Nantucket Grand (15 page)

Chapter Twenty

The Lay of the Land

The 'Sconset mandarins at the ProACKtive fundraiser wouldn't have particularly cared about saving lives. They were more interested in saving their property.

“I can't believe the way this town has turned against us,” Howard McAllister was saying as I arrived. I imagined him waving a hypodermic syringe in front of a young girl's desperate face, explaining in explicit detail what would be required for the next scene. I couldn't put that together with the image of the man in front of me, who seemed like a very different and much more boring sort of villain.

He and a group of his pals crowded around Spanky's Raw Bar, hoovering up the oysters and littlenecks as fast as Spanky could get them open. Spanky was always my first stop at these shindigs, and often he was the only good reason to attend at all.

“Chief,” he said.

“Hey, Spanky.”

“Prince Edward Island oysters today. Flew 'em in this afternoon.” He handed me one.

“Thanks.” I took it in one swallow.

“Good?”

“Like eating the ocean.”

He grinned as he worked. “Good one. You should write that down.”

“You keep it.” I took another oyster. “It could be your new slogan.”

“Naaa. I don't think too many people would get it, Chief. They'd be like, ‘The ocean? I'll be picking kelp out of my teeth. And that garbage island in the Pacific. No one wants to think about that.”

“Good point.”

I took another oyster and settled in, listening to Howard McAllister. He attended all these functions, holding court, overbidding at the silent auctions, drinking too many dark-and-stormys. I had pulled him over for a DUI just two weeks before.

“What will it cost to make this go away?” he had demanded, the words melting together like curls of grated cheese under the broiler.

“Wrong answer,” I said. “You just attempted to bribe a police officer. That's a bigger crime than drunk driving. I can arrest you, impound your car, and search it without a warrant. But I'm in a good mood tonight, so I'll forget you said that and lock you up just for speeding, illegal lane changes, driving under the influence, and an expired inspection sticker.”

“My caretaker was supposed to deal with that!”

“Well, he didn't.”

He glared at me. “Do you know who I am?”

“Is that a real question? Because if so, you may be more disoriented than I thought.” I glanced down at his license. “Your name is Howard McAllister. Does that help?”

We left his car by the side of the road and I took him to jail. He was out in an hour but the judge suspended his license and fined him a thousand dollars. The fine didn't matter, but losing his driving privileges had to hurt.

He glanced over at me now. “Well, if it isn't Chief Kennis! I've been meaning to thank you, Chief. I hired a car and driver after our little incident, and let me tell you—once you've had a chauffeur, you never go back! My father used to say ‘everyone wants a car and driver.' I laughed at him, but he never touched a steering wheel after the age of thirty. Smart man.”

“I'm sure the roads are much safer now,” I answered mildly, taking another oyster.

“It's simply harassment!” Harry Nolan said. Alana had IDed him as an accomplice. Tall and hawkish where McAllister was shaped like a summer squash, they would have made a great comedy team, if either of them had a sense of humor.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Cops pulling over innocent people, the town trying to stop the beach preservation project. After all we've done for this place!”

My old pal Pat Folger had sidled over, dressed in his usual formal getup of blue blazer and brown turtleneck sweater. The short, scrappy contractor had a big drink in his fist and it obviously wasn't the first one of the evening.

“Like what?” he said.

“Are you joking? We're the job creators! My addition alone employed dozens of people who—”

“Who you shipped in from off-island! So you could get the work done cheap! Oh, yeah—I see them getting off the boat every day, coming in at the airport. You brought your own paint crew from New Jersey!”

“I trust them.”

“And they're living in your house for three months, pissing on your toilet seats and breaking your stemless wineglasses, and good luck flying them in from Newark or wherever the fuck, every time you need a touch-up. You've done jack shit for this island, pal. You buy from catalogs. You eat out and stiff the waiters. And now you're trashing beaches with your bullshit geotubes.”

“Those geotubes are saving the bluff!”

“You're dreaming. That bluff's been eroding for a million years. Benjamin Franklin made them move Sankaty Light back a couple of miles because he knew what was happening, and that was two hundred years ago. The beach you're trying to save is crap now, the beaches around it are trashed, all because you spent too much on a house you never should have bought to begin with. Well, tough titty.”

“How dare you talk to me that way! That is the most outrageous, disrespectful, arrogant—”

“You can push me around all you want, Nolan. That's what you're good at. That's where you got where you are today. Fucking with people. But you're fucking with the ocean this time, pal, and guess what? The ocean don't give a shit. The ocean's going to take your house, geotubes and all, and I'll be standing on Baxter Road cheering the day it happens.”

“Don't get carried away, Pat.”

Our host for the evening, Jonathan Hastings Pell III, had ambled over, nibbling at a cracker spread with caviar. I was sure he'd have something dismissive to say about the local constabulary—nothing had ever come from our house break-in investigation. But he was leaving me out of this conversation.

“I don't know about Harry here,” he said, “but my friends on Baxter Road hired only local contractors for their homes. Scott O'Connor built Ray Davenport's house. Ron Winters just submitted blueprints for Sandy Farrell's new place in Shimmo. And that isn't just knee-jerk localism. These men are the best in the business. Look at the paneling in this house, the mantel, the banisters, the coffered ceilings. All made by Carter Mitchell in that extraordinary workshop of his out by the airport. Remarkable man. A true artist. But without people like us, he'd be hanging sheetrock in some Hyannis housing development. You won't see a man like Carter Mitchell slandering my friends and me. We're his bread and butter! He may be Botticelli or Michelangelo, but we're the Medicis! And he knows it.”

A woman's voice piped up. “And the Medicis used slave labor, just like you do.”

It was Jane Stiles. We had agreed to meet at the party, but she seemed to have arrived with her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Brad Thurman. For the moment she was ignoring both of us and I glimpsed something old-fashioned in her outrage: Eleanor Roosevelt confronting a robber baron.

Pell was amused. “So you think these lovely homes were built with slave labor?”

“Janey—” That was Brad. He was famous for his caustic temper, especially during the last third of a job with furniture and decorators arriving, big checks in the balance and the pressure of finishing on time jacked into the red zone, but today he was curiously mild-mannered. There was something beseeching in his tone. I could see this was one confrontation he very much wanted to avoid.

“It's okay, Brad,” Jane said as she advanced on Pell. “Slave-
owners provided room and board. People live here and make exactly enough to make the rent, pay for their truck, and buy groceries. What do you call that?”

“How about—the American Dream?”

Pell smiled, a glamorous high wattage affirmation full of white teeth that deepened his dimples and sparked his eyes. I thought of those three-way light bulbs, clicking brighter and brighter as you turned the switch. It captivated Jane, silenced her, and I realized—this guy has charisma. The real thing was rare. I could only think of one other specimen: Chief Bratton, the man who fired me from the LAPD in his last days on the job, and then caught up to me in the bright lobby of the new PAB to shake my hand and tell me, “That's a helluva a book, kid. Write another one.” I told him I'd be sticking to poetry for the foreseeable future and he laughed that big-throated inclusive laugh, threw an arm over my shoulder and said, “You and the Le Eme pastry chef! That pair beats a full house.”

I couldn't take offense. I could tell the idea really did amuse him. And I wanted to please him. Despite his financial shenanigans, his racist stop-and-frisk policies, and his possible complicity in the compromised investigation my book described; after he had ended my career, and knowing I would probably never see him again, I still wanted to please the guy.

That's charisma.

Jane Stiles clearly felt the same force of personality radiating from Pell. “I guess…” she said. “I just—I never really thought of it that way. But, well, yeah…I mean it's…”

“Let's get a drink.” Brad took her arm and eased her away from the group. When Jane was a step or two ahead of him he turned back to his host. “Sorry,” he mouthed silently.

Pell lifted his hands to his chest and parted them like a magician, about to make some small animal reappear out of a top hat. But Pell restored something else with that gesture, something more remarkable, if intangible—the atmosphere of cordiality. We were all at a party again. His self-effacing charm reduced the brief argument to the status of a hastily silenced cell phone or a spilled drink.

Brad smiled gratefully and disappeared into the crowd.

Then Pell turned to me. “This house is a perfect example.” He waved a hand expansively, drawing the great room with its thirty-foot ceiling around us like a shawl. “When Preston Lomax died, the place was a shambles—people suing the estate, attaching liens to the property, going unpaid for months. It was a tragedy and a scandal. Someone had to take responsibility for that mess. By the time Preston's estate was settled, everyone clamoring for their proper remuneration would have gone bankrupt. So the company stepped in. More to the point, as CFO of LoGran Corporation, I stepped in, one of those oligarchs the young lady so stridently detests. Well, Chief, sometimes you need an oligarch. To paraphrase my friends at the NRA, sometimes the only answer to a bad plutocrat with a checkbook is a good plutocrat with a checkbook.”

The other plutocrats chuckled at this and even I had to smile. The fact was, Pell had pulled a lot of people from the brink the previous winter, and some of them were my friends. I had been picking up my mail at the post office when Mike Henderson got his long-awaited twenty-three-thousand-dollar check. His bark of stunned elation made old Mrs. Tyroler drop her mail. We bent to help gather the scatter of envelopes, and as she walked away Mike showed me the check.

“People say money can't solve problems. They must have the kind of problems money can't solve. Like, incurable diseases or existential despair, or—whatever. I feel bad for them. But I'm lucky, Chief. My kind of problems, money solves just fine. Goddamn!”

He had practically danced out of the post office, and there was a lightness of spirit all over town that week, like a change in the weather, a second Indian summer in the middle of December. At the annual Christmas Eve red-ticket drawing, newly appointed Town Crier Sam Trikilis declared 2014 the island's most lucrative shopping season ever.

“That's the real trickle-down economics, Chief,” Pell was saying now, between oysters. “Put money in people's hands and they spend it. Everybody wins.”

I nodded. “The house looks good.”

“We made some changes. More work for everyone. All time and materials, cost-plus. That's what the tradesmen like. No reason they shouldn't see a little profit after everything they went through.”

“I'm glad it worked out.”

“But it's just the beginning Chief. ProACKtive isn't just about rescuing one building project. We're going to rescue this whole island. Bring it back to life! Supercharge the downtown, turn it into a year-round destination resort. New people, new money, new spirit. That's our slogan, by the way.” He winked. “You heard it here first.”

“I don't know, Mr. Pell,” I said. “I'm not sure Nantucket really needs to be rescued. You know, we have as many people living here now in the winter as we used to have in the summer. A lot of people actually wish the winters were quieter. They miss the old days. I think they're hoping all the people determined to save Nantucket will just give up and go away. Save another island. Save Haiti. That place could really use the help.”

He studied me as he set down an oyster shell. “That's what ‘some people' think. What do you think, Chief?”

“Well, for me, your new improved Nantucket just means crowds. Crowded parking lots, a crowded school, a crowded emergency room. A lot of houses, a lot of cars. And a lot of crime.”

He patted my shoulder. “That's why we have a brand new police station—and an off-island big city police chief to keep everyone in line. I just wish you were willing to use the available tools.”

Pell wanted Nantucket to buy surplus Army equipment—stinger missiles, automatic machine guns, even Bradley Fighting Vehicles, or BFVs as he called them, with a casual intimacy I found alarming. Lonnie Fraker agreed with him. We had fought about it, genteelly, at Town Meeting. I wasn't going to turn Nantucket into a police state, however much the State Police wanted me to. I preferred community policing, a comfortable relationship between my officers and the public. Call me crazy, but I have this idea that it might be a tad difficult to feel at ease with a policeman who's aiming a bazooka at you from the hatch of a tank. Still, Lonnie loved his toys and I knew Sheriff Bob Bulmer longed to deliver eviction notices and subpoenas with a SWAT team for backup.

I won that skirmish—the town voted against Pell's warrant article. He was cheerful about it outside the high school after Town Meeting. He shook my hand. “Democracy in action. You have to love it.”