A Case of Vineyard Poison

by Philip R. Craig

  Quinn and Zee had observed my sentimental responses to singers before, and were kind enough to refrain from comment, but Dave had not. He sat silently in a lawn chair and listened until the tape ended. I blew my nose. “Absolute dynamite,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Imagine three guys like that all in the same place at the same time.” My voice felt watery.

  “I was there, you know,” said Dave. I looked at him, and he nodded. “Yeah. I was playing in Rome, and a fan got some of us tickets. It was July 7. We all went out to the baths of Caracalla. A really beautiful, starry night, with a good moon. Six or seven thousand people. We had good seats down in front. And there they were: Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti. And Mehta conducting that big orchestra. Unbelievable. I’ll never forget it.”

  I wondered if he could see me turning green. “If I sell my soul, do you think the devil could arrange a rerun and let me attend?”

  “No. God was in charge of that one. Old Nick wasn’t anywhere around. You’ve got a tape of it, and that’s your blessing. People talk about the good old days, but in the good old days, you wouldn’t have that tape.”

  “You can have the good old days.”

  “No thanks.” He grinned. “Well, maybe I’d like to go back and listen and talk to Mozart and Ludwig Von and some of the others but I wouldn’t want to stay there. No, sir.”

  Quinn came out with glasses and the Stoli bottle in the ice bucket. Zee followed with crackers, cheese, and blue-fish pate. They climbed up to the balcony. I looked at my watch. It was indeed martini time. Dave and I climbed up to join them.

  In the morning Zee was gone before my guests were even awake. Back to work at the hospital, then home to stay with Mom while they and Zee’s women friends put together our wedding.

  After she was gone I washed up our breakfast dishes, waited until eight-thirty, still heard snores coming from the guest room, wrote a note and leaned it against the coffeepot, and drove to Vineyard Haven.

  Hazel Fine was in her office. Her thick, curly, dark hair was nicely coiffed, and she was wearing a summer banker’s suit and low heels. She smelled good. When I tapped on her office door frame, she looked up and smiled. “Come in, J.W. How are the wedding plans coming along?”

  “You know as much about it as I do. All I know is that it’s happening at John Skye’s place and that you and your group are going to be playing the music. My job is to show up, and I plan to do that.”

  “I’m sure you’ll perform splendidly. We’re all looking forward to having a fine time. John Skye’s farm is very pretty.”

  “You’ve been out there?”

  “Oh yes. Mattie Skye invited us out to show us the place. A very nice woman.”

  Indeed she is. The apple of John Skye’s eye, and a good friend of Zee.

  “I need a favor,” I said. “Maybe an illegal one.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “Name it.”

  “Can I see a list of all the transactions of a hundred thousand dollars or more that your bank has handled during, say, the last month?”

  Her gray eyes narrowed. “A curious request.”

  “That’s why I’m talking to you instead of somebody else. I’m trying to exploit our friendship.”

  “Does this have anything to do with that odd experience Zeolinda had at the ATM a week ago? The hundred-thousand-dollar glitch?”

  “Maybe. Maybe more than that. I’m not sure.”

  “Can you tell me any more?”

  I couldn’t think of why I shouldn’t, so I told her about Kathy Ellis’s bank statement and checks.

  She tapped her desk with a pen. “And you’re wondering how a college girl came up with all that money.”

  I nodded. “First a hundred thou goes in and out of Zee’s account, then another hundred thou goes out of Kathy Ellis’s. It’s none of my business, but it’s made me curious.”

  She thought awhile. “We can look at the information here in my office. Will that be okay?”

  “Are you going to get in trouble over this?”

  She gave me a wry smile. “What people don’t know won’t hurt them. Besides, it’s a lot easier to apologize later than to get permission first.” She touched a button on her desk and leaned toward a speaker. “Eddie, can you come in here a minute?”

  Eddie came in, and Hazel introduced us. “Eddie’s our programmer,” she said.

  Eddie was about twenty-five. He had a pleasant, intelligent face and slightly buck teeth. Hazel told him what she wanted.

  “For the past month?” he asked.

  “Yes. Can you do that?”

  “No problem. Take me about fifteen minutes.”

  He went out the door.

  He was back in eleven, printed papers in hand. He smiled at Helen, proud of his magic machine. “Is that all?”

  She smiled back. “For now. Thanks, Eddie.”

  “Piece of cake.” He left, and Hazel gestured to me to close the office door. I did that, and she spread the papers across her desk.

  Numbers are not my specialty, but with Hazel’s help I began to see what was there. There were two lists. The first was a listing of transactions of “one hundred thousand dollars or more, and I was surprised to discover that there had been as many as there were, since the Vineyard Haven National was not a large bank. Apparently they were fairly commonplace rather than rare, as I had imagined. No wonder banks paid little more than routine attention to them. I was also surprised by the size of some of the transactions. The largest was for a bit over nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and there were several for a hundred thousand or more.

  The second list consisted of the names and addresses of the holders of the accounts involved. The nine-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar transaction turned out to be a real estate deal, and island businesses accounted for the others. Except for one.

  There was no record of how Katherine Ellis had gotten one hundred thousand dollars in her account.

  On the other hand, there was the one nonbusiness-related transaction. On the Thursday after Zee’s hundred thousand dollars disappeared from her account, and the day after Kathy Ellis died, a one-hundred-thousand-dollar check had been written on the account of another woman. A Ms. Denise Vale. I memorized her address and phone number, and pointed to the transaction.

  “Can I look at this check?”

  “Yes, that might be interesting. I’ll be right back.” Helen went out of the office. When she came back, she was frowning thoughtfully. “Take a look.”

  She gave me the check. It was made out to cash and had been deposited by Cecil Jones in the account of the New Bedford, Woods Hole and Nantucket Salvage Company in the Zimmerman National Bank in Hyannis.

  I pointed this out to Helen. “What do you think?”

  “Bankers are supposed to be a careful lot,” she said. “We don’t like to jump to conclusions. So far, there’s nothing here that doesn’t look perfectly legal.”

  “But?”

  “But it’s interesting that both Kathy Ellis and Denise Vale each had checks amounting to a hundred thousand dollars made out to cash, and that those checks ended up in the same account over at the Zimmerman National. Excuse me again.” She left and came back with a file card. “Guess what?”

  “What.”

  “Denise Vale is twenty-three years old. Another college girl, according to one of our male tellers who has an eye for young women and says he’s chatted with her. She still has about a thousand dollars left in her account, by the way.”

  Like Kathy Ellis, Denise Vale was apparently good at saving money. Maybe she got a lot of tips. A whole lot. “How do you know how old she is?”

  “When you open an account, we need a photo ID and your Social Security number. Usually we get a driver’s license. We keep the information on file, so we know who we’re dealing with, and we check the Social Security number with a central bureau so we’ll know it’s real. If we didn’t do that, people could open up accounts under as many names as they wanted, and could stash away money—stole
n money, for example—that no one could ever find. You could rob a bank, stash the money somewhere under an assumed name, and keep it even if you got caught. The authorities could never trace it.”

  “So now we have two college girls with big bank accounts.”

  She nodded. “And that is unusual enough to make me curious.”

  “There’s no record of large deposits being made in Denise Vale’s account,” I said. “Only this one withdrawal.”

  “I’ll have to look at the records for smaller transactions. I’ll check the transactions in Kathy Ellis’s account, too. We know that she was careful to make withdrawals in amounts less than ten thousand dollars, so probably her deposits were in smaller amounts,’ too. It’ll take some time.”

  “I wonder if Denise Vale knew Kathy Ellis.”

  “I wonder. They both seemed to know Cecil Jones, whoever he is.”

  I stood up. “Maybe I’ll ask her.”

  “Let me know what you learn.”

  “I will.” As I went out, I wondered if Denise Vale lived in a swamp. It seemed unlikely.

  — 11 —

  I walked out and along the street until I could look down into Vineyard Haven harbor. There, swinging at their moorings inside the breakwater, were some of the loveliest boats on the island, including the large contingent of schooners that always caught my eye. The Shenandoah was headed out to sea, the square rig on her forward mast set broad to the following southwest wind, her decks filled with passengers bound for Nantucket Sound. The breeze that rippled the waters and filled the Shenandoah’s sails touched my cheek with a gentle breath. It was a lovely day, but out of my memory came long-forgotten lines that were in sharp contrast to the beauty before me:

  On the trees no leaf is seen

  Nor are meadows growing green,

  Birds build no nests, no song is sung . . .

  . . . For Jesus Christ does punish well

  The land wherein the wicked dwell.

  Where had that sad song come from? I dug back in my mind, but found no answer. I walked on to the Land Cruiser.

  Denise Vale lived in Oak Bluffs. Or at least she had a post office box there. Her home address was Swan Lake, New York, but here she had only the P.O. box. I could hang around the P.O. until she showed up to get her mail, or I could do something else. I went to the post office first and found her box, just in case she was standing there or if I ever needed to know where it was. She was not standing there, so I tried the something else: I found a phone and asked for her number. I could not imagine a college girl without a telephone. Sure enough, she had one, and when I told the operator I was with the police, she told me where the phone had been installed. I told her we appreciated her cooperation, turned and said, “Okay, McGillicuddy, let’s go,” and Hung up.

  I had never actually known anybody named McGillicuddy, but I imagined there must be one somewhere, so why shouldn’t he (or she) be on the same police force I was pretending to be on? I had once been a member of a real police department, the Boston P.D., but if there had been any McGillicuddys on that force, I had not met them.

  Denise Vale did not live in a swamp. She lived in a middle-sized house on one of the unfinished dirt streets leading off Barnes Road, not far from the sailing camp. There was a car with Pennsylvania plates parked in the front yard, and some clutter in the yard that seemed to be the remains of a party, or maybe several parties. Empty beer cans, an upset lawn chair, and an overflowing rubbish barrel were the main clues. Evidence of coed inhabitants hung on a line behind the house, in the form of various items of male and female clothing. Like me, Denise and her friends apparently preferred the solar dryer over the mechanical variety.

  I parked and went up onto the porch. There were pizza containers, plates of half-eaten food, and more beer cans on the floor. I wondered when the cleanup crew was supposed to arrive. September, likely, in the form of the landlord, after the summer inhabitants of the house were back in school. Teenagers and college types are not noted for their neatness, and this household was apparently no exception.

  I knocked on the door.

  After a while I heard unsteady footsteps coming, and the door opened to reveal a young man wearing wrinkled shorts and a badly hungover face. He stared vacantly at me and mumbled something.

  I asked if Denise Vale was in. His red eyes registered a vague understanding of the question. He shook his head and made a noise which seemed to be a negative.

  “She does live here, doesn’t she?”

  “Uhn.” The heavy head nodded slowly.

  “But she’s not here now?”

  “Uhn.” The head shook.

  “Is she working? Where does she work?”

  The young man pawed at his face, as if to wipe away the cobwebs. He smelled greatly of stale beer.

  “Not here,” he said with surprising clarity.

  “Is she at work?”

  He thought about that, husbanded his strength, and said, “Don’t know.”

  “Where does she work?”

  This was a puzzler. He frowned and bit his lip, then raised a feeble finger and pointed in several directions. “Town. Fireside.”

  “The Fireside, in Oak Bluffs?”

  “Uhn.” He seemed perilously close to falling over. Then he recovered and looked intently at me. “Missed the party,” he said.

  Yes, I had. “Thanks,” I said. “Get some rest.”

  “Uhn.”

  He lurched out of sight. I pulled the door shut and drove back to downtown Oak Bluffs.

  Oak Bluffs’ main street is Circuit Avenue, which is lined with shops catering to the day trippers who come over on the boats from the Cape. These visitors catch buses at the dock and take tours of the Vineyard. When they get back to Oak Bluffs, they grab some fast food, buy made-in-the-Orient souvenirs with the words “Martha’s Vineyard” written on them, and go back to America having “seen” the island. Thousands come and go every summer.

  The citizens of Oak Bluffs, knowing which side their bread is buttered on, make no bones about catering to this thrifty day trade, and the little shops and fast-food joints that line Circuit Avenue give the town a honky-tonk quality that differentiates it from the island’s other major towns: Edgartown, whose captain’s houses are huge and white and whose shops are the expensive kind, and Vineyard Haven, which is a normal New England town that just happens to be set on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Oak Bluffs is not only a street of souvenir shops, of course. It has its share of fine homes, and is famous for the Victorian gingerbread houses that surround its Tabernacle. As a major East Coast black summer resort, it is also the most racially integrated town on the island, and has been for decades. Its black merchants, lawyers, professors, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers are at least as aristocratic as their white equivalents in Edgartown and elsewhere, and many of their families have been coming to the island just as long.

  Oak Bluffs is also home to the Fireside Bar, one of the principal watering holes for the year-round working stiffs and the summer college crowd. The Fireside is where the island’s fights usually used to start, and occasionally still do. It is a bar where the smell of grass is mixed with that of beer and various glandular emissions, and a place where an efficient waitress who doesn’t mind roving hands and unimaginative proposals can earn a good dollar in tips. It’s also where my sweet, half-witted friend Bonzo earns his daily pittance with a broom and a bar rag.

  Bonzo was once a promising lad, I’m told, but long before I met him he reputedly got into some bad acid that did a number on his brain. Since then, he has been rowing with one oar. He lives with his widowed schoolteacher mother, loves birds and collects their songs on his recording equipment, and is a childish but dedicated fisherman whenever he can get someone to take him to sea or to the beach. I am occasionally that someone.

  I parked up toward the market and walked back down to the Fireside. The street was crowded, and I wondered once again why these people were here instead of at the beach. Come to th
ink of it, why was I here instead of at the beach?

  The Fireside was dark and not too crowded. It served pub food as well as drinks, and the noon crowd was just beginning to wander in. I went to the bar and ordered a Molson. The bartender served me, then went down the bar and began setting out pickles, boiled eggs, pickled sausages, pretzels, and peanuts. I watched the room in the mirror and saw Bonzo cleaning tables in the back. He hadn’t seen me yet. An aging waitress began to take orders at the tables.

  The beer was good, but then there is no bad beer. Well, actually, there is some bad beer, but Molson doesn’t make any of it. When the bartender seemed satisfied with his work down the bar, I waved at him and he came back. I ordered another Molson. When he brought it, I asked him if Denise Vale was around.

  He rubbed the bar with a clean rag, and decided that he would tell me. “No,” he said. “She’s not around.”

  “I thought she was working today.”

  “She don’t work here anymore, buddy.”

  “I just went by her place. A guy there said she was here.”

  “Well, she’s not. Dammed college kids. Can’t trust a one of them. Don’t know what it means to have to work, you know what I mean?” He looked angry.

  “Maybe I do,” I said.

  “You a friend of hers?” His voice was hard.

  “No, but I want to talk to her.”

  “Well, she’s not here.” He leaned on the bar and looked at me. “Damned kid hasn’t showed up for three days. She was supposed to work all weekend and never fucking showed up at all. No telephone call, no explanation, no nothing. Left me shorthanded on the busiest nights of the week. You see her, you tell her she’s fired! Had to get my wife in here to fill in. She’s still here, for Christ sake. Pisses me off, you know what I mean? Kids nowadays, you try to give them a break, a job where they can make a couple of bucks, and what do they do? They just take off. You know what it is, don’t you?”