Plum Island

by Nelson DeMille

  I said, “Archival science. Fascinating.”

  “It can be. I worked at Stony Brook for a while, then got a job out here in the Cutchogue Free Library. Founded in 1841, and they still pay the same salary. I was raised here, but it’s hard to make a living out here unless you’re in some sort of business. I own a florist shop.”

  “Yes, I saw the van.”

  “That’s right. You’re a detective.” She asked, “So what are you doing out here?”

  “Convalescing.”

  “Oh, right. Now I remember. You look fine.” So did she, but you’re not supposed to hit on the witness, so I didn’t mention it. She had a nice, soft, breathy voice which I found sexy.

  I asked her, “Do you know Fredric Tobin?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “He belongs to the Peconic Historical Society.”

  “He’s our largest benefactor. He gives wine and money.”

  “Are you a wine connoisseur?”

  “No. Are you?”

  “Yes. I can tell the difference between a Merlot and a Budweiser. Blindfolded.”

  She smiled.

  I said, “I’ll bet a lot of people wish they’d gotten into wine years ago. I mean, as a business.”

  “I don’t know. It’s interesting, but not that lucrative.”

  “It is for Fredric Tobin,” I pointed out.

  “Fredric lives way above his means.”

  I sat up. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he does.”

  “Do you know him well? Personally?”

  She asked me, “Do you know him personally?” I really don’t like to be interrogated, but I was on thin ice here. How are the mighty fallen. I replied, “I was at one of his wine-tasting things. Back in July. Were you there?”

  “I was.”

  “I was with the Gordons.”

  “That’s right. I think I saw you.”

  “I didn’t see you. I would have remembered.” She smiled.

  I asked again, “How well do you know him?”

  “Actually, we were involved.”

  “In what?”

  “I mean we were lovers, Mr. Corey.” This was disappointing to hear. Nevertheless, I stuck to business and asked, “When was this?”

  “It began … oh, about two years ago, and it lasted— Is this relevant?”

  “You can refuse to answer any question.”

  “I know that.”

  I asked her, “What happened to the relationship?”

  “Nothing. Fredric just collects women. It lasted for about nine months. Not a record for either of us, but not bad. We did Bordeaux, the Loire, Paris. Weekends in Manhattan. It was all right. He’s very generous.”

  I mulled this over. I had developed a tiny crush on Emma Whitestone, and I was a little annoyed that Fredric had beat me to the cookie jar. I said, “I’m going to ask you a personal question, and you don’t have to answer. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you still … ? What I mean is—”

  “Fredric and I are still friends. He has a live-in now. Sondra Wells. A total phony, including the name.”

  “Right. You said he lives above his means.”

  “Yes. He owes the banks and private investors a small fortune. He spends too much. The sad thing is that he’s very successful, and he could probably live very well on his profits if it weren’t for Foxwoods.”

  “Foxwoods?”

  “Yes, you know. The Indian gambling casino. In Connecticut.”

  “Oh, right. He gambles?”

  “Does he ever. I went with him once. He lost about five thousand dollars in one weekend. Blackjack and roulette.”

  “My goodness. I hope he had a return ferry ticket.” She laughed.

  Foxwoods. You took the Orient Point ferry with your car aboard to New London, or the Foxwoods high-speed ferry and bus to Foxwoods, blew it out, and came back to Orient on Sunday night. A nice diversion from the workaday world of the North Fork, and if you weren’t compulsive, you had a nice time, you made a few hundred or you lost a few hundred, you had dinner, saw a show, slept in a nice room. A good date weekend. A lot of the locals, however, didn’t like the proximity to sin. Some wives didn’t like the boys going over with the grocery money. But, like anything else, it was a matter of degree.

  So, Fredric Tobin, cool and dandy viniculturist, a man who seemed in control, was a gambler. But if you thought about it, was there a bigger gamble than the grape crop every year? The fact was, grapes were still experimental here, and so far, so good. No blight, no diseases, no frosts or heat spells. But one day, Hurricane Annabelle or Zeke was going to blow a billion grapes into the Long Island Sound, sort of like the biggest tub of Kool-Aid ever.

  And then there were Tom and Judy, who gambled with little pathogenic bugs. Then they gambled with something else and lost. Fredric gambled with the crop and won, then gambled with cards and roulette and he, too, lost.

  I said to Ms. Whitestone, “Do you know if the Gordons ever went with Mr. Tobin to Foxwoods?”

  “I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t know. It’s been about a year since Fredric and I parted.”

  “Right. But you’re still friends. You still talk.”

  “I guess we’re friends. He doesn’t like it when his ex-lovers are angry with him. He wants to keep them all as friends. This is interesting at parties. He loves to be in a room with a dozen women that he’s had sex with.”

  Who doesn’t? I asked her, “And you don’t think Mr. Tobin and Mrs. Gordon were involved?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I don’t think so. He wasn’t a wife chaser.”

  “How gallant.”

  “No, he was chicken. Husbands and boyfriends frightened him. He must have had a bad experience once.” She sort of chuckled in her breathy way. She added, “In any case, he’d rather have Tom Gordon as a friend than Judy Gordon as a lover.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. I never understood Fredric’s attachment to Tom Gordon.”

  “I thought it was the other way around.”

  “That’s what most people thought. It was Fredric who sought Tom out.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. At first, I thought it was a way of getting to Judy, but then I came to learn that Fredric doesn’t do wives. Then I figured it had to do with the Gordons’ attractiveness and their jobs. Fredric is a collector of people. He fancies himself the leading social personage of the North Fork. Maybe he is. He’s not the richest man, but the winery gives him some status. You understand?”

  I nodded. Sometimes you dig for days and weeks and come up with nothing. Sometimes you hit gold. But sometimes it’s fool’s gold. I mean, this was fascinating, but was it relevant to the double homicide? Also, was this an exaggeration? A little revenge on Ms. Whitestone’s part? This would not be the first ex-lover who sent me sniffing up the wrong tree in order to make life miserable for the party of the second part. So I asked her point-blank, “Do you think Fredric Tobin could have killed the Gordons?”

  She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, then said, “Fred-ric? He’s not capable of violence of any sort.”

  “How do you know?”

  She smiled and replied, “God knows, I gave him enough reason to take a swing at me.” She added, “He just wasn’t physical. He was in total control of his temper and his emotions. And why would he want to kill Tom and Judy Gordon?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know why they were killed. Do you?”

  She didn’t reply for a second, then said, “Maybe drugs.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Well … Fredric was concerned about them. They did coke.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  Interesting. Especially since Fredric never mentioned it to me, and since there wasn’t a grain of truth in it. I know what a cokehead looks and acts like, and the Gordons weren’t cokeheads. So why would Tobin pin that on them? I asked her, �
��When did he tell you this?”

  “Not long ago. A few months ago. He said they came to him and wanted to know if he wanted to score some good stuff. They dealt to support their habit.”

  “You believe that?”

  She shrugged. “Could be.”

  “Okay … back to Mr. Tobin’s relationship with the Gordons. You think he was the one who sought them out and cultivated the relationship.”

  “It seemed that way. I know in the nine months I was with him, he’d been on the phone with them a lot, and he rarely had a party without inviting them.”

  I thought about this. Certainly this didn’t square with what Mr. Tobin had told me. I asked Ms. Whitestone, “What then was Mr. Tobin’s attraction to the Gordons?”

  “I don’t know. Though I do know that he made it seem to everyone that it was the other way around. Funny thing is that the Gordons seemed to go along with it, as if they were honored to be in Fredric’s company. Yet, when it was just the four of us a few times, you could see they considered themselves his equals. You understand?”

  “Yes. But why were they playacting?”

  Again, she shrugged. “Who knows?” She looked at me a moment, then said, “It was almost as if the Gordons were blackmailing Fredric. Like they had something on him. In public, he was the big cheese. In private, Tom and Judy were pretty familiar with him.”

  Blackmail. I let that percolate for a good half minute.

  Emma Whitestone said, “I’m only guessing. Speculating. I’m not being vindictive or anything. I had a good time with Fredric, and I liked him, but I wasn’t hurt when he broke it off.”

  “Okay.” I looked at her, and we made eye contact. I asked her, “Have you spoken to Fredric since the murder?”

  “Yes, yesterday morning. He called.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing more than anyone else was saying. Standard stuff.”

  We went into some detail about that phone conversation, and indeed, it seemed standard and pro forma.

  I asked her, “Has he spoken to you today?”

  “No.”

  “I visited him this morning.”

  “Did you? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know why you’re here, either.”

  “Right.” I didn’t want to explain that I was out of potential witnesses after Plum Island and the Murphys and that I was off the job and had to interview people that the county PD would not think to interview. I wasn’t exactly scraping the bottom of the barrel, but I was sort of working the edge of the crowd. I asked her, “Do you know any of the Gordons’ friends?”

  “I didn’t really travel in the same circles except for when we were with Fredric. And then it was his friends.”

  “Wasn’t Chief Maxwell a friend of theirs?”

  “I think so. I could never understand that relationship any more than I could understand the Gordons’ relationship with Fredric.”

  “I seem to be having trouble finding friends of the Gordons.”

  “From what I can gather, all their friends are Plum Island people. That’s not so unusual. I told you—they’re a tight-knit group.” She added, “You’d be better off looking there than around here.”

  “Probably.”

  She asked me, “What did you think of Fredric?”

  “A delightful man. I enjoyed his company.” Which was true. But now that I knew he’d popped Ms. Whitestone here, I was more convinced than ever that there was no sexual justice in the world. I added, “Beady eyes.”

  “Shifty, too.”

  “Right.” I said to her, “Could I ask a favor of you?”

  “You can ask.”

  “Would you not tell him of our conversation?”

  “I won’t go into details. But I’ll tell him we spoke.” She added, “I don’t lie. But I can keep things to myself.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  In Manhattan, there are not that many of these interlocking relationships as there are here. I had to keep this in mind, and I had to deal with it, and I had to adjust my style accordingly. But I’m bright and I can do that. On that subject, I asked Emma Whitestone, “I assume you know Chief Maxwell.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Did you ever date him?”

  “No. But he’s asked.”

  “You don’t like cops?”

  She laughed. She wiggled her toes again and crossed her legs again. My goodness.

  We went round and round for the next fifteen minutes or so, and Emma Whitestone had a lot of gossip, a lot of insights into people, though not much of it seemed to relate to the case. The problem was that I still didn’t know what I was doing here, but it was nice being here. I should say, though, that I was a gentleman. To hit on a female officer is okay because as a peer, she can tell you to take a hike. However, with civilians, especially ones who might wind up in front of the DA, you had to be careful. You didn’t want to compromise yourself or the witness. Nevertheless, I was interested.

  No, I’m not fickle. I was still pining for Beth. I asked Ms. Whitestone, “Can I use your phone?”

  “Sure. Right in there.”

  I went into an adjoining room, which was like going from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. This was the office suite of the historical society, complete with modern office furniture, file cabinets, copy machine, and so forth. I used a phone on one of the desks and called my answering machine. There was one message. A male voice said, “Detective Corey, this is Detective Collins of the Suffolk County Police. Detective Penrose asked me to call you. She’s in a lengthy conference. She says she can’t meet you this afternoon, and she’ll call you tonight or tomorrow.” End of message. I hung up and looked around the office. Under one of the desks was a pair of leather thongs, most probably Ms. Whitestone’s.

  I went back to the library, but I didn’t sit down.

  Emma Whitestone looked at me and asked, “Anything wrong?”

  “No. Where were we?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I looked at my watch, then asked her, “Can we finish this over lunch?”

  “Sure.” She stood. “First I’ll give you a tour of our house.”

  And she did. Room by room. Most of the upstairs was used for offices, storage, exhibits, and archives, but there were two bedrooms decorated in ye olde. One, according to Emma, was mid–seventeen hundreds, and the other was contemporary with the house, mid–eighteen hundreds. She said, “The house was built by a sea merchant who made his fortune in South America.”

  “Cocaine?”

  “No, silly. Semiprecious stones from Brazil. Captain Samuel Farnsworth.”

  I pushed down on the lumpy bed. “Do you nap here?” She smiled. “Sometimes. It’s a feather mattress.”

  “Osprey feathers?”

  “Could be. They used to be all over.”

  “They’re making a big comeback.”

  “Everything’s making a big comeback. Damned deer devoured my rhododendrons.” She led me out of the bedroom and said, “You wanted to see the archives.”

  “Yes.”

  She showed me into what had probably been a good-sized bedroom, and which was now filled with file cabinets, shelves, and a long oak table. She said, “We have original books and documents going back as far as the mid–sixteen hundreds. Deeds, letters, wills, legal decisions, sermons, army orders, ships’ manifests and logs. Some of it is fascinating.”

  “How did you get into this?”

  “Well, I suppose it had something to do with growing up here. My own family goes back to the original settlers.”

  “You’re not related to Margaret Wiley, I hope.” She smiled. “We have family connections. Didn’t you enjoy Margaret?”

  “No comment.”

  She went on, “Archive work must be a little like detective work. You know—mysteries, questions to be answered, things that need to be uncovered. Don’t you think so?”

  “I do, now that you mention it.” I added,
“To tell you the truth, when I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I found a musket ball once. Somewhere out here. Can’t remember where.” I added, “Now that I’m old and infirm, maybe I should take up archive work.”

  “Oh, you’re not that old. And you might enjoy it. I can teach you to read this stuff.”

  “Isn’t it in English?”

  “Yes, except that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English can be difficult. The spelling is atrocious and the script is sometimes hard to decipher. Here, take a look at this.” She offered a big looseleaf binder that was on the table. Inside were plastic sleeves and in the plastic were old parchments. She flipped to one of the pages and said, “Read that.”

  I bent over the book and looked at the faded script. I read, “Dear Martha, Don’t believe the rumors about me and Mrs. Farnsworth. I’m loyal and true. How about you? Your loving husband, George.”

  She laughed. “That’s not what it says.”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Here, I’ll read it.” She pulled the binder toward her, and said, “This is a letter from a Phillip Shelley to the royal governor, Lord Bellomont, dated 3 August 1698.” She read the letter, which to me had been indecipherable. The letter was full of “my lords” and “haths” and “your humble servant” stuff. The guy was complaining about some injustice regarding a land dispute. I mean, these people came across the ocean to a new continent and had the same gripes they had in Southwold with a “w.”

  I said to Ms. Whitestone, “Very impressive.”

  “There’s nothing to it. You can learn it in a few months. I taught Fredric in two months, and he has no attention span.”

  “Really.”

  “The language isn’t as difficult as the script and the spelling.”

  “Right.” I asked her, “Can you give me a list of members?”

  “Sure.” We went into the office, and she gave me a paper-bound membership directory, then slipped on her sandals.

  I asked her, “How did you get this job?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know…. It’s a pain in the butt. This was another one of Fredric’s stupid social-climbing ideas. I was the archivist here, which I didn’t mind doing. Then he proposed me as president, and whatever Fredric wants, Fredric gets. Plus, I’m still the archivist. Flower girl and president and archivist of the Peconic Historical Society.”