Would it be terrible of Ed to say that he wouldn’t be sad either? Yes, he thinks, terrible. “Let’s wait and see what the fire inspector turns up,” the Chief says. “The good news is that Coco is okay and I can end my tenure with a win—or at least not a loss.”
“End your tenure?” Zara says. “My calendar says it’s only Friday. You aren’t finished until Monday. We have all weekend for something else to pop up.”
As the Chief is going around the small rotary by the mid-island post office, a silver Range Rover with the vanity plate BEAST cuts right in front of him, the driver flipping Ed off as he does.
That’s it, Ed thinks. Third time’s the charm. He throws on his lights and siren and pulls the kid over in full view of midday traffic.
“License and registration, please. You failed to yield in a rotary. The vehicles already in the rotary have the right-of-way,” the Chief says.
“How do you expect me to know that?” the kid says, his blond forelock falling into his eyes. Ed checks the license: Gryphon Dreck, hailing from a town called Newmony. If Ed had made up a name and a town for this tool, he couldn’t have done a better job.
The Chief heads back to his car, calls it in, then issues the maximum-fine ticket, which gives him enormous satisfaction. “I expect you to know it because it’s the law,” he says when he hands Gryphon the ticket. “The police are here for your safety. I hear about you flipping off any other officers, you’re going to have a problem. Am I understood?”
Gryphon mumbles something to the affirmative, and the Chief watches as he checks the ticket fine.
“What the hell?” he says.
Ed smiles. “Have a nice day, Beast.” He climbs back into the Suburban, looks at Zara, and says, “Now that was a swan song.”
41. The Cobblestone Telegraph III
The news about Triple Eight burning to the ground and the Richardsons’ personal assistant, Coco, going missing off their yacht nearly breaks the cobblestone telegraph. So many of us have a personal connection to the story that it’s hard to remain impartial. What actually happened?
Fire chief Stu Vick calls Chief Kapenash with the inspector’s report midday on Friday.
“It looks like the culprit was a curling iron left on in the primary suite,” Stu says.
“A curling iron?” the Chief says. Then he thinks: Leslee’s hair. Wait until Andrea hears about this. “So it’s being ruled an accident?”
“Someone wanted it to look like an accident,” Stu says. “But we found an accelerant. At first we weren’t sure what it was. Not gasoline, not kerosene, not lighter fluid. A little research revealed that its profile matched certain kinds of perfumes. Practically the first thing the inspector said to me was that the site smelled like burned birthday cake. I joked that it would have been wedding cake.” Stu pauses. “You know, because of the vow renewal.”
“But you’re sure there was an accelerant?” the Chief says. Which meant arson.
“Oh, yes,” Stu says. “Also, I don’t know if this matters or not, but one of the homeowners crossed the police tape and went up to the garage apartment and took a couple of boxes out of it. I told her she needed to leave everything up there untouched since that’s where the girl was living.” Stu clears his throat. “I won’t repeat what she said back to me.”
“What did she do with the boxes?” the Chief asks.
“She took them on the dinghy back out to the boat.”
Presence of an accelerant is enough for the Chief to get a search warrant for not only the garage but Hedonism as well. The Chief checks Coco’s notebook and sees that a few days before the fire, a package arrived for Leslee from Neiman Marcus containing three bottles of Guerlain Double Vanille perfume. Was that the accelerant? If so, was Leslee to blame, or—Ed’s heart sinks—do they need to take another look at Coco?
By Friday afternoon, the Nantucket police are all over the garage apartment as well as the trash and recycling in the actual garage. They find little of interest; the boxes in the spare bedroom contain Leslee’s clothes, the ones she supposedly intended to donate.
The Chief and Zara catch a ride with Lucy Shields, the harbormaster, out to Hedonism. They call Bull and Leslee up to the deck—Leslee is still in her white dress—and leave both the Richardsons under Lucy’s watchful eye while they search the boat.
The Chief is the one who finds the boxes, shoved in the crawl space under the bunk in the crew’s quarters, a blanket thrown over them. Someone did not want these boxes found. Ed gets down on his hands and knees, grunts as he pulls the boxes free. Blood pounds in his ears; he’s short of breath. The universe is testing his endurance with all this heavy lifting in his final days.
“Chief Washington!” he calls.
Zara helps him bring the two boxes out to the living area. The boxes both say DONATE on the sides and they’re bound up with packing tape; Zara searches for a knife in the galley so they can slice them open. Meanwhile, they hear Leslee up on deck giving Lucy a hard time: “I’m not sure what they think they’re going to find, this is insane, our house burned down and you’re treating us like we’re the criminals!”
Inside the boxes is… Monopoly money? There are bricks of what appears to be cash, only it’s in candy colors—orange, yellow, lime green. The Chief picks up a green brick and sees Queen Elizabeth II’s face.
It’s Australian money. A lot of it.
The money, totaling nearly half a million Australian dollars, is enough for Chiefs Kapenash and Washington to arrest the Richardsons for arson. But before their lawyer even arrives at the police station, Leslee Richardson confesses: She acted alone; Bull knew nothing about it. While everyone was waiting on Hedonism, Leslee placed her hot curling iron into one of the Amalfi lemon crates filled with packing straw and doused the whole thing with her perfume. After turning off the alarms, she created a trail of perfume-soaked rags down the hall to the library, where she hoped the books and the closet filled with bourbon would be enough to combust the rest of the house.
Her motive? Insurance money, of course. Bull’s business is going belly-up, the IRS have his feet to the fire, he owes them millions, and the real estate deal that he planned to do with Eddie Pancik and Addison Wheeler soured. The Australian cash is theirs; Leslee has been skimming off their accounts for years so that she had an emergency fund.
“I would have burned down all of Nantucket if I could have,” Leslee tells her attorney, Val Gluckstern, causing Val’s eyebrows to shoot up. “I hate this island and everyone on it.”
Curling iron, we think. Perfume. Amalfi lemons and hidden cash. Leslee Richardson is one hell of a glamorous arsonist.
But will she be charged with pushing her personal assistant, Colleen Coyle, off the back of her boat? Aggravated assault, perhaps even attempted murder?
Colleen “Coco” Coyle was discovered on the south shore of Tuckernuck, exhausted but alive. She has no recollection how she ended up in the water. She realizes that she could easily claim Leslee pushed her, adding a few more years to Leslee’s sentence. But Coco isn’t sure what happened. She must have slipped, in which case the faulty latch on the back gate could be a problem for the Richardsons should Coco decide to sue.
What we don’t know in the days following these events—and what we won’t, in fact, find out for many months—is that Coco won’t sue the Richardsons. Instead, she writes a screenplay titled The Personal Concierge, set at a gracious and iconic house on Nantucket that is purchased by a couple who set out to infiltrate and dominate Nantucket’s summer social scene. There are familiar details in the screenplay: The personal concierge has a handsome boat-captain boyfriend and a best friend who takes selfies of the two of them and sends them to her ex-girlfriend. The couple the concierge works for throw extravagant parties that involve wigs, nudity, and partner-swapping. The wife cheats at pickleball; the husband pits two local real estate agents against each other in a land-development deal.
Coco sends her screenplay to three producers in Hollywood whose contact information she acquired from creeping into Bull’s email account (Coco has been saving Bull Richardson’s password for the right moment). A bidding war ensues. Warner Bros. buys the screenplay for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.
Bull Richardson sells Hedonism back to Northrop and Johnson for a fraction of what he paid for it (the accident devalued the boat severely). There will be no insurance payout on the house, but Bull puts the empty land on the market for seventeen million—he wants to recoup his money somehow, though both Eddie and Addison agree he’ll be lucky to get a third of that, and it will likely take years for some abject climate denier to come along.
Bull stays with Leslee despite her two-and-a-half-year sentence at MCI-Plymouth (he, at least, meant every word of his vow renewal). Leslee makes friends in prison, of course, and shamelessly flirts with the corrections officers. Six months before her release date, she arranges for a viewing of The Personal Concierge, which earned great acclaim on the big screen before finally coming to Netflix.
“This movie,” Leslee tells her cellblock mates, “is about me.”
Leslee generally approves of how “Layla” in the film is depicted; they cast a beautiful, award-winning actress. Leslee loves the scene near the end where Layla takes the boxes of cash and escapes from Pocomo Harbor on her speedboat, Decadence (why didn’t Leslee think of doing this in real life?), before being caught by the Coast Guard.
