Vineyard Enigma

by Philip R. Craig

  Not too far beyond Matthew Duarte’s property I checked one last time to see if anyone was following me, then pulled off the highway and into the yard of the house where Zee had lived before we married. The place was almost exactly on the West Tisbury–Chilmark line, and I’d never been sure which town the building was really in. The house was small and neat and not yet occupied by summer people, and it was hidden by trees from the road. Not too many years earlier, I’d spent a goodly amount of time in that house before I’d persuaded Zee to live with me in mine. Now I parked the Land Cruiser under a tall oak, got my flashlight, my picks, and a pair of thin rubber gloves, and walked out past the house into the field behind it.

  A hundred years before, the island had not been the tourist destination it now was. True, Oak Bluffs had long been a popular place for camp meetings and associated summer socializing, but the greater part of the island had been devoted to farming and raising sheep, and was devoid of the trees and underbrush that now covered so much of it. The small field behind the house was all that remained of once wide-open grazing lands divided by stone walls.

  To the east, through second- and third-growth trees, I could see Matthew Duarte’s home and barn. I walked that way, moving slowly, with many pauses to look for other people and to make sure I wasn’t seen from the road.

  Long before, I’d once walked with equal care through a faraway forest, led by Sergeant Joe Begay on my first and last patrol in a war-torn land. My caution had done me no good at all on that occasion, for we’d been spotted by an efficient enemy mortar man or cannoneer (I’ve never been sure which) who dropped shell after shell upon us before he and his weapon were finally silenced and those of us who survived his assault had been taken out by helicopter. I still had occasional nightmares about that attack and would wake up sweating and full of fear, my ears ringing from the memory of the incredible noise of bombardment.

  It took me half an hour to get to Duarte’s yard. There I lay behind some tufts of tall grass and surveyed the place for activity. There was none: no people, no cars, no movement. Around me the darkness became thicker. I waited until it was thicker still, then got to my feet and circumnavigated Duarte’s barn.

  Aside from the front door to the office, there were large, sliding barn doors in the front and back of the building and windows on all sides. All the doors were locked and all but the office windows were barred and boarded.

  I then eased around the house, just to be sure, but saw no sign of anyone being there. Sam Hopewell had apparently gone home for the night and left no watchman. I dug my lock picks out of my pocket and went to the office door in the front of the barn.

  I’d gotten the picks years before at a yard sale given by a woman who was getting rid of her dead husband’s things. She hadn’t even known what they were, and I’d wondered at the time if her deceased hubby had had a secret life she’d known nothing of. As for me, I was more overt about my interest in the picks, and kept them, along with various locks, on the coffee table in our living room so I could practice their arcane usage when relaxing in the evening. They were taboo to my children and a joke to Zee and our occasional guests. I wondered if Zee would notice that the picks were gone this evening.

  If opening the outer office door triggered an alarm in the police station, I was in instant trouble, but I’d seen no sign of such wiring during my entrances and exits from the office and felt fairly sure that the building’s real security began inside.

  I am not the world’s champion lock picker, but the lock on the door was a simple one and I was quickly inside. I shut the door, flipped on the flashlight, and followed its beam down the hall to the inner office door, where another common lock was no more of a problem than the first.

  Inside the office, I put on the gloves. I hadn’t needed them earlier because I’d quite publicly visited the office before and had certainly left my finger-prints on both doors. Now, however, I would be putting my hands where they had no business being. I pulled the blinds on the windows and went to the desk once used by Matthew Duarte. There I found the wires leading under the Oriental rug to the inner wall. They ran up one leg of the desk and disappeared.

  I looked under the center drawer but saw nothing. Duarte apparently had his alarm switch inside a drawer. But which one? And was that drawer itself wired to some sort of alarm set to go off if some secret act did not precede its opening? I didn’t know enough about Duarte to guess his degree of caution.

  I tested a side drawer. Locked. I put the beam of the flashlight on it and saw no keyhole. I looked at other drawers. Only the center drawer had a keyhole. Duarte’s desk was one of those that had side drawers that unlocked only when the center drawer was opened. I picked the center drawer lock and slid the drawer open.

  If I had been Duarte, where would I have put the switch to arm or disarm my alarm system?

  Some place not too obvious but easy to get to. I slid the drawer out very slowly, looking for a switch. No switch. I tried another drawer. Nothing. The switch was two drawers down on the right side. I flicked it off.

  No sirens, no noise of any kind. I went to the front of the barn and opened the door a crack. I listened for a police siren or the sound of a car coming into the driveway. Nothing. But I was nervous, so I went outside, shutting the door behind me, and crossed to the dark shadows under a grove of oaks on the far side of the yard. I stayed there for many minutes, listening.

  No police cars came.

  I went back to the barn and let myself inside, locking the outer door behind me. The door in the side of the hallway had a much better lock than the ones I’d encountered earlier, and I had to work quite a while to get it open. When at last it swung into the room it guarded, my fingers were shaking. I apparently lacked the necessary nerve to be successful in the breaking-and-entering profession.

  There was a light switch beside the door, but for the moment I ignored it in favor of my flashlight. I was in a large, cool room, with windows that were not only covered with plywood but heavily curtained as well. At one end of the room was a small, enclosed wood-shop area where, I guessed, Duarte had made packing crates when he needed them. Through the large windows that separated that room from this one I could see plywood stacked against a wall, several power saws, and a workbench. In the wall across from the door where I stood there were double doors barred by a steel rod.

  I was in a climate-controlled storage area. Paintings, sculpture, ceramics, wood carvings, furniture, antique lamps, rugs, and other items filled shelves and storage bins. Boxes and crates were neatly stacked against one wall, and there was a large, old-fashioned safe beside a curtained and boarded window.

  Although no judge of art, I recognized pieces from the Orient, others from Africa, Europe, Central or South America, and still others from the American Southwest. When I decided that it was safe to turn on the overhead lights and take a better look, I saw something that I’d missed: a desk and chair tucked against the wall next to the barred double doors. I shut the door behind me and went to them, flicked on a reading light above the desk, and sat down in the swivel chair. The desk was locked. Matthew had been a locker.

  Some people are that way; they lock everything: their houses, their cars, their desks, everything they own that can be locked. They apparently believe they’re surrounded by thieves. I only lock my car when I go to Boston. The rest of the time everything I own, with the exception of our gun locker at home, I leave unlocked. And even the gun locker has its key lying on its top so I’ll know where to find it. Locks, as someone observed and as I now proved with my picks, are only good for keeping honest people out.

  The contents of Matthew’s desk were fairly sparse, and I guessed that he used this desk much less than his big one in the office. Its drawers held only a few recent papers: bills, paid and unpaid, records of transactions, invoices, and the other printed matter that computers promised but have failed to replace. Probably, I thought, he used the desk as a convenience when accepting or shipping merchandise, then later transf
erred the records to his and Hopewell’s desks in the office.

  I turned off the lights, unbarred the double doors, and followed the beam of my flashlight out onto a low loading platform. There was enough space between the platform and the far wall of the barn for a large truck to pull in through the double doors in one end of the building, load or unload, and exit through the doors at the opposite end.

  There was no starlight seeping in around the edges of the doors, and the windows here were also curtained as well as boarded. Duarte had been secretive, indeed. I found a switch and turned on the lights.

  Above the acclimatized storage room was the loft of the barn. In the dust in front of the platform were truck tracks. Big ones and small ones. On the platform there were dollies leaning against the wall and a small forklift parked beside a ramp leading to the ground. Nothing looked unusual. It was a commonplace loading platform, such as you see behind or beside many a business, where Matthew Duarte received and sent the goods that were his livelihood.

  I walked to the end of the platform and saw that there was a portable generator at the far end of the area. Emergency power for the climate-controlled room, in case normal power failed, which it does with some regularity when storms blow over Martha’s Vineyard.

  Beyond the generator was a tack room, filled with the sweet, horse smell of leather and oils. The Skye twins would have approved.

  I went back into the storage room and studied the safe. It was very old and very heavy, an antique in its own right, but powerfully constructed. Quite beyond my powers as a picker.

  Still, even people who go to great lengths to have yegg-proof safes almost always keep their lock combinations written down somewhere, in case of emergencies. It is another example of the paradoxical human character that the combinations are often kept close to the safes themselves.

  I tried the back of the safe, then the top, but no combination revealed itself to me. I looked around the room. The most permanent and convenient piece of furniture in sight was the desk by the door. Could it be…?

  I found the combination on the back of the smallest drawer in the desk. Ah, the world of crime lost a real slicker when I opted for the honest life.

  The great safe opened on oiled hinges.

  Inside were coins and jewels and small items of art deemed, perhaps, too easy to misplace or too valuable to be stored elsewhere. There was also a good amount of cash, and I withstood the temptation to take it although I could really think of no good reason not to. I was apparently one of those people whose upbringing didn’t prevent them from having sinful thoughts but did prevent them from enjoying them.

  I slid open a drawer and found a ledger.

  Hmmmm. What was it about this book that Matthew had valued enough to keep it secreted here? I opened it and found myself looking at ordinary-appearing records, notations, and figures.

  As near as I could tell as I leafed through the pages, Matthew had done business with Gerald Jenkins, Georgie Hall, Charles Mauch, and many other people I’d never heard of except in the local papers, where I’d read about their social, political, and humanitarian activities. If I was interpreting the sales figures correctly, all of Matthew’s clients had more money than I did. There were off-island customers as well as islanders, but the Vineyard buyers were apparently his principal clients.

  I found the record of the sale of the Bakuba sculpture to Georgie Hall, and noted that unless you knew that Gerald Jenkins had been slickered by Duarte, you’d never guess it by reading this file.

  I found papers recording payments to UPS, FedEx, and local movers and truckers, including several to Periera Food Service. Matthew had apparently been yet another islander willing to pay Miguel to do mainland shopping for him.

  Further along in the book I came to writings that were too much for me to grasp, made up as they were of cryptic notations and figures, and names of people and objects that seemed in code but perhaps were just the lingo of men in his trade. I wondered if it was this seemingly ciphered writing that Matthew had wished to keep locked away, and if Sam Hopewell knew about this ledger. Were these arcane words the records of Matthew’s less-than-legal dealings?

  If I’d been the hero in a spy movie, I’d no doubt have known the answers to those questions as well as which pages to photograph with my minicamera, had I owned one, but, alas, I was as untrained in espionage as I was in bookkeeping, so I put things back where I found them and shut the safe’s door. In time some agent more legitimate than I would come seeking its contents.

  I looked at my watch. I’d been there for some time. Maybe too long. I turned off the lights and went back through the storage room to the hall, again following the beam of my flashlight. As I opened the outside door of the hallway, I heard the sound of a car engine and saw headlights sweep into the driveway. I pulled the door almost shut, then froze as the car came into the yard. The police.

  22

  I was trapped, but Fate, ever fickle, chose to aid me. The police officer turned his cruiser in a slow circle, sweeping headlights across the front of the barn, then parked facing the house. The second the lights passed the door I nipped outside, pushed the door closed behind me, and ran across the dark yard into the greater darkness beneath the oak trees, reaching them just as the car came to a halt, its headlights on the door of the house, and the driver’s door opened.

  I stopped running and lay gently down in the high grass. The sounds of my beating heart and of the grass bending and breaking beneath my body seemed so loud that they must surely be heard across the yard, I thought, and my efforts to slow my gasps for breath seemed futile.

  But the young police officer paid no attention to me or my many noises. With his long flashlight in his hand, he moved leisurely to the door of the house, rattled the knob, then moved on around a corner and disappeared. In the lights from the cruiser I recognized the young West Tisbury cop I’d twice seen since finding Duarte’s body. The beam of his flashlight shone briefly on some bushes as he circled the house, checking windows.

  I didn’t wait for him to reappear, but got to my feet and walked carefully west until I was beyond the oaks that encircled the yard. There, from the security of a distant tree trunk, I turned back and watched the young officer reappear in the yard. He went to the office door in the front of the barn and gave it a shake, and I was glad I’d made sure that the door had locked itself behind me. He checked the double doors, then went out of sight around the barn, his light dancing on surrounding undergrowth as he went.

  Hopewell or Connie Duarte had apparently requested and gotten security checks from West Tisbury’s finest. I waited no longer but went away across the fields and under the trees until I got back to the Land Cruiser. As I drove back to Edgartown I realized that I’d been sweating. At the head of my driveway I told myself that nobody would be there waiting for me. No one was.

  Zee was in the oversized T-shirt she sometimes wore as a nightgown. There was a picture of a tiger on it and the words “Queen of the Jungle.” Usually we both slept naked. She was headed for bed. Her dark hair and eyes and her sleek body made me think, not for the first time, of a black panther.

  “Any luck?” she asked.

  “I never saw a swirl.”

  “Oh, well. You can always go to the A and P. They have a fish department.”

  “Ha, ha. Very amusing.” It was a familiar local jest among fishermen. Actually, I sometimes did buy fish from the A & P, but never anything that swam in Vineyard waters.

  Zee went into the bedroom and I put my lock picks back on the coffee table. When I got into bed a bit later, Zee seemed asleep. I lay down and put my hand on her hip. She didn’t move. I slid the hand down her smooth thigh. She still didn’t move. After a while I took the hand away and turned on my reading light. The summer night was warm, and I read many chapters before I was able to sleep.

  The next morning was Saturday, and I remembered little of what I’d read. Whatever had been between my mind and my book was still there. I had a slight headache.<
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  At breakfast Zee said, “You’ve been working hard. I think you need a break. It’s a lovely day. Let’s take Mahsimba to Wasque. They don’t have an ocean in Zimbabwe, so he should have a beach day while he’s on the island.” She paused, then added, “Maybe John and Mattie would like to come, too.”

  I chewed and swallowed my mouthful of bagel, cream cheese, red onion, and smoked bluefish. Normally delish but today tasteless. “You can but ask,” I said.

  “I will. It’ll be fun.” She went into the kitchen to the phone.

  When the dishes were washed and stacked, I put the rods on the roof rack of the Land Cruiser and ice in the fish box in the back along with the beach umbrella and the canvas bag of other essentials: the bedspread we used as a beach blanket, towels, a Frisbee, and plastic shovels and buckets in case we were overcome by an irresistible urge to build a sand castle.

  When I went back inside, Zee was making sandwiches and packing the cooler. There was a radiance about her that held me in thrall. I wished I were its cause, but knew I was not.

  “Pa?”

  “What?”

  “Are we going fishing?”

  “We’re going to the beach. We’ll fish if there are any fish, and maybe even if there aren’t.”

  “Good. Do you have our rods?”

  “Yes.” Their little rods were in the rack. If there were fish close in, near the surf, they might be able to reach them with their short casts. You’re never too young to start trying for blues.

  Zee put the lid on the cooler. “Beer, soft drinks, sandwiches, pickles, potato chips, and pretzels. Everything we need.” She seemed happy. “John and Mattie and Mahsimba will meet us at Wasque. If we leave now, we should get there for the last two hours of the east tide.”

  Around Martha’s Vineyard the tides rise to the east and fall to the west. At Wasque Point the fishing is good two hours before the change.

  I got into my swimsuit and pulled on a pair of shorts over it, then put on a T-shirt I’d gotten in the thrift shop where I get most of my clothes.