Vineyard Deceit

by Philip Craig

  “I don’t own a tux.”

  “The customer will pay for it. You interested?”

  “If the money’s good, every off-duty cop on the island is probably interested. Aren’t there enough of them?” Cops everywhere love off-duty special details. They make excellent money and can always use it; usually, too, the special details require very little work; whenever you see a cop standing beside an open manhole or beside a telephone company truck or outside a farmers’ market, directing traffic, it’s a special detail.

  “You must have won the lottery,” said the Chief. “You don’t seem too interested in making some money. I’ve already got every loose cop on this job, but I could use one more inside the house, and much as I may regret saying this, you’re my first choice.”

  “It’s been a while since I carried a badge.”

  “It’s a part-time job at best. You interested or not?”

  I thought about it. “Enough to talk about it some more. This must be a big deal, if you’ve used up all of the island’s off-duty fuzz. What’s it all about?”

  “It’s not just island law,” said the Chief sourly. “We’ll have state cops and some feds too.”

  “My breath is bated.”

  “You know the Stonehouse sisters . . .”

  “No.”

  “Yes you do. Amelia Muleto. Old Ray Muleto’s widow. She’s one of them. Her twin sister is Emily. She married Edward C. Damon. Owns that big place over on Chappaquiddick. You know, down harbor the other side of the narrows. White boat house big enough for the QE2. Keeps the Dog Star tied there. Sixty-foot yawl. Big cigarette boat, too.”

  I did know Amelia Muleto. She is Zee’s aunt by marriage, but I’d known her long before I’d met Zee. And I had once met her sister, but I hadn’t known they were the Stonehouse sisters and explained that to the Chief.

  He puffed on his pipe, undismayed by my ignorance. “In that case, you probably don’t know about the emeralds, either.”

  “No.”

  “Or about Edward C. Damon being appointed ambassador to Sarofim.”

  “As a matter of fact, I did hear that. He’s one of the fat cats who bankrolled the campaign of the new President of the U.S. of A. and he’s getting Sarofim as a reward even though he doesn’t speak the language or know anything about the Middle East in general or Sarofim in particular.”

  “You’re a snide bastard. How much do you know about Sarofim?”

  “I know it’s got more oil than it can pump in a thousand years and a king or sheik or whatever who likes movies and women.”

  “I see you read Newsweek. Gosh!”

  I gave him a wise smile. “Tell me about the emeralds. They sound more interesting.”

  “The way I get the story, a couple of hundred years ago one of the Stonehouse ancestors hired himself out as a mercenary to someone who wanted to replace the king or whatever of Sarofim. In the war that followed, Stonehouse got into the palace and away with enough of the royal treasury to establish a family fortune. He sold most of the jewels for cash, made some smart investments in land and the East India trade, and ended up with a peerage that he gave up to come to America and make even more money. But he never sold this emerald necklace. It’s been passed down through the generations until now. And now the king of Sarofim wants it back. National treasure.”

  “And is he going to get it?”

  “He is. The Stonehouse girls—girls! They’re in their sixties, at least—are going to hand it over to the king himself. You get the idea: cementing the historical friendship between the two sovereign nations, ending an ancient grievance between the royal family and the Stonehouse family . . .”

  “Guaranteeing Edward C. Damon a good start as potential ambassador to Sarofim . . .”

  “You got it. The show is scheduled to take place in Damon’s house. His Royal Whatsis was on the island a week ago and he’ll be back again in a couple of days. In Disneyland right now, I think. Anyway, it will be a very, very grand affair, with Important People from Sarofim, Washington, Boston, you name it, here for the event.”

  I thought of Amelia Muleto. I had never heard her say anything particularly flattering about Damon. If I were Amelia, the widow of a poor man, I wouldn’t hand over my emerald necklace for the sake of my brother-in-law’s career, especially if I didn’t care too much for him. I suggested as much to the Chief.

  The Chief sucked on his pipe. “Not sure the girls have much to say about it, actually. Trustees’ decision, or some such thing. Anyway, word has it, quite unofficially, that Sarofim is paying big bucks for the necklace. Under the table, of course. That way, all parties are satisfied. The Stonehouse sisters get megabucks, which Amelia at least certainly can use, the king of Sarofim gets to return triumphant to his homeland bearing the necklace that no previous king could get back, Edward C. Damon gets his ambassadorship, the President smiles, and so forth. You interested in the helping me out or not? The security precautions are sapping me dry.”

  “I get to wear a tux? And hang around the rich and famous?”

  He nodded. “This time, at least.”

  I was thinking about Jeremy Fisher’s catboat. The second deadly sin shares me with the other six, and I try to enjoy them all.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “I can give you one reason, maybe. The king or whatever they call him of Sarofim is not necessarily the kind of guy you want for a pal. Some people think he’s a dictatorial shit. His old man kidnapped women for his harem—a harem, for God’s sake! I didn’t know they still had them—and gave them to his secret police if they didn’t go along with it. The police screwed them and then cut pieces off of them and tossed the bodies back in the streets as a lesson to the uncooperative. They did the same thing to men the king didn’t like. Cut off their peckers and put out their eyes and then killed them. That sort of thing. Amnesty International didn’t like the old man and they don’t like this guy any better. Of course that’s just what I’ve heard through the grapevine. Maybe it’s all just bad-mouthing by somebody who doesn’t like the family.”

  “Where’d you hear it?”

  “Spitz. FBI guy who’s on the island arranging security from the federal end. He didn’t know if it was true or not, but he passed it along. One of those guys who distrusts our foreign policies. In J. Edgar’s day he’d have been on the hit list instead of carrying a federal badge. Times change. Spitz may be unhappy about the king, but he likes having a few days on this blessed isle of ours. You still want the job?”

  “Sounds too good to miss.”

  “I’ll give your name to the selectmen. They have to approve your appointment. The big party is next Saturday night. There’ll be a briefing that morning out at the Damons’ house. Nine o’clock. Security will walk the grounds, learn the ways in and out. That sort of thing. Thornberry Security is running the show.”

  Thornberry Security was a big outfit. When I’d left the Boston Police, Thornberry had offered me a job. I’d declined.

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “Islands may be the aristocrats of the earth’s surfaces, but there are just as many crooks and wacko people here as anywhere else,” said the Chief. “I don’t want anything going wrong while those rocks are in this town, so I expect everybody to keep his eyes open. They can steal them someplace else, but not here. You still have a pistol?”

  A pistol? I tried to look unsurprised. “Yeah. The .38 I carried in Boston.”

  “Well, carry it that night too. Or I can give you something from our armory, such as it is.”

  “You’re taking this pretty seriously.”

  He pointed his pipe at me. “I hear that there are people around who’d love to mess this deal up and I don’t want anything going wrong, even if the king is as bad as some say. Thornberry will tell you all you need to know at the briefing.” Then he had an afterthought. “You won’t shoot yourself in the foot or anything like that, will you? You do still remember which end the bullet comes out?”

  “As I recall,
you stand behind your gun when you shoot. That right?”

  “Just like pissing,” said the Chief. “I knew you had what it takes for this job.”

  3

  In August the bluefish seek cooler waters up north of Cape Cod, giving joy to Boston and Maine Coast fishermen. They drift south again in September, just in time for the Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby, but for a month or so, they’re hard to find from the Vineyard shore. Nevertheless, Zee and I were hunting them along East Beach on the far side of Chappaquiddick. We were in my Toyota LandCruiser, stopping at each point—Wasque, Leland’s, Bernie’s, the Jetties, Cape Pogue, and all the nameless little outthrusts of sand in between—and casting without any real hope of getting anything. There was a northeast wind that had cleared away the humidity for a couple of days and brought a hint of fall to the island. Across the Sound, Cape Cod was looming, and off to the southeast we could see Muskeget hanging on the edge of the horizon. Sailboats were moving over the waters, and there were fishermen working the shoals out in the Sound. Over us there was a clear blue sky. The sun was warm.

  Zee was again wearing shorts and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the tails tied around her waist. Her wonderful long black hair was tucked up under her bandanna. Her skin was brown and smooth. When she made her casts, the motion was like a movement of dance, something you might see in a ballet.

  As she was reeling in, she turned and looked at me. “Well, are you going to fish or not? You don’t catch them unless you put your plug in the water, you know.”

  “I’m waiting for you to get one first, because even though I’m a very macho guy I’m also very polite.”

  “Sure you are,” said Zee. “And you want me to have an improved self-image, too.”

  Zee made another cast. She was breaking in my brand-new eleven-and-a-half-foot one-piece graphite rod and was throwing a diamond jig a long way out. All to no avail. I watched her reel in again while I leaned against the Toyota and listened to the radio inside. I was tuned to the classical music station on the Cape, which was presenting Beethoven’s Ninth, the world’s heavyweight musical champion. When I die, I want my ashes poured out (downwind, of course) over the Wasque rip while somebody plays a tape of the fourth movement of the Ninth.

  Zee came up to the LandCruiser and changed lures. She smiled at me. We had been changing lures all the way up the beach. We’d started with Roberts and then tried Missiles, poppers, swimmers, and then metal in various shapes—Kastmasters, Hopkins and diamond jigs. And we had caught nothing. Now Zee was putting on a little broken-backed Rebel, blue with a yellow streak on its belly. I looked at it skeptically.

  “Well, why not?” asked Zee. “It can’t do worse than what we’ve tried so far.”

  “True enough. You’ve inspired me to try again myself.” I peered into my tackle box and extracted a pink Nantucket Bullet, got her rod, and snapped the lure onto her leader.

  “That’s the stuff,” said Zee. “Never say die. Just because you’ve never caught a fish in your life using that thing doesn’t mean you’re not going to catch one today.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “If you do catch something, of course it’ll belong to me because you’re using my rod.”

  “Use your own rod, then, and give me back mine.”

  “This rod is too good for you. You should really give it to me.”

  “Fat chance.”

  We walked down to the water and made our casts. Fifteen minutes later we still had no fish. No swirls, no hits, no anything.

  “The dead sea,” said Zee.

  We went back up to the car and got out the coffee. It was a beautiful morning, and we were the only people on the beach. I pointed this out to Zee.

  “Possibly because everybody else is smarter than us,” she said. “They don’t go fishing when there are no fish.”

  “Dumbness has its own rewards,” I said, leering. “I have you all alone on a beautiful beach on beautiful Martha’s Vineyard and I am plying you with strong drink.”

  “I don’t think this is the kind of drink the world’s Romeos use,” she said, sipping her coffee and looking at me with her dark eyes. “Besides, as I recall, you don’t even like beach parties. Sand in the food, sand in the drinks. That sort of thing. I’d have thought that sand in the crotch would be equally undesirable.”

  “It’s not that I’d enjoy it,” I said. “It’s just that it’s part of the ‘Romance on the Vineyard’ scenario, and, being the kind of guy I am, I have obligations. I mean, here we are. Beautiful, passionate woman, handsome, virile stud, bright sun, blue water, empty white sands, hormones bubbling, you unable to resist your erotic impulses. I have to satisfy you whether I really want to or not. I just want you to know that I’m prepared to do my duty as a manly Vineyard man.”

  “You’re a person driven by moral imperatives,” said Zee. “The way I see it is this: we lay out the bedspread I notice you just happen to have in the back of the Toyota, we dig out the towels, we put away these worthless rods, we strip and go for a skinny-dip, and then we see what happens.”

  The Trustees of Reservations, who own East Beach, do not approve of nude bathing or nude anything else taking place on their property, but they were not around at the moment.

  “You have good ideas, Cornelius,” I said. “When I am king, you may have my hat.”

  An hour later a pickup came up from the south and we got back into our clothes. The driver was Iowa, a retired guy from the Midwest who now lived on the Vineyard year-round and fished all of the time. Iowa stopped in front of us and glanced at the rods on the roof rack.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Not since daybreak,” said Zee, fastening a button on her shirt.

  “You been up to the lighthouse?”

  “Up there and back this far. Not a fish.”

  “You try the gut?”

  “No, and we didn’t try in the pond. Maybe you’ll find some there.”

  “I doubt it,” he said gloomily.

  “If you don’t go, you don’t know,” said Zee, quoting a trusty fisherman’s maxim.

  Iowa looked at the bedspread and at the sand in our hair and smiled. “It’s a nice day anyway, fish or no fish. I’ll toss a couple of lines at the Jetties and then try the gut. Maybe there’s a stray out there somewhere.”

  He drove on, and we stripped again and went back into the water to rinse off. Then we dressed and drove back to my house for showers and clothes without sand in them. Afterwards we sat on my balcony and drank sun tea and looked out over the pond. Beyond the pond was a strip of land bearing the road between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs. In two places bridges crossed over channels connecting the pond to the Sound beyond. On the far side of the road were miles of gentle beach greatly favored by island visitors with small children. Already the beach road was lined with cars as the August people poured onto the sands.

  “Tell me about your Aunt Amelia’s emeralds,” I said.

  Zee looked at me with surprise. “How do you know about Aunt Amelia’s emeralds?”

  I told her about the Chief’s visit.

  She smiled. “So you’ll be there Saturday night for the big event. I’m glad. I’ll be there too. Aunt Amelia says that Aunt Emily insisted upon it. Apparently Aunt Emily wants me to start mingling with proper society again.”

  Zee was not-long divorced from the doctor she’d helped put through medical school who had then replaced Zee with a younger lovely who, unlike Zee, adored him as much as he believed he deserved. Dr. Paul Madieras, known to me as Dr. Jerk, and his new bride now lived somewhere on the mainland, while Zee glued her life back together working as a nurse in the Martha’s Vineyard hospital. Zee had come to the Vineyard from Cambridge after the divorce because Ray and Amelia Muleto, her father’s brother and his wife, had offered a sanctuary she’d needed.

  “Why didn’t you go back to Fall River?” I’d asked her one day while we were raking for littlenecks in Katama Pond and she was finally telling me something about
the divorce.

  “To my family?”

  “Yes.”

  Zee had raked a bit before answering. “I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but my mother was on Paul’s side. He’s a charmer, and she figured that if he was leaving me I must have deserved it. I didn’t need that. Aunt Amelia and Uncle Ray were on my side.”

  I ran that through my computer while I dug two littlenecks out of my rake and dropped them in my basket. Littlenecks were selling at many pennies each in the Edgartown fish markets, and I planned on making a couple of bucks that afternoon.

  “My mother died when I was young,” I said, “so I don’t know what she’d have done when my wife and I split up. I’d like to think she’d have been on my side.”

  “You and your ex still get along,” said Zee. “Paul and I don’t. Your mother wouldn’t have had to choose; mine did. She chose the doctor. To understand that, you have to understand her. She came from the Azores, from a poor family in a poor town. Over there a doctor was almost like a saint. He was the most important person in town. He had education, money, and usually owned the biggest house in the area and had a car. He was the one people went to when they had problems. He gave advice, helped them write letters to America, helped them with government paperwork.”

  “The Godfather.”

  “Yes. My mother got to America only because she was sponsored by a cousin in New Bedford. She didn’t speak English at all, but she learned it. She married my father, a man a lot like herself, and they raised us kids in Fall River. They worked hard. She cleaned houses, he was a handyman. Finally they saved enough money to open their little store. Muleto’s Market, specializing in Portuguese foods. All us kids worked there from the time we were little. My parents did that with no education, but they made sure my brothers went to college and they were even proud when I decided that I would go too.

  “When I met Paul in college and my mother learned that he was going to be a doctor, she was completely overjoyed. Her daughter and a doctor. A Portuguese boy, to boot. He was charming, she was in love with him, and I fell in love too.” She glanced at me as she dropped a littleneck into her basket. Her voice was clinical and detached. “Paul and I made plans. I stopped studying the liberal arts and switched to nursing because we knew that when Paul was in medical school I’d need a good job. We were married the June after graduation, and my mother was in heaven. Of course we couldn’t afford children. Six years later, in the middle of his internship, he found someone who didn’t know about his less-attractive side. A wife always knows about that side of her man, but other women don’t. His new love didn’t. My mother didn’t. She still doesn’t. But she knows about mine. And after all, Paul is a doctor and I’m only a nurse. They still write and they visit when he’s in Fall River. I think he’s her favorite son.”