A Vineyard Killing

by Philip R. Craig

  “Did you hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “About Dodie Donawa!”

  “What about Dodie Donawa?”

  “She’s in jail. They caught her up in the hospital with a pistol in her pocket looking for Donald Fox’s brother.”

  4

  Sure enough, Dodie was in the county jail in Edgartown. The Dukes County jail looks more like a big white house than a jail, but it’s a jail just the same. When we went down there, we were with Norman Aylward, who was the closest thing we had to a family lawyer.

  Dodie, fair, fat, and fifty, was hardly the type of person normally found in the gray-bar hotel.

  “Dodie, we’re going to get you out of here,” said Zee.

  “I’ve never been in jail before,” cried Dodie. “I used to think that the people there probably deserved it, but now I know different. It was cold yesterday and I was wearing Dave’s old winter coat. How was I supposed to know there was a pistol in one of the pockets?”

  “You can tell us all about it after Norman gets you out of here,” said Zee.

  After Norman did that, the four of us went to our place for coffee.

  “Are they going to put me back in there?” asked Dodie. “If they do I have to find somebody to take care of the cats.”

  “I’ll try to keep you out,” said Norman. “Now start from the beginning and tell us what happened.”

  Dodie bristled. “Well, it’s because of that son of a bitch Donald Fox! He’s stealing my house! Says it isn’t really mine! He’s found some relative of somebody who owned the place a hundred years ago and he’s paid them peanuts for what he says is their claim on the land and now he’s going to take me to court unless I sell to him cheap! Says if I sell to him I can save myself a lot of trouble and get at least some money for the place instead of losing in court and getting nothing.”

  “Do you have a lawyer?” asked Norman.

  “I can’t afford a lawyer.”

  “You can’t afford not to have one,” said Zee. “Norman, how’d you like to be her lawyer? I’ve got some money and I’ll be glad to pay your fee.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t accept that,” said Dodie.

  “It’s not just for you,” said Zee. “Fox is after our place, too. Norman can work for both of us.”

  “We can talk about that after Mrs. Donawa tells us more about how she got arrested,” said Norman.

  I liked Norman. He was the only lawyer I knew on Martha’s Vineyard who didn’t wear a tie unless he was in court. He’d originally been recommended to us by our old friend Brady Coyne, who practices law in Boston to support his fly-fishing habit. Brady comes down to the island now and then to pursue the wily bluefish and bass with us as a change from angling for trout. If Brady worked on the island instead of up in America, I’d have called him to help Dodie, but Norman was a good second choice.

  “Well, as you can guess,” said Dodie, “I’ve been awfully upset by this business with Donald Fox. It just makes me sick. And then I find out that Maria has been going out with that other Fox! That Paul Fox! The nerve! His brother is trying to steal my house and Paul Fox is trying to steal my only daughter away from Rick Black. I just couldn’t stand it! I threw on Dave’s old coat and went right to the hospital to put a stop to that.”

  I thought that last choice of words was probably not one that she should repeat in court. “Wait a minute,” I said. “How’d you know Paul Fox was in the hospital?”

  “Because Maria works there, of course! She’s a nurse. Didn’t you know that?”

  “I thought I’d told you,” said Zee to me. “I guess I didn’t.”

  “Well,” said Dodie, “when they brought that Paul Fox in, that silly daughter of mine called me all teary and worried and it made me so mad, especially when she told me that he wasn’t really shot very much, that I decided to go right over there and give both of those goddamned Foxes a piece of my mind! That Donald Fox was there, too, you know, so I could get to both of them at the same time!”

  I had known Dodie for a long time, but I had never heard her use such language. I was impressed.

  “And you took a pistol with you,” I said.

  “I didn’t know I had it! Dave used to target-practice at the Rod and Gun Club, and he must have forgotten the gun when he hung up his coat. It wasn’t a very big gun. A twenty-two, I think they said. I’m not like you, Zee; I don’t know one gun from another. Anyway, that coat is heavy and has a lot of pockets and I was so mad I never even noticed the gun. That man Hillborough found it when he grabbed me.”

  “The jail keeper said it was unloaded,” said Norman. “That’s one good thing.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Dodie. “If it had been loaded and I’d known I had it, I could have shot all three of them. Good riddance!”

  “Now, Dodie, you don’t mean that,” said Zee.

  Dodie gave a great sigh. “No, I guess I don’t.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” said Norman. “Then what happened?”

  “Then they called the police and Maria almost had hysterics and they took me to jail. And I was there until you got me out.”

  “Did you talk with the police?”

  “They asked me what happened and I told them.”

  “Well,” said Norman, “from now on don’t say anything about this case to anyone. If anybody asks you anything, you tell them to talk with your lawyer.”

  “But I don’t have a lawyer. I don’t have any money to pay one.”

  “Lawyers do what’s called pro bono work,” said Norman. “That means they work for nothing. If you want, I’ll be your attorney. If you don’t want me, I can probably find another attorney for you. I recommend that you get one, in either case.”

  Dodie looked at Zee and me.

  “He’s already our lawyer,” said Zee.

  “All right,” said Dodie. “You can be mine, too, Mr. Aylward. And to tell you the truth, I’m glad to have you help me. I never thought I’d spend a night in jail and I never want to spend another one there.”

  “I’ll try to keep you out.” He gave her his card.

  “You and I should go to my office now so I can get some more information and we can talk about our options.”

  “And then what will happen?”

  “And then you’ll go back home and take care of your cats and I’ll get to work.”

  “What can you do?”

  He stood. “First we’ll see what we can do about this matter involving the pistol, then we’ll have a look at the land title business.”

  “That awful man must have a thousand lawyers. What can you do?”

  “I hesitate to use this metaphor with reference to lawyers,” said Norman with a small smile, “but Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. I may do as well with the book of law.”

  When they were gone, Zee looked at me. “I think Dodie is in good hands.”

  “Yes. Did you know Paul Fox was dating Maria Donawa?”

  “No. Maria works in another part of the building, so I don’t see much of her. She’s a pretty girl and I imagine she dates a lot of men.”

  “Is she really as emotional as Dodie seemed to say?”

  “It’s hard not to be emotional when someone you love gets shot and your mother gets thrown in jail for threatening somebody with a gun. Besides, Dodie may be projecting her own emotion onto Maria.”

  True.

  “At least,” said Zee, “we can be pretty sure that Dodie didn’t take that shot at Donald Fox. She was home when Maria phoned her about Paul.” I said nothing, and after a few seconds Zee said, “Hmmmm. Maybe we don’t know that. Dodie had plenty of time to drive home before the medics got Paul to the hospital.”

  “She’s not one of the usual suspects,” I said, “but you shouldn’t take her off the long list.”

  “Some day someone else may take a shot at Donald Fox,” said Zee. “He’s made a lot of enemies here and he probably had a lot before he came. I don’t think I’d like to h
ave so many people hating me. I think I’d stop doing the rotten things he does.”

  “People who do rotten things don’t think of them as rotten. I read somewhere that when Hitler was in his bunker and the end was near, he still thought that he was right to kill the Jews and that some day people would understand that and would thank him for it.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think Donald Fox or his kind feel very guilty about what they do.”

  “What about Paul Fox? Is he the same way?”

  “I don’t know. He seems to be different.”

  “I know some people I don’t like much, but none of them are evil like Donald Fox.”

  “I guess I don’t think of Paul Fox as being evil.”

  It was a meaningless statement, since I rarely thought of anyone as being evil. Whenever I considered the nature of evil and good, I used the pine tree test: if a pine tree observed an act that men considered evil, would the pine tree consider it evil? I doubted that it would. I was pretty sure that no act had meaning except for the significance that human beings gave it. After my death, religious people seemed sure, I would discover I was wrong about that. But I wasn’t dead yet.

  Which was not the case with Albert Kirkland, as I learned the next day while reading the Boston Globe.

  Kirkland had been found stabbed to death in the parking lot in back of the Fireside, one of Oak Bluffs’ seediest but most popular bars. Kirkland was the Saberfox agent who had arrived at our door with an offer to buy our land for chicken feed and had left with a threat to get it for nothing.

  People associated with Saberfox were taking some real hits lately. First Paul Fox and now Albert Kirkland. Another good reason to be glad I’d turned down Donald Fox’s job offer.

  A car came down our long, sandy driveway, and I went to the door to see who it might be. The car was a State Police cruiser and the driver was Dom Agganis.

  He looked around, taking in the gardens and the view beyond them of Sengekontacket Pond, the far barrier beach, and the sound beyond.

  “So this is your place. Not bad.”

  “We like it. Come and have some coffee. What brings you here?”

  He followed me inside and sat down at the table. “Make the coffee black. I’m here on business. You know a guy named Albert Kirkland?”

  “I know who he was. He worked for Saberfox. He was here a while back trying to buy this place cheap. We told him no sale. I was just reading that he got himself kacked last night.”

  “Yeah. Stabbed with a long-bladed knife. Looks like the stabber was sitting in the passenger seat. You got a long-bladed knife?”

  I nodded toward the magnetic rack on the kitchen wall. “There’s the long-bladed-knife collection. And we’ve got fish knives in the shed and tackle boxes.”

  “I’m talking with people who might have been mad at Kirkland,” he said. “You’re one of them. Where were you last night about eight?”

  5

  “I was right here.”

  “I suppose Zee and the kids were here with you.”

  “Actually, the kids were off-island, so they don’t count as witnesses.”

  He drank more of his coffee. “You mentioned more knives out in the shed.”

  We went out to the shed behind the house and I showed him our several very sharp fish knives. Then we went back inside the house.

  “What was Kirkland doing behind the Fireside?” I asked. “Besides getting himself killed, that is.”

  “Well you might ask. We’re nosing around right now trying to find out if anybody saw him or the killer. It’s a public place and the lot has pretty good light.”

  “But it was cold and there aren’t too many people wandering the streets at night this time of year.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. People are inside, where it’s warm. Whoever it is who’s taking whacks at Fox’s people has been lucky twice now. First up in Vineyard Haven and now in OB. Both times he did his work right in plain sight but nobody saw him. Kirkland was sitting in the driver’s seat of his own Saber-fox Range Rover when he bought it. He managed to get his door open and fall out onto the tarmac to die. Almost like he didn’t want to get too much blood on the company car.”

  “Thoughtful of him. Robbery, maybe? One of our local druggies might have needed money, and a guy driving a Range Rover would be a good target.”

  “His wallet was in his pocket, but we’re nosing around the streets in case anybody knows something. So far they don’t seem to.”

  “You talk like it might be the same guy who did Paul Fox.”

  “Who knows? However many people were involved, it would be quite a coincidence to have two unrelated killers out there whacking at Fox and his people.”

  “So because I’m mad at Fox for threatening to take my land I figured out a way to shoot Paul while I was having lunch and to stab Kirkland while I was home with Zee. Right?”

  “Something like that. Don’t get snippy. You know the routine. We’re talking to a lot of people.”

  I did know the routine. When a crime is solved it’s not done by a genius sitting in his house getting his clues from the newspapers and naming the villain by being smarter than the bumbling police; it’s solved by hard work and, often, good luck. The cops start asking questions and keep at it and somewhere along the line learn something that takes them to the next thing until they finally think they have enough evidence to charge somebody.

  “If I was going to the Fireside,” I said, “it would be because I was thirsty or because I was meeting somebody.”

  “It’s your kind of place, all right, but the Fireside isn’t the sort of joint I’d expect one of Fox’s people to habituate. I’d have thought they’d go to a classier watering hole. Kirkland was wearing a suit and tie when he bought it.”

  “Habituate,” I said admiringly. “That’s a word I never once heard used by my colleagues when I was a cop.”

  Agganis sighed. “I’m one of those new-breed policemen you may have heard about. The ones who can read and everything.”

  “Yeah. Well, I guess I wouldn’t have thought that Kirkland was the Fireside type either. When he came to our place he was wearing a jacket and tie, too, and seemed like a bit of a prig. The only other people I’ve ever seen wearing ties around this island are lawyers. Maybe he was there to meet somebody more my type.”

  “Could be. We’ve talked with the bartender, but he didn’t have much to contribute. He did say that he hadn’t seen you for a while, so we know you weren’t waiting for Kirkland inside.”

  “I’m a married man. I don’t hang around bars as much as I used to do. You talk with Bonzo?”

  “Bonzo was off duty last night. Home with his mother. You have any ideas about this that might help?”

  “You check out Kirkland’s quarters yet? Maybe something there might steer you in the right direction.”

  “We’ll do that today. Donald Fox has made himself a lot of enemies since he got here, and he had a lot before he came. Probably the same can be said for the guys who work for him.” Dom climbed to his feet. “Well, if you come up with any brainstorms, let me know.”

  “Meanwhile, am I on your short list of suspects?”

  “No. Only the long list.”

  “Along with Zee and your mother. Anybody else?”

  “Well, Dodie Donawa says Paul Fox stole Maria away from Rick Black, and Rick can be a bit of a hothead. So there’s him. And of course there’s Dodie herself.”

  “You’re getting cynical in your declining years, Dom. See you later.”

  I followed him outside and watched him drive away.

  Dom was a good cop and I had a lot of confidence in him. On the other hand, I didn’t have total confidence in anybody, and I knew that many people had been found guilty of crimes they hadn’t committed. It was possible, if not likely, that Dom might find reason to move me to his short list.

  In every small community there are people who are, as the papers say, known to the police. The guy w
ho gets shot at three in the morning is known to the police. The suspect is, too. The kid who beats up his girlfriend and steals from his mother may never be charged with anything because both the black-and-blue girl and Mom will swear he never did it, but he is known to the police because he’s caught their attention before. The cops, especially small-town cops, almost always know the local perps and can usually guess who ransacked the empty house or drove the stolen car into a tree or smashed a series of mailboxes with a baseball bat as the batsman and his friends drove by in the night having a good time. They may not be able to prove it, but they know the people involved.

  I had no desire to be known to the police in that way, but it seemed possible that I could be. I was, after all, one of the few people who had been visited by Kirkland and had also been present at the shooting of Paul Fox. One event might have been coincidence and the other might have only been circumstance, but I didn’t feel like waiting for a third that would indicate enemy action. I got into my winter coat and hat and drove to Oak Bluffs.

  Oak Bluffs and Edgartown are the only two towns on the Vineyard where there are liquor stores and bars, so those are the towns where most of the fights happen. Edgartown likes to think of its bars as being classier than those in Oak Bluffs, and the other OB bars are certainly classier than the Fireside, which is at the low end of the drinking totem pole and has made little attempt to improve its image over the years.

  In the barroom the smells of sweat, spilled beer, and tobacco smoke mixed with the faint scent of vomit and marijuana, and the toilets were rich with the odor of urine and disinfectants. I liked the place.

  The back parking lot, where Kirkland had been killed, was off Kennebec Avenue, but that area would be cordoned off. However, since it was March there were parking places in front on Circuit Avenue, OB’s honky-tonk main drag. I slid the old Land Cruiser into a slot.

  The stores along the street, which would be bustling in June, were mostly closed up tight and the whole street had that look of emptiness that you find in all resort areas off-season. The Fireside, on the other hand, had a year-round clientele and never closed except when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts forced it to take a holiday. It was almost noon and somewhere the sun was over the yardarm. I went in.