“Yeah. I might feel the same way about somebody I knew or loved. I might do what they’re doing: remember the good, and forget the bad. Bury the bad where it can’t be found.”
“But you’re not going to let them do that, are you?”
I wound a thick strand of her hair around my hand and let it slip away again, remembering how, when she lay in bed with her hair spread on her pillow, her perfect face seemed to be at the center of a glowing black sun.
“Bill Perry and Pete Scorsese aren’t the only guys who might actually believe I killed Ingalls. It’s not a reputation I want to have, and I especially don’t want people to think that you and Josh are a murderer’s family.”
“We’re not. And I don’t care what people think!”
But I cared.
“There’s something else,” she said. “I got a call from Drew. Apparently he tried here first, but the line was busy, so he called me at the hospital. He and some other people are coming down to the island early, to get some R and R before they start shooting the film.”
Drew, eh? What a day I was having. “Great,” I said. “When are they coming?”
“Next week. They just decided, so the papers don’t even know about it yet. Guess who’s coming!”
“Who?”
“Drew and Emily and their daughter, Carly, and Kevin Turner and Kate Ballinger! The stars themselves! Drew says he wants them to meet us! Isn’t that exciting? Imagine, he wants us to meet Kevin Turner and Kate Ballinger!”
I’d met a few of the island’s celebrities over the years, and though I’d found most of them to be no different than other people, meeting more of them, including Kevin Turner and Kate Ballinger, was not high on my list of things I’d like to do.
“Great,” I said.
“And there’s something else . . .” Her voice had a tentative quality to it.
“What?” I turned toward her.
She was looking down at Joshua, and I had the sudden impression that she was doing it so she wouldn’t have to look at me. “Drew wants me to fly out to Hollywood on Wednesday, to take some screen tests. He says I can come back here with them, when they come.”
The evening sounds of birds, wind in the trees, and distant automobile engines filled my ears. I looked across the pond and took a sip of my martini. When I looked back at Zee, she was letting Joshua suck on her finger. He looked happier than anyone else in the family.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I’d talk to you, then let him know.”
I took another sip. “What would you like to do, if you had your druthers?”
She clearly had anticipated my response. “I’d like to do what makes you happy.”
Ah, so. I returned serve: “And I’d like to do what makes you happy.”
She finally met my eyes. “I think we’re going in circles here.”
That’s what you do when the injuns are about to ambush the wagon train. I stepped away from my feelings, and my mouth said, “I think you should go. I mean, after all, how many times do you get an offer like that? It should be fun. And Josh and I can bach it for a while just fine.” I looked down at Joshua. “Can’t we? We can do manly things without any women around to tell us how to behave.”
Joshua’s eyes were wide but noncommittal.
“Oh, I wouldn’t leave Joshua,” said Zee, almost with alarm. “I’d take him with me. In fact, you could come, too! We could all go together!”
“I doubt if that would fit into Drew’s plans,” said my voice before I could stop it.
She laughed a real laugh. “Oh, I don’t think that he’s planning to seduce me, if that’s what you mean! He’s not the professional-lover type. No, I’d have seen it in him by now if he was. And even if he did want me on the casting couch, I wouldn’t be interested. You and Joshua are all the men I want in my life! I’d just like to see what a screen test’s like and maybe see the inside of a studio and people making a movie while I’m there. Wouldn’t you like to do that? Wouldn’t you like to come, too?”
I put on a smile, and took Joshua from her lap to mine. “Not a chance! If I have to choose between Hollywood and Martha’s Vineyard, I’ll take the Vineyard every time! No, it’ll be better if you go on out there by yourself, so you won’t have to worry about the rest of us. You’ll have a good time, and Joshua and I will be fine right here.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, now I’m not sure I’m sure.” She picked at some imaginary thread on the sleeve of her blouse. “Maybe I’ll just stay home. They can give me a screen test when they get here, if they still want to.”
I put my arm around her shoulder. “You go,” I said. “And have a good time. You can use a break. And when you get back, we’ll be waiting for you.”
She gave me a long kiss. A little later she stood up. “It’s getting cool,” she said. “And it’s time for the man-child to go to bed. Come on, Joshua.”
She took him in her arms and went down the stairs.
I watched them disappear, and then looked back out over the pond. The evening seemed to be darker than it had been only minutes before.
— 24 —
I watched Zee’s plane rise and head north to Boston, on the first leg of her flight to California. When it was out of sight, Joshua and I got into the Land Cruiser and went back home. It was an empty-feeling ride to an empty-feeling house.
Zee’s good-bye kisses had been sweet, and her face had been bright with expectation, the way faces are when their owners are starting on adventures they expect to be happy ones.
“I’ll be back in no time,” she’d said. “And I’ll tell you all about it when I get home. It’ll be fun, I think. I’ll even get to travel with some stars!”
“You’ll be the star,” I’d said, and she’d laughed.
“You and Joshua will be fine?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’ll phone you when I get there.” Everyone else had gone through the gate. “Go,” I said, giving her a small push. “Have fun!” And she was gone.
At home, Joshua and I were outside, weeding flowers, when the phone rang. It was too soon for it to be Zee’s call from California, but it might be her, anyway. Maybe she’d changed her mind, and was calling from Boston. Or maybe she was calling from one of those telephones they have on airplanes these days. I got to the phone before it stopped ringing.
“Get with it, man,” said Quinn’s voice. “Buy yourself a goddamned answering machine like everybody else. Save yourself those mad runs from the yard!”
“City living is making you soft,” I said, puffing. “You can’t live without gadgets.”
“Soft in the head, at least. Here’s what I’ve got on Lawrence Ingalls.”
What he had on Lawrence Ingalls was his birthdate, the names of the members of his family, which was the kind with old North Shore money, his education (Andover and Harvard, just like Dad), the dates of his marriage (right after his graduation) and his divorce (two years later), a list of the jobs he’d held (something to do with financing, briefly, in one of Dad’s firms; in international banking, for a longer time, in one of Dad’s banks; then steady employment for the state DEP, where he’d finally found his vocation).
“What about his private life?” I asked. “Friends, girls, all that travel to the Orient, that kind of stuff? What about his enemies?”
“Well, there was you, of course.”
I went out to the porch with the portable phone, to keep an eye on Joshua. “Who else? What kind of a life did he lead?”
“Nobody at Dad’s firms had a bad thing to say about him. No surprise there, of course, since who’d bad-mouth the boss’s boy. And apparently, the truth was that he left those places just because he didn’t take to the kind of work they did, and he had enough money so he could afford to quit. He found his spot in the environmental biz, and was good at it, according to my sources. A real go-getter. Smart and up on top of the latest information in the fie
ld. On the cutting edge, as they say. People he worked with think he was the cat’s pajamas.” Quinn could string clichés together with the best of them when he set his mind to it.
“No enemies?” I asked. “Nobody mad at him for any reason? Some guy who was envious? A jilted girlfriend? A jilted boyfriend, maybe?”
“You have a low mind, J.W. No, he apparently dated after the divorce, but nothing heavy ever came of it. Just friends, and like that. I guess women liked him and he liked them, but he never got thick with any of them, so there were never any bad feelings that I heard about. He wasn’t interested in remarrying.”
“Until Beth Harper.” From the porch I could see that no eagle had swooped from the sky and snatched up Joshua. He seemed to be playing with his toes.
“I guess so,” said Quinn. “But that’s a recent thing. Nobody seemed to know much about it.”
I was collecting zeros. “What about all that Oriental stuff? Where’d he go? Was he maybe smuggling dope or something? Did he get somebody mad at him that way?”
“You’ve been reading too many thrillers, my boy. No, our lad probably puffed a little weed and maybe dropped some acid or shot up with something just like a lot of people did back when he was in school, but he never was into anything heavy. Far as I know, he grew up to use the normal WASP drugs, just like Dad and the rest of us: alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. What he was doing over in Asia was, first, following Dad’s footsteps. The old man was in the service over there in the Big War, and went back afterward as a civilian doing business for his bank. When our boy Lawrence was working for the bank, he traveled for them over there, too. In fact, I think Dad went with him the first couple of times. Places like Indonesia and India and Singapore. I guess he liked the territory, because for a while after he left the bank, he went back on vacation almost every year. I understand he got to be some kind of an Oriental scholar, in fact.”
“When did he stop? And why?”
“How should I know? I know he stopped, and started taking his vacations down in the Caribbean. And then he quit that and built himself a house on Martha’s Vineyard a couple of years back. Since then, he’s been down there when he wasn’t working out of Boston. He apparently never took anybody with him when he went abroad, and all he ever said about it was the standard stuff: beaches and sight-seeing and like that.”
“He never took his wife with him?”
“Nope. While they were married, he was traveling for the bank, on business. By the time he was going abroad on vacations, they were divorced. The only person who was ever over there with him was his old man, and that was only the first couple of trips. To introduce the kid to the right contacts, probably.”
Hmmmmm. “What about his friends? Did he talk with them about his private life?”
Quinn said: “I asked about his friends. Everybody was his friend, sort of. The people he worked with, old school buddies he met again at reunions, and so forth. Aside from them, I don’t know that he had any friends. He didn’t seem to be the warm and cuddly type.”
“Is cold the word?”
“No, not cold. Aloof? Cool? Formal? Something more like that. Just not the type who looked for a lot of friends, or needed them, like a lot of other people do. Got it from his old man, maybe. I hear he’s the same way. Lots of casual friends, but no close ones. A bit of a loner. Hears the different drummer.”
I ran all that through my brain and out the other side. Nothing. I tried a couple of last, wide shots. “The old man another Orientalist?”
“So I hear. Like father, like son.”
“Did Lawrence become a scholar of the Caribbean, like he became a scholar of the Orient?”
“Not that I know of. I don’t think he’s a scholar of Martha’s Vineyard, either, for that matter.”
More nothing.
“Well, Sherlock,” said Quinn, “who done it, and why?” “The butler,” I said. “In the conservatory with a rope. If you find out anything else, let me know. Forget the foreign travel part, and concentrate on the private-life-at-home part.”
He gave a snort. “If I find out anything else, it’ll be by accident. I don’t have time to do this pro bono work for the likes of you. Unlike some people I could name, I’ve got a real job.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” I said. “You’re a journalist.”
We rang off, and I went outside.
Joshua was still under his umbrella, taking in the sights: birds around the feeders, a branch moving in the wind, shadows dappling the lawn. His was a prettier world than mine. I wondered if he’d trade, but decided not to ask. He’d grow into mine soon enough; better if I tried to get into his.
I went back to weeding flowers. Out of the experiences I’d had before and after Ingalls’s death, some sort of shape was beginning to form from the fragments of information I was getting. But parts of it were missing, and I couldn’t make it out. Perhaps I had overlooked the parts. Or perhaps I’d not yet encountered them.
I weeded the hanging pots, and the flower boxes on the fence, and got to work on the ground beds. How long had it been since I’d first met Ingalls, on the beach in Gay Head? Only ten days. I thought about what I’d heard and seen since then, trying to remember everything. What did I know? Not a lot.
Then thoughts of Zee began to mix with those of Ingalls. Where was her plane now? What was she thinking about? What would she find waiting for her in California?
I remembered the Zen master who said to his confused student, “If you are confused, be confused. Do not be confused by confusion. Be totally confused!”
But I was not a Zen master, or even a good student, so I willed myself away from my confusion and tried to become only a weeder of flowers whose son was watching him as he weeded under a soft summer sky. But Zee and Ingalls continued to intrude upon the oneness I was trying to make of Joshua, the flowers and weeds, the sky, and myself, and I was still confused by confusion.
I was washing the supper dishes when Zee called from her Los Angeles hotel.
It had been a perfect flight, and she was tired but fine. Drew and Emily had met her at the airport. She was having dinner with them and tomorrow was getting a tour of a studio before getting ready for her screen test. L.A. was a huge place that went on for miles in every direction. There was supposedly a sign high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado that said “Los Angeles City Limits"! How was Joshua? How was I? She missed us both, but would be home soon. She’d call again tomorrow. She loved us both.
I played with Joshua for a while, alternately watched and ignored by Oliver Underfoot and Velcro, who didn’t seem to mind having been nudged out of their position as primary family pets by the newcomer who now occupied so much of their humans’ attention.
When I thought the time was right, I walked with Joshua in my arms and softly sang “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” until his eyes were heavy, then I put him to bed. He fussed a bit, then quieted down. When I peeked the first time, he caught me in the act, having only faked being asleep. But the second time, he was off in the wooden shoe, sailing down that river of crystal light into the sea of dew.
The mountain would not come to Mohammed, so Mohammed went to the mountain. Since Joe Begay had not called me, I called him.
“I told you this would take some time,” he said. “I don’t have much yet. Just some dates and destinations from back in the seventies, when Larry was in Malaysia and Thailand and thereabouts.”
“Quinn says his father was over there after World War Two, on banking business, and that when his kid was first in that trade, he took him over there to show him the way around.”
“That’d be Carlson Bank and Trust. Pretty big outfit, but straight arrow, as far as I know.”
“A lot of drugs come out of that area,” I said. “A big international banking outfit might have a finger in that pie.”
“I think I’d have heard about it if it did,” said Begay casually, “but I’ll double-check.”
I wondered but didn’t ask why he would have heard about
it.
“I’d like to have you concentrate on Ingalls’s foreign travel,” I said. “I’ve asked Quinn to let that go and focus on his private life at home. That way, each of you only has to look at one thing, and afterward maybe I can put the two together, if there’s anything to put together.”
Begay heard something in my voice that I hadn’t known was there.
“You think there is something, don’t you?”
When he said that, I knew he was right. I did think that. It was almost a relief to realize it.
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know what it is, but the past is prologue.”
“What would we do without the Bard?” said Begay. “I’ll talk to you later.”
He rang off, and I got myself a Sam Adams and took it out to the balcony, where I sat under the darkening sky and watched the lights glimmer from the far side of the sound. Above me, the Milky Way was a white road across the sky. As I looked up at it, more of old Bill’s wisdom gave form to my thoughts: the fault lay not in our stars, but in ourselves. I drank some beer. It was cold and good, just like the night sky.
— 25 —
“It really is a tinsel town,” said Zee two nights later. She was three thousand miles away, but sounded like she was just next door, where I wished she really was. “Everything’s shine and glitter on one side and strictly business on the other. The people out here talk the talk and walk the walk, but when they go home, they mostly only think about the money. It’s great! I’m having a terrific time!”
“How’s the screen test coming along?”
“I’ve been made up, dressed up, dressed down, and I’ve read from a script. They’ve taken stills and movies and even tried to make me act. Everybody says nice things, but I’ll tell you the truth: I don’t think I’ve got what it takes. When I move around in front of all those people and cameras, I feel like I’m made out of wood. And when I try to read what they give me, I sound like an illiterate!” She laughed, and I felt happy. “I’m having fun, but I don’t think we should sell the farm and move out here so I can have a career on the silver screen. I have met a couple of people who want to be my agent, though. Everything that moves out here has an agent, of course. But Emily—that’s Drew’s wife—gave me the right advice: I should enjoy everything, have a good time, and not take any of it seriously, especially what people say to me, because it’s Hollywood, and everything is images. So that’s what I’ve been doing.”
A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard Page 18
