Score One for the Nook

 

This is how the New York Times looked on the Kindle app: just text, no formatting, no pictures, no ads, a bare-bones info-shot for news junkies. A while ago the perennial ebook underdog, Barnes & Noble's Nook, got into the newspaper fray. Their app was better in every way, with a photorealistic image of the real thing, the ability to enlarge any page, and the option of clicking a tab to read any story in plain text -- the actual New York Times, on your iPad ... but better.

Of course, the Nook has a cumbersome purchasing protocol -- I guess "one-click" is proprietary to Bezos world -- and the app was glitchy. Sometimes there were delays in delivery. Stuffing your head into the no-frills text trough was easier most mornings, though I did go through the slog for the Sunday edition. 

I signed on to Nook in the first place because Kindle didn't offer the Pevear and Volokhonsky War and Peace, a fresh translation that seemed like my best shot to climb Mt. Tolstoy. Nook fills other gaps, also, and of course, I'm rooting for Barnes & Noble. After my most recent viewing of You've Got Mail,  I couldn't help noting the irony that Tom Hanks's mega store, which had just obliterated Meg Ryan's indie bookshop, would soon be all but obliterated itself by the implacable force of online shopping. Amazon did finish off Borders ... but Barnes and Noble struggled on.

And now, they've scored an unlikely victory.

Jeff gave up. Jeff got beaten, fair and square. They pulled the New York Times from the Kindle app, or as we say the tech world, "slinked away with their tail between their legs". Much as I rely on our number one internet retailer, it's a union-busting late-capitalist nightmare bully, and it feels good to see the other side notch one in the Win column.

The weird thing is that no one else seems to have noticed. Anyway, I haven't seen any mention of this particular skirmish in the mainstream media. I guess that leaves it to me. 

So congratulations, Barnes & Noble. Keep up the good work.

Jimmy Devlin Misses a Step

 

              

 

 

The trail had taken me to Fort Mitchell National Cemetery in Georgia, where CSM Paul Bishop (the tombstone read: Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan HE SERVED WITH PRIDE) was no longer buried.

The name had come up a few weeks ago, unrelated to anything else in the case, long after the investigation seemed to have run its course, and everyone else had given up. No leads, no witnesses, no hard evidence – just a hunch, and after the debacles of the last few years no one at INSCOM had much patience for my hunches.

      Still, I persisted – not so much because I wanted to be proved right, but because of the catastrophic results if everyone else was proved wrong.

      I drove into the small city-state of Fort Benning on an unseasonably mild late November afternoon, asking myself again: What did I actually have to go on? Intercepted, encrypted emails, stolen nuclear materials, a talkative witness doing ten years to life in the Chesapeake Consolidated Naval brig; coded messages from page numbers and word counts in The Turner Diaries.

      I drove up the main gate, flashed my credentials to the guard, and got a swift salute as the barrier lifted. The reflexive military gesture of respect buoyed my sprits briefly, but a phone call to the Intelligence and Security Command would flip that one-eighty. I had no official business here and no clearance for what I needed to do. It would come down to bluff and bluster. I heard my COs voice in my head again, as I so often did: Culhane laughing: “Bullshit baffles brains, Jimmy.” And it usually did. Anyway, I had always been good at the bullshit. The look I gave that guard, for instance  -- cold, bored and impatient, had been pitch perfect, as was my unrushed cruise onto the base. The car’s body language said I was in no rush and didn’t have to be. People would wait for me – or come to me when I called them.

      More bullshit of course: I’d managed to burn the last of my credibility as the few scraps evidence had dissolved like the last pile of dirty snow in a rainstorm. The emails were ambiguous – “dirty bomb” was some sort of popular rap lyric, the stolen nuclear material had apparently been accounted for, the Turner Diaries code breaking had yielded only ambiguous hate speech  about wiping out the “towel heads” and “one cockroach in the sink meant a thousand in the walls”  -- no evident master plan, no plan at all really, except that the people using the book would do whatever they had to do to “not be replaced”.

      “Ya can’t repair em,” Culhane had said once. “So what the fuck else are you supposed to do with em?”

      That left the witness, who it turned out would confess anything to anyone about anything in exchange for a shorter sentence or a bigger cell. So it was no surprise that when I came upon the name Paul Bishop and located a Command Sergeant Major of the same name buried at Fort Mitchell, no one had the slightest interest in digging up the grave. I spoke to Bishop’s widow privately and explained me theory: a newly empty grave was the best possible hiding place for contraband you didn’t want people to find.

She hung up on me.

      Not a great career week for James Devlin.

      But, still – it all made sense. If the nuclear materials were still unaccounted for, and the Army had no clear origin point for them … and anyway, you didn’t have to steal radioactive isotopes from a power plant to make a dirty bomb. A few grams of Polonium could be scavenged from a dozen sources, from construction sites to food processing plants to hospitals. You didn’t get enough for a nuclear explosion, but the dynamite spread the radioactive particles over a good distance, and that made the perfect surprise coda to your bomb drama, a lingering reminder of your message and your threat.

And if the coded phrases from the book really did refer to an actual dirty bomb, and if the emails corroborated it, and if that lowlife scumbag convict just happened to be telling the truth for once in his life …

If, if, if.

“If I had ham, I’d have ham and eggs,” Culhane had scoffed at me. “If I had eggs.”

So I was on my own, going rogue as usual. I had used that phrase with Jenny once and she’d said, “I only seem like I’m ‘going rogue’ because I’m right and you won’t do what I say.’ Well, Jenny was right most of the time, whether the subject was a lighter more expensive bit for her mare or the unacceptability of over-head lighting. I gave her those, and she’d give me this one, I was certain. Jenny had good instincts.

CMS Paul Bishop’s grave was full of metal tubing dynamite and some radioactive isotope, most likely polonium 210. But I wasn’t going to debate my theory any more. I was running out of time. It was closing in on Duhl Hijjah, the final month in the Arabic calendar. That meant Yawm-Al-Arafat, the holiest day of the Muslim year, was less than two weeks away. Whoever these people were, I was sure they were going to blow a mosque on that day … probably, given the logistics of the operation, Al-Farook Masjid, the biggest mosque in the southern United States, located in Atlanta, just over a hundred miles north, less than two hours by car from the cemetery. Two of the encrypted messages supported this theory: “Let them die on their knees” and even more alarming: “Careful when you face east. We’re gonna get you when you turn your back on the west”.

That was my case.

I’d made as well as I could, and Culhane rejected it. So I was on my own. Fuck it. I was used to that.

I pulled up to the Admin building, organized my story, and walked inside. On the second floor, amid the quiet rustle of computer keys and the distant ringing of a telephone, the Staff Judge Advocate’s assistant greeted me. He offered bottled water and gave me the list of volunteers. The job involved “spade work” and one of the men, private first class Caden Bowers, had actually been a grave digger in civilian life. I had to smile at that.

Ten minutes later I was driving off the base with Bowers riding shotgun: a square faced, squinting redneck mouth-breather more interested in whatever he was scrolling through on his phone than the job he’d been chosen for, or the man in charge. That was fine with me. I had no interest in small talk.

I badged my way into the cemetery and found the grave in a wide meadow dotted with gravestones, backed by a dense screen of forest.

“Now what?” Bowers asked me

“Now we wait for dark.”

“The fuck are we doing here, Colonel?”

I twisted in my seat to face him. “We’re digging up a grave.”

“Hey no, that aint legal, sir! Plus it’s a sin.”

“The U.S. Army absolves you, private. And you can go to Confession on Sunday.”

We sat in silence for a while. I rolled down my window and let the cool evening breeze touch my face. Crows squawked. I heard a siren dopplering into the distance. Bowers returned to his trusty iPhone.

When it was full dark I turned on the headlights to illuminate the grave and climbed out of the car. Bowers joined me, shovel in hand. “I don’t think we should do this, sir.”

“Noted.”

“I mean, dead bodies, you know … disturbing them and what not …”

“Dig it up,” I said through gritted teeth. Genuine fear moved through his eyes.

“I’m sorry, sir … dig – dig what up?”

“All of it. Dig it all up. I want it all gone. Now.”

“You mean, like body parts … because –”

“Jesus Christ! There’s no body under there, Private! If I’m right you’ll find nothing but the components of a bomb.”

“Like a land mine? If it blows –”

“Relax, it’s disassembled.”

“I don’t know …”

Before I could answer, he swung the shovel at my head. Pain exploded behind my eyes and I found myself on my hands and knees in the grass. He pulled my Heckler and Koch from its holster, and stepped back. He spoke but my ears were ringing. I couldn’t hear him.

He spoke louder. “Now you get to dig your own grave, and I don’t have to handle all that nasty ass plutonium. Kind of a win-win, Colonel. Doncha think?”

“Wait – who … what are you …”

“Come on college boy, time for the post graduate course. We was on to you from jump street and my boys are coming right now to pick this stuff up and get it to A-Town. Oh yeah. Who do you think I was texting back in the car? Uber? Some dating app? We don’t have time for that shit. We got a mission and we’re just a little ahead of schedule now. But you gotta roll with shit, you know? Now start digging.”

By the time I had gotten down to the black plastic back full of aluminum piping, ten-penny nails, Semtex and plutonium, a black Ford F350 had pulled up beside us. I was breathing hard, feeling the stab in my lower back and the raw blisters on my palms.

“Yo, Caden!”

“Hey, T-Bone, we got us a helper.”

T-Bone laughed. “You always was a lazy shit.”

“You AWOL now, cracker,” a third voice chimed in from the truck

“Fuck yeah.” He turned to me, waved the gun at the truck bed. “Start loading up, college boy.” I heaved the bag out of the grave and scrambled after it. “Empty the bag! Get your hands on that stuff. Won’t hurt ya unless you gopt an open blister or something Feel it hit ya. Don’t worry the radiation’ll take a coupla days to kill ya, and you’ll be long dead by that time. So, it’s all good!”

When I was done he shot me five times in the chest and the close-range rounds punched me backward into the pit. The Kevlar had saved me but I could tell some ribs were broken and I couldn’t move as the first shovel full of dirt hit my back.

The darkness saved me. I got my jacket pulled over my head without them seeing, and I had a pocket of air to breathe until they were gone. The dirt was loose but it was heavy and I almost suffocated before my legs could push me out into the air and my hands could claw the soil aside. I stood for I don’t know how long, filthy and wounded, radiation poisoned, trying to get my breath and my bearings. Finally, I lost consciousness for I don’t know how long.

The voice woke me. “Sorry, son. I don’t know what you’re doing out here, but I’m going to have to put a stop to it. Military police from Benning are on their way right now. They can sort this out. You just get yourself out of there, and hold tight till they get here. Won’t be long.”

I squirmed out of the dirt and pulled myself to my feet. I was dizzy, my whole body was screaming in pain, my throat felt choked with dirt. But I managed to disarm the old man, take his gun and club him to the ground. His car was still running. I jumped in, dug the turf up in a three point turn and took off. I could hear sirens in the distance.

I was a fugitive now, and probably dying from the radiation exposure, but I still had a job to do and less than two weeks to do it. By the time I hit interstate 185, I’d figured out my plan.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

     

     

R.I.P. Nikki Finke

So sad to hear tonight about Nikki Finke's death at age 68. I had always enjoyed her gleefully fearless Deadline Hollywood site. She told the truth and revealed the embarrassing facts about Hollywood big shots. Inevitably, you would hear the self-righteous denials ... and when the proof came out, you could count on the patented Finke "TOLDJA!" to celebrate another victory over the untouchable. Her hilariously venomous live blogging of the Oscars was a highlight of my year, every year ... and far more entertaining than the actual show.

Then she sold the site to Penske and went to war with him ... and lost; and then went silent... at least online -- there was a non-compete clause in her sale contract with the trucking giant.

I missed her, and the splash of vodka she had slipped into the processed orange juice of Hollywood news.

So I wondered ... what would she do next?

Her new project was Hollywood Dementia -- a site dedicated to tinseltown fiction written by movie biz insiders. I had a 250,000-word Hollywood novel I could dip into ... but did my family connections, my WGAw membership, and my paltry few years in L.A., qualify me to contribute?

Nikki thought so, and a lovely, long-distance friendship began. She was a tough quirky editor and a tireless champion of the writers she liked. I'll never forget her grabbing Francesca Orsi -- the HBO executive she had corralled into attending her Hollywood Dementia writer's party -- pointing at me and growling, "Talk to him! He's the most talented writer on the site!" I certainly wasn't, not even close, but her ferocious advocacy meant the world to me. She even tried to convince the cable channel to make my Kennis mysteries into a season of True Detective. Her efforts were tireless, Quixotic, and futile, but it felt good to have such a tough stubborn ally.

Then the site turned moribund and she stopped returning phone calls. I feared the worst -- she had been in ill health even six years before when we met at her party.

And now the worst has happened.

A lot of the people she scandalized and humiliated probably assume she's going to hell. But when arrives at the pearly gates for a champagne toast with St, Peter I'll be down here crowing: TOLDJA!

Finding the Seam

 

The technique of letting a story develop as you write it demands an array of unusual tactics. I thought it might be interesting to dismantle a single scene to demonstrate the process. When I wanted to do something similar for my graduation lecture at Vermont College, my professor dismissed the idea with his usual blunt style: “No one cares how you wrote your book. It’s not Anna Karenina.” Eight books later, this one won’t be much competition for Tolstoy, either. But I still find the granular details of narrative construction interesting

 

Without giving too much away, I had a scene between a married couple in which the husband was a crude, abusive bully. It worked very well, I checked the “first scene between Jan and Hannah” box and moved on. But the hero of my story is on a mission to rescue Hannah, and I needed him to encounter some difficulties en route to her apartment. “The mission was accomplished without incident” might be high praise in a military operation post-mortem, but it’s terrible for a story. I badly needed an incident or two. How about this? A couple has mounted their own escape and my hero, in military garb, is swept into the hunt for them … derailing his own plan and its meticulous timing. Two escapes, unconnected, seemed plausible but unsatisfying. What if Jan had helped them? But Hannah is part of the organization behind these exploits, and the big fight in their kitchen which opens the chapter is all about Jan demanding that Hannah stop her high-risk activities. Why would he do that if he was also involved? Bad idea, forget it. Still, the contradiction kept scratching at the door like a cat locked out of the bedroom. What if…? No. Or --? Naaa, stupid idea. I felt like I had a whole TV writer’s room in my head, staring at the white board, eating cold Chinese take out and trying the break the story. But of course, it was all just me, as usual.

 

So, how about this -- Jan got sucked into the fervor of the cause, somehow? But why? Just being around his wife’s fanatical dedication could have infected him almost against his will … only a partial explanation, but at least it makes the action seem possible. But that’s not enough. So pile on a little: the woman was the love of Jan’s life, until she dumped him – for his best friend, the husband. Still not quite sufficient, but it was enough to let me move forward.

 

“Moving forward” meant re-writing the kitchen argument to reveal these new facts … and set up enough details for my hero to grasp at least part of the situation when he encounters the couple hiding in an alley and helps them get away. Belatedly, I realized that the twist in the story, when Jan follows Hannah and my hero, winds up saving them both and sacrificing himself, was simply not supported by the evidence in the scene I had written. We saw nothing in Jan with that first draft that would make us believe he had the potential for such a noble gesture. That was why my conscious mind kept pushing and poking at the narrative: the unconscious mind was saying: do more. Give me more. Maybe I just found the one-dimensional thug boring. That was certainly part of it – but just a part. Anyway, I certainly had my marching orders.

 

In these situations, you can just start from scratch with a whole new scene, but I wanted to keep the anger I had started with. I wanted it both ways. That meant finding a seam in the argument that I could pry open to accommodate my new dialogue.

 

But first I had to write the dialogue.

 

Here’s the critical section of the scene, as it stood this morning

 

Jan knew how to take care of himself. He made sure to join the Żydowska Służba Porządkowa working with the Judenrat. But that meant Hannah’s war was over. Jan made that very clear after a brief clandestine visit from Fredka Oxenhendler, bringing precious guns and bullets through a secret tunnel beneath the cemetery wall.

That was the first time that Jan had beaten her. He took the contraband weapons and ammunition, turned them over to the SS and received a promotion in return. He couldn’t tell Obergrppenfuhrer Kellzen how the ZOB had penetrated the ghetto because Hannah wouldn’t tell him, and he couldn’t turn her in, however his feelings for her might have soured, because she was carrying his baby, and the baby might be a boy: checkmate.

Or at least stalemate.

Jan slurped the last of the thin soup and Hannah weighed the various options: frying pan to the head? Knife to the throat? Some simple poison? There would have to be something she could use at the hospital in Cyzste, if she could steal it, if there were any supplies left on the shelves, if Dr. Zielinski would help her, if was even still alive. What else? She could strangle him with clothesline – was she strong enough for that? She wouldn’t get two chances. If only she still had one of those lovely Mausers. Fredka had asked, one sardonic eyebrow lifted, “Could you really pull the trigger, Darling?”

“I know where you’ve been tonight,” Jan said suddenly, as if he was answering her, as if they were in the middle of the argument already. It must have raging in his head since she got home. “Smuggling potatoes into the Ghetto, putting our lives at risk for nothing.”

He lurched out of his chair, took two steps to the counter by the sink where Hannah had filled a cracked china bowl with two dozen of the lovely small kartofla wiosennas, her favorites, from the evening’s haul. He grabbed a handful of them and threw them at her. One struck her forehead. “And you bring the evidence home! How are you going to explain these, if there’s a raid?”

She reached up to touch her forehead. It would bruise soon. “I thought we could eat them, Jan. Then the Schutzstaffel pigs could investigate our toilet for the evidence.”

“So, this is a joke to you?”

“It’s a mitzvah. I know you love those pickle potatoes.”

“We don’t need your dirty loot, your nielegalne zyski! I get all the food we need.”

“I thought you’d be happy.”

“Happy to die for your arrogance and vanity? So you can pose and strut for your radical friends? Look at me! The future mother of the Erez Israel kibbutzim, Queen of the underground freedom fighters! You child! You truant little girl, skipping school on Dzien Wagarowicza! Getting me shot in the head so some toothless grandmother can eat her placki ziemniaczane! You make me sick.”

She shook her head. “You understand nothing.”

Tactical blunder: silence was always best. Now her tone of tired contempt ignited his rage again and he bounded across the room at her, shoving the table aside. The empty soup bowl shattered on the floor, their last decent bowl. He jammed her against the cabinets, hands at her throat.

Could I pull the trigger, Fredka?

Just watch me.

“You were forbidden to do more smuggling! I forbade you to do that! You disobeyed me! You lied. You lied to me, you dirty little klafte.” 

She couldn’t breathe. “Jan --Jan, please … the baby …”

He seemed to come to his senses. He released her, stumbled backward. “The baby. Always the baby. That’s your secret weapon.  I’m going out. I need a drink. Tadeusz has some good vodka.

And I smuggled it across the wall for him, you fucking chazer! she almost shouted after him. But it was better to let the chazer go.

Choose silence for once, Hannah -- before it’s too late.

 

Six hundred and sixty-six words; and somewhere in that passage, a seam I could open up to insert the dialogue that would shift and deepen the story. It was only in the actual writing of the new dialogue that the final piece of the puzzle fitted itself into place. I was flying improvising … and I stopped short. Had I gone too far? The revelation scared me, but the best ideas always have that element of risk and the flinch you feel is virtually a guarantee that you’ve found something good. The insert slipped easily into the seam I found,  neatly sealed at both sides, beginning an end, highlighted in boldface:

 

She couldn’t breathe. “Jan --Jan, please … the baby …”

He seemed to come to his senses. He released her, stumbled backward. “The baby. Always the baby. That’s your secret weapon.

“I’m not Mala.”

“Don’t say her name.”

“You can’t stop me. Mala. Mala, Mala, Mala. I’ll say it as much  as I want.”

“We are not speaking of Mala tonight.

“Yes we are! Of course we are! That’s all we speak of, even when we’re speaking of the weather.”

“That’s the past, Hannah. Can’t you let it be the past?”

“Answer that one for yourself.”

“Every honest word I have ever uttered in your presence I regret.”

“Jan -- ”

“I should have taken a vow of silence. My father told me. ‘Lock your heart. Leave that door open and the thieves will steal everything from you’. I should have listened.”

“I’m no thief. And your father was a drunk. A bitter, mean-spirited drunk.”

“How dare you --”

“It’s true and everyone knows it. But you’re different, Jan. You’re not that way. You helped Aaron and Mala.”

“Because of you! All your wild talk. I started to believe it, God help me.”

“That’s not why.”

“No? You tell me why, then.”

There was no going back. “Mala is pregnant. And the child is yours.”

He gaped at her. “No one knows that! How could you know that?”

“I didn’t. But I do now.”

Silence dropped over them like a blanket on a rat – the smothering darkness and the stillness of panic. She could hear Jan’s breath, and a rattle of coughing from the back room. Starving dogs, streets away, barked and howled, fighting over something dead.

“Got in Himmel,” Jan said finally. “How did we wind up here?”

“Fredka will help them.”

“If she can. If they even get that far. Probably they will both be dead before morning. Anyway, we’ll never see them again.”

“Until we meet in Shamayim.”

“Shamayim! Your optimism is poison to me. Poison! We are all doomed. We are going to hell. And your cheerful brainless chirping just makes everything a thousand times worse. You make me sick. I’m going out. I need a drink. Tadeusz has some good vodka.”

 

And that’s where the scene stands today, all finished … until I have to go back and change it again.

 

The Freemasonry of the Brush

 

Sitting, sipping coffee and reading a book, in a warm house with a cold, sun-sharp windy April afternoon blowing and glaring outside, with nowhere I need to go and nothing I need to do, feeling truly at home for the first time in years. Not visiting, not commuting, not counting down the days until the next slog up 95 and the long groaning churn of the ferry ride across Nantucket Sound, but simply living, secure and settled. Back to work again on Monday, after the long Easter weekend, but that’s fine. It’s work I know and even enjoy. The ease with which I slipped into this new painting crew, side by side with the gang of tough old carpenters, surprised me a little. I always knew that painting houses was a trade I could take up anywhere, but this is more than a job. The building trades have their own lively Freemasonry, and it’s as effortless to talk about favorite brushes(we all favor Wooster) and despised “luxury” paint brands (I’m looking at you, Farrow & Ball) as it was to chat about point-of-view or image patterning with a friendly stranger in an MFA dining hall.

The world of the construction site is so familiar, with the universal tang of sawdust, the tangled snakes of power cords, the grinding saws, and the bad music, that it hardly seems like you’ve come to a new place at all. Even the characters remain the same: the seldom-seen but exigent GC; the strutting and hilariously self-important architect,  the demanding but oblivious owners; the same fuck-ups and epic stories of fuck-ups past. There’s the inevitable cabinet maker with OCD, the painter with the drinking problem, the landscaper waiting for his green card. We all understand each other, we’ve all been there and we’re all still here. I feel like I could join a crew in Athens or Tokyo or Helsinki and it would be the same. It’s a fraternity and you have to earn your place in it. The quiet look of approval the first time you cut a ceiling or glaze a window tells you what you most want to know – not that you can do the job, but that you’re welcome to the club. You’ve already paid the dues, in spilled paint and broken panes of antique glass, in the twenty-hour weekends ahead of the furniture or the floor guys, in the all-nighters under the halogens to get that final check before Christmas.

It’s nothing special – just another day on the job. We’re all in it for the long haul, picking up where we left off, stripping it off to put it back on, finishing the job, and starting the next one. It’s a living, and surprisingly, I realize after more than thirty years,  it’s a life.

The Character Connundrum

 

Scrolling through TikTok’s array of writing experts, and trying to absorb their tips about character development, I’ve become increasingly baffled. Their advice bears no relation to my own experience. I’ve never used a white board or a flow chart, never listed personality traits or ginned up a biography, complete with childhood traumas. In fact, I believe that real writers have all their characters already inside them, fully formed but inert. The act of writing brings them alive and leads them out of the shadows, with no analytical thinking and technical trickery required. You just need to trust your unconscious mind, which does most of the heavy lifting, anyway.

All my favorite characters have ambushed me, wrenching the narrative into a new direction which turned out to be the inevitable way the story was meant to unfold from the beginning. Who knew? Not me. A runaway 16-year-old boy named Rickey Muller upended my new thriller  “White Crow” … and then somehow became the crucial centerpiece of the plot and the novel’s moral compass. I fought it for a  while, but finally I was smart enough to give in. His traits, his biography, his “character arc”? Those I discovered in the course of the book, just as the reader will. Rickey led the way; I just paid attention. This somewhat nerve-wracking renunciation of control made the book more fresh and lively, with an improvisational edge that I would have been hard-pressed to construct by will power and conscious thought. The stigma of mechanical engineering, the smell of engine oil and metal shavings, rises from that mass of online instruction -- all those computer programs and structural guidelines, all those tricks and gimmicks and hacks. Forget about them. Your characters are all inside you. Just let them out -- and let them take over.

You’ll be glad you did

Nantucket Plunder, A Henry Kennis short story

 

Mike Henderson was in trouble again.

His brushes with the law had never amounted to much – in fact they had become a small private joke between us. The time he managed to give himself the best possible motive and no alibi for the most notorious murder in the island’s history, or the time he was seen walking away from a murder scene with what looked like blood all over his hands. He was cleared both times – coincidence and paint.

            But this was different. This was serious.

            Five customers had filed theft reports on houses where Mike had been working over the winter. They’d arrived for the summer season, opened their houses and found things missing. The five lists together made an impressive inventory: Tiffany silver, Reyes lightship baskets, a stash of Kruggerands. And there was a startling amount of original art gone missing: Rauschenberg collages, Jim Dine hearts, Hockney swimming pools, along with several pieces of Stickley furniture and collections of Staffordshire dogs and Rookwood pottery.

            “This is no smash and grab break in artist,” Haden Krakauer said after I finished going through the missing property lists. My assistant chief was shrewd and cynical and he knew the island much better than me. He grew up on Nantucket and knew everyone and their families and their family scandals going back three generations. “This is a connoisseur. These robberies were curated.”

            “So ignore the usual suspects?”

            “Well …”

            Neither of us wanted to be accused of profiling but the fact remained that most of the house robberies on the island were committed either by drunk high school kids who had the alarm codes or by desperate immigrants trying to keep up with the rent, the food prices or a shiny new all-American opioid addiction. It could be a landscaper from Jamaica, a mason’s apprentice from Ecuador, a bus boy from Belarus – single or married, with kids or without. But those thefts all had a common accent, a familiar grammar -- like English spoken badly. Those thieves stole bling and electronics – Apple Watches and X-box systems, flat screens and costume jewelry. Lots of fake diamond rings and pearl necklaces along with the occasional valuable item, because they didn’t know the difference.

            This guy knew the difference. This was an educated, discerning thief who had access to the most well-guarded and expensively alarmed houses on the island. Which narrowed things down drastically – that was what Haden meant.

            “I need the next list,” I told him. “The list with the names of everyone who worked on those houses over the winter. Put Kyle Donnelly on it.”

            It took Kyle a few days, leveraging a lifetime of island contacts to pry information out of the close-knit community of builders and contractors. My friend Pat Folger had put up a guest cottage for one of the burglary victims; Billy Delavane had built the custom staircase. Kyle got a list of all Folger’s subs -- from electricians and plumbers to plasterers and painters.  The other houses had no large-scale projects going on through the winter months, but Kyle contacted the owners, and through them he found the caretakers, and the caretakers gave him lists. Some owed him favors (a warning instead of a DUI), some had been pals with his grandfather. Some accepted the standard bribe: a Bud Lite 18 pack.

            When the roll call was complete, Kyle surprised me by taking the next step. I’d been teaching him for five years; he was finally starting to learn something. Baby steps – simple procedure. But I made sure to give him what my old boss in L.A. used to all an “attaboy” when he laid the five long lists -- and the one short list -- my desk the next Monday morning.

            He had done the cross referencing. Only three people had worked in all the burglarized houses in the off-season. Arturo Maturo, the plumber, Tom Danziger, the electrician – and Mike Henderson, the painter. They had all worked on the Lomax house a few years back and had all been suspects, briefly. They all had other secrets they were reluctant to share and by the end of the investigation I felt more like a parish priest than a police officer. I gave them the only absolution I could – I let them go with a thank you and an apology.

            But now they were all on the blotter again.

            I cleared the first two quickly. Maturo had been draining the pipes after one of the families came up for Christmas and kids had come up in March to grab some summer clothes. Their selfies showed most of the loot in the background. That let Maturo off the hook.

Danziger had done extensive re-wiring in two of the houses, and the inspector remembered various stolen objects still in place when came over to sign off on the work.

None of that cleared them of every house on the list, but we were assuming one thief and one modus operandi for all the crimes. Beyond that, Danziger and Maturo were unlikely suspects. Plumbers and Electricians ruled as blue collar royalty on Nantucket. They had no need for petty theft to augment their incomes and no reason to jeopardize their standing in the hierarchy of the building trades by stealing from their customers.  At around two hundred bucks an hour, most people thought they were stealing anyway.

That left Mike Henderson.

As usual, he had no alibi. All the circumstantial evidence was against him. He had worked in all the houses, mostly alone. He had often remarked that painting was a socially sanctioned form of trespassing, and more than one client had fired him, accusing him of that very crime. He was always broke, scrounging a living from job to job, so he was motivated to pick up a few extra dollars by theft. He charged according to the model of car he found in the garage and felt no compunction about gouging the wealthy. So why not help himself to the odd silver tea pot or lightship basket?

But was angry and baffled when I brought him in for questioning. It’s hard to fake that level of outrage.

“Check my bank account! See if you can find all this money I’m supposed to be stealing. I hope you do find it! I could use it. We’re a month behind on our mortgage payments right now.”

I pushed against the edge of my desk, rolled my chair back a few inches. We were talking in my office, much to Haden Krakauer’s dismay. He liked doing things by the book. As far as my Assistant Chief was concerned, Mike was a suspect in a string of B&E felonies, and ought to be treated that way. I wasn’t so sure. I hadn’t arrested Mike, and I didn’t want to Mirandize him. I wanted to talk, but I wasn’t going to shove him into an interrogation room like a common criminal.

At least not yet. “Your bank account is the last place I’d expect you to stash stolen money, Mike. You told me yourself – small-time house-painters are the last stalwarts of the cash economy.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You don’t work for big contractors. You don’t carry Workmen’s Comp. Not since the Lomax job. You don’t have big crew anymore, either -- or a big payroll to meet. When you need a 40-foot ladder, or someone you trust to roll a ceiling, you ask your friends. Right?”

“Right.”

“It’s a collective. You all fly under the radar and you all prefer cash payments, rolls of hundreds –“

“Nantucket Sawbucks.”

“Exactly.”

“Some people call them Nantucket tens, but that sounds like a political movement.”

“Maybe you are a political movement. Guerilla painting – steal from the rich and give to the poor. Which would be you, I assume. Unless you’re also donating to the Food Bank.”

“I can’t afford to donate to anyone! It’s like my dad used to say – I have to take out a loan to pay attention.”

“And yet your wife is driving a brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee.”

“That was a gift. From her father.”

“And you can prove that.”

“Do I have to?”

“You might.”

“So you can just … audit my whole life over some random accusation?”

I shrugged. “It’s one way to prove you’re innocent.”

“When we asked Cindy’s dad to help us pay for Montessori school, it was just like this. ‘Should you really be going out to dinner in your financial situation?’ ‘That sounds like quite the expensive vacation for a fellow in your straightened circumstances.’”

“So what did you do?”

“I told him to take his money and go fuck himself, and I put the kids in public school.”

“Good for you.”

“That wouldn’t really work in this case.”

“No, but I’ll tell you something, Mike. I’m going to stick the foundational assumption of American jurisprudence -- that you’re innocent until proved guilty. Still, someone’s been stealing stuff out of the houses you work on.”

“So … what are you going to do?”

I gave him my best encouraging smile. “Catch them.”

 

Unfortunately, I had another criminal matter to deal with that day, one much closer to home. It had begun the week before, with Jane Stiles’ yard sale. Rain had forced the event inside and we spent the morning hastily arranging antique furniture, glassware, rugs and runners and a rack of vintage women’s dresses in the cramped confines of her cottage.

Otherwise the sale was normal: advertised for ten o’clock, with the first early birds showing up at eight, helping themselves to a Downeyflake donut from the traditional box of a dozen Jane always set out for the shoppers.

The usual crowd appeared by the formal start of the sale – long-time customers (Jane’s family ran a legendary consignment store back in the day), old friends and the small tribe of local hoarders and collectors, along with the occasional tourist.

The scroungers were a diverse group – from High School history teacher Roy Danvers to Sam Trikilis, my garbage man; from landscapers and masons to Sheriff Bob Bulmer and a dot com millionaire who had just bought the giant house next door. The music from his parties on those early summer nights made Jane feel like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.

The kids all pitched in, Caroline talking up the merchandise and horse-trading the prices, Tim manning the cash box. Jane’s son Sam helped carry the smaller items to the cars. The sale went well and the rain let up in the early afternoon, with a fresh south wind tearing the clouds apart, revealing ragged patches of blue sky. In accordance with another long-standing Stiles family tradition, we skimmed some of the cash proceeds and treated ourselves to dinner for five at the Sconset café.

That was Sunday night. Tuesday morning Jane noticed that her fore-edge books were missing. She hadn’t included them in the sale and never would. They had belonged to her grandfather and she had inherited them after a scuffle with her sister, who had taken the five volumes from the old man’s house the day he died, along with a Matisse screen and various other valuables. Fortunately the will specified that Jane got the books, and she managed to recover them. Her sister already had them packaged up and ready to auction off on e-Bay.

I had never seen a fore-edge book before and neither had my kids. They’re the perfect artifact for a detective, because the art they feature – in the case of Jane’s books, paintings of various Nantucket landmarks – is hidden. The images only appear on the outside edge of the pages when you fan the book open. With the book closed, there’s no way to know the pictures exist.

It’s a book! It’s a toy! Tim seemed particularly fascinated with the trick, as well as the subject matter, Many of the featured destinations no longer existed – the black Washing Pond water tower, the old Straight Wharf theater. He even said he’d love to buy one if he only had the money and Jane was willing to part with it. I think she found his enthusiasm touching.

But then, on Tuesday, she saw him riding away from her cottage on his bike with his school backpack bulging.

And the books were gone.

It may seem like an open-and-shut case from this brief description: Tim had motive and opportunity. But Jane was mostly living with me that summer, and only used the cottage for a writing studio. Most of the time the place was deserted and she’d never even owned a key to the front door. Anyone who’d been snooping around at the sale could have come back for what my old boss in L.A., Chuck Obremski, used to call a “five-finger discount”. Everyone there had a motive, and anyone who took the time to study Jane’s routines had an opportunity.

But Tim was the only one Jane saw at the scene of the crime.

“I hate to even bring this up,” she said that night after dinner. We had strolled into town and were walking along Easy Street. She sat down on one of the benches facing the harbor.

“Tell me,” I said.

So she did.

We sat in silence for a while.

“You know he didn’t do it,” I said finally.

“I hope he didn’t. But he was out there by himself the day after the sale. What was he doing there?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re going to have to ask him.”

“Yeah.” Then after a few moments: “How would it work in one of your books?”

She relaxed a little, reached out a hand to let a passing Labradoodle take a sniff. She had time for one quick ruffle behind the ears before the owner, a slim blond in a yoga outfit, yanked him away. Jane squinted in thought. “You’d need parts of all five books to crack a code. Or maybe they’d be clues to some kind of crazy scavenger hunt.”

“How about someone just taking them and selling them to collectors?”

“Naaa. Too boring.”

“But this is the real world, and they’re worth a lot of money.”

“I guess.”

“Tim doesn’t need money. He’s a kid. He gets an allowance.”

“Unless he’s on drugs. Or something.”

“But he’s not. I know the signs. And so do you.”

She nodded. We sat for a while more. An artist started setting up to paint the view. “You still need to talk to him,” she said.

I shrugged. “Interrogations are my specialty.”

“Innocent until proven guilty,” Mike Henderson said, the next day, riding shotgun i9n my cruiser. “Not too many people really believe that. In America it’s more like you’re guilty even after you’re proved innocent – like O.J. Simpson, or that car guy. DeLorean. He was acquitted, too. But everybody knows he sold coke to finance his car company.”

“You’re a cynical man, Mike,” I said.

“Which makes me normal. And you’re not cynical at all – which makes you kind of a freak, to be honest.  But in a good way.”

“Especially right now.”

I was investigating the burglarized job sites, talking to the families. I had Mike with me because I wanted his painter’s eye on the crime scenes, and I was curious to see how he’d react to the victims. More importantly, I wanted them to see Mike  on good terms wioth the Chief, and cooperating with law enforcement.

Nothing we had found out so far made his case look any better. Two houses had surveillance cameras working year-round, and both had been crudely disabled. One had a piece of the burlap landscapers used to wrap shrubs against the cold blocking it. Hungry deer chewed through the burlap sometimes, and the wind could have blown a scrap against the lens. But this piece of fabric was cut cleanly, with a knife – like the Swiss Army knife that Mike always carried. The other house was even more damning. What looked like bird droppings obscuring the camera lens turned out to be paint – the very paint Mike had been using on the job.

The victims didn’t share my quaint beliefs about innocence and guilt any more than Mike did. They weren’t pleased to see him, but they had to pretend to welcome me. At least I got detailed inventories of the missing items. “My belongings,” one of the women moaned to me.

“A Stickley table, two Tiffany lamps, a first edition of the 1930 Random House Moby Dick with the Rockwell Kent illustrations. You have quite an eye, buddy,” he said to Mike.

“Someone does.”

I sighed. “It’s hard to hate a criminal who loves Rockwell Kent.”

“He doesn’t love Rockwell Kent! He knows he can get a couple of grand for the book. He’s probably sold it already.”

Cynic.

We caught a break on the last house Mike had painted. A hulking pile on Medouwe Creek road in Polpis, Mike still had the keys and the alarm codes. The family wasn’t going to arrive for another week. As usual they had threatened to be on island by Memorial Day to crack the whip on the tradesmen, but weren’t actually due until the Fourth of July. “They think we work because we’re afraid of them,” Mike said. “Actually we work because we want to get paid. False panic is not required.”

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 in 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 finger tip, 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 job site.

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-though 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 on 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 that edged 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 would 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 end paper 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 off her, the only ones where she had ever looked good, 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 car 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.