Nantucket Sawbuck (9 page)

So Derek knew exactly what to do with the information he'd picked up this morning. These men were talking secrets, and the best way to kill a secret was to let it out. That meant the newspaper, and that meant
The Shoals,
because Derek seriously doubted the other paper would even run the story. Derek liked
The Shoals.
He liked its attitude; the editorials gave him a laugh. So that was that; he'd swing by the newspaper office after work, stir things up a bit. Derek wasn't particularly soft-hearted, but he loved Nantucket.

And he wasn't going to let these fat cats wreck it without a fight.

Chapter Ten

High School Confidential

The intercom buzzed as I walked into my office Tuesday morning.

“They're bringing in the Snoopy kid, Chief. He's got his lawyer and they want to talk to you. Apparently your drug speech at the high school got him thinking. Not cleaning up or going straight. Just thinking.”

“Hey, he's innocent until proved guilty, Jesse. Remember?”

“Snoopy tells no lies, Chief.”

Snoopy was the drug-sniffing dog the Nantucket police had purchased three years earlier for seven thousand dollars. His actual name was Westcott, but Snoopy stuck. He was a perfectly friendly pure-bred beagle, but was supernaturally good at his job. I didn't really approve of using drug dogs, but as Haden Krakauer had pointed out when he first brought up the subject, “Snoopy has seniority on you, Chief.”

Of course, the individual who really had seniority over me was Haden himself. He'd been up for the job when I was hired. He should have had a built-in grudge, but he had decided to like his new boss anyway. “Maybe I'm not as ambitious as I thought I was,” he had explained. “Or maybe I'd rather deal with criminals than the Board of Selectmen.” He was handling the drug bust. I could leave him alone for awhile. He was good with kids.

I was going to have to check in with Simon Bissell, the superintendent of
the school, before I inspected the car where Snoopy had found the drugs. It wouldn't take long, but I would have preferred to avoid Bissell. As an authority figure who went out of my way not to abuse my position, I detested Bissell's tyrannical posturing; as a parent with two children in the school system, I dreaded it.

This was the man who wanted to paint traffic lines in the hallways to make sure the students walked from class to class in an orderly manner. He had suspended one of the editors of
Veritas
because the student wrote a story trying to find out why the school pool had been built a foot short of regulation length. Exactly how that had happened was still a mystery, but the kid had managed to dig up the fact that the contractor was Bissell's brother-in-law.

The teachers all hated Bissell because he had completely restructured the high school curriculum into an elaborate MCAS prep session. Snoopy had been his idea. He had bullied the drug dog concept through Town Meeting with great fanfare. But there had been no results yet. Maybe this was the first one, but somehow I doubted it.

Bissell was sitting stiffly behind his desk when I arrived. The tightly combed hat of hair was obviously a wig. The blue blazer and red bow tie was his standard uniform. His face was all thin sharp lines, pulled down into a disapproving scowl. He looked like someone had just offered him a big plate of something messy—crabs in the shell and a wooden hammer.

“I want to make an example of this Jared Bromley boy,” Bissell said. No greetings or preliminaries. “He hid ten ounces of cocaine in the engine compartment of his car. Clearly he was planning to sell it on the schoolyard to other children. Unfortunately for him, he chose to do that on a day when the school system's illegal substances canine task force was conducting a surprise inspection.”

“I understand,” I said. “But right now I'd just like to get all the facts straight. See the car, talk to the boy and…”

“The facts are not in dispute, Chief Kennis. The question is, what are you going to do about them? This boy must be punished to the full extent of the law. This is not the moment for leniency. We must send a strong, clear message to the deviant element in our school community. This behavior will not be tolerated.”

I let the words jostle past me like a crowd of commuters pushing out of a subway car. When they were gone, I took a breath and stepped inside. “The case is a priority for us, Mr. Bissell. That's why I'd like to see the car as soon as possible.”

Bissell sighed dismissively: this incompetent policeman didn't understand the gravity of the situation and he never would. Bissell flicked his wrist at the door. “It's at the side of the building, next to the maintenance shack. A bright red pickup truck. One of your men is there. I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding it.”

Bob Coffin was leaning on the fender, arms crossed against the cold. A heavyset ex-high school linebacker, Coffin looked stoical standing in the snow. This was his life. At least he wasn't a crossing guard.

“Hey, Chief,” he straightened up.

I nodded. “Coffin.”

Coffin popped the hood and braced it. We leaned in toward the engine. “It was all right there, Chief. Two eight balls, tucked right behind the battery.”

“Was the car locked?”

“No one locks their car on Nantucket. You know that.”

“Even the drug dealers?”

“I guess not.”

“That doesn't strike you as odd?”

Coffin shrugged. “This ain't L.A., Chief.”

“Has the car been printed?”

“About half an hour ago.”

“OK. Close it up and get back to the station. We're finished here.” I stepped away from the car as Coffin slammed the trunk and paused a moment. “Thanks Bob,” I said. “See you later.”

Coffin nodded and trudged off toward the slant-parking in front of the school. I watched him go, looking past the beige, ground-hugging building to the cars passing on Atlantic Avenue, almost invisible through the screen of snow. The cold air was tight on my face. I stuck my hands in my coat pockets. How many years it was going to take before I got used to winter? I might never get used to small-town life. It was a miniature world. Superintendent Bissell behaved with an arrogance comically disproportionate to his job. But maybe he was right. In this isolated, painfully inter-connected island world, you didn't need much real authority to do a lot of damage, and that was how true tyrants measured their power.

Still, maybe you could do some good in a place like this. That was the flip side. Maybe you could apply some big city experience to a questionable drug bust. Maybe you could stop bureaucratic preening and lazy police work from wrecking a kid's life. Maybe. I was way ahead of myself. Guesses were useful, until you refused to part with them. First I had to talk to the kid, check the forensics on the car. It was getting late. I started for the front lot, following Bob Coffin's tracks in the new snow.

Driving back out to the station, I saw that the snow had abolished the ordinary civic landscape. Sidewalks, back yards, even the normal boundaries of the streets themselves, vanished. You crept along, exploring the new wilderness. It was like the roads had never been built, or had fallen to ruin under the packed white powder. The mounting blizzard meant that school would be closed tomorrow. Miranda was off-island at some business guru's real estate seminar (called, all too appropriately, “Love What You Sell, Sell What You Love”),
which meant I'd be taking the day off with the kids. The long-promised sledding at Windmill Park, slightly marred by the pager at my waist, but still fun. Hot chocolate at The Bean, and then lunch together, and leisurely homework in the afternoon. The fist of tension behind my chest from the long morning started to unclench.

I always felt better when Miranda was gone. It had taken me a long time to understand her, in part because I was reluctant to accept the truth. It had been dormant during our years in Los Angeles. A slim shy girl with the face of a Titian Madonna, she had called herself a “seeker” in those days. When people like that actually find what they're seeking, the results can be dispiriting. I had watched Miranda's odyssey of self-discovery move through Sufi-ism, Scientology, Torah class and even a very expensive set of Tony Robbins Personal Power tapes. Those tapes should have been a clue, but I couldn't help being startled when the self that Miranda finally discovered turned out to be a Nantucket real estate agent. There had been clues, I realized. She had never been interested in the movies I loved, but she always kept track of the grosses. She knew how exactly much each star made, and how much they received in their divorce settlements.

After the move to Nantucket, money and all the details of its loss, transfer, and acquisition took her over completely. She was working for Elaine Bailey, the ultimate land shark.

Miranda had known Elaine most of her life—Elaine had sold Miranda's parents their first house on the island—but their affinity ran deeper. Miranda had lost her groping connection to the poetry of things; Elaine had never had one to begin with. Neither of them could appreciate the evening light on the moors or the sight of a redwing hawk gliding on the thermals above Madaket Road. They didn't read, not even the newspaper (except the real estate section). They didn't go to plays or movies. They didn't watch television, except sports channels and CNN. They didn't fish or sail or even walk the beaches. They drove around in giant SUVs, showed houses, closed deals, gossiped, drank white wine, and went out to dinner. That was it. That was life.

That was the life my ex-wife had been seeking.

Miranda was in her element at last, and it made her supremely boring. No matter what subject she was talking about, she wound up talking about real estate. Deforestation of the Brazilian Rain Forest? That makes it the perfect spot for a gated community! Jungle View homes, a perfect real estate broker's idea of a name, since there was no jungle to look at anymore.

I feared it was all rubbing off on the kids. Both of them were pushing me to buy a place, which was an economic impossibility. They didn't care about that. They were relentless. Tim had used the phrase “investment opportunity” the other day. Caroline was alarmingly knowledgeable about which parcels of land were subdividable and which houses had deed restrictions. A day of non-commercial play on stubbornly public land would do both of them a world of good.

David Trezize was waiting outside the police station when I pulled up. Stumpy and forlorn, standing bundled in the snow, David looked like the public defenders I had dealt with in Los Angeles. He had the same slouch. It came from delivering bad news to an ungrateful world for not enough money. That was actually a pretty good description of police work, too. I stood up a little straighter as I approached the editor. I hadn't dropped by the newspaper office in a while.

“Chief Kennis,” David called out. “Do you have a second?”

“Just about. I'm running late.”

“I wonder if you have any comment on a story I'm going to be running this week,” David was saying. “It reveals that hard drugs are being sold in the Nantucket schools. And the police are involved.”

I felt the first sizzle of anger behind my eyes. “Which policemen are you talking about?”

David smiled. “Well, that's the question, isn't it?”

“Who's your source on this?”

“Come on, Chief. You know I can't tell you that.”

“So some anonymous person says cops are selling drugs. And you print it. I have an anonymous source that says newspaper editors are having sex with farm animals. Will you print that, too?”

“Absolutely, Chief. If I trusted the source. And I do trust this source. Actually, I was almost scooped on this one.
Veritas
was going to run the story, but Bissell spiked it. He doesn't believe a student newspaper should report a story like this. Which leaves it up to me. Apparently the
Inky Mirror
wasn't interested.”

I squinted down at the little editor. “Who wrote that story?”

“Jared Bromley. The only one there who can write.”

“It's a lost art, David. I have to read crime reports every day. But if you want my comment…I believe the story is false. And I know there has to be a better way to sell newspapers than libeling the police force.”

“Are you going to sue me, Chief?”

“Don't worry, David. I have real work to do.”

I turned and walked around the corner to the front door of the station. Maybe it was impossible to be friends with a reporter. We were natural adversaries, and neither of us could afford a conflict of interest. I knew I had offended David, but there was no way around it.

In the interview room downstairs, Jared Bromley sat at the Formica-topped deal table with his lawyer, Charlie Hastings. They could have been brothers: two tall, thin, pasty, disheveled guys. Their heads were too big for their bodies; their noses were too big for their heads. Jared had his dirty hair in a pony tail; Charlie needed a haircut.

Charlie didn't even look that much older than Jared, but he was a good lawyer. I had seen him in court. He was quick and funny. One of the judges had teased him about his youth during a court date last Halloween, asking him what costume he would be wearing this year.

“I'm going to really scare people,” he had responded easily. “I'm going as a lawyer. What do you think?” He did a quick turn to show off his pinstripe suit. The judge laughed, and Charlie got his client's sentence reduced to time served and a year's probation. He was wearing the same suit today, and he looked just as uncomfortable in it, as if he'd been dressed up for a family photograph.

Jared was wearing jeans and a torn Whalers T-shirt. Their coats and gloves were in a dripping pile on the table. They stopped talking when I walked in.

“Hi, fellas,” I said. “Thanks for waiting.”

“This is ridiculous, Chief,” Charlie said. “I've got appointments backed up and Jared's missing his AP English class. Come up with a charge or let us out of here. And how about a few pictures on the wall? This place is depressing.”

I took a breath. “I'm not charging anyone with anything, Charlie. I want to clear a few things up. It won't take long.”

“All right, here's the first thing: My client will gladly take any drug test you care to administer. He doesn't even eat poppy seed bagels.”

“Jared, what I wanted to know was—”

“There's nothing he can tell you, Chief. That's the point.”

“Still, I'd like to talk to him directly. If that's okay with you, Charlie. I know he can speak for himself. I log onto Sharkpool a couple of times a week.”