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.

I decide to ignore Harry’s apparent amusement. I’ve no interest in discussing Louisa Rawlings’s many assets with him.

“The Kydd picked a hell of a day to sleep in,” I say as I head out of his office.

“Don’t worry,” he answers my back. “He’s done your warrant research.”

“How do you know that?” I turn and lean in the doorway again.

“He was here yesterday,” Harry says. “A man on a mission.”

“Yesterday? I thought you went fishing yesterday.”

“I did. But not until late afternoon. I stopped in here first for an hour or so to check messages and pick up a little.” He sweeps the room with one arm, as if he might have a shot at a job with Merry Maids.

I laugh out loud. I can’t help it. It’s scary to think this is the after-cleanup picture.

He frowns when I look back at him, apparently insulted. “Anyway,” he says, “the Kydd was already working when I got here and he was still hard at it when I left. He said he would be tied up last night. Wanted to get the job done by the end of the day.”

This information should make me feel better. But for some reason I can’t articulate, it doesn’t.

“And he looked like the future of civilization depended on the results of his research,” Harry continues. “So I think you can relax.”

I’m not relaxed. Harry’s news unsettles me. The Kydd made a point of telling me he had no plans. But so what? Plans develop sometimes. And why the hell should I care anyhow?

Harry rests his head against the back of his tall leather chair and looks up at the ceiling for a moment. “You know,” he says, pointing his pen at me, “I think maybe the Kydd has found himself a woman.”

“A what?”

“A woman,” he repeats, laughing. “You’ve heard of the species?”

I stand up straight in the doorway. As usual, my stomach races ahead of my brain.

“Think about it,” he continues, smiling and tapping the pen in his palm. “Big plans for last night. Working like hell so he could keep them. Later to the office than usual this morning. I smell a romance brewing.”

I’m speechless.

Harry winks at me.

I don’t wink back. The Kydd’s red pickup—parked in Louisa Rawlings’s driveway early yesterday—pops into my head. Morning dew undisturbed.

Harry chuckles. “Maybe my offer to hook him up with a good-looking inmate got to him, scared him into finding a sweetheart on his own.”

Now I see different scenes: the Kydd matter-of-factly negotiating the hardware on the double doors of Louisa’s veranda; his familiarity with the steam room switches in the Queen’s Spa.

I force myself to answer Harry. “Maybe you’re right,” I tell him. But I hope like hell he’s wrong. And it’s not because I begrudge the Kydd a love life.

I hurry back to the front office, grab my briefcase and jacket, and head out the door. Harry’s wrong, I tell myself. And so am I. It’s as simple as that. We’re just plain wrong.