Vineyard Chill

by Philip R. Craig

  “How do you feel about working on the schooner? I told Zee and the kids to tell the truth about what they know if anybody asks.”

  “I’d go wacky if I wasn’t working. I take roundabout routes to get there and I don’t go to the barn until I’m sure nobody’s on my tail. I do the same thing coming home to this house. I park behind the barn at Ted’s and I try to avoid using power tools so I’ll hear anybody driving into Ted’s yard. If Jack and Mickey ever show up, I should hear them in time to hide in the loft or cut and run through the back woods. I feel like some kind of character in a B movie.”

  “The hero, I hope. The heroes in B movies always survive and get the girl.”

  “That’s my plan: to be a star.” He slapped me on the back and got his coat. “Speaking of work, it’s time I got to mine. You can follow me if you want to, just to make sure I get there.”

  I did that and saw no sign of anyone showing the slightest interest in Clay’s blue Bronco as it turned down Ted Overhill’s driveway. I drove on into Edgartown wondering just how big a gang was after the suitcases Clay had carried to San Diego and whether Jack and Mickey were just the tip of the iceberg. I parked in front of the police station on Pease’s Point Way. To get into the station these days, thanks to Home-land Security policies, you have to punch a button beside the door and have someone at the desk admit you. The someone that day was Kit Goulart, the 250-pound wife of a similar-sized husband. When the two of them walked hand in hand, as they often did when she was in her civvies, they never failed to remind me of a team of draft horses.

  “What brings you to this citadel of law and order?” she asked.

  “I’m trying to catch up with Tony D’Agostine.”

  “Well, you won’t find him here. He’s off duty today. Try his house.”

  “Can I use your phone instead?”

  “Since it’s you.”

  I phoned the house and Tony was actually there. I asked him if he knew the last name of the woman Reggie Wilcox was seeing. “You called her Joyce Something-or-other, but I don’t think that’s in the book.”

  “Smithwick, I think,” he said. “Joyce Smithwick. Or something like that. She lives out on West Chop someplace. Works in a jewelry store on Main Street. My wife likes the store. Wait a minute.” He was back in less than that. “Yeah, that’s right. Rita says it’s Smithwick. There can’t be too many Smithwicks in Vineyard Haven.” He gave me the name of the jewelry store, in case I couldn’t find her house.

  I thanked him, hung up, thanked Kit for the phone, and asked if I could now borrow her phone book. She said yes and in it I found a lone Smithwick telephone number and an address. I thanked Kit again and left. Outside, the sun was trying to break through a high, gray overcast as March was deciding whether to be warm or cold that day. Someone once told me that the weather was always perfect in San Diego, where Clay’s suitcases were parked, but the same could not be said for New England. I drove to Vineyard Haven.

  Vineyard Haven is the only town on Martha’s Vineyard where you can still buy most of the things you need. Oak Bluffs still has a couple of practical stores, but Vineyard Haven has more. The jewelry store where Joyce Smithwick worked, however, was not one of them.

  I actually found a parking place on Main Street, a difficult thing to do in Vineyard Haven even in the wintertime, and went into the store, past windows full of gold and wampum bracelets and earrings. Inside was more of the same. A young woman was the only clerk and I was the only customer. She was tall and slender and was decorated with mostly silver jewelry, which she wore well. She gave me a nice smile.

  “May I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Joyce Smithwick.”

  “That’s me.”

  I couldn’t fault Reggie Wilcox’s visual taste in women. She was a beauty. I told her my name and said I was talking to people who might know something about Nadine Gibson, the girl whose body had recently been found in Oak Bluffs.

  “Oh,” she said, and her smile disappeared. “I heard about that on the radio. But I don’t think I can help you because I never knew her.”

  “Actually, I want to talk with you because you’ve been dating a man who did know her. Reggie Wilcox.”

  “Reggie?” Her eyes widened. “Did he know that girl? He never mentioned it.”

  “Have you seen him since they found her body?”

  She shook her head. “No. I haven’t seen him since last weekend. Did he really know that woman?”

  “They dated a few times, apparently. I talked with him yesterday and I’m interested in your impressions of him.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. What impressions? Why are you asking me about my impressions?”

  I raised a hand in what I hoped was a calming gesture. “There’s going to be an official investigation about the woman’s death because it was probably either a murder or an accident that someone tried to cover up. Everybody who knew her, especially during the last days of her life, is being interviewed. The hope is that someone can help the police figure out what happened and who, if anyone, is responsible.”

  “Reggie didn’t kill anyone!”

  Reggie apparently hadn’t told her about his life as a policeman in New Bedford. I was tempted to mention it, but didn’t. I’d leave that to Reggie himself, or to someone else.

  “How long have you been dating?”

  Her face had become unhappy. “About six months. Since last fall.”

  “What sort of person do you take him to be?”

  Her chin lifted slightly. “I don’t know what you mean. He’s very nice, very thoughtful.”

  “Who decides where you go and what you do?”

  “Are you trying to find out who’s the boss? Well, neither of us is. We decide things together. If one of us really wants to do something, the other one agrees. We don’t fight about anything.”

  I thought but didn’t say there’d be time enough for that later, if their relationship continued. Was I becoming a cynic? Should I write The Return of the Prince?

  “So he doesn’t boss you around?”

  “No. He told me he was married before and he didn’t want to make any of the mistakes he’d made in the past.”

  “Did you take that to mean that he’d tried to boss his first wife around?”

  “No. I think he meant he wanted to be different in a lot of ways. He’s very gentle and that’s always a surprise to me because he’s so big and strong. It would be easy for him to use power to get his way, but he never does.”

  I remembered how he’d looked down at me. He was at least four inches taller than I am and about fifty pounds heavier. And he’d looked very fit in his deputy sheriff’s uniform.

  “Women must find him attractive,” I said.

  Her face became happier. “Who could blame them? Not me. But I’m the one who’s dating him. The others are just looking and wishing.”

  “Does he ever lose his temper?”

  “Never.”

  “Does he ever hold you too tightly?”

  “No! What sort of question is that?”

  “You mentioned his strength.”

  “And I told you that he never uses it!”

  I thought I’d learned whatever Joyce Smithwick could tell me.

  “The police may come by to ask you similar questions to the ones I’ve asked,” I said. “Meanwhile, I think Reggie is fortunate to have met you. Thanks for your help.”

  I went out and noticed that the sun had won the battle with the clouds. The day was warming and there was a faint promise of spring in the air. But nature is always indifferent to the woes and joys of men. The sun may shine on murder and lovers may reap the whirlwind.

  20

  I had talked with everyone I could think of and I hadn’t learned much other than that Nadine Gibson had been beautiful and nice and liked men as much as they liked her. Her flaming hair had been a wonder, and she had smiled and kidded with everyone in the Fireside. Everybody liked her. She was young and vibrant and independent.r />
  And now she was dead, dead, dead.

  Since I was already in Vineyard Haven, I stopped at the state police offices on my way home, to get the latest news about her. Officer Olive Otero was at the desk. There was a pile of papers near her elbow and an open file cabinet behind her. Her eyes were going from her computer screen to a piece of paper in front of her and back again.

  “One of these reports is wrong,” she said as I sat down. “The problem is, I don’t know which one.”

  “Information overload,” I said. “The curse of the electronic age. Back when there was less to know we didn’t get as confused.”

  “The theory that confidence is a sign of ignorance. I’ve heard of it.” She pushed her chair back from the desk as though to put some psychological distance between her and it. “What brings you here? Let me guess. You want to know if the ME has found a cause of death. Am I right or do I owe you a beer?”

  “No beer for me this time.”

  She leaned forward and glanced at a sheet of paper she took from the pile. “Blunt trauma to the head,” she said. “Homicide by person or persons unknown. Probably with a piece of pipe or a tire iron or some such thing.”

  “Definitely not an accident, then.”

  She shrugged. “Not according to the ME. There were multiple blows and signs of defensive efforts on the part of the victim. A broken arm and broken fingers.”

  “Any leads? Did you get any evidence from her house after she went missing?”

  “You mean a diary naming some stalker who had been threatening her? No, nothing handy like that. The most suspicious thing we found was her clothing. There was no sign that she’d packed anything for a trip. Aside from that, we didn’t have any real evidence that a crime had been committed, so we didn’t take her stuff and keep it in storage. The landlord collected it and he probably still has it in his attic or someplace if he hasn’t sent it to her family. If he still has it, we’ll take a closer look at it in case we missed something the first time.”

  “Was the body clothed?”

  “She was fully dressed and wearing a green loden coat and she was wrapped in a sheet. No sign of attempted rape. We’ll see if anybody at the Fireside remembers what she was wearing when she left work that night. If the clothes are the same, we can be pretty sure that she was killed that night, maybe before she even got home.”

  “Can you trace the sheet?”

  “I doubt it, but we’ll try.”

  “What kind of a night was it? March can be warm or cold.”

  “We’ll check the records for that night, but my recollection is that it was cold for most of that month. I know there were about six inches of snow on the ground when we went to her house, and that it didn’t melt for a long time. That might explain why she was buried under those boards.”

  “Ground too frozen to dig a grave?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “If you’re right about that, it probably means the killer knew about the cellar when he killed her, and put her there because he couldn’t think of a better place.”

  Olive nodded, and her voice was wry. “I never heard of that old farm until this happened, but now it seems almost like I’m the only one who hadn’t. If you listen to talk around town, you’d think every birder on this end of the island used to go up there before the Marshall Lea outfit closed it off. And some of them, like your pal Bonzo, snuck in after that. There must be more to looking at birds than I ever guessed.”

  “Hamlet would probably agree. Birders are a passionate bunch. Maybe it would spice up your life if you became one. All you need is field glasses and a bird book.”

  “My life is spicy enough already. We’ll be talking with birders. Maybe one of them saw something.”

  “I doubt if there were many birders wandering around Oak Bluffs in the middle of the night when Nadine left the Fireside.”

  “We don’t need many,” said Olive. “We just need one.”

  “I’ve been talking with some of the people who knew her or wanted to,” I said. “Do you want to know what they told me?”

  Olive frowned. “You just can’t keep your nose out of our business, can you?”

  “I don’t like the idea of Bonzo being in your sights.”

  “Everybody is in our sights right now. Him, too. All right, tell me what you have.”

  I did that and when I was through Olive said, “That’s not much.”

  “No, but it’s all I have so far.”

  “So far? Are you planning to do more? Why don’t you go home and leave this investigation to us?”

  “When you decide to take Bonzo off your list, I’ll go home.”

  “We can’t do that, and you know it.”

  “I do, so I’ll keep going. I won’t interfere with your investigation, and if I learn anything I’ll let you know.”

  Olive placed her strong hands flat on her desk. “Don’t get under our feet, J.W.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Don’t try. Succeed.”

  I left and drove to Circuit Avenue. The Fireside had just opened for the day, and I went in. The bartender was putting beer bottles in the cooler behind the bar, and I caught a glimpse of Bonzo going down into the cellar, where the beer and booze were stored. I was the day’s first customer. I took a stool and ordered a Sam Adams and a hamburger, and the bartender passed the food order back to the kitchen through the service window behind him.

  “I just learned that Nadine Gibson was murdered,” I said. “Were you on duty the night she left here that last time?”

  He paused in his work. “Murdered? Are you sure? Jesus! Well, I can’t say I’m too surprised, because that’s seemed possible ever since they found the body. Still…”

  He shook his head and I waited for him to tell me that you read about these things but you never expect them to happen to people you know.

  “You read about these things,” he said after a moment, “but you never expect them to happen to people you know.”

  “Isn’t that the truth,” I said. “Were you here that last night?”

  He shook his head again. “No. Clancy O’Brien was on. He’s talked about it a lot since they found Nadine’s body. People treat him like he’s an expert on the subject and he’s beginning to think he is. You want to see Clancy, you come back this evening. He’ll be here about six.”

  “Do you have his address?”

  “Sure.” He looked at a tattered piece of paper tacked to the wall behind the bar, and read an address and a phone number to me, adding, “He worked last night, but he’s probably up by now.”

  “One more thing,” I said. “I ran into a couple of friends of Clay Stockton. Have they come by looking for him?”

  “Yeah, they did,” he said. “Just a couple nights ago. I told them he hadn’t been in for a while. They wondered if I knew where he lived or was working but I couldn’t help them out.”

  Clancy lived in Vineyard Haven, wouldn’t you know? So when I finished my beer and sandwich, and had a brief chat with an uncharacteristically somber Bonzo after he brought a case of beer up from the cellar, I drove there for the second time that day. I was glad that the owner of the Fireside kept Bonzo on year-round. It was about as demanding a job as Bonzo could handle and it brought in some money to supplement his mother’s income from teaching. She and her eternal child were all the family either of them would ever have.

  Clancy O’Brien lived in an apartment in the basement of a house near the Stone Church on William Street, a one-way street that stops at Woodland, skips a block, then starts up again on Greenwood as North William Street. I’ve often wondered why it skipped that block, but have never been enlightened.

  Clancy came to the door chewing on a grilled cheese sandwich—lunch for the single male. When he heard that I wanted to talk with him about Nadine Gibson, he waved me right in.

  “Want a beer? I’m having the first of the day.”

  “No thanks. I just had one at the Fireside. They said you were working
the bar the night Nadine disappeared and told me where I could find you.”

  We sat at his kitchen table and he talked around bites of food and swallows of Rolling Rock. He didn’t actually have much in the way of information, but he spread what he had over quite a bit of time. The usual crowd had been there, and when the place closed, several of the guys had invited Nadine to go home with them as they always did and she’d laughed and said no as she always did and the guys had laughed and left and a little later Nadine had said good night and left, too.

  When he was through I said, “Was Bonzo still there with you?”

  “Yeah. Him and me. We always stay and clean things up a little more, just to make sure we’re ready for the next day.”

  “Did you leave together?”

  “Yeah, like always. I drove him home, like I do sometimes. It’s pretty much on my way.”

  “When Nadine left, did you happen to notice if anybody was hanging around waiting for her?”

  “No. Could have been, though, because I wasn’t watching. I just let her out and locked the door so nobody would come in looking for a nightcap. That was the last time I ever saw her. It’s a weird feeling. You hear about these things but you never think it’ll happen to somebody you know. You know what I mean?”

  “I sure do. Do you remember what she was wearing that night? Do you remember her coat? Was she wearing a hat?”

  “Nobody ever asked me that before,” he confessed with a frown. But then he beamed when he suddenly realized that he knew the answers. “You know why I remember the coat? Because it was a new one she’d just got. Made in Germany, I think she said. Sort of a green color. Looked good with all that red hair.”

  “A loden coat?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s what she called it. Something like that, anyway.”

  “What sort of night was it? It was a cold month, mostly, as I remember.”

  He was back on familiar ground now, answering a question he’d been asked before. “It was chilly, but what I remember most is the moonlight. It was almost a full moon and everything had that sort of silvery look to it. You know what I mean? It was chilly but it was a bright night with a lot of stars. I almost didn’t need to turn on my headlights to drive home.”