Vineyard Chill

by Philip R. Craig

  I had been wondering about the Mercedes. Why had Jack and Mickey driven it all the way from California when it would have been much faster to have flown to Boston and rented a car?

  And why had they arrived in chilly New England wearing California clothes? Why hadn’t they brought winter jackets? When I’d seen them they were wearing new coats, probably bought on the island.

  It was a puzzler.

  Where were they now?

  They’d been on the island only a few days, so they couldn’t know their way around too well, but they’d probably learned that Edgartown and Oak Bluffs were the only two wet towns, so that’s where they’d be barhopping. They might also have heard about Gannon & Benjamin, properly famous builders and repairers of wooden boats, and may have made inquiries, assuming that Clay might be working there.

  It would be hard for them to miss all the house construction that was going on all over the island, because mansionizing was the Vineyard’s principal industry during the winter, so maybe they were also checking those projects. I had hinted that Clay might be living and working up-island, so maybe that’s where they were focusing their efforts.

  As I prepared supper, I wondered what Joe Begay would come up with. I had confidence that he’d find out something, at least. Maybe quite a lot.

  Supper was red beans and rice with kielbasa, and I used a recipe we’d stolen from a visiting professor friend of John Skye who’d come up to visit him from the U of Kentucky. The Kentucky prof had gotten his recipe in New Orleans, a town famous for its food and one that I had never visited. He’d served the dish at John’s house when we were guests, and when Zee had fluttered her eyelashes at him, he passed over the recipe without hesitation. Another triumph for sex appeal.

  The kids got home first and I fed them hot cocoa and cookies to keep them alive until supper. When Zee arrived and had switched into her civvies, I plied her with vodka on the rocks. We sat on the sofa in front of the stove and watched the flames dance while we told each other of our days.

  “You’ve been a busy bee,” said Zee.

  “I’m not through yet,” I said. “After supper I’m going up to the Fireside to see if I can find one or both of the two other guys who were interested in Nadine. I want to talk with them. Maybe they know something.”

  “You’re a married man,” she said in a faux-tart voice. “You’re supposed to be past your days of hanging around in bars and hang around at home with me instead.”

  “Home is where the heart is,” I said. “You can come, too, if you don’t trust me alone.”

  “Someone has to stay with the children. Remember the children? We have two.”

  “Bring them along. They’re old enough to learn what a bar looks like. They can have soft drinks if you think they’re too young for beer.”

  “You’re a danger to society, McGee. How about another wee dram?”

  I poured her another Luksusowa and stirred the beans. They smelled delish, as always, and tasted just as good when we ate them a half hour later. Vanilla ice cream was dessert. The little people had theirs with chocolate sauce and the big people had theirs with blackberry liqueur. Simple pleasures are the best. Since I was the cook, Zee was the dishwasher, in accordance with our traditional division of labor. While she was washing the plates and stacking them in the drainer, I kissed her, suggested that she lock the doors while I was gone, and drove to Oak Bluffs.

  Bonzo was on duty at the Fireside and the place was about half full of regulars, mostly young guys but with a mixture of middle-aged men. There were even a few women: girlfriends and wives and wannabes. The place smelled of spilled beer and illegal cigarettes, both hand rolled and packaged. Since the sixties, the management of the Fireside had always been lax in its enforcement of Massachusetts’s laws against smoking in public places, as long as the sinners were discreet, and the Oak Bluffs police were happy to ignore the transgressors as long as no one complained. Like all police, they had better things to do.

  Bonzo gave me his happy child’s smile. “Hey, J.W., good to see you! Whatcha doin’ here? You don’t come so much at night anymore.”

  I had been married more than ten years but to Bonzo time was always new. He was just as surprised now as he’d been when I first stopped being a steady customer a decade earlier.

  “I’m a married man, Bonzo.” I found an empty booth, sat down, and ordered a Sam Adams. When Bonzo brought it, I said, “I’m looking for a couple of young guys. You may know them. Jimmy Calhoun and Al Verdi.”

  He beamed. “Yeah, sure I know them. They come in here almost every night for beer and burgers. I guess they don’t like to cook like you do. Lookie. See that booth? That’s them eating together. They’re pals.”

  I looked across the room at the two young men. They were chewing hamburgers and chatting. I’d seen them both before but had never known their names. There are fifteen thousand year-round people on Martha’s Vineyard and I don’t know almost all of them.

  “They live together or just eat together?”

  Bonzo thought that hard one over, then nodded as though to himself and said, “They just eat, I guess. Al said once he lives in a house in the winter and a tent in the summer, but Jimmy’s got a year-round house someplace. I think they’re working on the same job this winter. You can ask ’em.”

  Al wasn’t the only islander who summered in a tent. The secret was to have it out of sight of people who were afraid such primitive accommodations would lower their property values. Many a native family once earned a good portion of their yearly income by renting their house in July and August and camping out until fall.

  “I heard that they both liked Nadine,” I said. “Do you know anything about that?”

  He immediately became sad and rubbed nervous hands on the bar towel he had across his shoulder. “Yeah, I remember that. They liked to talk with her all the time. She was beautiful, so a lot of people liked to do that. She talked back, too. She was nice, you know. She talked and smiled at me and everybody else.”

  “Did either of them ever get mad? At each other or at her?”

  He thought hard and shook his head. “Gee, I don’t think so. How could you get mad at Nadine? Nobody could get mad at Nadine.”

  Saint Nadine. Actually, Bonzo was probably the saint.

  “I mean did Al and Jimmy ever get mad at each other? You know, the way men do sometimes when they both like the same woman.”

  Another head shake. “I never seen it. Not ever. They’re pals.” He leaned closer to me. His voice was conspiratorial and touched with fright. “I hear that they found Nadine dead up there on that Marshall Lea land where we was the other day. They say that was her hair in my bird nest and that Dom Agganis may be wanting to talk with me some more about her and me going up there last year. My mom is scared and I don’t feel too good myself. I don’t like people thinking I’d do something bad to Nadine. You don’t think I would, do you, J.W.?”

  “No. I know you wouldn’t, Bonzo. Dom Agganis has to talk with everybody who knew Nadine. I already told him that you’ve never hurt anybody in your life.”

  “Thanks, J.W. I’m glad you think that, because it’s true. I never would hurt Nadine or anybody else. Not ever.” He patted my arm with his thin hand and went back to work, wiping tables, returning glasses and bottles to the bar, and serving customers.

  I drank some of my beer and kept an eye on Jimmy Calhoun and Al Verdi. When they finished their burgers and were having dessert beers, I got up and went over to their booth.

  I gave them my name and asked if I could talk with them. They couldn’t see why not and made room for me in the booth.

  “What can we do for you?” asked Calhoun. “You have a building project in mind?”

  “If you do,” said Verdi, “we won’t be able to get at it for a while because we’re working on a job already and we won’t be done with it until May or so.”

  It was a familiar tale. People with small construction jobs such as a porch roof to be repaired or a garage to
be built had a hard time finding anybody to do the work because all of the carpenters were busy building mansions.

  “No,” I said, “I’m not here about a job. I want to talk with you about Nadine Gibson.”

  They instantly became cautious.

  “They say they found her body,” said Verdi, twirling his beer bottle. “What’s that got to do with us?”

  “I’m talking with everybody who might have been close to her,” I said. “I’m trying to find out what happened. A year ago people figured she probably just left the island, but now we know she didn’t.”

  Calhoun glanced at Verdi, then back at me. His eyelids had lowered. “You a cop of some kind?”

  “This is preliminary and off the record,” I said, dodging the question but putting on the cop face I’d learned to wear in Boston. “The investigation will get official when the state police come to talk with you. I’ve talked with Reggie Wilcox already, and with Nadine’s landlord and the woman who first noticed Nadine was missing and called the cops. Now I’m talking to you because you were two of the people who were interested in Nadine and you may know something that will help find her murderer.”

  Calhoun sipped his beer. “Murderer? Are you saying she was murdered?”

  “It’s not official yet, but that’s how it looks. You don’t seem surprised.”

  He paled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I looked at him. “It means you don’t seem surprised.”

  “Why should I be?” he asked in a low, angry voice. “They find a body, what’s the first thing you think of? That it’s either an accident or a murder.”

  “I don’t like this,” said Verdi. “Are you here because we’re suspects? Is that why you’re here?” He looked at Calhoun, then back at me. “We don’t know anything about what happened to her.”

  “You both went out with her, didn’t you?”

  “So?”

  “So how did the dates go? She argued with Adam Andrews, the guy she’d been living with, and threw him out. Did she argue with you, too?”

  “Not with me,” said Verdi. “Hell, I was only out with her a couple of times.”

  “You get inside her house? Into her bed?”

  “None of your business!”

  “The police will ask you the same thing.”

  He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “Okay, so I spent a night with her once. Two, three days after the boyfriend left. So what? She was a nice girl.”

  I looked at Calhoun. “Did you know about this?”

  I don’t know if he heard me but he was staring at Verdi with an expression that gave me my answer. I raised my voice. “How about you, Jimmy? You dated her. Did you make it with her, too?”

  He glared. “What are you, anyhow? One of those jerks who gets his kicks talking about sex?”

  “I don’t make it a habit,” I said, keeping my voice deliberately low now. “I’m trying to find out what might have happened to her. You two are supposedly pals, but if you were both bedding the same girl, it’s not hard to imagine you getting mad about it, either with her or with each other. Maybe mad enough to get violent.”

  They exchanged looks, then shook their heads.

  “That never, ever happened,” said Calhoun. “She was as nice a woman as you’d ever want to meet. Maybe she liked more than one guy at a time, but she never gave me any reason to be mad at her.”

  “You never made it to her bed.”

  “I don’t make it to a lot of beds, and I was never mad at her.”

  “Neither was I,” said Verdi. “She was beautiful and she was sexy but she was sweet, too.”

  “Did she ever say anything about anyone who was giving her grief?”

  They both thought, then Calhoun shook his head. “No, not really.”

  “And you two never tangled over her?”

  “No. Never.”

  Roland and Oliver.

  I sat back and drank the last of my beer. “Did you ever see her with anybody else? Besides Reggie Wilcox, that is.”

  “A lot of people liked Nadine.”

  “Anybody you can name?”

  Calhoun waved an arm in a gesture that took in every customer in the room. “Take your choice,” he said.

  “Not everybody loved her,” I said. “Somebody killed her.”

  Calhoun looked at Verdi. “Now that I know Al got into the bed I was after, maybe I’ll kill him.”

  “You’re scaring me,” said Verdi, looking at his empty bottle. “Tell you what. I’ll buy you a beer if you spare my life.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Calhoun. “That should make us square.”

  I thanked them for their time and went home.

  19

  The next morning I drove to John Skye’s farm and found Clay putting breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. We don’t have a dishwasher at our house, though I’m not sure why since they seem handy things to have. Maybe the reason is the same one that accounts for me driving a rusty forty-year-old truck: I’m too cheap to buy anything I don’t really need. As long as my old Toyota Land Cruiser keeps passing inspection and running, I’ll probably keep driving it. Why not? If we need a fancier vehicle—if we’re ever invited to a presidential ball, for instance—we’ll use Zee’s little red Jeep, Miss Scarlet.

  “Did you find the shotgun?” I asked.

  “I did. I loaded it with buckshot.”

  “Wyatt Earp always loaded buckshot.”

  “I’m not Wyatt Earp, but I thought buckshot was appropriate under the circumstances.”

  I told him about my musings concerning Jack and Mickey’s car and clothing, and wondered what he made of them.

  “All I can guess,” he said, “is that they left California when the weather was warm and drove cross-country trying to catch up with me.”

  “If they knew where you were, why didn’t they fly, then rent a car?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know where I was when they left. Maybe they drove to Palm Springs first, then went on from there one step at a time, following those fake clues I left on my way here.”

  That made as much sense as anything. But if that was what had happened, when and how had they learned from Clay’s friend in Sausalito that he’d shipped Clay’s tools to the Vineyard? If they’d gotten that information before they came east, they’d have known that Clay’s false trail was false and would have flown directly to Boston and then rented a car. But they hadn’t done that; they’d driven east in a convertible and summer clothes.

  “Ergo, what?” asked Clay, when I put this issue before him.

  “Ergo, maybe they have someone else working with them. A pal who stayed behind and caught up with your Sausalito friend after Jack and Mickey were already headed east. Their West Coast guy gave them the information about the tools, and since Jack and Mickey were already halfway here, they just kept coming.”

  “That would explain why they didn’t stop in Arkansas,” said Clay. “Lewis sent Jack and Mickey east and had somebody else on the coast check out my friends there.”

  He shut the dishwasher door. The machine was far from full and he made no move to add soap since, like most dishwashers, this one served most of the time as a storage space for dirty dishes. When it finally was full, it would be turned on to do its duty. At my house we washed up after every meal and stacked the clean dishes to dry in a rack by the sink.

  “I wonder where Mark is,” said Clay. “The money I left in the locker is his, but he hasn’t contacted me about the key. Lewis seems to want the money more than Mark does, so why did he give it to me to take to Mark in the first place?”

  “Maybe Mark is dead,” I said. “He was in a dangerous profession.”

  Clay frowned. “It’s possible, but I doubt it. Mark was a careful guy, and he always treated people fair and square so I never heard of anybody who was mad at him. Whoever tried to get that money I was carrying is more the double-dealing type.”

  “Lewis Farquahar?”

  He nodded. “That would be
my guess, although I can’t be sure. I only met him a few times, but my gut told me I didn’t want to work for him. Of course, Jack and Mickey could be working for somebody else entirely by now. It’s a byzantine business and there are a lot of people who’d like to get their hands on three or four million dollars.”

  “But you think it’s probably Lewis and that he probably figures that you have money he wants to retrieve.”

  “It belongs to Mark, if it belongs to anybody.”

  “If Mark is dead, it doesn’t belong to anybody. Was he married? Did he have children or kinfolk?”

  “I never heard about them.”

  “Have you tried to contact Mark since you got here?”

  He nodded. “The problem is making contact without revealing my position, but I’ve given it a shot. I know a woman in Vancouver. She’s an old friend, and she’s smart. I sent her money and had her buy a cell phone, then go to one of those online cafés and send an e-mail to Mark telling him I wanted to get in touch with him and that he’d get a phone call in Palm Springs at a certain time. Then I had her make the call for me on the cell phone. But all she got was the same answering machine I got, so she hung up. I haven’t tried contacting him since.”

  “Did you tell the woman where you’re living?”

  He shook his head, smiling a small, ironic smile. “No. She probably looked at the postmark on the letter I sent her, and if she did she knows it was mailed from the Vineyard, but she doesn’t know more than that. She’s a good friend.”

  He’d had a lot of women in his life and not all of them had ended up friends. I hoped he was right about this one. I remembered the book Loretta Aldrich had been reading and thought that Machiavelli would have advised Clay to be less trusting. I saw no point in mentioning that cynical diplomat’s views on faith and, instead, told Clay of my guesses concerning Jack and Mickey’s search pattern.

  “Well,” said Clay, “they can certainly find people who know I used to be here on the island, but there aren’t many who can swear I still am, and you’re the only one who knows where I’m living, so I don’t expect to have to use your shotgun.”