasons, but I knew she was just cheap.

My mind wandered. It occurred to me suddenly, as if for the first time, that my father was dead. Despite my own best efforts at Kathleen Lomax's denial technique, the treacherous thought kept slipping up behind me. It was always a chilly surprise. It gave me the same queasy sense of imbalance each time: one of the great cables attaching me to the Earth had been cut and I was swaying dangerously in the wind, like these trees.

I had no unresolved issues to torment me, I just missed my dad. One of his friends had said to me at the memorial service, “No one's going to call me ‘dear boy' anymore.” I could only nod. David Kennis had been a Hollywood screenwriter of the Old School, but he never took it very seriously and was delighted with his son's choice of career. “Well, what do you know? Someone in this family is finally going to have a real job,” he had remarked on the day when I graduated from the academy.

Details of police procedure had intrigued him and he had enjoyed knowing the inside scoop on various high profile crimes. He had edited the crime novel that got me fired, trimming it into a lean if somewhat generic action piece. “You're writing a thriller,” he had explained breezily when he handed back the much-thinner manuscript. “I took out everything that wasn't thrilling. But don't feel bad. I could cut a minute-thirty out of the Book of Genesis if I really had to.”

Dad had always wanted to go on a stakeout. I could never convince him of how boring they were. LAPD policy forbade ride-alongs in any case. But I set the policy at the Nantucket PD and it would have been good having Dad here with me tonight. The cold would have gotten to the old man, but his ghost didn't care.

So I sat with that spirit and the spirits of all the Indians who had hunted here and all the other lives I could have chosen and didn't, and I was just starting to doze off when I heard a sound from the bushes on the other side of the house.

I sat up, fully awake, listening.

I heard it again: a rustle of low branches. Whoever it was must have parked near Wauwinet Road and cut through people's back yards, skirting the harbor, using the woods as cover.

I struggled to my feet, stiff and cramped. My heart was pounding, fear and anger and outrage clenching in my chest. They were really doing it. Some hired thugs from Boston or Fall River were closing in on my family, deciding whether to go in through a window or a door, maybe checking their picking tools. That would really mark them as off-islanders. Miranda had never locked her house and didn't even own a key. One turn of the knob and these goons could be inside, cocking their weapons, choosing who to take out first.

I crouched low and sprinted through the trees. I couldn't stuff my bulky gloves into my coat pocket. I pulled them off as I ran, my feet thudding softly in the untouched snow. I had the Glock in my hand when I reached the side of the house. I stood with my back to the shingles, my mouth held open, breathing quietly, giving the air the widest channel I could.

I listened, my whole body flexed in the effort. I heard the wind rasping against the snow, nudging the high branches. A solitary car passed on Polpis Road. But there was nothing from the other side of the house. I edged my way toward the corner, straining for a single unnatural sound.

Nothing.

They must have heard me. That meant they were waiting, too, guns out, leveled at the spot where they expected me to appear. I checked the safety on the Glock and brought it up to my chest, clutched in both hands. I was outnumbered. One or two of them were probably moving around the house right now, to take me from behind in a flank attack. Whatever tiny advantage I had, I was about to lose it.

I had to move.

I took a breath and then swung around the corner of the house in a single step, crouched low, with the gun in front of me.

Standing ten feet away in a patch of rosa rugosa was a huge and stately white-tail buck, complete with nine point antlers. It looked like it weighed at least a hundred and fifty pounds. The deer was staring at me with feral indifference. I stood still, watching the big animal, feeling the adrenaline crash of relief and self disgust.

So this was the gang of hit men from the big city. The only big city creature in these woods was me, standing with slack-jawed urban awe in front of this beautiful animal, who had clearly sized me up perfectly. Despite the gun in my hand, I was no threat at all.

We stood ten feet apart, our breath condensing on the icy air. I slipped my gun back into my coat pocket. The deer cocked its head slightly at the movement. I took a step forward and the deer pawed the ground with his foot. It was like a dance. I had a piece of a Fast Forward oatmeal cookie wrapped in plastic next to my wallet, left over from a hasty lunch a few days before. I had been intending to feed it to the ducks at the Union Street pond. This was better.

I reached under my coat, took out the cookie and unwrapped it. My fingers were stiff and numb from the cold. The buck seemed content to watch me at first. But when I extended my hand, I broke the fragile intimacy between us. Maybe I moved too fast. The deer tossed his head once, as if he had caught more interesting scent, twisted sideways, launched himself off his hind legs and bounded away into the woods. There was a diminishing clatter of branches, and then silence.

I was alone. I leaned back against the side of the house, let the frigid air burn my lungs. I pushed my parka sleeve back easily, having dropped my gloves as I approached the house, and checked my watch again: 5:15. I jammed my hands into my coat pockets and looked around.

There were no footprints, no surveillance litter, no cigarette butts or take out coffee cups, no sign of human life at all. The woods breathed in the winter night as they had for ten thousand years. No one was here and no one was coming. All I had to show for my vigil was a near case of frostbite and a funny anecdote to tell at the cop shop. “How I almost shot a deer out of season.”

It would be dawn in another hour. If I moved fast I could get home, have a hot shower, and see my family off at the airport.

I found one of my gloves, and gave up on the other one as I trudged back to the car, shivering and annoyed with myself. The cold had finally eaten through my clothes. The gun banging against my hip made me feel absurd. I half expected to get lost on the way back to my car. But I found it all right. The drive home was uneventful, the shower was hot and long, the farewell predictable: Tim begged me to come with them, Caroline told me she was proud of me for working so hard. Miranda looked at my still-wet hair, red nose, and bloodshot eyes, shaking her head with weary fatalistic contempt.

“Where have you been all night?” she whispered to me as the bags were being weighed and tagged at the Cape Air counter. She held up a hand as I started to speak. “Please. Don't tell me. I don't want to know.”

I hugged the kids and watched the plane take off, feeling bereft and relieved at the same time. There was more air on the island with Miranda gone; but watching my children sealed into a metal tube and vanishing into the cloud-wracked December sky weighed me down.

I turned away from the window. Everything evened out.

I had breakfast at Crosswinds, chatted with my Bulgarian waitress and took a second cup of coffee to go. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting at my dining room table, with the Lomax case binder open in front of me.

I pulled the rings apart, took out the interview transcripts and stacked them on the table. The problem was here, in the things people said, the way they described what had happened on the night of the murder. Someone was lying. There was a contradiction and I was going to find it. I had all day.

You searched differently when you knew the thing you were looking for had to be there. A missing wallet, car keys, an incriminating statement, it didn't matter. Questions made you falter. When you were sure, you didn't give up. And I was sure. That was the one unintended benefit of last night's wild goose chase. Someone thought I was close enough to try and scare me off. That was a fatal miscalculation. I might have actually walked away from the case if I had never gotten that phone call.

I took the first page and started reading.

It took me three hours to find the answer. I had shuffled the pages, hoping that reading them in random order might trick me into seeing something fresh. If
Bob Haffner's deposition had come up on top of the pile, I would have been done in the first five minutes.

It was so obvious. When I finally saw it, I felt like a fool. I had highlighted the passage with a yellow marker and still missed it. I arranged the rest of the pages in their proper sequence and slipped them back into the binder.

Then I read Haffner's statement again:

Hey I was totally out of it that night. I went to the benefit but I had dinner at the strip first and I was sick as a dog. That's all I was thinking about, okay? Bad clams. I actually got to the benefit, though. They gave me something to make me puke at the emergency room and everything was cool. I'm like a dog, man. I barf and I'm fine. Hey, at least I don't try to eat it like my dog does. I got to the party late, someone was watching Leno's monologue in the back room. But the place was still jumping, so that was cool. You should check out the guest list, man. Everybody was there.

I rummaged through the photographs, found the one I wanted and set it next to the sheet of paper with Haffner's statement.

I had felt this before, when cases came together and everything was suddenly clear. It was a triumph and a letdown at the same time. Mysteries seemed so obvious and banal once they were solved. And at the same time, you knew your leaps of perception were partly luck; and you had to wonder if you'd ever get lucky again.

But there was something else, this time. It was like watching the film of a shattered vase in reverse. I kept running the film forward and backward—the ball smashing the vase into a million pieces and then retreating, pulling the cloud of fragments in its wake, the shards sealing themselves together, creating the seamless reality of how things looked before. This is what happened. This is how it happened.