A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard

by Philip R. Craig

  I put a last plate into the drainer. “He said he wanted to talk to you.”

  I looked at her, but her own eyes were lowered toward Joshua.

  “He says he’s going to try to talk me into being in the movie,” she said. “I told him he could talk about anything he wanted to, as long as he paid for lunch.”

  She raised her dark eyes and looked at me. “You don’t mind, do you? If you mind, I won’t do it.”

  “I don’t mind,” I lied.

  — 9 —

  The next morning, Joshua and I were on the road minutes after Zee had driven off to work. At the head of our long, sandy driveway, she had gone right, toward Oak Bluffs, and we went left. It was early, so the dreaded A & P traffic jam had not yet formed, and we got through Edgar-town with no problems and went on south to Katama.

  Joshua was being grumpy, and I couldn’t talk him out of it, so it was a whiny ride all the way to Katama, where I got the Toyota into four-wheel drive and turned east onto Norton’s Point Beach. When I reminded Josh of the No Sniveling sign above our kitchen door, he only sniveled more.

  “Fussing won’t help our fishing any,” I said.

  He spit out his pacifier and cried.

  “Look,” I said, “it’s a beautiful day. You’ve had breakfast, your diaper is clean, we’re going to have the beach to ourselves, and the fish are going to be there waiting for us. What more can you want?” I found the pacifier and returned it to him. “Here’s your plug, kid.”

  He wouldn’t take it, and kept crying.

  Demi-crisis.

  I pulled off the jeep track, parked, and hauled him out of his car seat. Soaked pants. Good grief. I got him dried and powdered and into a new diaper. Still he cried. I put him on my shoulder and walked him down to the surf, patting him on the back. He burped a fair-sized burp. Aha! The old piss-in-your-pants-and-then-need-to-burp syndrome, eh? I should have guessed.

  I hauled him around so I could see his face. He smiled weakly. What a guy. I put him back in the car seat, gave him his plug, and we went on.

  To our right, the Atlantic Ocean slapped against the sand, and to our left Katama Bay reached up toward Edgartown. Ahead, parked off to one side of the track, was a white pickup. When we came up to it, I saw that it was empty. I also saw a DEP logo on its door. Somewhere nearby, no doubt, some plover-loving official was snooping around in hopes of finding a reason to close down the beach again next year.

  I didn’t see anyone who belonged to the pickup. Maybe the driver had gone for a morning swim and had drowned. Or maybe some other unpleasant thing had happened to him. Or her. EPA types came in all genders, and one sex was as bad as the other.

  “Now, don’t get all worked up just because of one government truck,” I said to Joshua. ’Just keep your mind on bluefish.”

  Joshua said he’d try to restrain himself, and we drove on.

  The bluefish were waiting for us at Wasque Point, and there was only one other Jeep ahead of us. It belonged to John Skye and had contained the whole Skye family: John, Mattie, and the twins, Jill and Jen. They were all catching fish. A lovely sight.

  I pulled alongside the Jeep, got Joshua set up in his lounge chair, so he could be part of the action, and took my eleven-foot graphite rod off the roof rack.

  Mattie Skye came up from the surf with a nice six-pounder as I headed down to make my cast.

  “They’re here,” she said. Then she beamed at Joshua, the way women do when they see babies. “Hi, Joshua!”

  Joshua gave her his big smile and said hi.

  I made two casts and got nothing.

  “Gee, J.W.,” said one of the twins, pulling in a fish, “I can’t understand what you’re doing wrong. Here, do you want to land this fish? I can get another one.”

  I could never tell one twin from the other. “No satire, please,” I said. “The trouble with the younger generation is that it doesn’t have any respect for its elders.”

  She landed her fish just as I made my third cast. As the lure hit the water, a fish hit the lure, and I felt that old familiar thrill that never changed no matter how many fish I caught. The rod bent as I set the hook, and the line sang as the fish ran with it. I got him turned and began to bring him in, hauling back, then reeling down and hauling back again.

  He was a jumper, and went high into the air, tossing and thrashing. But I kept the line just tight enough, and he couldn’t throw the hook. He jumped again and then again, and I heard myself laugh with delight at his beauty and strength. Then he was in the surf, still thrashing, and then I had him on the beach.

  I brought him up to Joshua, who eyed him with approval. Nice fish, Dad.

  It’s good to have a kid who appreciates his father.

  The twins seemed equally interested in Joshua and fishing, and divided their time between the surf and Joshua’s lounge chair. I did the same, so the lad was never lonesome even though the fish hung around until the tide slacked off and the rip flattened out. By that time, I had a dozen nice six- to eight-pounders in my box and was feeling very fine.

  I put the rod on the roof rack and got out my stainless steel thermos and Joshua’s bottle. Coffee for me and milk for him. Good stuff to sip once the fish were gone.

  John and Mattie came over to the Land Cruiser.

  Mattie, whose dashing first husband had, years before, driven his motorcycle at a high rate of speed into a large tree, leaving her a young widow with twin daughters, had found a new and good life with John for herself and her girls. John, in turn, doted on all three of them, and they had become a happy family.

  “Well,” John now said. “I think we have enough blues for the time being. What an August! This is the way fishing is supposed to be.”

  True. Between the four of them, they had over twice as many fish as I did. “What are you going to do with all of them?” I asked.

  “The same as you. We’ll give some away, fillet the ones we keep, freeze some, and smoke the rest.”

  That was, indeed, what I was going to do. I knew half a dozen people in Edgartown who loved eating bluefish but who, for one reason or another, couldn’t catch their own. I routinely took fish to them when I caught a few. John and Mattie Skye, like most surf casters I knew, had similar acquaintances to whom they gave fish. It was a rare blue-fish that went to waste on Martha’s Vineyard, and mine never did, since I had a commercial license and had markets for any fish I caught and didn’t want for myself or my friends.

  “I see that the DEP is eyeballing the beach again,” said John, who was not above rubbing a little salt in my well-known sores.

  “You’re mean, John Skye,” laughed his wife.

  “I saw their pickup when I came by,” I said, hearing the only half-feigned sourness in my voice. “But I didn’t see any people. I’m kind of hoping that a flock of giant plovers swooped down and carried them away where they will never be seen again.”

  “I take it that you didn’t bother attending Lawrence Ingalls’s talk with the Marshall Lea Foundation. They gave him a standing O.”

  “I met him earlier in the day. We didn’t chat long, and I didn’t go listen to his speech.”

  “We did,” said Mattie. “We thought he was pretty good.”

  “I think he’s a fanatic. Hitler was a good speaker, too, remember?”

  “Tsk, tsk. No Nazi comparisons, please.” She grinned. “That was his pickup you passed on the beach. We saw him there when we came by. He’s a dedicated public employee, up at dawn and out on the job. Your tax dollars at work, my boy!” John matched his wife’s grin.

  “Why is it that only the jerks are dedicated?” I asked. “Why can’t they be lazy slobs like everybody else?”

  The distant whump-whump sound of a helicopter entered my consciousness. I looked north and saw a dot in the sky growing larger. A helo, sure enough, loafing down East Beach, flying low.

  It arrived and circled over us, filling the air with sound. We could see that a passenger was aiming a camcorder at us, and we all waved. The camc
order person waved back, then the helo went slowly on to the west, following Norton’s Point Beach.

  I recognized the logo on the side of the plane as being that of the company I’d hired for Drew Mondry. Apparently the pilot and photographer were doing a little Vine-yard scouting of their own as they flew to meet Mondry and me at the airport.

  I looked at my watch. “Hey, I gotta go.”

  I told the Skyes about my job as tour guide while I packed Joshua and his gear into the Land Cruiser.

  “No kidding!” exclaimed one of the twins, who were helping get Joshua squared away. “You’ve been working with the movie guys? Say, any chance they need some extras?”

  “You’ll be back in school when they start shooting,” said her mother.

  “I’ll cut classes!” said the twin.

  “Me, too!” said her sister.

  “We could be twins,” said the first twin, hooking arms with the other one. “We could wear the same clothes and do our hair the same way. I’m sure they’ll want us!” She looked at me. “You’ll put in a good word for us, won’t you, J.W., friend of our childhood, father of our very favorite baby boy, fisherman par excellence?”

  She smiled the loving smile.

  Where do girls learn these things? Is there a secret school somewhere that only girls know about where they’re taught the smiles and fluttering eyelashes and all the other winsome stuff?

  I narrowed my eyes. “As I recall, it wasn’t long ago that you were making sarcastic comments about my fishing abilities. Remember that ’you want to land mine?’ stuff? I do. I don’t think the movies need any wise-guy girls working for them.”

  Twin One clutched her throat and staggered back. “That wasn’t me! That was her!” She pointed at her sister. “I’m the good twin!”

  “She’s lying!” exclaimed Twin Two. “She’s the evil twin! No one would want to hire her, but I know they’d want to hire me!” She did the eyelash bit.

  I got into the Land Cruiser, and they both rushed up as I closed the door.

  “Please! Pretty please!” They clasped their hands as if in prayer.

  “If I find out they need two clowns, I’ll mention you,” I said. I looked over their heads at their parents. “Are teenage sons as bad as teenage daughters? Do I have this to look forward to in fifteen years?”

  “We don’t have any teenage sons,” said Mattie, “but I imagine they’re just as wacky.”

  “Great.” I rolled my eyes and drove away while Joshua, tired from the morning’s fishing, decided to take a nap.

  Coming off the Wasque Reservation onto Norton’s Point Beach, I could see the DEP pickup still parked where it had been. Loathsome Lawrence was still at work, apparently, although I didn’t spot him moving around anywhere.

  When I came alongside the pickup, I saw why.

  He was lying on the ground in front of the truck, staring at the sky. There was blood on his shirt and some trickling from his mouth.

  I stopped and went to him. I touched his throat. No pulse. I lay my head on his chest. No heartbeat. I put my hand on his forehead. Still warm. I looked both ways along the beach. Far to the west, a vehicle was disappearing from view as it reached the paved road at Katama.

  I put my mouth to his and tried to get air into him. I could fill his lungs and empty them, but it did no good. I switched and worked on his chest, trying to get a heart-beat. Nothing.

  I got off my knees and went to the Land Cruiser. From under the front seat I got out the phone I’d never used before, and called 911. Then I went back to work on Lawrence Ingalls, even though I knew it was a waste of time and energy.

  Finally, I stopped. I had blood on my hands and face and clothes.

  The Skyes had never come by, which probably meant they’d gone home via the On Time ferry.

  I walked down to the surf and washed my hands and face, then went back to the Land Cruiser and made another call, this one to the airport with a message for Drew Mondry: I wouldn’t be flying with him this morning; something had come up.

  By then I could hear the sirens coming down toward Katama, and not too much later four-wheel-drive police vehicles from the sheriff’s department and Edgartown appeared off to the west and came down the beach.

  They stopped, strung out on the two-track roadway used by ORVs. The sheriff was there with some deputies, the chief was there with some Edgartown cops, Doc Boone and some medics were there, and Corporal Dominic Agganis of the state police was there, along with the island’s newest state trooper, Officer Olive Otero, the two of them having bummed a ride down with the sheriff.

  There are ten different police forces on Martha’s Vine-yard, and Lawrence Ingalls’s death had brought representatives of three of them here. We might not have order on the island, but we had plenty of law.

  Doc Boone confirmed the obvious: Lawrence Ingalls was dead. He then hazarded a guess that the gunshot wound to his chest had done the job.

  Several of the cops and deputies, under the supervision of Dom Agganis, spread out, moving cautiously over the sand, looking for whatever they could find that might be enlightening. While they did that, I told my tale to the chief, the sheriff, and Olive Otero.

  They listened and scribbled an occasional note. When I was done, Olive Otero said, “If you worked on him like you say, how come your hands aren’t bloody? He’s got blood all over his face and chest.”

  “I told you. I washed my hands and face.”

  “Oh, yeah. You still got it on your clothes, though.”

  “That’s right. I decided to take them home and wash them there.”

  “And you saw another vehicle leaving the beach after you found the body?” “That’s right.”

  “But you couldn’t tell what it was or anything like that? Make, maybe? Or color?”

  “It was too far away. It was darkish. I only saw it for a second.”

  “You know this dead guy?” asked the sheriff.

  “I know who he is. His name’s Lawrence Ingalls.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I was introduced to him.”

  “When was that?”

  “Day before yesterday. Up in Gay Head.” “Oh, yeah?” said Otero, making a note. “Met him just day before yesterday, eh?” “That’s right.”

  “And you never met him before that?” “No.”

  “And today you met him here.”

  “I didn’t meet him. I found him.”

  “You didn’t meet him when you drove out to go fishing?”

  “No. I saw the pickup here, but I didn’t see him or anybody else.”

  “Was the other vehicle here at that time? The one you say you saw when you found the body?” “No.”

  The sheriff looked at me. “You don’t happen to have a gun with you, do you?”

  I felt a coldness. Anger is often the product of fear, they say. “Search me,” I said, spreading my arms. “Search the truck.”

  “Maybe we should search the ocean there, too,” said Otero, pointing at the surf. “Out as far as a man can throw a pistol, maybe.”

  “While you’re at it, you should dig up the whole beach,” I said, hearing the fury in my voice. “I’ve been alone down here for quite a while. I could have buried it anywhere.”

  “Now, take it easy, J.W.,” said the chief.

  “It’s just that I read the letters to the editor and listen to the gossip,” said Otero, looking at me. “You may never have met this Ingalls guy before day before yesterday, but you never made any secret about what you thought of him. And now he’s dead, and you say you found him still warm. That’s something people are going to talk about.”

  “I’m a stupid guy,” I said, leaning toward her. “I always stick around after I kill somebody, and I always do something dumb like calling the cops so they’ll know it was me that did the deed!”

  None of them seemed impressed by my satire.

  “Motive and opportunity,” said Otero. “You have both.”

  “So did somebody else!�
��

  “Maybe. Tell me about when you met Ingalls day before yesterday. It’s funny that you met him then and he’s dead today. Didn’t you two get along?”

  I had the feeling of a man being handed a shovel to dig his own grave.

  “You don’t seem to have a very high opinion about what I have to say, so ask Joe Begay,” I said. “He was there.” “I will. Anybody else there?”

  “A guy named Drew Mondry and a woman named Beth. She was with Ingalls. I don’t know her last name.” “Anybody else?” “No.”

  The sheriff eyed me. “I’d like to hear your version first, J.W.”

  Terrific. But if our places had been reversed, I’d have wanted the same thing.

  So I told them what had happened on the Gay Head beach.

  They listened and took notes, and when I was through I didn’t have to guess about who their prime suspect was.

  — 10 —

  Joshua was smelling bad when we got home just before noon, so I got him cleaned up first, then took care of the fish I had left. I was feeling chilled and nervous, almost as though I were actually guilty of killing Ingalls. No wonder people failed lie detector tests. I could imagine what Beth whatever-her-name-was would tell Otero and the sheriff when they questioned her about the incident in Gay Head.

  All my bitching about Loathsome Lawrence was coming back to haunt me. More evidence that all too often our brains are out in the south forty while our mouths are right here. Fate loves a jest, as they say, and what’s more ironic than to be scalded by our own hot air?

  I wondered if Zack Delwood’s loud mouth had caught Olive Otero’s ear as well as mine had, and if she and the other minions of the law were checking out his whereabouts this morning, or that of the other hundreds of islanders who had made no bones about their hostile feelings toward Ingalls. Unlike most of the bitchers, however, Zack not only had a big mouth but also had big muscles and a violent streak that had, on more than one occasion, wreaked havoc on lesser men. He liked his reputation as a tough guy and seemed to me to be just the sort of character who might have kacked Lawrence Ingalls. Zack and I were not friends, nor seemed destined to be, but I hoped he wasn’t the one. I didn’t want it to be anyone I knew.