“I’m afraid I’ve heard very little. Charles and Ethyl are sensitive people, and don’t discuss Larry’s life when I’m with them. They know how much the divorce distressed me.” She touched a hand to her head and smoothed an already smooth strand of yellow-brown hair.
We watched Manny replace the first rifle on its pegs and take down the second. It was like watching Galahad achieve the Grail.
I said, “You must have married Mr. Ingalls when you were very young, Mrs. Singleton. And you couldn’t have been married long, if it’s been twenty years since your divorce. What went wrong?”
She watched Manny. “That’s not your business, Mr. . . .”
“Call me J.W. Everybody does. I know it’s not my business, Mrs. Singleton, but it might help me understand Lawrence Ingalls. Some people change a lot between when they’re young and when they’re older, but other people don’t. If you can tell me what went wrong between you, maybe I’ll get some information that’ll help me figure out who might have killed him. You would like to know who did it, wouldn’t you?”
She crossed her arms beneath her breasts, the way some women do when they’re getting stubborn. “Maybe it wasn’t anything wrong with him. Maybe it was something wrong with me. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Why so great a no? “I doubt if it was something wrong with you, Mrs. Singleton. You married again and had a happy life, didn’t you?”
After a moment, she said, “Until Jack Singleton died, yes. But what does that prove? Larry and I just had bad chemistry, that’s all. Jack and I were compatible.”
I thought of my own first marriage and how it had gone wrong even though it wasn’t anyone’s fault, and how my new marriage with Zee was so different.
“Your first parents-in-law didn’t think there was anything wrong with you, Mrs. Singleton. They’ve remained your friends and protectors. Was Lawrence Ingalls cruel to you? Did he bully you? Was he unfaithful? What sort of man was he?”
Her voice was suddenly sharp. “What do you know about what Charles and Ethyl think about me? You don’t know anything!”
Manny had returned the second rifle to its pegs and was now coming back to us, so I said nothing.
“Wonderful old weapons,” he said, his voice filled with excitement. “You know what you got there, ma’am? You got a matched pair of Holland and Rigby five hundred double express guns! I’ve read about ’em, but I never thought I’d ever see the real thing! You got a real treasure there, ma’am!”
His enthusiasm was infectious enough to thaw the ice that seemed to be forming in Barbara Singleton’s soul. “I’m sure I don’t know what a Holland and whatever even is, Mr. Fonseca, but there are more rifles upstairs and others in the basement. Would you like to see them now?”
“Does a bear sh—!” Manny caught himself just in time, and instead exclaimed, “Yes, ma’am. I surely would!”
We went upstairs to the master bedroom. In addition to the huge bed, side tables, and dressers, it, like the study below, held bookshelves, a desk, and file cabinets. There was a walk-in closet with mirrored doors, a large TV set against the wall opposite the foot of the bed, and a fireplace faced with two comfortable chairs. Above the fireplace hung two more old rifles. An open door revealed a dressing room, which, in turn, led to a private bathroom, complete with bidet. All in all, the suite was almost as big as my whole house.
Manny went right to the guns, while I looked at everything else, including the books in the bookcases. More books on the environment and the Orient, and more classic and contemporary erotica. Some books on Mexico and the Caribbean. I went and stood beside Barbara Singleton. She gave me a cold look.
I gestured at the bookshelves and said, “I don’t want to annoy you, Mrs. Singleton, and I’m sorry if I’ve already done that, because I need your help. Anything you can tell me about your ex-husband might be important. For instance, did you ever go off to China or wherever it was that he used to go when he was younger? I know he had a great interest in that part of the world.”
Her face paled and hardened even more. “I’m not going to discuss my marriage with Larry. I think that you should wait for your friend out in your car.”
I hesitated, then nodded. “I’m sorry to have offended you, Mrs. Singleton. That was not my intention. I’ll find my own way out.”
She gave me a stiff nod, and I left the room. At the foot of the stairs I looked back. She wasn’t there, watching me, so I went into the study.
— 21 —
The file cabinets and the desk drawers were still locked. I took a fast look at the bookshelves. The same books appeared to be there. Maybe that meant the same stuff was still in the locked drawers. I studied the room, taking in Oriental vases in crannies between bookshelves, and a dancing Siva on a pedestal beside a window. Since Ingalls had locks, it meant he had keys. He’d probably carried them with him when he was alive, but now that he was dead, where would they be?
Odds on, they were somewhere in the house, probably still on his key ring, since it made no sense for them to have been taken elsewhere. Barbara Singleton knew where they were, for sure, but she wasn’t ever going to give them to me.
I peeked into and under the Chinese vases, but found no keys. Ditto for under the Siva and the papers and books on the desk.
I heard footsteps and voices on the stairs and flattened myself against the wall behind the open study door. Barbara Singleton and Manny went down other stairs into the basement.
I went back to the desk and cabinets and studied the locks. Like most locks, these were simple and would only serve as deterrents to honest people. They would pose no problems to anyone who really wanted to open them. Having assured myself of this, I slipped out the front door into the yard and waited for Manny.
When he appeared, thanking Barbara Singleton again and again for having been given the incredible privilege of examining the rifles, I was in the truck, listening to the C and W station in Rhode Island. Garth was singing about a guy who had done his loving woman wrong and was sorry he’d ever let it happen. It was classic Garth, and I was almost sorry for the guy he sang about. But not quite. I didn’t think Garth was either, really.
“What happened to you?” asked Manny, climbing into the driver’s seat. But before I could tell him I’d just gone out for some air, he rushed on: “Whatever, you missed a sight you’ll probably never see again! You know what that Ingalls fella had there, just hanging out in plain sight? I’ll tell you! Besides them matched Holland and Rigbys, he had himself a Rodda four-bore! Them guns is rare! And hangin’ right with it was one of them four-bore Greeners with them side safeties! Holy cow! Both of them rifles in the same room!”
“No kidding?” I said, never having heard of any of those apparently famous weapons.
“No kidding!” said Manny. “And that ain’t all. Down in the basement there’s a six hundred Nitro Express and a .577 Snyder single shot! My gosh! I told that woman that she should lock them weapons away someplace safe, ’cause they’re worth a lot of money, yes siree!” He shook his head, grinning at the memory of all that beauty. ’J.W., I owe you one, for sure. Hadn’t been for you, I would have missed ’em and never even known about it!”
“Glad it was worth the trip for you,” I said. “You think you can afford to bid on any of those guns if they come up for sale?”
Manny put his teeth over his lower lip while he did some calculating. Then he tilted his head to one side. “Maybe one of ’em. Not the Holland and Rigbys, for sure; they’d never split them up. And not that Rodda four-bore. The Greener, maybe, or the Nitro, or maybe the Snyder. But I dunno. Lot of money any way you cut it. I’d love to have ’em all, but any one of ’em would be terrific. Terrific just to see ’em, matter of fact.”
We passed Moonbeam’s house and I felt the eyes of his pale children and their fierce mother follow us out of sight. Then we drove on down to Edgartown, Manny waxing lyric about the rifles, me making meaningless noises in reply while I wondered what was locked in Ingalls’
s desk and files, why Barbara Singleton didn’t want to talk about her divorce, and why Charles and Ethyl Ingalls treated their ex-daughter-in-law with such respect and trust.
Zee and Joshua came out of the house when Manny took me home, and Manny couldn’t resist telling her of the treasures he had found. Zee smiled and nodded and said that it must have been really exciting. Then the two of them agreed to meet down at the Rod and Gun Club the next afternoon and get in some pistol practice. Then Manny, still happy, drove away, and I took Joshua out of his mother’s arms.
“Were the rifles really as wonderful as that?” asked Zee.
“They were to Manny. But if I’m going to ogle something, it won’t be rifles, it’ll be you.” I leered at her accordingly as I told her about our expedition to Chilmark. When I was through, she said, “So you pretended to be a cop, eh? I don’t think that was too smart. You could get in trouble.”
“I didn’t ever actually say I was.”
“But you implied that you were.”
“Imply, imshmy. All I did was ask her some questions, and she didn’t answer most of them, anyway.”
“You worry me sometimes, you know that? So what are you going to do now?”
“Make some phone calls.”
“Who to?”
I looked at Joshua. “She means to whom,’ but she’s Portuguese, so she talks funny.”
Zee had a sharp elbow. “Nobody says ’to whom’ anymore. Who to?”
“To Quinn, for one,” I said, rubbing my ribs. “To Joe Begay, for another.”
Quinn owed me one for the interview I’d given him after Ingalls’s murder. Besides, he considered himself to be Joshua’s unofficial uncle. I dialed the Globe in Boston.
He picked up his phone on the first ring.
“Quinn here.”
“And a good place for you to be,” I said “The loose women of New England can use a few minutes of rest.”
“J.W.! You’ve called about Zee deciding to leave you and come up here with Josh to live with me, right? Now, I know your nose is probably a little out of joint, but, face up to it, you were never meant to have a woman like her. So just put her on the phone so we can arrange where to meet. I know she’s anxious to get out of there.”
“I think she’s busy packing, but I’ll have her call.”
“Excellent. Naturally, you’ll want to bestow a generous divorce settlement upon her, even though you know she’s going to marry me.”
“But of course.”
“Fine. Now that that’s settled, what do you want?”
I told him what had happened since last we’d spoken.
“I think you probably need a lawyer more than you need me,” said Quinn. “I know this guy named Brady Coyne. He’s not only a lawyer, he’s a fisherman. He—”
“I don’t need a lawyer,” I said. “I want to know all I can about Lawrence Ingalls. What he was like as a kid, when he got married, whether he took his wife along on those trips he used to make to the Orient, where he went and what he did over there, what went wrong with his marriage, and what kind of guy he was in general. If he did anything odd or hung around with any dangerous types, I want to know that, too. Did he do drugs? Did he import them? Did he ever get anybody mad at him? That sort of stuff.”
“Only that, eh? Well, if I drop everything else that I’m supposed to be doing, I might be able to put a dent in that list in a couple of years.”
But I could tell that his ears were up and his nose was already in the air, sniffing. Murder in Eden, mixed with big money and a possible scandal involving an old New England name made a brew with a heady aroma.
“I’ll be glad to get anything you can give me,” I said.
“I can give you one thing right now,” said Quinn. “You can bet your last dollar, if you still have one, that Ingalls did some dope somewhere along the line. You and me and Bill Clinton are the only people between thirty and sixty who didn’t.”
“You’d better make that just you and Bill Clinton,” I said.
“I guess we’d better make it just Bill Clinton,” said Quinn. “I’ll be in touch.”
He rang off, and I called Joe Begay. His answering machine said that nobody was home but that I should leave a message after the beep. I told the post-beep silence that I’d called and would like to be called back.
I couldn’t decide whether or not I liked answering machines. I knew I didn’t like the big kind that companies had, which told you to punch this number for this, and that number for that, and, finally, to punch this last number if you wanted to talk to a genuine human being but after that, even, sometimes had still another list of numbers that supposedly would put you in contact with the particular human who could best tell you what you wanted to know but, after you punched that final number on your Touch-Tone phone, sometimes just thanked you for your patience with a click and a dial tone.
Like everyone else, I hated those answering machines, but the kinds that people had in their houses might not be so bad.
On the other hand, I couldn’t think of any really good reason to have one, so I didn’t. Was it my fate to be the last man to enter the twentieth century? The last to have an answering machine, the last to have a fax, the last to have a computer, even? I was a contender, at least.
I served flounder almondine, rice, and a garden salad for supper, and offered jug sauvignon blanc, the house white, with it. Delish, as might be expected.
As I was washing up the dishes afterward, the phone rang. It was Joe Begay. I asked him how things were going. He said slow. I brought him up to date on my adventures and asked him to try to find out about the same things that I’d asked Quinn to find out about. He said it would take time, but that he knew some people who might be able to get their hands on some information.
After I hung up, I thought some more about the truism that we usually get murdered by family members, friends, and acquaintances, and decided that while I was waiting for whatever Quinn and Joe Begay might come up with, I’d go visit some people who had at least worked fairly closely with Ingalls. They probably wouldn’t want to talk to me, but that was nothing new. I’d met a lot of people like that lately.
Maybe it was my breath.
But if it was, Zee didn’t mention it later, as we lay on top of the summer sheets and she pulled me to her, sending Ingalls, Begay, and everyone and everything else out of my mind.
— 22 —
The next day Joshua was grumpy. Nothing pleased him. He didn’t like his milk, he didn’t like being carried around, he didn’t like not being carried around, he didn’t like anything. Burping him didn’t help; cuddling him didn’t help; changing his diaper didn’t help.
I took his temperature. It was maybe a bit high, but nothing serious.
He cried and whined and spit out his pacifier.
“Maybe I should stay home with him,” said Zee, worried, even though she would have advised any other young mother not to be.
“No, I’ll take care of him,” I said.
“Maybe you’d better call Dr. Clanton,” said Zee.
Dr. Clanton, old and gray and always a quieting influence on young parents, was our pediatrician, soon to retire to his gardening and painting. He knew from vast experience that babies, like bigger people, almost always got over whatever was bothering them without any help from anyone, but he knew, too, that parents needed to think something was being done for their offspring, so he always gave solemn advice such as “Well, he’s going to be cranky and out of sorts for a while, but it’s nothing serious. You should just make sure that he’s comfortable and dry. And don’t worry if he doesn’t want to eat. It won’t hurt him to go without food for a while, although you might offer to feed him every now and then in case he decides he’s hungry. You can give him a little Tylenol, too. I think his fever will probably go down, but if it goes up very far, call me.”
It was the equivalent of the take-two-aspirin-and-call-me-in-the-morning-that’ll-be-fifty-dollars-please advice to adults that doctors kno
w will usually cure their patients because we usually cure ourselves.
“I’ll call the doctor if he gets any worse,” I said to Zee, hoping I sounded confident that things were really okay with Joshua. I was caught in that common conflict between mind and emotion. My brain was saying what I knew Dr. Clanton would say, but my feelings were saying that Joshua was really awfully small and that maybe it was something serious.
“Dr. Clanton’s retiring, you know,” said Zee, still worrying over her son. “We’re going to have to get a new pediatrician in the fall.”
“We can ask Dr. Clanton for a recommendation. I’m sure he’ll point us at someone who’s good.”
“The new person is taking over his practice. A young doctor from off-island.”
I decided not to point out that all Martha’s Vineyard doctors are of necessity from off-island since the island has no medical school.
Instead, I said, “We can check him out, and maybe he’ll do. It would be good to have one doctor for Joshua all the time he’s growing up.”
Joshua bawled, and Zee and I exchanged more uneasy looks.
“You go on to work,” I said. “He’s howling, but it doesn’t sound like a really hurting howl; it sounds more like a mad howl or probably an uncomfortable howl. If he gets worse, I’ll definitely call Dr. Clanton.”
“Call me, too.”
She didn’t want to go, but she did, leaving me and Joshua alone.
Joshua cried and waved his arms and legs. I picked him up and walked around with him. He kept crying. I sang to him and he cried some more. I got a little liquid Tylenol and tried to get him to take it. He spit it out.
All morning long he whined and cried. Then, suddenly, he went to sleep, exhausted by his own tears, it seemed.
A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard Page 16
