Nantucket Grand by Steven Axelrod Read Free Book Online Page B

surrounding bushes—it was too late to save the house—I spoke to the witnesses one at a time, pulling them away from the subsiding blaze and the sagging skeleton of support timbers.
    They made an odd cross section of island life. David Lattimer, an old money septuagenarian crank who lived on the edge of the moors nearby. Alana Trikilis, the seventeen-year-old daughter of local garbage man and homespun philosopher Sam Trikilis. (“Show me a man’s trash and I’ll tell you his life story.”) Housepainter Mike Henderson. Local newspaper owner and editor David Trezize. And an off-island visitor. The trades, the media, the high school, the island aristocracy, and a tourist. You could make five seasons of The Wire out of that catalog, if Nantucket were a city like Baltimore. I glanced around the wind-bent scrub pines and brush-tangled holly trees. It could happen. Manhattan had looked like this once. But Nantucket would probably drown from rising sea levels long before anyone tried to get the first skyscraper past the voters at Town Meeting.
    The witnesses agreed to meet me at the station, and I left the site to Sam Culbertson, the fire chief, and Detective Charlie Boyce. Charlie had taken some classes in arson investigation at John Jay College, and picked up some experience with this particular crime working in Boston before he came back to the island. Lonnie Fraker, our bulky and squeaky-voiced, grandstanding but good-hearted State Police captain, would show up any minute. His first move would no doubt be to fly in an off-island expert, but it never hurt to get a jump on the Staties. Charlie’s “Go Whalers!” pride would spike if he found something before the big shots did.
    Stumping back to my car, I heard the house collapse into a bed of charred planking and coals behind me. The fire was shocking, but at that moment I felt more irked and stymied than anything else. The Todd Macy investigation was going to have to wait now, at least for the next few days. I could send someone else out to work the case but I didn’t feel confident that my other detective, Kyle Donnelly, would do anything but contaminate the crime scene. I felt overworked and outnumbered. Things were piling up fast.
    And this was supposed to be the quiet season.

Chapter Six
    Daughters
    As it turned out I had a fair-sized crowd waiting for me at the cop shop. Liam Phelan was standing on the big compass cut into the brickwork in front of the station talking to a Laurel and Hardy team—Laurel was a tall, thin gent in what looked like a thousand-dollar suit under a cashmere overcoat. His dark steel-gray hair rose off his long bony face like a hat and he sported a thin, perfectly trimmed moustache—a policeman’s dream, when it came to eyewitness descriptions. He cut a distinctive figure; even a bunch of scared people remembering a brief incident a few days before would agree on the basics, and it would be easy to pick the lanky gray-maned aristocrat out of a lineup.
    I had to smile as I approached them—this guy was much more likely to be the victim of a crime than the perpetrator. Still I found it obscurely comforting to cast a jaundiced eye on the island’s ruling class. Cops see everyone as potential criminals, anyway—at least the cops who taught me did.
    â€œJust give ’em a chance,” Chuck Obremski used to say, whether he was talking about a banker, a politician, or a movie star. During my first year with the LAPD, Winona Ryder got busted for shoplifting from Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. That day, Chuck dropped the Times on my desk with a dramatic shrug. The story was on the front page, below the fold.
    â€œThat’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “It’s a bug. Anyone can catch it.” He caught it himself later on, but that’s another story.
    The Oliver Hardy standing next to the old man struck me instantly as a private detective. One more balding