“His body?” Anastasia plants her hands on her substantial hips and pivots toward the Kydd and me, her heavily outlined eyes opened unnaturally wide. “My father wanted to be cremated,” she tells us. “The whole family knew that.” She tosses her hair toward Louisa. “Even her.”
“That’s true,” Louisa says, “but still.” She shakes her head. “It seems like we should find him first.”
“My father’s been dead a week,” Anastasia snaps at her. “And you haven’t even begun to make arrangements?”
Louisa looks uncertain, as if she thinks perhaps Anastasia has a valid point, as if the idea of a funeral hasn’t occurred to Louisa before now.
“Well, of course you haven’t,” Anastasia continues. She turns toward the Kydd and me, and a synthetic smile spreads across her face. “You’ve been way too busy commiserating with your lawyers.”
Glen Powers clears his throat. “Maybe now’s not a good time to discuss it,” he says to Louisa. “Let’s talk over dinner.”
Louisa looks at the Kydd for a moment and then back at Glen, shaking her head. “Not tonight,” she says. “I’m afraid I’m rather exhausted by all of this.”
Anastasia laughs and turns toward Lance. “What did I tell you?” she demands. “It’s a good thing we came down here. We’ll have to take care of my father’s arrangements. His waif of a wife is way too exhausted.”
I can think of a lot of words to describe Louisa Rawlings. Waif isn’t one of them.
Lance nods a silent agreement toward Anastasia, something I suspect he does often, and the beast yips again.
“Tomorrow, then,” Glen says to Louisa. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”
“We’ll see,” she answers. “Let’s talk in the afternoon.” Her glance at me is almost imperceptible. “I have a rather busy morning.”
Glen Powers seems eager to take his leave. He bids all of us good-bye, even Lucifer, and then heads out of the room far more quickly than he entered. “I’ll see you out,” Louisa says.
The Kydd turns to me as soon as they’re gone. “I’d better get started on that research,” he says. His eyes, though, send a more desperate message. Let’s get the hell out of here, they scream. Fast.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve had about enough of Family Feud too. I nod at him and we both stand to repack our briefcases.
Lance and Lucifer remain stationed against the far wall as we pack up, Satan’s namesake momentarily soothed by Lance’s constant stroking. Anastasia strolls to the kitchen sink, where she yanks the curtain aside to watch Glen Powers and Louisa in the driveway. When a car door slams, she drops the curtain and shakes her shiny hair. “That guy,” she says to no one in particular, “is a special kind of stupid.”
CHAPTER 13
Monday, October 16
Harry’s old Jeep sits alone in the office driveway when I arrive at eight o’clock. It looks worse than usual, as it often does on Mondays. Whenever he has a free Sunday, Harry four-wheels down Nauset Beach and stakes out a remote spot. He spends the day, the evening, and sometimes the wee hours of the next morning surf casting for stripers, blues, or whatever’s biting that week. He went yesterday. The Jeep’s mud flaps are sand-caked and the bottom half of its olive green chassis is white with the chalky residue of salt water.
The front office is empty. I leave my briefcase and jacket on one of the chairs and head for the kitchen in search of coffee. Harry’s office door is open and he’s laughing out loud on the telephone. Harry is one of the only people I know who’s immune to Monday-morning malaise. I wave to him as I pass, fill my mug from the pot he’s brewed, and return to lean in his doorway. He gestures for me to come in and sit.
That’s more easily suggested than done. The two chairs facing his desk are piled high with files, legal pads, and photocopied cases. One is topped off with a crumpled deli bag and an empty chocolate milk carton, litter from a prior day’s lunch. We all suffer from a chronic lack of administrative help in this office. Harry’s case is critical.
I lean against his wooden bookcase instead. He tells the person on the other end of the line to forget it, he’ll take his chances in court. He hangs up and laughs again. “She’s a piece of work,” he says.
Enough said. The person on the other end of the phone was Geraldine Schilling, Barnstable County’s District Attorney. She’s a piece of work by anybody’s standards; a pain in the ass by Harry’s. He must be feeling charitable this morning.
“She wants Rinky to do time,” he reports. “Sixty days.” He shakes his head at the telephone.
Rinky is Chatham’s only homeless person and he’s homeless by choice. He’s a tortured soul who prefers the streets and the woods to the shelter repeatedly offered by locals. He also prefers the voices in his head to anyone else’s conversation. Rinky rarely speaks to anybody the rest of us can see. Court documents dub him Rinky Snow, but no one seems to know where the surname came from. I secretly harbor the notion that it stems from the stuff he sleeps on half the year.
“He could do worse,” I tell Harry.
“Not in October, he couldn’t.”
Rinky has lived on Chatham’s streets since his return from the Vietnam War in the mid-sixties. It didn’t take long for the year-rounders to recognize his latent wounds. By unspoken agreement, we look the other way when Rinky spends the night in the woods on town-owned property, and when he drinks from a brown paper bag in public, and when he utters the occasional obscenity to an unsuspecting tourist.
Even the cops are in on the arrangement. They turn blind eyes to Rinky’s antics too—unless it’s winter. In winter they pick him up whenever they can, haul him in, and hold him as long as his transgression-of-the-moment allows. That way he won’t freeze to death during our frigid winter nights. Come spring’s thaw, they once again look the other way like the rest of us.
Harry’s been representing Rinky for decades. Rinky’s never done time as early as October, and Harry doesn’t intend to let him start now. Hell, sixty days starting now barely taps into the cold season.
But Rinky’s transgression-of-the-moment is more serious than usual. When two vacationing women approached him on Saturday night to ask for directions, he took a knife from under his coat and caressed its six-inch blade. As Harry sees it, Rinky didn’t actually threaten the visitors—he simply exercised poor judgment in sharing his prized possession with them. The two women don’t see it that way.
Of course, in Rinky Snow’s universe he could just as easily have been brandishing a bayonet—or a banana.
Rinky will be arraigned later today, but he’s not my concern at the moment. Harry will take good care of him, as usual. “Where the hell is the Kydd?” I ask.
Harry shrugs. “Haven’t seen him. I thought maybe you two went straight to the station.”
I shake my head. “We’re not going to the station. We’re meeting Walker here. At ten.” I lean forward and look out the window to see if the Kydd’s truck has pulled in yet. It hasn’t.
“Walker agreed?” Harry asks.
“Agreed to what?”
He smiles up at me. “Agreed to meet here?”
I’m distracted. Harry’s amused by that. So now I’m annoyed. “Of course he agreed. Why wouldn’t he?”
Harry’s smile broadens, but he says nothing. I know what he’s thinking. Mitch Walker agreed—at least in part—because he knows Louisa Rawlings is a force to be reckoned with. Walker has met her only once, but with Louisa, once is enough. Besides, he knows where she lives and that means he has a pretty good handle on her net worth. Money matters, especially at the earliest stages of a criminal investigation.