“Of course not. But she thinks the police might.”
And she’d be right about that. The police think anyone is capable of murder.
“Did he leave a large estate?” I asked.
“Large enough, I suppose. But Connie Duarte wouldn’t hurt a fly. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body, and she doesn’t care about money as much as I think she should!” His eyes were hot. “Besides, she was over on Nantucket when it happened.”
I wondered if his apparent anger was rooted in simple friendship with the woman, or in some deeper passion or desire. More than one man has fallen for the wife of a business partner. Then my brain did a turn and I was thinking how women, too, could be caught up in feelings for men other than their own husbands or lovers. I remembered Zee and Mahsimba arm in arm in our garden.
“Was there another woman?” I asked.
“It’s all just nasty gossip,” said Hopewell, making a sharp gesture. “I’ll say no more about it.”
But I shook my head. “You probably will say more, actually. The police aren’t fools. They’re bound to learn of everything you’ve told me and they’ll want names. It’ll be in your own best interests to tell them what they want to know.”
He was tired of me. “You may be right, but I’ll deal with that issue when it arises, if it arises. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
Instead of leaving, I said, “The press will be digging around, too. The public will love a story like this: Murder and scandal on tony Martha’s Vineyard. My own first guess is that the other woman is Rose Abrams.”
He looked startled. “What? How did you…?” Then he recovered. “What makes you think that?”
“I know she worked for Matthew Duarte and I saw her reaction when she heard of Duarte’s death. She fainted, and she doesn’t strike me as a woman who faints easily. Does Connie Duarte know about her?”
He drummed his fingers on his desk. “She knows there was a woman. I suspect she knows who it was. I don’t like the idea of these private matters becoming public scandals. Connie deserves better than to have her name bandied about in the press.”
“The more they dig, the more they’ll find,” I said. “They’ll probably resurrect the Headless Horseman story while they’re at it, since now we have two unsolved murders here in Eden.”
He gave me a wary look. “There’s no link between the Headless Horseman and Matthew’s death. That’s nonsense.”
“Two killings have taken place within miles of each other on an island where murder is rare. And so far, at least, the killers are unknown. In small towns, and this island is like a small town, when a killing does happen, the cops almost always know who did it as soon as the deed is done. The state police and the press may not find any link between Duarte and the Headless Horseman, but the possibility will cross their minds, and some writer will speculate about it.”
Hopewell shook his head. “No one even knows who the Headless Horseman was. Whoever he was, he certainly wasn’t a Vineyarder or someone would have reported him missing. I can’t imagine that what happened to him had anything to do with what happened to poor Matthew.”
“You may be wrong. A man who was looking for the Zimbabwe eagles in California has been missing since just before the Headless Horseman was found. Daniel Duarte’s firm sold the eagles, and Matthew may have been the agent.”
He stared at me, then ran a hand over his thinning hair. “That’s quite a leap in logic, isn’t it? A man goes missing on one coast and his body is found three thousand miles away on another coast? Besides, Matthew wasn’t the agent. If he had been, I’d have known about it.”
“Maybe not. Maybe Matthew didn’t let you in on all of his business arrangements. You said yourself that he wasn’t a very moral man. If he was immoral in his dealings with others, maybe he was with you, too. More than one business partner has cheated another.”
“I wasn’t his partner, I was his accountant. If he’d sold the eagles, it would be in his books, and there’s no such sale. I keep the accounts very carefully.” His voice was almost pompous, but it contained that suggestion of uncertainty that you can sometimes hear beneath loud words.
“Maybe he kept another set of books,” I said.
“Impossible.” But he was frowning as the word was spoken.
I’d been using a lot of maybe s, but I tried one more. “Maybe Matthew was crookeder and smarter than you think. Isn’t it possible that he was selling art objects of dubious ownership, like the eagles, or even stolen objects without your knowledge?”
“Where do you get these absurd ideas?” Hopewell walked to the door and opened it. “I’m a very busy man, Mr. Jackson. I’m afraid I can’t give you any more time right now. Good-bye.”
As I went out, I said, “I may want to talk with you again, Mr. Hopewell.” To that he gave an abrupt nod, and shut the door.
I was hungry, but West Tisbury is a dry town, so I headed for Oak Bluffs, where you can get a beer with your lunch. In the Fireside, a popular Circuit Avenue bar of dubious reputation, I ordered a Sam Adams and a fish sandwich.
The place was pretty busy with a combination of regulars and mostly young summer people. At the back of the room Bonzo was pushing a broom, about the highest form of employment he could manage since, I’d been told, he’d blown out his brain on bad acid years before I met him. He was a sweet, dull boy who loved his mother, birds, and fishing, more or less in that order. Good old Bonzo. Too bad he didn’t know anything about the Zimbabwe eagles, because I trusted him more than I trusted most of the people I’d talked to that morning.
The beer, America’s finest bottled brew, was cold and good, and the fish had just enough grease in its batter to be delicious. I’d made it even better by slathering it with a thick layer of tartar sauce. Yum!
In the last few hours I’d talked with at least three people who claimed to know nothing about the eagles but who conceivably had motives to kill Matthew Duarte: Gerald Jenkins, whom Duarte had cheated out of a valuable work of art; Connie Duarte, who was about to be divorced; and Millie Hopewell, who was Connie’s best friend and who might have bumped Matthew to protect Connie from being left destitute.
And Sam Hopewell could probably be added to the list because of his strong feelings about Connie. Passion has pulled many a trigger.
And while I was at it, I thought I might as well toss in Georgie Hall and Charles Mauch, because Duarte, who I knew had cheated Jenkins, might very well have dealt badly with other of his customers as well.
Everyone’s a suspect but thee and me, and I’m not sure about thee.
I wondered how Mahsimba’s inquiries were going and what efforts, if any, were being taken to determine whether the Headless Horseman and David Brownington were one and the same. If they were, the discovery would focus a lot of official attention on the island art scene. If they weren’t, well, the Horseman would be no less identified than he was now. DNA evidence would be the best proof one way or another, but I imagined that any DNA Brownington had left behind was probably in England or Africa, in the form of a relative. A long plane flight from the body of the Headless Horseman.
Around me the voices of other diners murmured and droned through the beer- and marijuana-scented air. I doubted if any of the speakers knew orcared that there was a subsociety of artists, art dealers, and art collectors on the island, any more than most tourists were aware of the other minicultures that coexisted here: the nude bathers up in Chilmark and Aquinnah, the pond people living along the shores of the Great Ponds on the south side of the island, the fishermen who roamed the beaches in their four-by-four trucks, and the others.
The only private Vineyard society known to most of the public was that of the rich and famous summer people whose names and faces appeared in the gossip columns and on the pages of popular magazines. And I was acquainted with just enough of such people to know that public imaginings about them and their lives were none too accurate.
The more I thought of things, the more it seemed that the
river of new money that was flowing over the island in an ever-widening stream had washed aside restraints that previously might have inhibited certain people from doing certain things. What once might have been unimaginable had become quite possible and attractive. A person with a wad of new bills and boundless confidence in an endless, continuing supply of the same could do almost anything: sail around the world in a small boat, buy a Vineyard mansion and tear it down and build a bigger one, climb Everest, found a college or museum, play with dynamite. Or perhaps loot a foreign land, or his own, of its ancient artifacts.
Such a person would do those things because he or she could afford to. And it might be fun.
Would some commit murder for the same reason? It was conceivable, and anything that’s conceivable has probably been done.
15
Who owns history? That seemed to be the question.
I was in the Edgartown library reading about archaeological theft.
Did artifacts of past civilizations belong to the nations or people now occupying those sites, or to those individuals who found them, preserved them, and displayed them to a wider world?
And what about the damage done? Haphazard excavations often destroyed as much as they saved. Reading this, I remembered hearing my sister Margarite saying that out in the Santa Fe country where she lived, archaeologists were now being very careful about how they excavated Anasazi ruins, and were leaving many untouched, in the expectation that less destructive techniques would be developed in time.
But according to my book the ancient sites of many countries had not been dealt with so kindly. They were routinely being plundered by professional and amateur thieves, who then sold the artifacts to museums and private collectors. And since grave robbers outnumbered police throughout the world, and since there apparently was no limit to the number of collectors who were willing and able to pay top dollar for purloined art objects, it seemed equally unlikely that the theft and accompanying destruction of old sites would soon end.
Archaeologists and religious leaders were particularly outraged by such commerce, the former because the raiders destroyed sites that were often the best or only source of knowledge about ancient cultures, and the latter because the illegal commerce involved objects considered sacred: mummies, skeletons and other human remains, burial objects, and religious art.
Some American Indian tribes were demanding and receiving the return of skeletons and burial artifacts so they could be reburied with proper ritual, and according to my book the bones of at least one ninth-century Anglo-Saxon warrior had been given a Christian burial after scientists had finished their study of them. How anyone knew the warrior had been a Christian was not explained.
Political correctness, of course, often prevailed over reason. One ancient body found on the American West Coast, for instance, was not only very, very old but seemed to resemble some race other than that of American Indian. Nevertheless, over the objections of scientists intrigued by the remains’ origins, it was returned by a socially sensitive federal cabinet member to a local tribe that claimed it, with little evidence, as a sacred ancestor.
By the time I put my book aside, I knew for sure that international trade in stolen artifacts was big business and that the UN’s agreement to outlaw such enterprise was often ignored by the very nations that had signed the convention. There was just too much money involved, and those charged with maintaining law and order were spread too thin.
I left my book and walked outside, where North Water Street was busy with tourists, many of whom were walking in the street instead of on the sidewalk. Visitors strolling down Edgartown’s streets often seem genuinely surprised when cars try to inch by them. To them the village, including its automobiles, is a make-believe place, too lovely to be real.
A catboat was beating in from the outer harbor, and the driver of the On Time ferry, recognizing the limited maneuverability of a close-hauled sailboat, held his vessel back as the catboat slid across in front of him and tacked away from the town wharf. The catboat’s skipper waved thanks and the On Time continued its hundred-yard trip over to Chappaquiddick to deliver its three-car cargo.
I hadn’t gone for a sail on the Shirley J., our eighteen-foot Herreshoff cat, for several days, and I had a strong urge to do so now. But I only watched enviously as the catboat tacked on into the inner harbor, then I got into the Land Cruiser and drove to Aquinnah.
Joe Begay lived in Aquinnah. He and I had first met as soldiers in a faraway, long-ago war, then had met again years later when he married Toni Vanderbeck, of the Aquinnah Vanderbecks, and had left Oraibi to come and live on the island. He was a big guy with a face like granite and thick black hair that was barely beginning to gray.
In the years between our meetings, Joe had worked for some vaguely described organization in obscure places around the world. Even now, although officially retired, he occasionally went off somewhere for a few days to do some work about which he said little, if he mentioned it at all.
I had made it a point not to ask what he did or where he did it, but since our reunion I had learned that he had esoteric information about shadowy activities on several continents. And what he didn’t know personally, he seemed to be able to find out. He was a handy guy to know.
His wife, Toni, sold good Native American crafts in her shop on top of the Aquinnah cliffs, the western-most point of the Vineyard, and since the summer season had already begun, I figured she’d be there and Joe would be at the house waiting for their two children to get home from school. It wouldn’t be long before summer vacation and they, like my own kids, would be home all day.
I remembered how, when I was a kid, I’d looked forward to the last day of school and the feeling of freedom and endless time I’d had when that last day had come. By fall, I was ready to go back, but that first free day was like standing at the door of heaven. Now, as a parent, the thought of having my children home all day also made me as happy as I would no doubt be when they went back to school.
The Begays lived in a small, neat house not far from the beach, just north of the cliffs. There was a sandy path leading from the house to the beach. On that beach, on January 18, 1884, the frozen bodies of men, women, and children had washed ashore from the wreck of the City of Columbus, which had struck Devil’s Bridge and sunk with a loss of 103 lives. It was the most disastrous shipwreck in Vineyard history, but today the waters smiled and twinkled under the June sun, and there were no frozen ghosts on the beach.
As I pulled into his yard, Joe Begay was sitting in a lawn chair making a Nantucket basket. His big, thick hands looked too large for such work, but his touch was delicate and unhurried.
“I thought they made those over on that other island,” I said. “You should be making Vineyard baskets.”
“Actually,” he said, “I believe these were first made on the Nantucket lightship, not on the island. In any case, I don’t think there are any official Vineyard baskets, although I might be wrong about that. This one is going to be a genuine Native American work of art that Toni will sell for a pretty penny.”
“A Native American work of art being a work of art made by a Native American, I take it.”
“You bet. And you can’t get any more Native American than me.”
That was probably true. Joe Begay had a Navajo name, but his mother was Hopi and Joe was married to a Wampanoag. What could be more Native American than that?
“If you go into the house,” Joe now said, “you should find some Ipswich Ale and a couple of glasses.”
I went in and when I came back out with the ale, Joe had set his basket makings aside. I handed him a glass and took another chair and we drank. Good. God might not be a full-time brewer, but it was surely one of his trades.
“Now,” said Begay, “what brings you up here to Indian country?”
“I need some help,” I said. “Maybe you can give it to me.”
“Maybe is the operational word,” said Joe, taking another sip of beer. “Try me.”
I told Joe almost everything that had happened since I’d gotten the telephone call from Stanley Crandel, omitting only whatever was going on between Zee and Mahsimba, since that whatever had nothing to do with Zimbabwe eagles, and, moreover, since I wasn’t sure just what the whatever was.
When I was through, Joe said, “I’ve run into a few guaqueros during my travels. Most of them are just peasants trying to make a buck, but some of them are mean sons of bitches with machine guns who will kill you if you mess with them.”
“I’d like to know how the system works,” I said, “especially at this end of the tunnel.”
“There’s a lot of money at this end, but you know that already.” Begay dug into his shirt pocket and got out the makings: papers and Prince Albert, just like my father used to use. He rolled a smooth cigarette and lit up. I inhaled enviously and thought, not for the first time, about taking up my bent corncob pipe again. “The system works pretty much the way you’d think it would: The locals sneak out and dig up graves or anything else that they think might contain something valuable. They sell what they find to more sophisticated types, who move it to the cities and probably sell it to somebody else, who boxes it up and calls it bananas or some other legit product, pays off anybody who needs paying off, and puts it on a ship or plane.
“They have dogs to sniff out drugs these days, but they don’t have any that can sniff out ceramics or jewelry so the stuff gets to Europe or the States or wherever. It gets picked up by somebody at this end and stored away until they contact a buyer, if they don’t already have one. The buyer buys and everybody in the tunnel’s made some money.” He blew a smoke ring that drifted east on the gentle breeze and slowly fell apart.
“There’s a good market for the stuff and not much danger to people on this end, especially if there’s no official report of the theft or description of what was stolen. A smart dealer will fake papers if need be, and the collector can always play innocent if anybody can actually identify some stolen object.”
Vineyard Enigma Page 9
