A Vineyard Killing

by Philip R. Craig

  “If you know more than you’re telling me and I find out about it, I’ll take it amiss.”

  I felt my eyelids lower slightly. “Fox is lucky to have somebody like you on his side,” I said. “That cane tells me how loyal you are. Tell me about Albert Kirkland. Why do you think he got himself killed?”

  “Albert was a hardworking fellow,” said Hillborough, “but Donald trusted him.”

  “Did you?”

  He hesitated, then said, “I brought him into the company. Donald hired him on my recommendation.”

  “Did Kirkland like to have a few at the local bars?”

  Hillborough shook his head. “He didn’t drink at all. I believe he was meeting someone in the last place anybody would expect him to be. I wish I knew who. The police haven’t told us much more than’s in the papers.”

  “They don’t know everything. Do you know anyone working for the company who drinks at the Fireside tavern?”

  He studied me, then shook his head. “I had a beer there when we first came to the island. I haven’t been back since. It’s not my kind of place. If any of our people have been there, I’ve not heard about it. Why?”

  “Because a man who may have been Kirkland met somebody driving a green Range Rover in that parking lot a couple of days before Paul Fox got shot and Kirkland got killed.”

  Hillborough rubbed his chin. “Is that a fact? Well, well.”

  “Another question: Do you know anybody in the Saberfox crew who carries a long-bladed knife and knows how to use it?”

  He smiled wryly. “We’ve talked about that in the office. Donald likes to hire fencers. We have several working for us, including Paul and me, although none of us was ever in Donald’s league. Even Al Kirkland could fence well enough to try out for the pentathlon team, although he never made it.”

  “Were any of your other fencers mad at Kirkland? How about your boss, for instance?”

  Hillborough’s face darkened and he lifted his silver-headed cane and shook it at me. “You watch what you say about Donald, you hear me? I’ll have no one speak ill of him. No one!” He leaned forward, his eyes wildly bright. “And if you try to harm him in any way, I’ll make you sorry you were ever born!”

  I looked down at the cane and after a moment he took it away. I got into the truck and left. As I drove I looked in my rearview mirror. He was still standing there, watching me, like some angry, lame berserker.

  13

  After Zee got home that afternoon I drove back to Airport Road, tucked the Land Cruiser out of sight, well away from the entrance to John Reilley’s lair, and walked into the woods, taking a roundabout path to the site.

  The hiding place under the crooked little fir was just right for my purposes. I could see out, but it would be hard for anyone to spot me. I arranged myself as comfortably as possible and got out my paperback car book. I didn’t have a lot of reading light, but there was no use in wasting what I had.

  Velikovsky was comparing some Mayan myths to Old Testament stories about earthly disasters when I heard the distant sound of a small engine from the direction of the road. Then the sound stopped. I put away my book, and a few minutes later heard someone coming along the little path I’d found earlier in the day.

  I peeked out and John Reilley, pushing his moped, came into view. He paused and looked casually around. His eyes passed over my hiding place and moved on. Then he pushed the moped across to the patch of greenbrier, parted some of the vines, and entered it by some route I’d missed. I watched him cover the moped with the tarp. Then he came out of the briers, gave another offhand look at the forest around him, and disappeared into the cellar hole.

  I was surprised by how quickly it happened. In one moment he was standing there, glancing around, and in the next he was gone.

  I waited for him to reappear, but he did not, so after a few minutes I crawled out of my spy nest and walked to the cellar hole. It looked exactly as it had before, half filled with a jumble of stones and rotting wood. There was no sign of John.

  I sat on my heels and studied the site. Leaning haphazardly against the far wall was a pile of broken and apparently rotting boards and timbers, seemingly the collapsed remains of what had once been the floor of the long-disappeared building above the cellar hole.

  John had to have gone somewhere, and there was nowhere else he could have gone. Since, as Holmes observed, when all other possibilities have been eliminated, what remains must be true, John had gone behind that pile of lumber.

  I climbed down and crossed to the jumble of rotten pieces of wood.

  It was not, of course, a jumble of rotten pieces of wood but a carefully constructed doorway made to look like a jumble of rotten pieces of wood. When I looked where I figured there had to be hinges, there were hinges. When I looked harder I found what served as a door latch. I tried it. Nothing moved. Locked from the inside, certainly.

  I put an ear to the door. I could hear nothing. I knocked.

  Nothing.

  I knocked again, harder this time. After a while I heard a slight noise above my head and looked up in time to see a hole close in a beam above the doorway. I waited, then knocked a third time. Finally I heard a slight noise from the other side of the door. I stepped back. The peephole quickly opened and shut once again. Then, silently, the door latch turned and the door swung open.

  John Reilley stood there, looking out at me. His expression was one of resignation.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. Are there more of you?”

  “Just me,” I said.

  He looked beyond me and, seeing no one else, he nodded. “No matter,” he said, “one tongue is enough.”

  “Only if it flaps,” I said. “Are you going to invite me in?”

  “Why not? Come in, J.W. Shut the door behind you, if you will.” He turned and led me down a short, low hallway and into a small room lit by electric lamps. A bunk bed was against one wall and a table and chair against another. A doorway led to another room in which I could see a camp stove and some storage shelves. The walls and the ceiling of the cave were made of lumber scraps of various widths. He sat on the bunk and waved to the chair. “Sit there. I have only that single chair because I never have guests. Until now, that is.”

  I sat down and looked about me. “Nice,” I said. “Cool in the summer, warm in the winter. Where do you get your electricity?”

  He seemed willing to talk about his underground house. “There’s a construction company just off the Vineyard Haven–Edgartown road. I’ve tapped into their line. They don’t notice what little I use. I get fresh air from a pipe I ran up inside that tall stump you probably noticed. I’ve got a chemical toilet and I bring in water for cooking. I use the Laundromat for my clothes and I sneak showers after work in the houses I help to build. There aren’t many public rest rooms on this island, but I know where every one of them is and I use them to keep clean between showers. I get my books from yard sales and the libraries and I have a TV and radio. The antennas are in trees. You can see them if you know where to look.”

  “I didn’t notice them. How long did it take you to build this place?”

  “Three years, and it would have taken longer if I hadn’t been able to borrow a pickup to haul the wood I needed. When I started, I was living in Vineyard Haven in an apartment that I had to be out of by summer, so I spent all my free hours that winter digging this first room and lining it with timber so it wouldn’t collapse. It was hard work, especially hauling those two-by-tens I used for the ceiling, but by spring I could live here. I enlarged it for a couple of more years until I figured I had as much room as I needed.”

  “You scatter the dirt out there in the woods?”

  He nodded. “It took a lot of time and effort. I’d fill a gunnysack and haul it off and spread the dirt thin, then come back and do it again. I don’t recommend it as a way to build yourself a house. You want some coffee? I’m about to brew some.”

  “Sure.”

 
He went into his kitchen and soon the smell of fresh coffee filled the air. He came back with two cups.

  I took mine and said, “I’d guess that one problem was hauling the wood and other stuff in here without being seen. There’s a lot of traffic out there on Airport Road.”

  He nodded. “It was easier in the winter because there weren’t so many people around. I couldn’t do much in the summer unless I waited till late at night when the moon was bright and I could move through the woods without killing myself. It was slow going. I did better off-season.” He sipped his coffee and looked around the room. “And now that the place is finally in shape, here you are and I’ll be moving along.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “I’m guessing that you must have used that Vineyard Haven apartment to get your PO box and any other papers that required a street address.”

  “That’s right. Once I got the papers, all I needed was the PO box. How’d you know I lived in that apartment?”

  “Because I went to the apartment looking for you. I got the address from a friend.”

  He looked down into the coffee cup. “Are you some kind of cop, J.W.? Why were you looking for me?”

  “I’m not a cop. Somebody asked me to find you, that’s all.”

  “Who? Why?”

  “I may tell you later, after we talk some more.”

  “How’d you find me, anyway?”

  I told him and he shook his head. “It serves me right. I’ve been careless lately. Too cocky, too casual. A year ago I would have been watching my back. A year ago you wouldn’t have found that tire track.”

  “I wouldn’t have found the track today if I hadn’t been looking for it, but you’re probably right about getting too sure of yourself. It’s pretty common for people who drop out of sight to be very careful at first but then begin to make mistakes as they relax. I think you’d better pay more attention to your security if you plan to keep living here.”

  He brightened, but it was a careful brightening. “You mean to say you don’t plan to spill my beans?”

  “I didn’t take this job to blab about where you live. I took it to find out something about you.”

  He sipped his coffee and studied me.

  “You’re sure you’re not some kind of cop?”

  “I used to be on the Boston PD, but that was a long time ago. Now I live here and I’m no kind of cop, but you’re a mystery somebody wants solved, and I got talked into trying to be the solver.”

  The brightening in his face went away. “What do you want to know?”

  “You might start by telling me why you live here instead of in a house like everybody else.”

  “I’m antisocial.” His stare was steady and he didn’t smile.

  “You’re not so antisocial that you don’t get along well with the people you work with, and you’re not so antisocial that you don’t visit your friends.”

  He raised a brow. “Like who?”

  “Like Dodie Donawa, for one.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding slowly. “So that’s what this is about. Dodie Donawa.” He smiled a small, crooked smile.

  “It’s about Maria, actually,” I said. “She doesn’t want her mother hurt. She likes you but she doesn’t know enough about you to trust her mother to you.”

  The smile stayed. “Role reversal, eh? Daughters, lock up your mothers; the Vietnam vets are in town for their convention.”

  “Something like that. And there’s another thing.”

  “What?”

  “For the past couple of days two guys who work for Saberfox have been tailing me. It’s occurred to me that they may be doing it because I might lead them to someone else whom they can’t find. It’s also occurred to me that that someone might be you.”

  The smile fled from his face. “Do you know their names?”

  “Wall and Reston. Ring any bells?”

  He drank the last of his coffee and held the empty cup in both hands. “You sure they’re not cops?”

  “Like I said, they work for Saberfox. This is the second or third time you’ve been worried about the cops. If you’re worried about the cops, maybe Maria Donawa is right to be worried about you.” He said nothing, but only looked thoughtful and sad. I pushed on. “What’s your concern with the police? Are the cops the reason you live in this cave?”

  He nodded. “Yes.” Then he seemed to come to some agreement with himself. He looked at me. “Forty years ago I killed a man.”

  14

  There are killings and there are killings, and they’re not all the same. I should know.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” I asked.

  “You don’t look shocked.”

  “No.”

  “Another coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  When he came back from the kitchen, he began:

  “It was a long time ago. There was a woman. The man and I were full of piss and vinegar. All of us were young. The man and I fought what some thought was a fair fight, though I knew it wasn’t. Afterward the woman held his body, not me, in her arms. I ran before the police got there. I became John Reilley.”

  When I said nothing, he went on. He seemed glad to talk.

  “I had good hands, so I became a carpenter. It was a kind of work far removed from what I’d done before the killing, and I chose it in part so people who knew me before would probably never meet me. I grew this mustache. Not too big and not too small. Just enough to change my face a little. I’ve been careful to be friendly but not too friendly, and I always live alone. I want people to like me in a casual way, but not get so close that they’ll pry into my background.

  “I never stayed anywhere for long until I came here, but even here I didn’t want to be too much in the public eye. I had too little money to buy a house, and I didn’t want anyone, bank or credit company, for instance, checking into John Reilley’s past.

  “But I took to the Vineyard. It’s beautiful and it’s got a population that makes it easy to get lost: a few thousand people in the winter, a hundred thousand during the summer. People coming and going all the time. There’s a lot of the kind of work I do and the money’s good and people don’t ask too many questions as long as you do your job. Everything is in flux, like it is out in northern California, where people are all from somewhere else and probably won’t be doing what they’re doing now for very long.”

  “I’ve never been to northern California.”

  “Pretty country. Lots of energy in the air. I was there before I came here, and I came here because it was as far from there as I could get and was a place I’d never been. I liked the island, so I rented that apartment and stayed in it long enough to get John Reilley a post office box and to start building this place. I’ve been here ever since, and somewhere along the line I realized I was tired of moving. Then I met Dodie and was even surer of that. I’m sixty years old, and for forty years I’ve been on the run. The only women I’ve known have been the touch-and-go kind. I want to settle down, but I guess that may not happen now that you’re here. I’ll be moving on if the police don’t nail me first.”

  His face had a fatalistic look that made me uncomfortable. “I told you I don’t work for the police,” I said, “and I told you I’m not interested in where you live. I just want to know the kind of person you are. Or rather, Maria Donawa wants to know. How’d you meet Dodie?”

  He made a small gesture. “Our lives are a series of happenstance events. Rick Black was dating Maria. Rick and I had worked together on a few jobs. One day after work we bumped into each other in the A&P. I was about to move on when Dodie and Maria came by, and Dodie and I got introduced. If I’d left a half minute sooner we’d never have met. Do you believe in fate?”

  The Moirai and Norns seemed as active as ever, but I just shrugged and said, “You and Dodie began to date.”

  He shook his head. “No. I liked her but I didn’t have a place for a woman in my life. Then I met her again at the farmers’ market and we talked. It was easy for both of u
s, but naturally I had to dance around some of her questions.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Then one day Rick told me that Dodie had a small bit of work to do on her porch. He’d promised Maria that he’d take care of it, but he’d gotten a big job that kept him busy and he asked me to stand in for him. I said sure and that was the first time I went to her house. There wasn’t much to the job, but afterward she gave me tea and cookies. That was how it started.”

  “You hit it off.”

  “Yes.” He gave me a challenging look. “Of course she doesn’t know that I killed a man.”

  “Did you ever go back to where that happened?”

  “No. I didn’t want to disgrace my family, and the woman involved cared about the other man, not me, so I never went back and I never wrote to anyone. By now they must think I’m dead or in prison. I went as far away as my money would take me, changed my name, and got a job. Now I’m here and you know what Maria asked you to learn.”

  We sat in silence for a while. Then I said, “I’ve broken all of the commandments at one time or another, so I’m not in a position to judge the fight you had when you were young. I’m only interested in the way you are now, and I’m only interested in that because I know Dodie and I want her to be happy.”

  “Well,” he said, “for what it’s worth, in the last forty years John Reilley has never been in trouble, not anywhere for any reason. When it looks like trouble, I fade away. I’m antitrouble. Dodie makes me happy and I think I do the same for her. I’m healthy and I earn a good living and I’m tired of wandering. I’d like to settle down for good.”

  “What can you tell me about Wall and Reston, the two guys who’ve been following me? I think they might actually be interested in finding you. Why might that be?”

  His eyes narrowed and he shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t like it. I’ve never had people come looking for me before. First you, now maybe these guys Wall and Reston.”

  “You don’t know either one of them?”

  “No.”

  “Homicide cases are never terminated until someone is caught and found guilty. If that killing you were involved with was called murder, the case might be cold but it’s not closed. Have you seen anybody on the island who knew you back then and might have recognized you here?”