Edited EXCERPT
PARADISE ICE
Cape and Islands First Assistant District Attorney Michael O'Keefe told me to meet him Saturday night. He had agreed to discuss the recent murder of forty-six-year-old fashion writer Christa Worthington, who was found dead on the kitchen floor of her seaside cottage, her toddler daughter nestled by her side. O'Keefe said, "We'll meet. We'll talk. We'll talk about how we keep our mouths shut." He agreed to sit down, but first he was taking me to the Mashpee Wampanoag Winter Ball at the Sons of Italy Lodge in Cotuit. O'Keefe was running for office and had to show up at these community spectacles. It helped to have a woman along.
O'Keefe apologized for making me drive all the way up Route 6 on Suicide Alley, a tight two-lane highway that bisects the peninsula, famous for its long chronicle of head-ons. A lot of travelers avoid the bottleneck and turn around. O'Keefe said he didn't know why anyone with free will would choose to live way out on the tip.
The Cape Cod peninsula is like a flexed arm thrust into the sea. Truro is at its "wrist," and is only a mile wide at its most narrow site. The slender hook is the afterthought of the Wisconsin Stage glacier, a monstrous wall of ice ten thousand feet thick that shaped all of New England twenty-five thousand years ago. Today, the Outer Cape is still carved and remastered by tides, storm surges, waves, and wind. The Cape is a river of sand; the shoreline continually shifts and rebuilds its ridges. Backshore lagoons arise and disappear from one year to the next. The finial arm is always roaring and tingling, eroding three to six feet a year. All aspects of life this far out are evoked and controlled, atoned for or punished, by the sea. That's what I like about it.
"Why do you live way out there, on that clam strip?" O'Keefe said.
"You mean Truro?"
"That wilderness. Why do you people go for that?"
You people could be Truro's movers and shakers, but more likely O'Keefe is referring to the Land's End losers, lost souls and drifters who wash ashore and pile up down here.
"I guess it's not for everybody," I said. O'Keefe's sentiments mirrored those of the Reverend James Freeman, who in 1790 wrote about Truro, "What could induce any person to remain in such a place?" Even today, many people think that the Outer Cape is a "no man's land," "a god-forsaken wasteland," or "a situation so completely removed from the stir of society," as Emily Brontë writes in Wuthering Heights. Even Thoreau was appalled by the Outer Cape, and wrote of Truro, "We shuddered at the thought of living there" and "The walker there must soon eat his heart."
But for us it's Eden. It's heaven on earth. In fact, at the end of the selectmen's annual report filed in 1982, it was written, "The Board of Selectmen shall continue to make every effort to seek ways to keep Truro the Garden of Eden of Massachusetts." But I wasn't going to try to convert O'Keefe. I was getting used to his jabs.
The event of a murder in our small community was never expected. There hadn't been a murder in Truro for thirty years. Truro is renowned for its stunning wilderness, its remoteness, its quiet. In a recent issue of Men's Journal, Truro was placed near the top of the list in their survey "Fifty Best Places to Live." The article noted that one reason for its charmed status is that Truro is just about "invisible. And it means to stay that way." No such luck, when, for instance, one summer, Air Force One helicopters swooped in to deliver Vice President Al Gore and his family at a summer retreat. And Hollywood celebrates "invisible" Truro as the ideal bucolic spot in its blockbuster movies Men in Black and Men in Black II. In both these films, our small town is depicted as home and haven for Tommy Lee Jones's character, who flees violence and alien threats and returns here to become the "Truro postmaster." As absurd as that might be, before Christa's death was discovered on January 6, a murder in our town would have seemed even a further stretch.
Christa Worthington, the one-time Women's Wear Daily dynamo turned single mom, was a high-profile victim. Her killing presented instant contradictions; it crossed boundary lines within the small insular society of Truro, which had always seemed charmed and protected, like a village in a snow globe. Incongruent hitches emerged in a hodgepodge. Christa's chic CV, her Yankee credentials, and patrician lifestyle had become enmeshed with the Outer Cape's blue-collar mystique of mariner traditions, rogue sailors, lady-killers, and one local legend in particular.
Secrets, sex, and money.
The principals at the core of the murder were an offbeat triangle. There was Tony Jackett, a handsome harbormaster/shellfish constable; Tim Arnold, a quiet, sometimes stormy children's book author; and the woman who had entranced them both, Christa Worthington, a fashion writer. Praised by her editors, one of whom had called her a "fashion anthropologist," Christa left the fashion world and had holed up in Truro with her out-of-wedlock "miracle baby."
In addition to Jackett and Arnold, the murder had an unusual cornucopia of possible suspects. "Suspect is a TV word," O'Keefe griped, but the list of people "in the orbit of opportunity" was a ragtag patchwork of the American quilt.
The list included the philanderer's jilted wife, Susan, who remained "the undisputed most beautiful girl to ever graduate from Provincetown High School"; Jackett's edgy, Rapunzel-look-alike daughter, Braunwyn; the estranged husband of the edgy daughter, Keith Amato; Jackett's handsome and monastic sons, Luc and Kyle; and Christa's own father, Christopher "Toppy" Worthington, a retired Boston lawyer. Toppy's young girlfriend, Beth Porter, an ex-prostitute with a heroin habit, was also under investigation. A contrapuntal rumor soon began to circulate that Porter wasn't just a shack job but that she was Toppy's love child from an extramarital affair he had had when Christa was growing up.
That's quite a piebald gymkhana and I needed O'Keefe to help me sort through it.
O'Keefe is usually deadpan, with a wicked gleam that surfaces now and then. His stony face, dark hair, and compact physique is an attractive amalgam of two schools: the film noir detective and the all-too-familiar mainstream-TV Kojak. His locution is acerbic, clipped. He speaks in monosyllabic crits of whatever falls in front of him. Serious to a fault, his veneer is hard to break through, highly polished, and he doesn't volunteer much. But his introspections sizzle beneath the surface. It's my goal to soften him up. It's going to be tough to penetrate the steely prosecutor coupled with the savvy politician in him.
O'Keefe had told me, "I've stood over every dead body on the Cape for the last eighteen years. Unattended deaths--you have to figure out if it's suicide, accident, or murder. Like that boy killed last week in West Yarmouth--that was a violent crime. That kid lost twelve pints of his fourteen pints of blood."
"Twelve pints?"
"There's a lot of blood in you," he said.
That's almost a river. I imagined him rolling up his trouser cuffs.
"I've got a mortician's sense of humor by now," he said.
I wanted to learn how O'Keefe nosed around "murder world" without it seeping into him. It was taking its toll on me.
