“Everybody’s got to make a living somehow.”
“If all he got was pictures of cars, it’s quite a stretch to make a story out of them.”
“People who read the National Planet are used to stretches. They thrive on stretches. ‘I was a love child of Elvis and a creature from outer space.’ Compared to stuff like that, Burt was a model of scientific method.”
In Oak Bluffs, we found a spot to leave the car over by the wonderfully renovated Victorian house on the south side of the park, and walked back past the music grandstand to the Fireside, on Circuit Avenue.
The Fireside is far from being the island’s classiest saloon, but it’s popular with the young crowd and with a lot of old boozers, too. It’s where all of the island’s barroom fights used to start before such fracases became popular in Edgartown as well. The whole place smells of spilled beer, cigarettes, grass, and various bodily emissions. My young friend Bonzo, who long ago blew out a perfectly good brain with some bad acid, now works at the Fireside at the end of a broom or clearing tables. Bonzo labors happily and tirelessly to keep things clean, but there’s too much Fireside and not enough Bonzo for him to accomplish that aim, so the bar always looks and smells like it could use a good scrubbing.
Two hours before noon, there weren’t many people in the Fireside, and we spotted Jake Spitz immediately, where he sat in the farthermost booth and sipped at a cup of coffee. We went to him and sat down.
“You want to hear a funny story?” asked Spitz. “This booth reminds me of it. One time I was sitting in a booth down in D.C., and I could hear this woman and man going at it in the next booth. She was sort of hissing at him and he was apologizing all over the place.
“ ‘You unfaithful wretch,’ she says. ‘You promised me you were through with other women, and now you’ve got yourself another floozy. This is the last straw! I warned you last time, and now I’m leaving you!’
“ ‘Oh, no,’ he begs. ‘I’m sorry. I swear it’ll never happen again. Give me one more chance!’
“ ‘That’s what you said the last time, you philanderer!’
“And they go on and on like that with her hissing and him swearing he’d be true and groveling and apologizing until all at once she breaks off and says, ‘My God! I’ve got to go. There’s my husband.’ And she takes off, sort of covering her face with her hand as she heads for the door.” Spitz smiled.
“Did you make that up?” asked Zee, grinning.
“Honest to God, no. It really happened. I swear. People are weird.”
“Speaking of weird,” I said, “take a look at these.” I tossed him the envelope of photographs. “The order is important, so don’t mess them up.”
He glanced through them, then looked at me with arched brows. “This’ll take some time,” I said, and I told him the story of what had happened^ since Cricket Callahan and I had first met on the beach, and what I thought or suspected.
He listened, then looked through the photos again, and went back to those of the Volvo.
“This car, eh?”
Zee nodded. “We’d like to know who it belongs to.”
“And you don’t want the Secret Service to know anything about this.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Because you don’t know who to trust.”
“Except Karen Lea. I trust her. And you.”
“You might not be too surprised to know who drives the blue sedan that follows you,” he said.
I felt my forehead wrinkle. “You know who drives that car?”
He nodded. “Joan Lonergan.”
While I thought about that, Zee said, “But when we were being trailed by that car and Karen radioed in to find out if it was a Secret Service car, nobody knew.”
“That’s because it isn’t a Secret Service car. It’s Joan’s personal car.” He picked up a photo of the Volvo. “Just like this is—”
“Walt Pomerlieu’s personal car,” I said, ending his sentence for him. “I saw it up at Barbara Miller’s place yesterday. How do you happen to know about those cars?”
Jake Spitz looked at me with interest. “You saw the Volvo up at Barbara’s place, eh? Well, you seem to have your suspect list narrowed down. Shadow is either Walt Pomerlieu or Joan Lonergan, or maybe both. No wonder you don’t trust the Secret Service.”
“Yeah,” I said. I thought of the bomb underneath my house and felt a chill, as though death had walked through the door and sat down beside me.
“Don’t frown so hard,” said Spitz with a little smile. “You might break your face. Let me simplify your life for you. Joan Lonergan put the bugs on your cars, but she didn’t plant the bomb or the bugs in your house. Someone else did that.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Joan and Ted Harris don’t really work for the Secret Service, they work for the FBI. They work for me.”
— 25 —
“So that leaves Walt Pomerlieu,” said Zee, a bit wide-eyed. “Walt Pomerlieu. I guess you weren’t just being paranoid, after all, Jeff.”
“Maybe I was,” I said, “but you know the joke: Just because you’re a hypochondriac doesn’t mean you’re not sick.”
“Well, we know Walt owns the Volvo, at least,” said Spitz. “It’s the one his wife drives. They brought it up so she’d have wheels while she visited her sister during Walt’s stint here with the president. We’ve got to check out his schedule before we’ll know if he had the Volvo when Burt Phillips took these pictures. If he did, he could have planted the bugs in the house and the bomb. That shouldn’t be too hard to find out, but even if we have that information, it might not be enough to convince a jury. How come you don’t look as surprised as I feel about this?”
“Probably for the same reason you don’t look as surprised as you say you feel. Because from the first, there was something odd about this whole business.
“It wasn’t the fact that the letters tied the threat to Cricket to that botched IRS operation that ruined that poor little girl’s face, because revenge is always a popular excuse for killing and mutilating people.
“And it wasn’t the fact that the letters had followed Cricket around wherever she went, both here and overseas. That was interesting only because it showed that whoever was sending them knew the presidential schedule well enough to make sure the letters got there when Cricket did.
“One interesting thing was that the letters started coming only after the president and his family vacationed here on the Vineyard the first time, but the botched operation had happened almost a year before that. Why the delay? Italians may prefer their vengeance cold, but most people like it right away.
“Another thing was the fact that even though the letters kept coming, nobody actually attacked Cricket or even tried to. How come? How come, for example, Shadow didn’t at least do something like send her a letter bomb? But he didn’t do that.” I looked at Spitz. “Did he?”
“No.”
“So what we’ve got is threatening letters following Cricket around for a year, obviously being sent by somebody with inside information about her itinerary, but, until this week, when Cricket came to visit Zee and me, with no overt acts that might be called violent or sinister. Since Cricket came to us, though, there’s been a lot of that sort of thing, particularly the murder of Burt Phillips.”
“I’m still not sure why he had to murder Burt,” said Zee. “All poor old Burt had was a picture of the Volvo. He didn’t know who owned it.”
“Two reasons,” said Spitz. “First, because Burt could trace the car just like we did, and second because Burt saw Shadow’s face.”
“But the driver’s face doesn’t show in the film,” said Zee.
I found Burt’s photo of the Volvo coming out of the driveway and put it in front of her. “You don’t see a face, but you do see an elbow sticking out of the driver-side window, and the car’s turning toward Vineyard Haven, toward Burt’s camera. When the car went by Burt, the window was down and Burt could see the
driver plain as day.”
“And the driver could see Burt seeing him,” said Zee, nodding. “And since he couldn’t stop right there on the highway and do Burt in, what with traffic and walkers and bicyclists and all, he pulled into the next drive up the way, which happened to lead down to Felix Neck, and waited, right?”
“Right.”
“For Burt to go home, so Walt Pomerlieu . . . right?”
“Maybe,” said Spitz.
“So Walt, or whoever, could follow him there, where there might be more privacy.” She shivered. “I really don’t understand people like that. I know they’re there, but I don’t understand them.”
Spitz’s voice was gentle, almost soothing. “They say the stock market is motivated by fear and greed. Killers aren’t much different. In this case, it was fear of being found out. Burt knew too much.”
I said, “I imagine Burt almost faked him out of his shoes when he pretended to drive away that first time, then turned right around and came back. One irony is that Burt actually didn’t know anything at all. He didn’t know who he’d photographed, or that he had any reason to fear him. That’s why he was such an easy victim. Being the nosy guy Burt was professionally, I imagine that when he met Shadow there, he probably tried to find out who he was and whether he had any interest in Cricket Callahan. I don’t know what Shadow told him, but when Burt turned his back on him, it certainly never occurred to him that Shadow was going to kill him. . . .”
I had a sudden attack of remorse, and stopped talking. Zee looked at me and saw something in my face. She put her hand on my arm. “What’s the matter?”
Guilt has some odd characteristics. You can feel guilty even though you know you really aren’t. If anyone else admitted feeling guilt over the same thing, you’d tell them it was nothing to feel guilty about. But even if they believe you, they keep right on feeling guilty. And the same goes for you. It doesn’t do any good to know that you’re not really guilty, because you feel that way anyhow. I am very wary of guilt for these and other reasons, but sometimes it catches up with me just the same. It passes with time, usually, but while it’s there, it’s bad.
I made myself speak, but couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “It’s ironic that the driver didn’t have to follow Burt home, after all; Burt came to him. He walked right into his arms, there in the trees beside the Felix Neck driveway. And I was the one who sent him there. Burt was afraid of me, so he went someplace he figured was safe to make his phone call to the garage, and he got himself killed because he did that. It happened because of me.”
“It didn’t happen because of you,” said Spitz, in that same soothing voice he’d used before. “It just happened. You didn’t know Shadow was in there any more than Burt knew that Shadow had planted that bomb.”
Ignorant armies clashing by night.
I knew he was right, that what we sometimes think of as cause and effect is actually only the fell clutch of circumstance, but I also knew I was going to feel bad for a time.
“Oh, Jeff,” said Zee, my wife, the nurse, the healer. She put her arms around me, and held herself against me. Sweet, strong Zee.
And after a while, I could kiss the top of her head and say, “I’m okay.” And I was. As close as I expected to be for a while, at least.
“It’s not your fault,” she said, keeping her hands on my arm, looking into my soul with her great, dark eyes. “Jake is right. It just happened.”
“I know.” I gave her the most authentic-looking smile I could manage and took a deep breath. “Where were we?”
“Sinister acts as soon as Cricket Callahan came to stay at your place,” said Spitz. “People coming through the woods to your house, people bugging your house and your cars, people putting bombs under your bedrooms, people following you in a blue sedan. Stuff like that.”
“Yeah, until I finally took Debby and Karen out of there yesterday. The point is that one reason for letting Debby come to us in the first place, aside from the Roman holiday part of it, seemed to be that she’d be safer at our place, where nobody but Mom and Dad and a few of the Secret Service people knew she was, than she would be at the compound or traveling around the island with her folks.
“The plan sort of made sense, but in fact Shadow wasn’t fooled for a minute. He had never made any threatening moves during the past year, but he made a lot as soon as Debby was here, exactly where he wasn’t supposed to know she was.”
“I’m with you so far,” said Spitz. “Great minds must run in common gutters.”
“So things were out of whack,” I said. “It began to make more sense if I figured Debby was with us just so Shadow could get to her easier. Now, I’m sure that was the plan. Here’s what I think. I think that revenge was the motive for the letters, and I think that the letters didn’t start coming until Joe Callahan visited the Vineyard, because during the first year after the botched operation the writer was too occupied with other things to take revenge, even though he was filled with vengeful thoughts. Sort of like the convict who’d love to kill the judge who sent him to jail, but can’t because he’s still there.
“But by the time Prez came to the island a year ago, the writer was, as it were, out of jail. He finally had time and opportunity to get even, and I think he felt like the president’s visit to his island was the last straw, the final insult, the last twist of the knife. Prez was here having a wonderful time right where the writer had been having a terrible one. It was like salt in his wounds.”
“So he started sending a stream of letters threatening to make Cricket’s face look like that other poor girl’s,” said Zee. “Knowing that even if Cricket never learned about them, her father would be told.”
“Yeah. Psychological warfare. The same letter, over and over. I imagine that presidents get pretty used to the idea that there are crazies out there who’d like to kill them, because that goes with their job. But a threat to a daughter is something else. I doubt if a father ever gets used to that, and I think that the writer knows it. I think he knows it because he saw someone he loves suffering long, and because he suffered himself as a result. Pain like that can transform some people into monsters.”
“Who is he?” asked Zee.
I looked at her. “I can’t prove it yet, but I think it’s Ben Miller.”
Across the table, Jake Spitz arched a brow and did not look surprised, but said nothing. I wondered if he knew anything I didn’t know, and guessed that he did. I babbled on.
“Ben Miller has motive and he’s had opportunity. When Barbara lost her job after the bungled operation overseas, it was like losing her life. She says she might actually have died, in fact, but Ben put his business interests aside and cared for her during the year it took her to get herself glued back together She’s the great love of his life, and he almost lost her, so he hated the man who almost killed her. And just last year, when that man, Joe Callahan, came to the Vineyard to have a good time, Barbara was finally over her crisis and Ben was able to go back to his work and find time for revenge. He began sending the letters.”
“Which did the job, all right. So we’ve got motive. What about opportunity?”
“Ben is an international banker who travels all the time and has business contacts everywhere. He also knows people Barbara worked with when she was with the IRS. Wherever Cricket Callahan travels, Ben knows people who’ll mail letters for him. No problem, then, having the letters follow Cricket around. The people who mail them probably don’t even know what’s in the envelopes. All they know is that Ben is a bigwig with good connections, so they’re not surprised that he’s corresponding with Prez and his family. And since the people who mail the letters really are innocent agents, the Secret Service has no reason to think they’re involved, and probably won’t ever catch up with them.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” said Spitz.
“I’m not too sure of any of this,” I said.
“Neither am I,” said Zee. “Ben Miller may have sent the letters, b
ut we know he’s not Shadow. Walt Pomerlieu owns the Volvo, so he’s probably the driver in Burt Phillips’s pictures, and the guy who planted the bugs and bombs and who killed Burt. But what’s the tie-in between Walt Pomerlieu and Ben Miller?”
“The tie-in is that Walt and Ben are brothers-in-law. They married sisters. The first day I met him, Walt Pomerlieu told me that his wife’s name is Maggie. He even showed me a picture of her and the kids. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Just a picture of a plain-looking woman with big teeth. But when I was up at Barbara Miller’s place I was introduced to her sister, Margaret, who’s staying with her while Ben is overseas tending to his banks, or whatever it is that he does. Margaret looked like her sister, and I thought I’d seen her before. But the Maggie-is-Margaret idea didn’t come to me until we knew that the Volvo and Walt Pomerlieu went together. As soon as I saw the picture Burt took of the Volvo, and remembered the one in Barbara’s yard, I remembered the family photo that Walt had showed us, and a lot of things fell into place.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” said Zee. “When Barbara lost her job and fell apart, Maggie and Walt were as worried about her and as mad at the president as Ben was. Being a head Secret Service guy, Walt knew all about the president’s travel plans, and made sure Ben knew them, too, so the letters would always get through. Walt was also in the perfect position to keep the investigation of the letter-writer a little out of focus, just enough to keep Ben safe.”
“Right,” said Spitz. “But things unravel over the long haul. People make mistakes, or investigators get lucky, or somebody starts taking a new slant on things. The FBI and the Secret Service may be rivals, but they have common interests, too, including protecting the president and his family, and it wasn’t too long into this letter-writing campaign that some people began to think the same thing J.W., here, thought: that maybe somebody in the Secret Service itself couldn’t be trusted.”
A Deadly Vineyard Holiday Page 21
