THE PROBLEM WITH LOCATING CAPTAIN HOWIE WAS THAT HE was no longer where Ki’anna had known him to be. Not to worry, she assured me. She had gone to school with some of the island’s policemen and she would make some calls.
It took more than a day to find him in Poipu Beach, on the opposite side of the island, about as far away from Princeville as he could be. He had been a boat captain once. Now he ran a small condominium complex that provided units as vacation rentals.
The Hana Palms was three stories high, built of nondescript stucco and situated directly above a rocky beach. It had a parking lot in front and a small fenced-in swimming pool with a concrete deck between the lot and the building. Although there were a few cars in the lot, there did not appear to be any people around at all.
A breezeway led to the ocean side, where a green lawn looked nicer than it felt on bare feet. I retraced my steps and saw what I had missed on my first pass, a living quarters off the breezeway that doubled as an office. I opened a screen door in which part of the screen was separated from the frame. A bell tinkled above my head and a minute later a shirtless man appeared at a counter set up in the front room.
“Aloha,” he said, as if he was challenging me to a fight.
I figured I had my man. I asked if he was Cap’n Howie, just to make sure.
“You also known as Detective Landry?”
The man’s eyebrows rose as slowly as an elevator.
I went right to the point. “Chief DiMasi told me I could find you here.”
I showed him my card. He inspected it and said, “You wanna rent a condo?” There was just a bit of hope in the question.
“No. I need to talk to you about a case you worked on years ago.”
The man put his hands on the counter and tilted back like a water skier. He had a long, lean torso, with white hairs sprouting from his chest and a few from his shoulders. He was clean-shaven, but the hair on his head was sparse and blown about at various angles. He could have been seventy. He could also have been no more than sixty. “Got telephone service. Got email. Even got teleconference things these days. No need to fly all the way here just to talk to me.”
“This is a special case.”
Howard Landry could have done a lot of things at that moment. My own options were limited. If he had told me to get lost I probably would have had to go back to Princeville and drink whatever Primos were still available at the bar. But he spared me that. He asked if I wanted a beer right there.
WE SAT ON LOUNGE chairs facing the ocean. The lawn chairs had plastic cross-straps, some of which were broken. Ahead of us, the water was rough and sapphire blue. I wasn’t used to the color. On the Cape the water tends to be green when it isn’t gray. And if it ever is blue, it is only from a distance and more cobalt than sapphire.
Landry didn’t give me a Primo, he gave me a Sam Adams. “Taste of home,” he said, as if Sam Adams was a treat for me, and we clinked bottle necks because I was still being polite.
“How long you been here?” I asked, settling in.
“Seven years,” he said without looking at me.
“Like it?”
“It’s fuckin’ paradise, isn’t it?” He didn’t sound like it was paradise.
I took a diversionary approach with my next question, trying to make nice with a statement that clearly wasn’t true. “You look pretty young for a man who’s been retired seven years.”
“Took it early. When I was fifty. I’d put in twenty-five years. Figured that was enough.”
“Your last big case was the Heidi Telford murder, huh?”
“That what you’re here about?” He still hadn’t looked at me, not since we’d touched bottles.
“Remember her father?”
“Anything New.”
“That’s right. He’s still looking.”
“Must be a nutcase by now.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You dwell that much, let it take over your life, wipes out everything else. I know. Believe me, I seen it happen.” He took a long pull on his beer. “What’s he come up with now?”
“A girl who was at the Gregory compound on the night Heidi died.”
Landry held the bottle to his lips. Without lowering it, he said, “You talkin’ about the babysitter?”
“I’m talking about one of the girls who went to the Gregorys’ to party after the race.”
The bottle stayed. Landry talked around it. “There wasn’t no party.”
“But you checked it out, didn’t you? I was told, I was told by the Gregorys themselves, that you were asking them questions.”
That threw him. Like McFetridge, he had to figure out if I was friend or foe. “I asked questions of everybody I could find.”
“Thing was, I looked in the file. Didn’t mention the Gregorys. Didn’t say anything one way or the other about a party.”
Landry lowered the bottle. He had his answer now. He turned his head and leveled his eyes on me. They were more or less a washed-out blue, and I doubted they were ever used to show merriment. “I didn’t put down every false lead I had.”
“It seemed to me you started off chasing every possible lead, whether it was false or not. Then all of a sudden you stopped.”
“I stopped because I wasn’t getting nowhere.”
I gave him a number of nods, each one meant to be a strand of false hope. I said, “It’s unusual, though, to see that much diligence up to a point, and then almost nothing after that. Wouldn’t you agree, detective?”
He obviously had not been called detective in a long time. It brought him up short. Made him blink. “You wanna tell me what in particular you’re complaining about?”
“What I just said. Looking through the file, it was almost as if something happened somewhere along the line and you decided to close down the investigation.”
“I didn’t close it. I handed it off to Pooch.”
“Detective Iacupucci.”
“That’s right. Pooch.”
“Did he do anything with it?”
“Don’t know. I left.”
“And no one ever got in touch with you after you left?”
“That’s right.”
“That strike you as curious?”
“I don’t know. I never been retired before.”
I smiled, as if he had made a good joke. He did not smile back. He was looking at me warily. It was probably the look he had developed when he was about to arrest somebody and was thinking that a weapon might get pulled. I stopped smiling. It wasn’t doing me any good.
“File lists every friend, friend of friend, waiter, shopkeeper you talked to, but you never so much as mentioned the Gregorys. Why was that, detective?”
“Case as serious as that one,” he said, “you wanna be careful what you put down. Never know who’s gonna read it.”
“You thought the wrong people might read the police file?”
“I think, counselor,” he said, dragging out the last word, paying me back for calling him detective, “things work in funny ways back in the Bay State. The Cape, in particular.”
“So you were doing a little preventive maintenance, is that it? Deciding what should go in the file and what shouldn’t.”
“Something like that.”
“And the chief, did you tell the chief what you didn’t put in the file?”
“Depends. After a while you don’t keep reporting that you got nothing to report.”
I tried to keep the questions coming. Hit him with another as soon as he was done answering the one before. It was a basic courtroom technique. “You tell him what the people at the Gregory compound said?”
“Don’t recall.”
“He told me you couldn’t find everyone who was there that night.”
“So?”
“So you couldn’t find everyone; you must have found someone.”
Landry drank his beer, staring along the barrel of his bottle while he followed the logic.
“Who did you find?” I pressed.
“Gimme some names and I’ll tell you.”
“Peter Martin; Ned, Jamie, and Cory Gregory; Paul McFetridge; Jason Stockover.”
“That it?”
“A girl named Patty Afantakis.”
He didn’t ask who she was. He asked if I had talked to her. I said I had.
“What did she tell you?”
“Nothing. She wouldn’t tell me anything, except it was clear she was there.”
He nodded. “Anybody else?”
“Patty said she was with a girl named Leanne.”
“You talk to her?”
“Nope. Haven’t found her yet.”
Landry finished off the bottle and threw it on the lawn. His own lawn. I looked at mine and saw I had barely gotten beyond the first sip.
“All right, counselor,” he said, his voice suddenly very taut, “you want to know what was going on? Fine, I’ll tell you. Ned Gregory was fucking his babysitter, that’s what. His whachucallit, his au pair. Eighteen-year-old beauty who happened to be the daughter of a guy who owns a nationwide chain of movie theaters and contributes a zillion bucks a year to all the Gregory campaigns. And Ned’s got a wife and three kids and being groomed to run for some office himself and there he is, layin’ pipe with the girl who’s supposed to be watching his children while his wife’s away. You get the picture now, pal?”
“So you were covering up.”
“You wanna call it that. It didn’t have nothin’ to do with the investigation. So you put something down in writing, all it does is embarrass the people who pay for the Little League fields and the skating rink and underwrite the summer Pops concerts, what’s it gonna get you?”
“You don’t put it down, maybe it gets you retirement in Hawaii.”
We were dangerously close to a physical confrontation. I was pointed toward the ocean, but out of the corner of my eye I could see his fist balled. I tensed. If the fist came flying, I was going to hit him over the head with the bottle I was still holding. Until then, I was going to keep looking at the water.
He elected to keep glaring at me.
I made an effort to change the subject, see if I could temper him a bit. “Sounds like there are things you miss back there,” I said.
“I miss the fucking Red Sox, that’s what I miss.” And with that, Howard Landry got up and left me.