Death on a Vineyard Beach

by Philip R. Craig

  “Maybe I’ll get over it in time.”

  “Let’s hope not.” She sipped her Lukusowa. “But tell me, if you’ve solved the mystery, why do you still have that little wrinkle in your forehead?”

  I hadn’t known about the little wrinkle, which probably helps to explain why I’m not the world’s champion poker player; but I was aware of being less than quite content. “For one thing, the kid with the sweatshirt up in Boston wasn’t Fred Souza. I know what Fred looks like. I used to see him when Jimmy still had his boat and Freddy crewed for him, and the kid in Boston wasn’t him.”

  “Somebody he hired? A friend?”

  “I thought that for a while. But do you have any friends you could hire to kill somebody? Or do you know how to get in touch with somebody who’d do the job for you? No? Well, neither do I, and I’m having a hard time figuring that a college kid like Freddy knows any hit men, either. Even amateurs, like this guy.”

  Zee tried another cracker. “Oh, I don’t know about that. Remember that schoolteacher in New Hampshire? She got some of her students to knock off her husband.”

  Touché.

  “And another thing,” I said. “Whoever the guy was, he knows we can ID him, and he’s still out there. Until the cops find him, I want you to be careful.” I told her about Wally and his friend. “And these local guys only brought their fists,” I said. “The kid in Boston is a gunner.”

  Zee stopped nibbling. “You mean to tell me that two guys attacked you right here? This morning? While I was asleep?”

  “Well, it wasn’t much of an attack. The point is that the next one might be.”

  Zee reached across and put her hand on my arm. “The police will find Freddy, and they’ll learn who the shooter was, and they’ll bring him in, and we won’t have to worry anymore. They may have him already.” I didn’t think she sounded quite as confident as she had before.

  I finished my drink. “How’s the target practice going?”

  “It’s going fine, and it’s fun. But I’m not going to start carrying my trusty Beretta around with me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  That’s what I’d been thinking. “I won’t ask you to do that,” I said.

  “The wrinkle is still there, Jefferson.”

  I ironed it out. “Gone,” I said. “Let’s go down and eat.”

  But after the supper dishes were washed and stacked, I found her staring at me.

  “It’s back again?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Probably a sign of age. Your insatiable carnal demands are wearing me out and turning me into an old man.”

  She slowly shook her head back and forth, and allowed a little smile to cross her face. “Oh no. Those make us younger, not older. It’s something else.”

  True. I told her about Vanderbeck’s Axioms, then said, “One of them says things are not what you think they are. That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Freddy Souza seems too perfect. Motive, opportunity, and all that. The thing is, I can’t imagine who else might have stolen that shotgun. Who else knew where it was and that the house would be empty that night?”

  “It’s true that things are almost never exactly what they seem,” said Zee. “They’re always at least a little bit different. More complex, usually. It’s the way things are. On the other hand, aren’t you the one who’s always talking about Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation that accounts for the facts is probably the proper one?”

  I put my hands on her shoulders. “Haste makes waste, but the early bird gets the worm. That’s the trouble with truisms: there’s always one that contradicts another one.”

  “You sound tired,” said Zee. “Bring your worm, and I’ll bring my bird, and the four of us will go to bed.”

  So we did that.

  Later, Zee said, “You should have another talk with Bill Vanderbeck. Maybe he can tell you more about these axioms of his.”

  She tucked her knees up against the back of mine, and put her arm over me, and gave me a squeeze, then got out of bed, and put on her uniform and went to work. I was awake awhile longer, missing her warmth against me, but feeling blessed.

  The next morning I drove again to Gay Head, running things through my mind. I drove past Gubatose’s driveway, on to Bill Vanderbeck’s house. There was an extra car in his yard. Then the door of the house opened and the shaman came out and waved me in.

  I parked the Land Cruiser and went up onto the porch. “I don’t want to interrupt anything.”

  “No problem,” he said, putting one brown hand on my shoulder and shaking my hand with the other. “It’s only my niece, Toni. Come in. You might be able to help her out, as a matter of fact. She’s here to talk about her husband.”

  I followed him inside. Toni Begay smiled at me and said hello. She had a cup of coffee in her hand. Vanderbeck went to the kitchen and came back with a cup for me. We sat.

  “Toni here is wondering if she knows enough about her husband,” said Vanderbeck. “Can you tell her anything she doesn’t know?”

  No one had ever asked me to do anything like that before. “I doubt it,” I said. I thought Toni Begay was as surprised by her uncle’s request as I was.

  “Anything at all,” said Vanderbeck.

  I could think of little. “You know that I met him in Vietnam. But I wasn’t there long enough to learn much about him. He had a reputation for doing his job and for bringing his people back alive, which wasn’t the easiest thing to do. He saved my life, I know that.”

  “Toni, here, says that Joe doesn’t tell her much about himself.”

  “It’s not that, exactly,” said Toni. “It’s like he really believes that his life isn’t worth much discussion. If I ask him something in particular, he’ll tell me whatever I want to know, and he seems good-humored about it, if you know what I mean, and goes into as much detail as I want. But if I don’t ask, he doesn’t tell. Is that normal?”

  Actually, it sounded pretty normal to me. I wondered what Zee would say, if she were here.

  “For instance,” Toni went on. “He’s never really told me anything about his business. I mean I know about him growing up out there in Arizona, and I know he was in the army in Vietnam and that he got wounded there, and I know that he worked as a rep for a company, or maybe several companies. That gidget business. You remember? But he never really tells me much. Whenever I ask him, he seems to tell me what he’s done, but actually never does. It bothers me, but I don’t know if it should.”

  “So she called me up and I told her to come over for coffee,” said the shaman. “I figured she could think about it some more on the drive. Besides, I have some green beans she can take home, and maybe give some to her mother, too. They’re growing like crazy, and I have more than I can ever eat by myself. You’re welcome to some yourself, J. W.”

  There was a bowl of fresh green string beans on the table, which reminded me that I had better get to picking mine again. It doesn’t take beans long to grow you out of house and home. When they’re ready, you have to pick them almost every day. I wasn’t an hour past breakfast, but thinking about fresh string beans for supper made me hungry.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I have all the beans I need.”

  “Some men don’t want their wives to know what they do,” said the shaman to his niece. “Some of those men like to have something to hold over their women’s heads.”

  “Joe’s not that way. He’s never held anything over my head. It’s something else.”

  “Maybe he’s ashamed of what he’s had to do, and doesn’t want you to know about it.”

  “I don’t know what it is. I just wish he’d tell me. I wish he trusted me.”

  “Maybe he thinks it’s better if you don’t know. Maybe he’s done something illegal that would affect you if you knew.”

  “Joe wouldn’t ever do anything illegal!” she frowned.

  “I do illegal things all the time,” said the shaman. “So do most people. I drive over the speed limit, I trespass wh
ere there are NO TRESPASSING signs. I do that on purpose, by the way, just because I don’t like NO TRESPASSING signs. And another thing. There’s a law in Massachusetts that says that anytime you find something worth more than, I think, about three dollars, you’re supposed to report it. But when I find a buoy or a fishing plug washed up on the beach, or a five-dollar bill, or any other thing like that, I never report it; I keep it.”

  “Yes, but what if you found a wallet full of money, or something like that? You’d turn that in. I know you would.”

  “Maybe,” said the shaman. “Maybe not.”

  “You’re just being stubborn. You know you would.”

  He smiled. “Maybe so. The point is that people in business bend the law all the time. Good people do illegal things. Or sometimes they do legal things, but get into trouble anyway. Or they do legal things that most people think are immoral…”

  That seemed to make Toni almost angry. “Joe would never do anything immoral!”

  The shaman drank some coffee. I thought of the immoral things I had done.

  “He probably just doesn’t want to bore you,” I said.

  “He won’t tell me some things.”

  We sat quietly for a time. Then the shaman spoke again: “Do you trust him?”

  “I want to trust him. I want to!” She turned toward him. “I do trust him! But tell me this, Uncle Bill. I need to know. Do you trust him?”

  He met her gaze. “The important thing is that you trust him.”

  “But you’re a shaman. You’re not like other people, not like the rest of us. You know things about people. I want to know if you trust him.”

  He looked at his coffee cup, and turned it in his hand. “You shouldn’t base your faith on what a shaman tells you,” he said, almost sadly. “You’re a grown-up woman. You have to depend on yourself, on your own understandings.”

  “I said I trusted him, and I do.” She stared out the window at the barn. “This business of being grown-up and married is hard. I don’t know that I like having to decide so many things by myself.”

  “It is your fate,” smiled her uncle. “It’s the fate of all grown-up people. Children get to have someone else tell them what to think and what to do, but grown-ups have to decide for themselves. And getting married is part of it. When you get married, the two of you are responsible for the marriage. If you take that responsibility, the marriage may either thrive or break apart; but whatever happens, it will be the right thing. Sometimes, if the two people were wrong about thinking they could live well together, then breaking is the right thing. But if you decide that you can live well together, you are responsible for making sure that happens, even during the worst of times.” The shaman nibbled another bean, then went on:

  “You ask me if I trust Joe. I do. I think he is a strong, imperfect man who loves you but doesn’t think yet that you’re quite grown-up enough for him to tell you everything. You’re almost twenty years younger than he is, remember, and part of him still thinks of you as some sort of wonderful child who shouldn’t yet be introduced to some of the unpleasant aspects of life, of his life. I think that’s why he won’t tell you certain things.”

  “But I am grown-up. I’m a woman. I haven’t been a little girl for a long time!”

  The shaman ate a bean. “They say that there is a bit of woman in every girl and a bit of boy in every man. Maybe it’s the boy in him that can’t see the woman in you.”

  “You always did talk in riddles.” Still, she smiled.

  “Another thing to consider: Sometimes a lover or husband can be afraid of what his woman will think or feel if he tells her the truth. That’s not unusual in men.”

  “What should I do?”

  He shrugged. “Trust him until he knows he can trust you. Until he knows he can tell you anything. Until he’s either not afraid anymore or is willing to take the risks that go with fear.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think Joe Begay is afraid of anything.”

  “He may be afraid of you,” said the shaman. He turned to me. “You’re a married man. Are you afraid of your wife?”

  “No.”

  “Does she know everything about your life?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know everything about hers?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “We have an agreement. What happened to us before we met doesn’t count.”

  The shaman nodded, and looked back at his niece. “Maybe that’s something for you to think about.”

  She looked at me. “What will you do if something comes out of the past into your new life?”

  “I won’t know until it happens.”

  “How will you handle it?”

  The question made me uneasy. “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know how I will, either. But meanwhile, you don’t need to know any more?”

  “I know all I need to know about Zee. I’m not her judge. I’m her husband.”

  “What is it you know?” she asked. “Tell me.”

  “I’m not Solomon,” I said. “You’ll get no great wisdom from me.”

  “Try.”

  I thought awhile. Then I said, “What I know is that Zee was born to be loved and protected, and that I was born to love and protect her.”

  Toni looked at me. Then she shook her head and smiled. “You men. You’re all hopeless romantics.”

  I needed to change the subject, so I turned to the shaman. “Maybe you can tell me something.”

  “Maybe. Ask me. If I can, I will.”

  “Yesterday up in Luciano’s office, you gave Vinnie Cecilio an odd look when you left. What was that all about?”

  “Ah,” he said. “Vinnie. The young man who escorted me off of the property.” He looked thoughtful. “Vinnie has an odd aura. He’s not like us. He has no heart.”

  22

  No heart. Not like us. Vinnie, Luciano’s eldest grandchild, the apple of Angela’s eye, had no heart.

  I stared at Vanderbeck. “What do you mean by that?”

  He frowned. “Some people have heart. Others don’t. How shall I say this? If you have heart, you face the world. If you have great heart, you face it very well. If you have little heart, you face it badly. If you have no heart…” He shrugged.

  “And Vinnie has no heart?”

  He looked sad. “I saw none.”

  “He’s a shaman,” said Toni to me.

  Vanderbeck smiled his enigmatic smile and shook his head. “Shamans are like everyone else. There are good ones and bad ones, strong ones and weak ones. If I am a shaman at all, I’m a very imperfect one whose readings of auras should be taken with salt. I am no Passaconnaway.”

  I didn’t know who Passaconnaway was, and I was inclined to take what most people said with salt. But I wasn’t sure what I believed about Bill Vanderbeck.

  “Who else around here has no heart?” I asked.

  “Why, very few people,” said Vanderbeck. “Some tourists. No one who lives in this town.”

  “Not anyone else up at Luciano Marcus’s place?”

  He shook his head. “No one that I saw. All others I saw there have heart.”

  I tried another angle. “Are the heartless people the evil ones?”

  “Many people you would call evil have strong hearts.”

  There was something missing in his words, and I wanted to know what it was. “What are you saying? Why do you say they’re people I would call evil?”

  His eyes revealed nothing. “Sometimes I try to imagine that I am God, and I try to see things as God must see them. When I do that, I seem to understand that much of what men call good and evil is not that at all. I seem to see that good and evil are human notions that mean nothing.” Then he laughed, ironic and full of humor. “But as soon as I stop playing God, I see good and evil everywhere once again, as usual.”

  Actually, I didn’t see it everywhere. But I did see it sometimes.

  “And you,” I said. “Do you have heart?�
�

  “I hope so,” he smiled. “But it’s probably true that no one really knows himself. We are all good at self-deception.”

  “Even shamans?”

  Again the laugher. “Especially shamans, I would think!”

  I drove to the Edgartown library, on North Water Street. It being yet another fine summer day with most people at the beaches, I found a parking place no more than three blocks away, up near the Harborview Hotel, and walked back. On my right, the great white houses that lined the street, making it Edgartown’s loveliest, towered over me, and their gardens were bright with flowers. To my left, yachts swung at their moorings, and I could see the buildings and pier of the Chappaquiddick Beach Club, one of many Vineyard places I had never been. For so small an island, there were many such places. In fact, when I thought about it, I hadn’t been most places on the island.

  I had, however, been in most of its libraries. I am fond of libraries because they’re full of information and people who actually like to help you find it. Just as there is no bad beer, there are no bad libraries, although some are better than others. Edgartown’s is one of the island’s best.

  Inside, I looked up Passaconnaway. He, according to the books I found, turned out to have been no Wampanoag at all, but the great sachem of the Pennacooks, who lived up around Lowell. And he had been not only a sachem but a powahee, capable of incantations and visionary ecstasy. The English of the 1600s had called him a prophet and magic maker, and his reputation had made the Pennacooks the only people feared by the Tarentines of Maine, who, in 1618, had attacked and decimated the Agawams and other Massachusetts tribes before going back north for a while.

  Passaconnaway could make fire in the snow, could cuddle poisonous snakes, and could predict the future. A comet he saw led him to predict the plague of 1616, which wiped out two thirds of the Massachusetts coastal tribes, before the Tarentines pretty much finished the job two years later. When a group of Boston riflemen came to arrest him for troublemaking in 1642, he stopped them with a storm, and escaped.

  Passaconnaway’s magic had been considerable, but not strong enough, finally, to hold back the English.