It was a job I was glad I didn’t have, although I had admiration for those who stuck at the trade, in spite of their shortsightedness and self-destructive inclinations.
They that go down to the sea in ships.
“You hear anything about Jimmy Souza going to an AA meeting?” asked Buddy.
“No. Is he doing that?”
Buddy shrugged. “I don’t know. Somebody mentioned it. I guess I hope he is.”
I’d read that AA didn’t help unless you were ready for it. I didn’t know if Jimmy was ready.
“I guess I do, too,” I said.
I sat in the afternoon sun and for a while watched Buddy Malone’s flying fingers and Joe Begay’s slower, careful ones. Then I went home.
While I picked beans, watered the flowers in the boxes along the fence and in the hanging pots, and refilled the bird feeders, I ran things through my head. A few pieces were missing from the jigsaw puzzle, but if I was lucky, I might have them soon. It all depended on whether Sullivan or Thornberry checked out the names I’d given them, on what they found when they did so, and on whether they’d tell me what they learned, which they might well not do.
I was in one of those They Also Serve situations that irk me. I don’t like to depend on other people to solve my problems, but short of going up to Boston myself, I’d have to, in this case.
I went inside and called Aristotle Socarides. Naturally, he wasn’t answering his phone. What else was new?
I went out and looked at my hydrangea. Still not blue.
I went in and started supper. At least I could accomplish that.
25
When the information finally came, two days later, it came like catsup from the catsup bottle. Two catsup bottles, in fact, one shaken by Gordon Sullivan and one by Jason Thornberry. Blobs of data about Benny White.
Sullivan was friendlier than he had been the last time we talked. “I checked Mr. Benny White out, and the kid they call Roger the Dodger. Roger’s brain wouldn’t light a twenty-amp lightbulb, but he hangs around with Benny, like a dog. You know the type. Benny’s something else. A real hard-ass. Beginning to make a name for himself in the street. A bad boy, getting worse. Likes to muscle people. You know he went to college? Yeah, UMass Boston. For a semester. Ran a little numbers game there with—guess who?—your boy Vinnie Cecilio. They both dropped out about the same time.”
“And stole cars together.”
“One, at least, that we know of. Probably more that we don’t. But that was just the start, for Benny. Since then, he’s been brought in for questioning about aggravated assault, assault, battery, and rape, but nothing’s stuck. People won’t testify, or they drop charges. You know how it is.”
“Yeah. They know he’ll be back on the street about five minutes after he gets probation, and they’re afraid he’ll come after them.”
“He runs some girls, and probably is into gambling and dope, too, but mostly he seems to want to be muscle for hire. 1 get the idea he just likes to beat people up. He likes people to be afraid of him.”
“You think he’s a killer?”
“There are rumors about that, too. Maybe you can help us out there. We don’t have a mug shot of Mr. White, but we’ve got a couple of what you might call informal snapshots, and I’m going to fax one down to the Edgartown police. Maybe you and your wife can take a look at it and let us know if he’s the guy who tried for Luciano Marcus. If you can ID this slimeball, I can get a warrant to search his place. He lives with Mom, down in Dorchester, and she’ll probably swear that he’s home every night by seven and leads the church choir on Sundays. But we might find something that will help us nail him.”
I’d barely hung up the phone when it rang again. Quelle surprise! Jason Thornberry was on the line.
“J. W., Jason Thornberry here. I have some information I think might interest you.”
Surprise again. Jason Thornberry was actually going to give me information instead of just accepting it? “Shoot,” I said.
“Following up on those names you gave me, one of our operatives managed to get inside the home of Mrs. James White, the mother of Mr. Benjamin White. It was done quite legally, I assure you.”
“I’m sure.” I was, too. There’s no law in Massachusetts against lying about who you are, unless you lie about being a policeman and try to act like one. You can pass yourself off as anyone, real or imaginary, and nobody can charge you with anything, although some aggrieved party can no doubt find a lawyer who’ll give it a try. Probably a Thornberry operative wearing gas company coveralls, or some such outfit, carrying a clipboard, and armed with one of those neat ID’s that look so official, knocked on Mrs. White’s door, said something about a meter or the smell of gas in the neighborhood, and was invited in.
If it was me, I’d have used the smell-of-gas story, and would have asked the old lady to step across the street, just to be on the safe side, while I checked things out. Then, while she was gone, I’d have done some fast snooping before telling her all was well, and bringing her back inside.
Thornberry didn’t give the details about the entrance, but got right to the point about what was found.
“In the boy’s room, our operative found a box of double-aught buckshot shotgun shells, about half full. Found a box of latex gloves. Found a good deal of money in a drawer. Found some white powder in a cellophane bag. Found a pistol. A .38 or a 9-millimeter. Found an address book with Vincent Cecilio’s address and telephone number in it.” He paused. “Seemed to our operative that, considering all the stuff he kept in his room, Benjamin had a lot of confidence that nobody would ever come to his place. Our operative had a casual little chat with Mrs. White. Her husband is dead. The boy is an only child. Mom does everything for him, except clean his room. You can guess why he doesn’t want her in there. Something else, too.” Another pause. Even when I’d first known him in Boston years before, Thornberry was a man who knew the value of drama. Even then he wore one of those little Errol Flynn mustaches, and worked hard at looking like Henry Fonda in Fort Apache.
I played along. “What?”
“It seems that her son had an accident a while back. Slammed his hand in a car door and broke his little finger.”
Ah.
“You going to tell all this to the cops?” I asked.
“My first obligation is to my client. We want to contact the other person, Roger the Dodger, before we make any reports to anyone. This call to you is simply to keep you up to date, since you gave us the lead.”
“I appreciate it.”
And I did. As soon as Thornberry rang off, I drove into Edgartown and went into the police station. Naturally, the chief wasn’t there, but I asked the officer at the desk to get in touch with him and tell him about the fax coming down from Boston. She got on the horn, and I found a chair and sat down.
The Edgartown police station is the finest on Martha’s Vineyard, with several offices, a gym, showers, storage areas for recovered stolen goods, labs, and everything else a small-town cop could ask for. It is the envy of the other five towns on the island, and rightly so. The chief’s office has a private entry, so he doesn’t have to come through the front door if he doesn’t want to. He can also use his private door as a way to sneak outside to smoke his pipe.
He came in through that door just as the fax arrived, and the two of us took a look at the mug shot Sullivan had sent us.
Bingo.
Benny White wasn’t a big guy, but a gun would make him as big as anyone, and bigger than most. A shotgun, loaded with double-aught buckshot, would, at close quarters, make him a giant.
“Is that him?” asked the chief.
“It looks like him to me.”
“Let’s run up to the hospital and let Zee have a look.”
“Can we use the siren and the blue lights and break the speed limit with impunity?”
“Now I know the real reason they kicked you out of the Boston PD,” said the chief. “Come on.”
We drove up to the
blinkers on the Vineyard Haven Road, took a right on County Road, drove past Bill Clinton’s favorite island golf course, and went on to the hospital, where we parked in the emergency room parking lot.
“I’ll pretend to be bleeding,” I said. “That way they may let us talk to Zee without having to fill out forms first. If you’re bleeding, sometimes they take you right away, but if you’re not, you always have to fill out the forms before anything else happens.”
“I’ll tell them that you’re unconscious. They’ll believe that.”
We went in and there was Zee, looking splendid in her white uniform, talking to a young doctor who was informally garbed in shorts and a tee-shirt. She was taller than he was, I noticed when she looked over his head, saw us, and smiled.
We crossed over to her and showed her the picture. She nodded her head. “That’s him.”
“You’re sure this is the guy?” asked the chief.
“It looks like him to me,” said Zee.
The chief nodded. “We’ll give Sullivan a call, then.”
“You look great,” I said to Zee. “See you later.” I gave her a kiss and followed the chief out to the car.
“The scenic route, Jeeves,” I said.
We drove through Oak Bluffs and back to Edgartown along the shore road, which was lined with the cars of August people enjoying the sun and water of the long beach between the towns. There were umbrellas rising from the sand, and kites in the air. Bicycles moved along the bike path. When we got to the big bridge, I could see my house across Sengekontacket pond. Beneath that same bridge, many years before, the giant Jaws shark had chewed off some poor guy’s leg in the movie that kept a lot of people out of the water the summer it was released.
I felt simultaneously light and happy and depressed, because I knew who had done the shooting and why. The knowing felt good, but what was known felt bad.
In the chief’s office, we called Sullivan. The chief told him that Zee and I had ID’d Benny, and I told him what Thornberry had told me.
Sullivan gave a contented grunt. “This should be enough to get me warrants to search his place and to bring him in. I’ll get right at it.”
“You might try to round up Roger the Dodger while you’re at it,” I said. “If he’s as dumb as you say, he might tell you a lot about Benny.”
“It may surprise you to learn that I already thought of that,” said Sullivan, with a sigh. “Lemme talk to the chief.”
I listened while the chief yessed, uh-huhed, and mmmmmed. When he hung up, he looked at me. “With a little bit of luck, this case might actually work out. It’s the Boston PD’s baby now, so you can go back to loafing in the woods. Sullivan’s going to give me a call when they bring White in. When I get the call, I’ll let you know.”
I went out and sat in the Land Cruiser for a while. I had problems the chief didn’t know about. The biggest one was figuring out how to tell Luciano and Angela Marcus that their grandson was behind the assassination attempt on Luciano. Another one was making sure that Vinnie didn’t walk away from all this without a scratch. If he was willing to arrange for the killing of his own grandfather, he would probably be willing to kill somebody else, if he thought he could get away with it.
“One thing that’s irksome,” I said to Zee, as we sat on the balcony that evening with drinks and hors d’oeuvres, “is that if I’d been paying attention, I’d have known sooner that it was probably Vinnie. But I couldn’t figure out how he could have gotten the shotgun, so I scratched him off the list. Dumbness once again.”
Zee nodded. “Don’t fret about it. When Sullivan gets into Benny’s house, and brings Benny in, and grills Roger the Dodger, there should be enough evidence to make a case against Benny. And if there’s a case against Benny, he might cop a plea and testify against Vinnie. What made you decide, finally, that it was Vinnie?”
“I was pretty slow. I thought it was probably Fred Souza. He seemed to have motive and opportunity. His dad blamed the trawlers for destroying his career and wrecking the family finances. He knew where the shotgun was kept, and he left the party alone the night it was stolen. I figured that Fred had a grudge and had given the shotgun to some friend or hired thug in Boston to do the job.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“Buddy Malone had a hand in it. Buddy’s been pot fishing for a long time, and he’s probably as mad at the trawlers as anybody else, but he never heard of Luciano Marcus and had no idea he owned a lot of those boats. If Buddy didn’t know, would Freddy somehow know? It didn’t seem likely.
“Then there was Vanderbeck’s Second Axiom. It’s not what you think it is. I don’t know what Bill Vanderbeck thinks that means, but I began thinking that maybe what seemed to be true really wasn’t. So I started all over again, and remembered things people told me, and I suddenly realized that Vinnie was probably the guy.
“He’s lazy, he hung around with some young Boston hoods and stole at least one car; he likes his grandma, probably because she gives him money, but he calls Luciano boss. He’s greedy and immature, and when Luciano dies, Vinnie stands to get his hands on some real money. That’s motive enough.
“Then Bill Vanderbeck said Vinnie had no heart. That’s another one of those things Bill says but doesn’t really explain, but it rang right to me. A lot of killers aren’t much different than you and me, but the ones I know about are mostly stunted somehow. They’re children in grown-up bodies. They’re not too bright, and their moral development is way back down there where it was when they were two years old. They want what they want when they want it and they don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t have it.
“Angela says Vinnie’s mom is just as childish in some ways, so maybe Vinnie got it from her. Anyway, people like Vinnie only value people who do good things for them or whom they fear. Nobody else counts. They have no heart. They’re what some shrinks call sociopaths.”
“But Vinnie is a charmer,” said Zee. “Lots of people like him. Look at his girlfriends. He treats them well.”
“Yeah. He’s sweet on the outside, all right. But he’s got the motive, the right character, and he had the opportunity: He knew when Luciano would be going to the opera.”
“But how did he get the shotgun?”
“He stole it. John Dings had taken him duck hunting once, but it was too cold and miserable for Vinnie to ever do it again. Vinnie doesn’t like to do anything that gets him dirty or uncomfortable. He doesn’t like clamming or fishing or freezing in a duck blind or anything like that. I think that’s why he hired his pal Benny to bump off the old man: Vinnie didn’t want to get his own hands dirty. Too gross for Vinnie. Anyway, John Dings kept his shotgun in the hall closet, and probably either took it out of there when Vinnie came to go shooting that morning, or put it back when they came home. It wasn’t any secret where he kept the gun.
“The night it was stolen, John and Sandy Dings were already gone, across the pond at her sister’s place, playing cards. Vinnie came by to pick up Jean Dings, but Jean is always late, and everybody who knows her knows it. So Vinnie knocks on the door and goes in, and Jean says she’ll just be a minute, which probably means five or ten, at least. Vinnie sees his chance, gets the shotgun out of the closet, and takes it out to his Cherokee—borrowed from Luciano, of course—puts it under a blanket in the back, or something like that, and is back in the house reading a magazine when Jean shows up.”
“He was taking quite a chance, wasn’t he? What if she really had just been a minute?”
“She’d have found him outside, instead of inside. Unless she saw him with the gun, he’d just have had to say he was out looking at the stars, or some such thing. No problem.”
“And now he had the gun.”
“And his friend Benny was at the party.”
“And Benny takes the gun back to Boston and saws it off so it will fit under that long sweatshirt…”
“And maybe shoots a couple of other people before he takes a crack at Luciano.”
�
��A bad apple,” said Zee, with a little shiver. “I’m glad there aren’t many like him.”
“It doesn’t take many to ruin the barrel.”
“I’ll be glad when the chief calls and tells us that they’ve got him.”
“Me, too.”
But when the chief’s call came a little later, it was with other news: “Sullivan missed him. Seems that when Benny came home today, his mom told him about the man who’d come to the house earlier. By the time Sullivan’s people got there with his warrant, Benny was gone, and so was a lot of the stuff that Thornberry’s man saw in the room, including the pistol.”
“Terrific.”
“It gets worse. The guys Sullivan sent to pick up Roger the Dodger didn’t find him, either.”
“Great.”
“But some other cops already had. They’d responded to a report of gunshots and found Roger in an alley, very dead. Three shots at close range, right in the pump. They won’t know for sure for a while, but Sullivan says it looks like a .38 or a Nine.”
“And Benny is gone.”
“Nobody knows where. But if Benny did Roger, he may want to do other people who know what he’s been up to. So be careful.”
I thought that was excellent advice.
26
When the chief hung up, I told Zee what he’d told me. Her great dark eyes widened, then narrowed. “There are only three people I know about who can ID Benny. You, me, and Vinnie. And we’re all here on the island.”
“The cops will be watching the boats,” I said.
Zee did not look relieved, and no wonder. In the wintertime, Martha’s Vineyard has a population of about ten thousand people, but in the summer there are ten times that many, and the visitors are constantly coming and going on the ferries and planes. Hundreds of new faces arrive every day, and hundreds of others leave. Thus, if Benny White could bring himself to shed his city garb of baggy clothes and oversize sweatshirts, and don the collegiate summer-on-the-Vineyard costume of shorts, sandals, and tee-shirt and tote a gym bag—no problem for an old UMass man like himself—he could probably walk off a ferry past a dozen cops flicking their eyes back and forth between their copies of his picture and the faces of the people unloading onto the island. It would be the hide-in-plain-sight theory of anonymity, and it often worked.
Death on a Vineyard Beach Page 21
