Bound by Mystery Page 12

  It was a perfect late-June day, the island lush and green after a rainy spring, the sky a flawless blue. Even the humidity had broken. We approached the silent house over the perfectly manicured lawn and Mike said, “This is what they pay the million dollars for. A day like this. But look—” He pointed to the small squat city of air-conditioning condensers buzzing at the side of the house. “The most delicious sea breeze in America and they never even open their windows. That’s the new money around here, in a nutshell.”

  “An impeccably climate-controlled nutshell,” I added.

  “Exactly. Well, here we are.”

  He let us in, and poked the alarm code into the pad by the front door.

  “Did you notice anything missing?” I asked as we walked into the hotel lobby-chill of the foyer.

  He shrugged. “I really don’t pay that much attention.”

  “Not a great slogan for a house painter.”

  “Come on, Chief! I notice a bad cut-in, okay? I’m the king of latex touch-up. But I’m not casing the joint when I’m supposed to be stripping the trim.”

  I looked around the massive “great room” with its thirty-foot ceiling and wall of fifteen-light French doors. “So you’re finished here.”

  “Yeah. We packed up yesterday.”

  “But the cleaning people haven’t started.”

  “I think they come in tomorrow.”

  “Well, that’s a plus.”

  I found the stain ten minutes later. I saw it as an irregularity in the pattern of a woven-cotton area rug, sticking out from the hem of the cloth draping an end table. I was on my knees sniffing it when Mike walked up behind me.

  “Did you spill coffee here?” I said, moving the table aside. The lamp teetered and Mike reached out to steady it.

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No coffee on the job. That’s one of my rules. People leave the cups around, or knock them over. It looks bad, unprofessional. Most of my customers don’t even let their kids eat anywhere but the kitchen. They’re neat freaks. You have to respect that.”

  I nodded. “Well someone spilled hazelnut coffee here. Take a sniff.”

  He got down, put his nose to the rug. Standing, he said, “Yeah. And it’s fresh. Maybe a couple of days old, tops.”

  I pointed down to the wedge of carpet between the couch and the end table.

  “Crumbs,” he said.

  I smiled. “A trail of bread crumbs. Just a like a fairy tale.”

  He bent down, picked one up on a moistened fingertip, touched it to his tongue. “But this was a cookie.”

  We moved the table aside and found a small triangular wedge hidden under the skirt of the couch. I pulled on a latex glove, took an evidence bag and a pair of tweezers from my pocket, and dropped the cookie chunk inside. “Now we figure out where this came from and who ordered it with a hazelnut coffee.”

  Mike shook his head in amused disgust. “And learn what kind of lazy pig brings treats and coffee to his own crime scene.”

  “And spills the coffee and laughs because he knows they’ll blame it on the painter.”

  “Story of my life.”

  The next part was easy. Michelle at Fast Forward—we’d been friends since I gave her a copy of The House at Pooh Corner to exorcise the Disney demons from her daughter’s mind—identified my evidence instantly.

  She took it on her tongue for a few seconds, wincing at where it had been, then spit it out onto a napkin and gave it back. “That’s one of Dany’s health cookies. No dairy, no eggs, no sugar. She makes them with tahini. They’re totally unique.”

  “So…does anyone order hazelnut coffee and one of these?”

  She thought for a minute or two while she poured a few cups of coffee for nervous customers. I was wearing my uniform and everyone was feeling guilty about something.

  Michelle made change for someone and turned to the other girl behind the counter. “Angie? Can you think of anyone?”

  “Just Bob Bulmer. The sheriff? But he drinks decaf. Does it matter if it’s decaf?”‘

  “Not really.”

  “Is he in trouble?” Michelle asked.

  “No, no. Though you have to wonder about someone who drinks hazelnut decaf.”

  “Now what?” Mike asked me later as I drove him back to his jobsite.

  I looked up at the imposing three-story shingled pile, dormers lined up on the steep roof, presided over by the freshly painted widow’s walk. “Now we stake out this place—and catch him in the act.”

  But we were too late. Mike had been working downstairs and hadn’t ventured into the finished bedrooms for weeks. A quick walk-through of the second floor told the tale like a tour guide: picture hooks where paintings had hung, end tables with circles in the dust, dents in the carpet where an antique dresser had stood.

  Mike looked like he was about to cry. “If we don’t find this stuff before the Binghams show up…Jesus. Someone hates me.”

  “Someone’s stalking you,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s the only way they could get in to these houses. You unlock the doors. You disable the alarms.”

  “Yeah. But I’m always—oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “I drive into town for lunch, or to pick up some supplies from Marine, and sometimes I—it’s a hassle locking up and setting the alarms if I’m only going to be gone for half an hour. And also…they monitor the systems. I don’t want my customers knowing when I’m gone or how long I take for lunch. It’s none of their business.”

  “And who’s going to know? Or notice?”

  “Exactly! This isn’t inner-city Detroit. What is a burglar supposed to do? Try every mansion and hope for an unlocked one and then try every unlocked one for a disconnected alarm?”

  “No, Mike. He’s supposed to choose a house painter, track his movements, and use the time, however long it is, when he leaves the house open, to do the burglaries. Then the burglar just waits. The homeowners come back in the summer and the painter gets the blame. If he really does hate you, it’s a win-win.”

  “So this is about the Bradley?”

  Bulmer had pushed a warrant through Town Meeting the year before. He wanted the town to buy him a U.S. Army surplus Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Some prominent citizens took his side in the debate, including Jonathan Pell, the new CEO of Logran Corporation, and a consortium of real estate brokers who were concerned about property values.

  But you have to see a Bradley to realize how crazy this idea was. It’s a small tank, perfect for enforcing martial law in a conquered city—a deranged and surreal choice for Nantucket.

  Mike had said some harsh things about Bulmer, calling him a would-be tin-pot dictator and a fascist blowhard. David Trezize ran Mike’s guest editorial in the Nantucket Shoals, and the link on the little newspaper’s website had been shared more than a thousand times.

  The Bradley was voted down by acclamation.

  A bad defeat; and Bulmer was famous for his grudges. That sounded like a motive to me. And as sheriff, Bulmer’s main job was driving around; mostly he delivered summonses. He had plenty of free time for surveillance.

  But some wild conjectures, a coffee stain, and a handful of cookie crumbs weren’t enough to arrest him for.

  And I had another suspect to deal with.

  The next day I took Tim to Something Natural. We got a pair of lobster salad sandwiches, some Matt Fee tea, and a couple of bags of chips. We drove out to the new standpipe on Washing Pond Road. The gate was open and we cruised past the giant white metal water tank to the grassy verge that overlooked the jumble of houses edging the western moors. I explained the situation while we ate. The strong south wind nudged my cruiser.

  “I didn’t take those books,” he said. “I swear. Where would I even put them? Someone woul
d see them. Carrie would tell on me.”

  I nodded, finished my iced tea. “So what were you doing out there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on. That’s a long bike ride for nothing.”

  “Dad!”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s private.”

  He stared away, out the car window, following a red-tailed hawk as it circled the valley. I was going to have to put this one together myself. Jane had seen him at the bookshelf. The comment about the fore-edge book must have been a hasty improvisation to cover whatever it was he was really doing there. The sudden interest in antique endpaper watercolors had struck me as a little odd anyway. I had studied Jane’s library myself and there was no adolescent contraband there, nothing racy beyond a copy of Lolita. But Jane kept some photographs her ex-husband had taken of her, the only ones she had ever looked good in, or so she said. She was planning to crop one of them for a new dust-jacket portrait. “The whole picture might sell more copies,” she had joked when she showed it to me. She was topless, coming out of the water at Pickle Beach, our informal nude bathing strand. And Jane was right. She looked great in the photo—sea nymph, slim and girlish, perfect fodder for a seventh-grade crush.

  Tim would never admit to finding that picture and I would never force him to. I needed a new tactic.

  “Okay,” I said. “I have to tell Jane something, so let’s think of a reason you might have been out there. Not the real reason—whatever it was. That’s none of my business. As long as you didn’t actually steal anything.”

  “Are you kidding? I would never do that.”

  I keyed the ignition and started backing up. “Here’s a lesson from the adult world. If you’re suspected of something, confess to something else. Something not as bad but maybe…a little embarrassing?”

  “Like what?”

  “Well…Jane has a collection of vintage Barbies at the cottage. Maybe you were playing with them.”

  “But those are girls’ toys!”

  “Exactly. So you wouldn’t automatically admit it, the initial denial is explained…and no one ever thinks about whatever it was you were really looking at.”

  He thought about this as we turned off Washing Pond Road and headed back into town. “You’re sneaky,” he said.

  “But for a good cause.”

  “Barbies? Really?”

  “It’ll be great. Jane will think you’re a budding feminist.”

  “I am a budding feminist.”

  I patted his knee. “Good for you.”

  I was on a roll that week. Mike Henderson’s case came together the next day.

  ***

  Pat Folger called to tell me he had found squatters in one of the houses he did caretaking for. The illegal tenants were brothers from Ecuador who worked for Quidnet Land Design, one of the biggest gardening firms on the island. Pat knew I was interested in squatters and their stories. These three had been evicted from Bob Bulmer’s house on Essex Road. The area was known for its barracks-style housing, with as many as twenty people crammed into three or four bedrooms, all paying a thousand dollars a month for the privilege of heat, running water, and a roof over their heads. It was a great deal for the landlord, though.

  So why would Bulmer have evicted them?

  Maybe he had an even more profitable venture going. Maybe he needed the space for storage.

  But how to find out? I decided to reverse the tactic I had shared with Tim. Bulmer’s barracks housing scheme was illegal, but fairly common, and we cracked down on the worst offenders from time to time. Bob knew he got a free pass from the town because of his law-enforcement position. But that was going to change. I called Paul Higgins, our building inspector, and he agreed to make a surprise visit to the Essex Road house, looking for safety violations or an overtaxed septic system.

  I’d be there to check out the real crime.

  Bob had no idea I suspected him of anything beyond some building-code violations, and so he was happy to give us a tour of his now-empty house.

  I found Jane’s fore-edge books prominently displayed on the mantel, between two of her sitting-dog bookends.

  Bob waved a pudgy hand around the living room. “No illegal tenants! Are we good?”

  I hefted one of Jane’s books. “I’m good, Bob. But you’re busted.”

  When I told Jane the story later that night she said, “Bullmer, ugh. I think he was rifling through my photographs, too. They’re all in different order now.”

  “Does it bother you? Him seeing, you know—the uncropped versions?”

  She shrugged. “A little. But what the hell. Boys will be boys.”

  “Right, you are.”

  I remembered my boy as we sat by the water tower, his face turned away in shame, and thought, you’ll never know how right.

  But that secret was safe with me.

  Sunday Drive

  James Sallis

  Years ago I wrote a novel titled Drive. New York publishers didn’t want it. Too short. Too quirky. Too pulpy.

  Rob at Poisoned Pen Press did. And so, as it turned out, did a lot of others.

  When Poisoned Pen Press knocks at the door, I hitch up my pants and answer.

  —J.S.

  ***

  Because it’s the weekend, traffic is light, and once we get out of downtown, where I parked on the street quite a ways off, having made the parking-lot mistake once before, we’ve got smooth sailing, calm seas, all that. Caroline stares out the window, talking about how much this area has changed, the whole city, really, that you can hardly recognize it from what it used to be. Mattie, in the back, is texting one-handed on her new iPhone, nibbling at a Pop-Tart in such a way that the edge is always even. She holds it away from her mouth every few bites to check.

  When I suggest that we take a little drive, not hurry home, Mattie groans, then looks away as I glance in the rearview mirror. “Whatever you want is fine,” Caroline says.

  I jump on I-10, then the 202 out toward Tempe and all those other far-flung lands. Back years ago, when Caroline and I were first married, I worked these roads, running heavy equipment, backhoes, bulldozers. Knew every mile of highway, every block of city street. Then I went back to school and got my degree. Now I program computers and solve IT problems all day long. Now I can barely find my way around out here in this world.

  “The music was lovely,” Caroline says. “Back there.”

  “Puccini, yes.”

  “The story was dumb,” Mattie says, leaning hard on the final word. So at least she was paying that much attention.

  We drive out past the airport and hotels to the left, cheap apartments, garages, and ramshackle convenience stores to the right, past a building that looks like a battleship and that I swear was not here the last time we came this way, past the two hills near the zoo that look like humongous dung heaps. Wind is picking up, blowing food wrappers and blossoms from bougainvillea in bursts across the road.

  Caroline fidgets with the radio, cakewalking through top forty, light jazz, classical, country. Trying to regain something of what we felt momentarily, by proxy, back there? Trying to muffle the silence that presses down on us? Or just bored? What the hell do I know about human motivation, anyway?

  On impulse I exit, loop around, and get on the 51 heading north. Soon we’re cruising through the stretch of cactus-spackled hills everyone calls Dreamy Draw. Caroline has something peppy and lilting about a lost love playing on the radio. Ukulele is involved. Mattie leans forward to listen to the music as three Harleys come up on our left, their throaty raaaa like a bubble enclosing us. All three riders have expensive leather jackets and perfectly cut hair.

  At the 101, the Harleys swing right toward Scottsdale. We head west for I-17 to begin the slow climb out of the valley, through Deadman Wash, Bumble Bee, Rock Springs. Where clouds hang above hills, the h
ills are dark. Nascent yellow blooms sprout from the ends of saguaro arms. Caroline stares off, not toward the horizon or into green-shot gorges, but out her window at dry flatland and cholla. Mattie is asleep.

  In the distance, out over one of the mesas, hawks glide on thermals.

  ***

  Close to the end of the second act of Turandot, about the time Calaf was getting ready to ring the gong and lay his life on the line for love, the old geezer sitting in front of me, the one whose wife had been elbowing him to keep awake, began weeping uncontrollably. She elbowed him again, more English on it this time, and after a moment he struggled to his feet and staggered up the stairs and out. I followed. When I caught up, he was standing motionless by one of the windows. He could have been part of a diorama, twenty-first-century man in his unnatural habitat.

  “You okay?”

  He looked up, looked at the window, finally looked at me. I could see the world struggling to reboot behind his eyes.

  A minute ago I was thinking how all these people paid sixty or a hundred dollars to spiff themselves up and sit through two hours of largeness and artifice—grand emotion, bright colors, carnival—before going back to their own small lives. Now I was thinking about just one of those people, and how sometimes we find expression for our pain, how it can just fall upon us.

  “I didn’t want to come to this. My wife’s employer, she works for a doctor, he gave her tickets he couldn’t use. She insisted we come. I knew it was a bad idea.”

  “Because…?”

  He shook his head.

  “Let’s get some air,” I said.

  We stepped outside, where life-size sculptures of dancers, canted forward on one leg, arms outstretched, had found refuge from time and the Earth’s pull. A beautiful day. Across the street an old woman stood behind a cardboard podium singing arias much like those going on inside. Poorly dyed gray hair fell in strands that looked like licorice sticks. Her dress had once been purple. My companion was watching her, no expression on his face.

  He took out his wallet, pulled something from one of the photo holders and began unfolding it.