Vineyard Chill

by Philip R. Craig

  “I decided that it was time to leave the West Coast and I figured that two suitcases full of money was probably a good motive for somebody to come looking for me. I didn’t know if Lewis Farquahar thought it was still his money or whether Mark thought I had made off with it or whether the Feds thought it was theirs. But I trusted Mark, so I took a bus to Palm Springs. I didn’t have Mark’s address, but I figured I’d phone him again once I was there and give him the key to the storage locker. But nobody answered the phone and so much weird stuff was going on that I thought maybe somebody had tapped the line. So I finally left a message on the answering machine saying that I’d gone to Las Vegas and I took a bus to Denver.

  “There I sent an e-mail from a café to Mark and another to the ranch telling them where I was and saying I’d phone later. But instead I went down to Dallas and stayed there a week before I tried another phone call to Mark and had no more luck than before. I e-mailed the ranch again and said I was going to Little Rock but I came to Boston instead and you know the rest. I didn’t figure they’d find me here but I was stupid about the tools. Farquahar’s boys must have had to dig a little, but they had enough information to find me.”

  “Well, we know one thing,” I said. “Mark isn’t after you. Lewis Farquahar is.”

  “There’s that,” agreed Clay. “Of course, there’s the Feds, too. I don’t think we should leave them out just yet.”

  I believed he was right, and I felt as worried as he looked thoughtful.

  12

  “Why don’t you just give Blume the key?” I asked. “Then Lewis Farquahar will have the money and Mark can deal with him directly and it won’t be your problem anymore.”

  “Because I think Lewis may be behind all this bad business. Mark didn’t know anything about the new guy I met at the bank and something must have spooked him enough to make him disappear right after I phoned him from San Diego the first time. All he had to do to get the key was answer his phone when I called him from Dallas. But he didn’t do that. He’s gone underground if he’s not dead, and if he’s alive, the money’s his, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “So you think Lewis wants his money back now that he’s got the ranch? Is that it? He pays Mark all fair and square, but then robs the stagecoach before it can get the strongbox to the bank, like in those old Westerns?”

  “If Hollywood can think of that idea, so can Lewis.”

  “Look,” I said, “you may think you owe something to Mark, but you’re not working for him anymore, so it still seems to me that you’ll be better off if you give Blume the key and step out of the scene. Blume and Monroe will go away, Lewis will be satisfied, Mark can’t blame you for a thing, he and Lewis can fight it out, and you can live happily ever after.”

  Clay shook his head. “Even if I did that, I’d still be the only guy who knew what happened and if Lewis is the man he seems to be, he won’t want to leave a loose tongue behind that might flap in a Fed’s ear or in Mark’s ear, if Mark still has an ear. I might slip away from Blume and Monroe after I gave them the key, but I couldn’t stay here any longer and I’d never know how far they might chase me.” He looked around the cabin. “I’m getting too old to play cat-and-mouse games.”

  “About the Feds,” I said. “Maybe the new guy at the bank was a Fed. Maybe he wasn’t working for Lewis at all. Maybe that’s why Mark went underground. Because he smelled the Feds getting too close. After he talked with you the first time, he got to thinking that he’d been doing business with that bank for too long and that it was time to break away from it, take his losses, and drop out of sight for a few years. You said that he had more money than he could count and had it in a lot of banks. He may have had a lot of passports, too, and other plans in case the Palm Springs one didn’t work out.”

  Clay nodded. “That could be.”

  We looked at each other for a while.

  “Blume and Monroe said they were staying at the Harbor View?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They’re definitely not Feds.”

  “No.”

  “I want you out of this picture,” he said. “It’s bad enough that I’m in it, but that’s my own fault.”

  It always annoys me to discover that I have habits and values I distrust in others and would advise them to alter if they asked me for my opinion. One of the ideals I view with suspicion is loyalty, because even the devil has faithful followers and fidelity has caused as much grief as treachery. So when I find someone sticking to a friend or cause out of simple loyalty, I’m skeptical at best. Yet now, in spite of the logic of his reasoning, I had no more impulse to abandon Clay than I had to abandon Bonzo, thus proving once again that my efforts to be rational were often in vain. The realization almost made me laugh. But not quite.

  “You trust Mark?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “With your life?”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “Sure. I trust people with my life every time I step off the curb when I have a green light.”

  “Is there any way you can get in touch with him or he can get in touch with you?”

  “No to the first, yes to the second. I have a cell phone number and an e-mail address but he hasn’t answered any of my messages. Also, Blume and Monroe found me, so Mark probably can, too. I may have mentioned my Sausalito friend to him at some point.”

  “Yes, if Blume and Monroe left your boatbuilding friend alive to talk to the next guy who asked where he sent your tools. That next guy could be Mark or a Fed, which means we may be getting more visitors soon, if they’re not here already.”

  “That’s why you should get out of this business.”

  The statement made me angry. “What we need to do first is get you to a safe house, someplace nobody knows about, including Eleanor and Ted and Zee. I know a place that will do. Then we have to find out what’s going on, and I know a guy who might help us do that.”

  “I don’t like the idea of Elly and Ted being left in the dark.”

  “You can explain the details to them if you want to. That’s your business, not mine. With a little luck, we’ll have this situation straightened out before long and you can move back to Eleanor’s apartment.”

  “I don’t want Blume and Monroe coming near Elly or Ted.”

  “And I don’t want them coming near Zee or my children,” I said, feeling a tingle of fear as I spoke those words. “The best way I know to stop it from happening is to keep you under cover while we decide what to do, and the quicker we do that the better.”

  He nodded and looked around the cabin. “All right. I don’t want to abandon what I have here. I’ve abandoned too much in my life already. I just wish we had a few more things going for us.”

  “We have local knowledge. They’re strangers in a strange land. That should even things up. In the Code Duello, the challenged party got to choose the ground, as you no doubt recall.”

  “Actually,” he said, “I’ve never read the Code Duello. I don’t believe it was included on the Five Foot Shelf.”

  “No matter.” I stepped back into the cockpit of the boat. “Blume and Monroe won’t be coming around today unless they’re a lot smarter and luckier than I think they are, so you may as well stay here and get some work done during the rest of the afternoon. I’ll go get your safe house ready, then come to Eleanor’s apartment later and take you to it. That’ll give you time to tell Eleanor and Ted whatever you want them to know.”

  I climbed out of the boat and briefly allowed myself a fantasy that consisted of Blume and Monroe arriving next fall instead of now and finding that Clay, Eleanor, and Ted had sailed over the horizon in the schooner and were forever beyond their grasp, somewhere on the far reaches of the sea. It was a pleasant fancy but one I set aside as I drove out to the highway, made sure no yellow Mercedes convertibles were in sight, and went home.

  I got the keys to John Skye’s farmhouse and drove there. John taught things medieval at Weststock College and wouldn’t be coming down to the island
until May, when he and Mattie and their twin undergrad daughters would arrive for the summer. One of my jobs was to close the place in the fall, tend to it through the winter, and open it in the spring. It was just the right place to put Clay. He’d be out of sight and comfortable, but with ready access to Eleanor and the schooner.

  I parked in the yard between the house and the barn and corrals, circumnavigated the house, and walked through the outbuildings making sure everything was more or less as it had been when I’d made my last inspection, then went inside.

  March could be pretty chilly and we could even have snow; I kept low heat in the house all winter so the pipes wouldn’t freeze even if we got an unusual cold spell, and all I had to do now was turn up the thermostat. There was dry firewood stacked on the back porch and I brought some in and laid paper, kindling, and logs in the fireplaces. I turned on the water heater and checked the toilets and faucets. Upstairs, in the guest bedroom, I made the bed, using sheets and blankets from the linen closet. When I was sure that everything was as it should be, I drove into Edgartown and bought a week’s worth of groceries, a bottle of rum, and a gallon of cider. Back at the farmhouse I stored the provisions in the kitchen, noted that the house was already warming up, and indulged myself with a visit to John’s library, my favorite room in the house.

  The library was walled with books and had a triangulation of épée, foil, and saber on the wall, a tribute to John’s long-ago athletic career in college as a three-weapon man. His desk was a heavy old carved table and there was a large, worn Oriental rug on the floor, upon which were gently distressed leather chairs, reading lamps, and small tables. A fireplace interrupted the bookcases on one wall, and on its mantel was a small bust of Beethoven and another of Socrates. Often during the winters when I was making sure that all was well in the house, I’d sometimes lose myself in the library, so that when I returned home, Zee would wonder where I’d been.

  I found it hard to imagine that Clay wouldn’t love the library. Not everyone is drawn to books as bees are drawn to nectar, but I liked to imagine that my friends were, even though I knew perfectly well that some of them read nothing but scandal sheets and the sports pages.

  Driving to Eleanor’s house, I wondered how serious she and Clay were about each other. They’d been seen together in enough public places for gossip to continue to thrive in the slow winter months, when the year-rounders had less to do and could concentrate on rumor and romantic speculation. Ted, too, had been free in his public talk about how well the schooner was coming along and how pleased he was with Clay’s work, so I didn’t think it would be long before Jack and Mickey heard the talk and came to see Ted and Eleanor.

  At Eleanor’s house I found her and Clay together in the apartment. His gear was already in the old blue Bronco. Her face was unhappy and her eyes were damp, so it was clear that he’d done his best to explain his plan to move and that she didn’t like it. She didn’t like me, either, for having suggested the move.

  “No one needs to know you’re staying here,” she said angrily to Clay. “I won’t tell anyone. It’s nobody’s business anyway!”

  “Did you tell her about Jack and Mickey?” I asked him.

  He nodded, and I turned to Eleanor. “Jack and Mickey are not nice guys and they work for another guy who apparently doesn’t mind hurting people, including people like you and Ted. You’ve never met people like these men, but I have. If you know where Clay is, they’ll make you tell them whether you want to or not, so it’s best that you don’t know.”

  “I’d never tell them!”

  I didn’t want to describe what they might do to her to get the information, so I said, “Not even if they put a gun to your brother’s head and give you ten seconds to talk before they pull the trigger?”

  “They wouldn’t dare!” But there was fear in her voice.

  Clay put his hands on her shoulders. “I’ll be on the island. You just won’t know where. You can’t tell what you don’t know.”

  She hesitated until I said, “Half the people on the island have seen you two together, and the other half have heard Ted talk about Clay working on his boat. Jack and Mickey have ears for gossip so they could be here anytime. You want to be able to say Clay heard they were on the Vineyard and moved out right away. You can show them through your house and the apartment to prove he’s gone.” Even if they hurt her, I thought, she wouldn’t be able to tell them anything. But I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “You can tell them you think he flew to Nantucket.”

  She flashed her eyes up into his. “Do you think you might go to Nantucket?”

  He put on a smile. “It’s not a bad idea.”

  “Go! You’ll be safer there!”

  “If things get tight here, I’ll do that. But it may not be necessary.” He brushed at her hair with a gentle hand.

  After a moment, she stepped back. “All right,” she said. “Do what you have to do.”

  “The first thing we’re going to do,” I said, “is go to Ted’s place and tell him what we’ve just told you. Then we’ll put Clay’s tools in the Bronco so Jack and Mickey won’t find them if they go looking in the barn.” I looked at her. “With luck this will all be over soon and things will get back to normal.”

  She pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and blew her nose. “Good,” she said.

  I followed the Bronco to Ted Overhill’s house and we replayed our scenario while we loaded Clay’s tools into his truck. To his credit Ted didn’t bluster about his ability to take care of himself. Instead he said, “Tell you what. Tomorrow morning at the coffee shop I’ll start bitching about Clay taking off with hardly a word except something about Nantucket, leaving me with jobs half done and summer getting closer by the day. I’ll keep it up whenever I get the chance. That help any?”

  “That will help a lot!” Clay smiled grimly. “If Jack and Mickey have their ears up, they may decide I really have pulled out.”

  Ted put a hand on his arm. “I hope you don’t. Elly would be pretty sad, and so would I.”

  “Me, too,” said Clay. “Maybe we’ll be lucky.”

  All three of them deserved to be lucky, I thought, but as Bill Munny said, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Sometimes it’s a blessing when we get what we deserve, but just as often it’s a blessing if we don’t.

  I led the way to John Skye’s farm and we parked with the house between the road and us.

  “You can put the Bronco in the barn, if you want a little more security from prying eyes,” I said.

  “I may do that.” Clay’s eyes flowed around the house and farm yard.

  I showed him where I sometimes hung the key, behind a shutter on a kitchen window, and we went inside.

  “Nice,” he said, after I showed him around.

  “Don’t tell anyone where you are and don’t show yourself in the usual places,” I said. “Buy gas and groceries up-island, where they don’t know you. If you need anything, give me a call, but don’t use the phone to call any of your friends out west because their lines may not be secure or they may have caller ID. You have a cell phone, so use that if you need to.

  “I’ll come by tomorrow morning and take you for a ride.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To Aquinnah to talk with a friend who may be able to help us find out what’s going on.”

  His blue eyes were bright. “You have interesting friends.”

  I felt a smile on my face. “You’re evidence of that.”

  13

  I rarely tell anyone everything, so that evening I told Zee about my encounter with Jack and Mickey and how I’d warned Clay about them, but I didn’t tell her about the rest of my day because if Jack and Mickey came by before she learned otherwise via gossip, she could tell them that Clay was living in Eleanor’s apartment and was working for Ted. If the gossip about his departure reached her before Jack and Mickey did, she could pass that bit of disinformation along instead. I asked her to tell Jack and Mickey what she knew and to have
the children do the same, so there would be no reason for Blume and Monroe to feel any need for threats or violence.

  She looked up at me with her great, dark eyes. “Do you think there’s any danger of that?”

  “I don’t think there is but I want you to be careful.”

  She glanced across the room at the gun cabinet, where we kept our weapons locked up tight. I guessed she might be thinking about the deadly little .380 Beretta 84F she’d used when she first learned to shoot. It was easier to conceal than the big .45 she now shot in competition.

  The trophies stored in the closet of our guest bedroom spoke to her skill but not to her paradoxical dislike and disapproval of firearms in general. I, on the other hand, lacked her magical abilities with a pistol but had no theoretical objections to the existence of guns or their use in hunting or self-defense as long as the hunting was for meat and the self-defense could stand the test of reason. I don’t like trophy hunting, and in practice, I rarely feel so endangered as to go armed, unlike a few islanders I know, who feel quite naked without a pistol on their person and are, therefore, always dressed.

  I thought that Mickey Monroe was such a pistol packer, although I hadn’t actually seen what he carried in his coat pocket. But if Jack Blume was another one, he hid his weapons more successfully and was, if my first impressions were correct, less inclined to use brute force as anything but a last resort. Even his threats had been indirect. Maybe he’d studied to be a psychiatrist before abandoning that career for one of crime.

  Now, as we sat before our fire after the children were in bed, I put my arm across Zee’s shoulder. As an ER nurse she had no illusions about violence in the world and had devoted her life to tending to its victims. Her gentle heart was accompanied by a cool head that forbade her to ignore truth, so I had no doubt that she would now accept the reality of Blume and Monroe and I trusted her to act appropriately. If she decided to carry the Beretta, that was fine; if she didn’t, that was fine, too. But I hoped she didn’t feel that she had to.