by Philip Craig
“What did you talk about?”
“Talk about?” She picked at a thread on her shirt. “Nothing, really. Looking back, I understand that he was making his last visit with me, but I didn’t realize it then. He kissed me when he left . . .” She seemed uneasy at her recollections. “We talked of friends and—well, nothing notable. Small talk. You know . . .”
“Did he mention the theft of the necklace?”
“The theft? Well, yes . . . Of course we talked about it. Not that there was anything new to discuss . . .”
“Did he say he had stolen it?”
Tea sloshed from her cup. She looked at me with wild eyes. “What?!”
I told her what Nagy had told me. Amelia gazed at me as I spoke, and gradually the color which had fled her face returned.
“Are you sure about this, J.W.? Is that Nagy person to be trusted?”
“Willard never said any such thing to you, then?”
“Heavens no! What a remarkable notion!”
“Did Willard mention a girl named Periezade?”
She frowned at her teacup for a moment, then shook her head. “This Colonel Nagy gave you some very interesting information.”
“Have you ever heard the name?”
“I . . . perhaps I have. It’s a name I think I would have remembered had I heard it often. Who is it?”
“I don’t know. It reminds me of Scheherazade. Do you have the telephone number of the professor who wrote Free People? You know, the book about Sarofim.”
“Free People. Of course. Hamdi Safwat. He teaches at Weststock College. No, I don’t have his number. I’m sorry. I still have his address . . .”
“That’s okay. I can get his number. Maybe he can tell me if Periezade is a Sarofimian name. So Willard Blunt came by, you think now, just to say goodbye. You had no idea that he was considering suicide?”
Amelia had almost recovered her composure. “No, I did not. And he certainly did not confess to stealing the necklace. What an extraordinary notion that is!”
“He seems to have been an unusual man.”
She looked thoughtful, then pushed back a strand of hair with her hand. “Yes. It seems that he was. Dear Willard . . .”
21
I showered, shaved, and dressed up in my most splendid Vineyard clothes: blue blazer, blue tie with little whales on it, Vineyard-red slacks held up by a belt decorated with sailing boats, and, to suggest that perhaps I just came off of one of the yachts anchored in the harbor, boat shoes with no socks. I admired myself in the mirror, got into the LandCruiser, and drove to the ferry. The ferryman was impressed for the second time in one week.
“You’re becoming a very dashing fellow,” he said. “First a tux and now this. What will the guys at Wasque think?”
“You working-class people will never understand,” I said.
Helga Johanson was waiting at the door. She looked quite smashing, with her golden hair done up and a golden necklace at her throat above a black summer dress. I told her so.
“Thank you.” She climbed into the LandCruiser without a single sarcastic remark, and we rattled back to the ferry.
The ferryman looked at Helga and bowed his head. “I didn’t think it was possible, J.W., but I may have underestimated you all these years.”
“She’s my sister,” I said.
Helga laughed.
We ate at the Shiretown, where I have never had a bad meal, and afterwards went to the Harborside for Cognac. The Harborside has the best view in town, looking out, as it does, over Edgartown Harbor. We sat and looked at the lights on the boats and in the windows of the houses down harbor. There were lights on the second floor of the Damon house, and I wondered if Colonel Nagy was still in his room sipping wine and looking at us as we were looking at him. I told Helga everything I’d been told so far, which wasn’t much but seemed to be adding up.
“Of course people may be lying,” she said when I was through. “The Colonel is probably right to suspect that. You suspect it too, don’t you?”
“Maybe that’s one of the reasons I got out of the cop business. I don’t like spending my life not believing people.”
“I thought you got out of the business because you got shot and have a bullet still in you.”
“That too. And then my wife left me because she’d been a cop’s wife for years and she’d been worried all the time about something like that happening and as soon as she knew that I’d not be crippled, she knew she’d had enough. She wanted a marriage where she could expect her husband to come home every night and where she wouldn’t be afraid to start a family. After she left I thought she was probably right, so I left too. Or something like that.”
“I read somewhere that for years in New York City no cop had ever been killed by a handgun at a distance of more than twenty feet. I think that may be true. Most of the cops who get it, get it at close range. You got yours at a distance, I hear.”
“Your agency is full of snoops.”
“It’s one of the things we do for a living. I got your file from the old man himself. I guess he did a checkup on you when you left the force. Wanted to hire you, I think. How did you happen to get shot?”
“It was night. An alarm had gone off, and my partner and I happened to be right there. My partner took the front, and I ran around back. Somebody came out of a door and started running down the alley. I yelled stop and police and all that, but naturally the person just kept running, so I ran too. It was dark and both of us kept running into things. Boxes and trash barrels. Then the person I was chasing ran into a sort of dead-end alley. The other end was closed off by a metal fence a construction crew had put up while they were building a building on the other side. I was feeling pretty lucky, but then the woman turned around and shot me. It was the damnedest thing. I fell over, and she came running back by me, still shooting, trying to get away, I guess. As she went past I shot her till my gun went dry. I didn’t know it was a woman until later, not that it would have made any difference.”
Helga nodded and then looked out at the lights in the harbor. “My dad is a cop. He’s never pulled his gun once in thirty years.”
“Most don’t. It was just one of those things. I don’t think about it much anymore.”
“The woman died?”
“Oh yes.”
We sat silent for a while, then Helga nodded again. “Thanks for telling me. Now let’s think about possible liars in this case.”
Good. “Anyone could be lying. Blunt might have been lying to Nagy, Nagy might have been lying to us, Zee might have been lying about the kidnapping, Bonzo might have . . . No, I don’t think Bonzo remembers how to lie. Who else is there? The Chief? Spitz? You? Me?”
“Bonzo’s the kid up at the bar in Oak Bluffs, right? The one who tipped you off about the people in the guitar.”
“Right. I’ll tell you who I believe. I believe Bonzo and I believe Zee and I believe the investigators on the case. I don’t necessarily believe that Spitz, or you, or the Chief, for that matter, have told me everything you think or know, but I don’t think you’ve lied to me. I don’t know about Blunt or Nagy.”
“How about you? Have you lied to us?”
“That’s for you to decide. I’m no problem to me, I’m only a problem for everybody else.”
“I don’t know why you’d be lying to me.”
“I don’t either.”
“I want to go with you to the bar in Oak Bluffs. You are going up there later tonight, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but it’s got nothing to do with your work. It has to do with Zee’s kidnapping if it has anything to do with anything at all.”
“Nagy was right when he said it was an awful lot of coincidence that your friend got snatched just long enough for the necklace to get stolen and Blunt to get shot. Do you think Blunt was lying when he told Nagy that he stole the necklace?”
“Do you think Nagy was lying when he told us that story?”
“I don’t know.”
“I d
on’t know either. I’d like to talk to Spitz again and find out what he and Blunt and Nagy talked about that Sunday night.”
“I want to go with you tonight.”
“I don’t think so.”
“If I don’t go with you, I’ll go alone. Then there’ll be you watching for the guitar people and me watching you. We can have a parade.”
“You’re a tough customer, Johanson.”
“Call me Helga.”
I gave up. “Well, we can’t go dressed like this. We’d stick out like sore thumbs. We need some Fireside clothes.” I eyed her. She and Zee were about the same size. “I’ve got some clothes you can wear, at my place. We can change there.”
“Gosh, this is getting exciting. I get to wear your girlfriend’s clothes! Is this kinky, or what?”
“Kinky, shminky. We just won’t tell Zee. Get out your wallet.”
She waved for the waitress, paid up, and got a receipt for her expense account. “Lead the way,” she said.
She liked my house. Everybody likes my house. I found a shirt and jeans belonging to Zee and gave them to Helga. Zee’s clamming sneakers were a half-size too small, so Helga would have to wear her own low heels. We changed in separate rooms. I felt a lot better in sandals, shorts, and a tee shirt than in my yachtsman-ashore duds. Helga took her hair down and let it fall straight to her shoulders. She now looked about twenty-one.
“Make sure you take your ID,” I said, “or it may be a dry night.”
We drove to Oak Bluffs. I parked down by the Reliable Market, and we went into the Fireside. It was a Thursday night and the crowd wasn’t quite what it would be on a weekend, but the blast of sound from the jukebox and the smells of drink and smoke were about the same. We found a couple of stools at the bar, and the bartender never batted an eye when Helga ordered a Cognac. I got a Sam Adams, America’s best bottled beer. I looked around for Bonzo, but didn’t see him.
After a while Bonzo came out of the men’s room and saw me. In the Fireside, the men’s room is identified by a stencil of a little boy trying to button his pants. The ladies’ room is identified by a stencil of a little girl pulling up her panties. The Fireside is nothing if not chic. Bonzo came right over.
“Hi, J.W.! Say, that was some fish I caught. That was maybe the best fish I ever did catch.” He smiled his foolish smile at Helga. “A bonito,” he said. “A nice one.”
I introduced them to each other. Bonzo took her hand. “Any friend of J.W.’s is a friend of mine,” he said. Then he turned conspiratorial and leaned closer to me. “Those guitar people aren’t here. They ain’t been here all night.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “We’ll wait. If they show up, let me know.”
“Good,” said Bonzo, relieved that he had not disappointed us. “If they come, I’ll be sure to tell you.” A glass went onto the floor somewhere, and the sound of its breaking alerted Bonzo to his duty. His dim eyes sought out the accident. “I got to go to work,” he said. “These people, they break glasses and spill things all the time, you know? My gosh, how they break so much is beyond me.”
He went off. Helga smiled after him. I told her the bad acid story I had heard and how he’d gotten his name from his fondness for Ronald Reagan’s movie Bedtime for Bonzo.
“He’s nice,” said Helga.
I was on my second beer when the jukebox began to fill the beery air of the Fireside with the deafening noise of a particularly awful band. I frowned at Helga. She was smiling and tapping her finger on the bar. She leaned toward me and shouted, “The Gits! Terrific!”
The Gits howled and throbbed at me from loudspeakers all around the bar. There was no escaping them. I looked into the mirror behind the bar and saw a girl standing at the jukebox, punching in more coins. As I watched, she bobbed her head in rhythm with the music and turned away. I watched her walk back and sit down in a booth. Then Bonzo was in the mirror beside my own image. “Hey,” he yelled. “There’s those guitar people!”
I put a finger to my lips, and he immediately put one to his own. A look of dull cunning appeared on his face. He glanced quickly toward the booth and then, using his other hand to shield the gesture, jabbed a finger toward it. His mouth moved silently. I realized he was mouthing “Guitar. Guitar.” I smiled at him and nodded. I put my mouth close to his ear and shouted.
“Got it, Bonzo! Thanks!”
He looked conspiratorially at Helga, again touched his finger to his lips, smiled and nodded, and went off.
The Gits bombarded my ears with screams and electronic howls and booms. No one besides Helga seemed to notice them. Helga was happy. She yelled in my ear. “Great stuff! You don’t get to hear the Gits too much! Too new, I guess! The sign of a with-it bar!”
Terrific. The men’s room was beyond the booth holding the Gits girl and her companions. I walked back past the booth and glanced at its occupants as I passed. I did the same coming back. Three young people. Two women and a man. Two with olive skins and dark hair, the other woman Caucasian in her coloring, but with those fine, sculptured facial bones I had seen in pictures of people from Iran and Pakistan. The man had a beer, and the women were sipping wine. The Gits woman was bobbing to the beat of the music, and all three were smiling. They apparently felt safe in the bosom of the Fireside. The Gits drowned out any words they might have been speaking.
I went back to the bar and, a bit later, got us a booth where we’d be easier to overlook. I couldn’t see the back door, but I could see the front one. About midnight the three young people got up and went out the front door. I put some bills on the table, and Helga and I went out after them.
“You get the car,” said Helga. “I’ll keep track of them.”
They went right toward Giordano’s, and I went left up the street to the LandCruiser. I was barely inside when Helga came hurrying up the street and climbed into the passenger’s seat.
“They’re in a Chevy two-door. They should be coming by any minute.”
The parking slots on Circuit Avenue are the diagonal kind. I waited until an average-looking Chevy two-door went by and then I tried to back out. But another two cars were not interested in my problems and passed before I could get out of my slot. The Chevy was now three cars ahead, and I was behind a guy who liked fifteen miles an hour as a maximum speed. I watched the lights of the Chevy disappear ahead of me along Circuit Avenue. Christ! The fifteen-miles-an-hour guy flashed his brake lights. There is a universal principle of some kind that says that the slowest drivers use their brakes most often. Scholars argue whether they are slower because they use their brakes so much or whether they use their brakes so much because they’re the slowest drivers. Happily for me, in this case, the fifteen-miles-an-hour guy turned left by the Brass Bass. Now there was only one guy between me and the Chevy.
I goosed the LandCruiser and rattled on after the disappeared taillights of the Chevy. The guy between us was also hurrying along, and on Wing Road I caught up with both him and the Chevy’s taillights. Both turned west along County Road and a bit farther along the Chevy’s brake lights brightened. The Chevy turned right, and the car between us went on. I slowed, found the dirt road the Chevy had taken, and turned off my lights. I got my flashlight out of the glove compartment and found the name of the street. Ocean View Lane. I put the flashlight back into the glove compartment. On Martha’s Vineyard, if you can catch even the slightest distant glimpse of the ocean in the dead of winter when there are no leaves on the trees, developers and home owners call their places names like Sea View, Ocean Vista, and Water View.
The moon was a week or more past full, but I could still see by its light. I drove slowly after the Chevy’s tail-lights until they brightened again and the car took a left. I drove to the turnoff and saw the Chevy stopped at a house set at the end of a driveway. I went past, found another driveway, turned around, drove back past the Chevy’s drive, and parked.
I got my flashlight from the glove compartment again, and Helga and I got out.
“What do you have
in mind?” she asked.
“I just want to see the number on the house.”
“Yeah. Everybody’s up and around right now. Better to hit them early in the morning when everybody’s half-asleep.”
“You got it, kid, but I’m going to do a little scouting right now.”
“I’m right behind you, then. I just hope they don’t have any dogs.”
“Zee never mentioned a dog. If there’s one here, we’ve got the wrong house.”
There wasn’t a dog. There was a floodlight in front of the house, but I came in from the trees and slipped along close to the house itself, ducking under a couple of windows en route, until I got to the porch. Number thirteen. I could see the license plate on the Chevy from there, so I noted that too. To make things complete, I crept around back and located the rear door. Then I slipped away and found Helga waiting. We went back down the driveway, got into the LandCruiser, and drove away.
“When?” she asked.
“Five-thirty?”
“That’s good. Nobody’s awake at five-thirty.”
“You off-islanders are all alike. You sleep away your lives. Here on the Vineyard we’ve done a half a day’s work by five-thirty.”
We got back to my house. It was almost one in the morning. Helga yawned and stretched.
“Find your clothes and I’ll take you home,” I said.
“The ferry’s not running.”
“We’ll go along the beach.”
“That’s a long way for you to drive.”
“No problem.”
She ran her hand through her hair. “You have an extra toothbrush?”
“Yes.”
“Any objection to my staying here? I want to be in on it when you hit the house in the morning, and by the time you take me home, it’ll be time to leave again.”
I thought about it. I needed somebody to watch the back door of the house when I went in the front.
“All right.”
There was a tingle of sexual energy in the air. Helga’s tongue touched her upper lip. She was a lovely woman. She took one step forward, then stopped.
