A Vineyard Killing

by Philip R. Craig

  I drove fast to Saberfox’s office, peeling off my rubber gloves en route and stuffing them into the pocket of my coat. Dana Hvide was at her desk. She was cool as ever but kept looking at my bloody face. No, she didn’t know where Donald was. Paul and Brad knew and had gone to join him.

  I didn’t have time to be gentle. I reached over her desk and dragged her across it to my side. She opened her mouth to scream, but I covered it with one hand as I shook her with the other. I tried not to shout.

  My bloody head was what convinced her I was telling the truth as I described my encounter with Hillborough. When I took away my hand she told me where to find Donald.

  “Call the police and tell them what’s happened,”

  I said, “and don’t let Hillborough near you. If you hear from Donald or Paul, tell them what I’ve just told you. I think they may both be in danger. Certainly Paul is. I’m going to try to get to them before Hillborough does.”

  I ran down to the Land Cruiser and broke the speed limit getting to Katama. Naturally there wasn’t a cop in sight to come racing after me, siren howling and blue lights flashing. I wished I had my pistol.

  Donald Fox was at a development site not far from Herring Creek. From the deck of the house he was planning to steal, you could see South Beach and the Atlantic Ocean rolling over the curve of the earth toward the far-distant Bahamas.

  I got there late.

  There were already three green Range Rovers pulled up side by side in the driveway, and Brad Hillborough was lurching, cane in hand, toward the Fox brothers, who were standing on the lawn looking at him curiously.

  I pounded on the horn and swerved into the yard, trying to get between Hillborough and the Foxes. But at the last moment I saw the trench of a new sewer system between the lawn and me and had to slam on the brakes to keep from sliding into it.

  I jumped out of the truck and shouted, “Run, Paul! He wants to kill you!”

  I leaped over the trench and ran after Hillborough, shouting words I don’t remember.

  But Paul Fox didn’t run. He stood there, stunned, as Hillborough reached him, whipped the blade from the cane, and lunged at him.

  But Donald was as quick as Paul was slow. As Hillborough lunged, Donald shouted, “No!” and stepped in front of the sword, taking it full in the chest.

  The blade bent and Donald Fox fell. Hillborough recovered from his lunge and stared with horror as Fox’s coat began to turn red.

  “Run, Paul!” I shouted, as I closed on Hillborough. “You’re the one he’s after!”

  But Hillborough seemed to have forgotten about Paul. He stared at Donald, who lay on the lawn, and stepped away as if in a daze. I got between him and the Foxes, but he paid no attention to me.

  “What have I done?” he asked abstractedly. “What have I done?”

  “Put down the sword,” I said, looking around for some weapon to enforce my demand but finding none.

  “Christ,” he said. “Wilde was right.” He turned and walked off a few steps.

  Then he put the silver ball of the cane on the ground and fell on his sword.

  27

  As I watched Hillborough fall, I heard a groan behind me and turned to see Paul Fox holding his brother in his arms while Donald touched a hand to his own chest and brought it away red with blood.

  But Donald was alive.

  In the distance I heard the sound of sirens. Dana Hvide had given the police both my story and directions to this location.

  “Help is on its way,” I said.

  Paul Fox cradled his brother in his arms. “Take it easy,” he said. His face was white.

  “I think I’m all right,” said Donald. He gripped his brother’s hand. “I’ve been wearing Kevlar for a week now.”

  I opened his coat and there was the armor. Hillborough’s blade had gone through it far enough to bring blood, but apparently not too far.

  The brothers smiled at each other.

  I rose and walked to Hillborough’s body.

  There’s a thin line at best between the willingness to commit suicide and the willingness to commit murder, and sometimes there’s no line at all. I had read about ancient warriors throwing themselves on their swords, but I had never imagined I’d see it happen.

  For some reason I thought of Yukio Mishima, the Japanese writer who disemboweled himself when a regiment of soldiers laughed at his efforts to lead them into fanatical nationalism, and I wondered if most suicides were similar failures of romance. Maybe love had killed both Hillborough and Kirkland, and had come close to killing Paul and Donald Fox. It could be a dangerous emotion.

  I walked back to the Foxes and stood beside them as the police cars and ambulance arrived.

  I was home when Agganis called and asked me to come and see him.

  Before nurse Zee would let me do that she sat me in a chair, took off the bandage the medics had put on my head wound at Katama, cleaned the area again, and applied a new dressing. Then she did the same for the puncture wound in my thigh.

  “You should go to the hospital right away,” she said.

  “I’ll go after I see Agganis,” I said, standing up.

  “You need to be X-rayed,” she said, “although I’m not sure they can x-ray a rock. I thought you told me you were going to stay out of trouble!”

  I tried humor. “Because I did not stop for harm, it kindly stopped for me.”

  Zee was not amused. “You’re a terrible example for our children!”

  “They still like me,” I said in a small voice.

  “I think I’d better drive you up there. The kids can come with us.”

  I put my big hands on her shoulders and looked down into her worried eyes. “I’m fine. I drove here and I can drive there.”

  She put her arms around me. “I worry about you.”

  “I’m glad you do.”

  Agganis was in his office with Officer Olive Otero.

  “You want to tell me what happened between you and Hillborough?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. I then lied about who’d gone into Kirkland’s house first, didn’t mention having written the note, but told him most of the truth about the fight between Hillborough and me and about what had happened after I had gotten away from him.

  Agganis listened and then said, “So after you got away you went to the Saberfox offices first, to warn the Fox brothers, then went down to Katama. Is that your story?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Paul Fox says you asked him how to get to Kirkland’s house and that he didn’t give that information to Hillborough until fifteen or twenty minutes later. Now you say you followed Hillborough into the house for fear he’d destroy evidence. Where were you for that twenty minutes?”

  “Driving from the house to the Fireside parking lot. I wanted to know how long that took. After I got to the lot, I went back to Kirkland’s house to do it one more time just to be sure. That’s when I saw Hillborough going in and followed him.”

  Agganis gave me a sour look. “I can’t prove it didn’t happen that way. Can you prove it did?”

  I feigned innocence. “What do I have to prove? Maybe somebody saw me at the Fireside parking lot.”

  “We’ll ask. Why did you want to know how long it takes to get from Kirkland’s house to the Fireside?”

  “Because Kirkland met somebody in the parking lot in the other guy’s car a couple of days before Paul Fox was shot. Bonzo saw him in the passenger’s seat. But he was driving his own company car later when he got himself killed. The evening Kirkland got killed there wasn’t another car in the lot, which probably means that whoever he met there was either a passenger or arrived on foot. I wondered if the guy on foot had called Kirkland and told him where to meet him and if he did, how long it would take Kirkland to get there. The answer is about ten minutes. Hillborough lived in the Martin’s Vineyard, which is about that far away from the parking lot, if you walk.”

  “That’s true of a lot of the people who live in OB. Why did you think
Hillborough might destroy evidence in Kirkland’s house?”

  “He was already on my short list. Besides, why else would he break into the house? And, remember, we did find something. We found that note.”

  “Says who?” snapped Olive. “You say Hillborough put it in his pocket, but he wasn’t carrying any note when we searched his body.”

  I let my surprise show, but hid my relief. “He must have destroyed it. It was evidence against him.”

  “So you say. Did you read it?”

  “No. Hillborough grabbed it. But whatever it said, it was enough to make him try to kill me.”

  Olive’s face was full of skepticism. “You’d lie to God himself,” she said.

  “You should train Olive to be more polite,” I said to Agganis. “People might begin to think that all cops are as obnoxious as she is.”

  “Both of you, stop it!” said Agganis. Olive gave me a final glare and turned away. I coughed to cover a laugh. Agganis shook his head. “You two.”

  He paused, then said, “I’m pretty sure that Hillborough stashed the gun in Rick Black’s house, but I can’t prove it. I don’t know if we’ll ever get all this officially straightened out. What we know for sure is that right here in Paradise in the last several days we’ve had one killing, one suicide, one attempted murder, and one stabbing that looks like an accident. I think we pretty much know who did what and why, but I doubt if the case will ever be closed.”

  “Is Donald Fox going to make it?”

  “The medics were there quick and got him to the hospital, and as far as I know the armor stopped most of the impact of the blade. Gutsy act, like him or not.”

  I thought of the fear that had been in me when I’d stood in front of that blade, and had to agree.

  I signed a document telling my side of the story of what had happened in Kirkland’s house and what I’d done immediately afterward. God might get me for that later, but Agganis let me go. I waved at Olive as I left, but she didn’t wave back.

  I was longer at the ER than I’d hoped to be, but at the ER you wait around a lot unless you’re bleeding on their floor, in which case they take you right away. An X ray showed that my skull was in one piece, and the puncture in my thigh was clean and not too deep, so I was rebandaged at last and sent on my way.

  As I drove home I wondered if any good could come out of such madness and violence and how much I was responsible for the wounding of Donald Fox and the suicide of Brad Hillborough. I decided I could live with Hillborough’s death, but I was bothered by Fox’s wound. I didn’t like Fox, but if I’d not had my confrontation with Hillborough, he might not have snapped and accidentally stabbed the man he loved more than he valued his own life.

  Or had it really been an accident? Was it Freud who suggested that there are no accidents, but, rather, that what we do we do for reasons buried deep within us?

  I thought back to my encounter with Paul Fox earlier in the day. He’d mentioned that he and Brad Hillborough were about to join Donald Fox at the site of a prospective purchase. If I’d asked him where that was, he probably would have told me, and I’d have known where to go to warn both of the Foxes that Hillborough was on the loose.

  But instead I’d asked for the location of Kirkland’s house, and because of that one man was dead and another stabbed in the chest. Thus large events turn on small ones. It was another case of the kingdom being lost for want of a nail.

  The children were in bed by the time I got home, but Zee was up and wide-awake, full of questions.

  I got us each a brandy and we sat on the living room couch in front of a dying fire in the stove I’d installed just before our wedding in an attempt to make my sometimes chilly old bachelor camp into a place suitable for a married couple to live during the winter.

  I pushed my lock picks and practice locks to one side so we could put our feet on the hatch cover that served as our coffee table. I told her what I’d told Agganis and what Agganis had told me.

  When I was through, she said, “So Brad Hillborough hated Paul Fox and got Kirkland to shoot him, then killed Kirkland to keep him from talking about it.”

  I nodded. “So it seems.”

  “And you figured that out.”

  “I thought that the shootist was probably somebody in the organization, because he knew where Paul Fox was going to be and had established an escape route for himself ahead of time. If I’d remembered that Brad Hillborough actually admitted that he’d made the plan to go to the E and E, I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort, but I didn’t.”

  “It’s a good thing that Paul was wearing that vest.”

  “Amen to that, because the bullets that hit him were very accurately fired. When I learned that Kirkland was brought into the company by Hillborough and that he was a good pistol shot, I thought about Hillborough’s fanatical dedication to Donald Fox.

  “I don’t know what the shrinks would call that kind of devotion, but they probably have a name for it. Whatever it’s called, as far as Hillborough was concerned anybody who got between him and Donald or between Donald and what Donald wanted was an enemy.”

  “And Paul fit that bill.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ten-cent psychology,” said Zee. “But then you found that note in Kirkland’s house.”

  “That’s what I told Agganis,” I said. “There was a note and what it said was enough to push Hillborough over the edge. Apparently Hillborough destroyed it between the time he tried to kill me and the time he stabbed Donald Fox. But there’s more to the story.”

  “Tell me,” said Zee, and I did that.

  She was quiet for what seemed like a long time, then she put her arm around me. “I’m glad you had that chair.”

  I sipped my brandy. “It’s too bad I couldn’t have stopped Hillborough there in the house. He came within a whisker of killing Paul before he killed himself.”

  “But Donald stepped in front of the sword and saved Paul just like Hillborough shoved Donald from in front of that car years ago. Crazy.” Zee laid her dark head against my shoulder.

  “I believe that’s a politically incorrect term these days,” I said, “but it seems appropriate. Shall we go to bed?”

  “Yes. We can test whether the penis is mightier than the sword.”

  “Is that an original pun, or did you steal it?”

  “Do you care?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to participate in the test?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, come on, then!”

  We went.

  28

  The next morning Zee phoned me from the hospital and said that Donald Fox was definitely going to live. He was a tough man in good physical condition. The sword blade had stopped short of his heart and major arteries but had punctured a lung and sliced through lesser blood vessels. They’d operated and repaired most of the damage. Paul Fox was by his side, and Maria Donawa was by Paul’s side as often as she could slip away from her duties for a few minutes.

  “Bad news for Dodie,” I said.

  “Dodie will just have to get used to it,” said Zee.

  “Besides, Paul is not the kind of man Donald is. He’s a nice guy. Maria told me that he told her that Saberfox will only take Dodie’s house over his dead body. The boy has spunk he may not have known about.”

  “He’s in love with Maria,” I said, “and love is transforming. Take me, for instance. Before I knew you I was just a lazy guy who was only interested in beer and fishing. I didn’t have a steady job, and I was totally without ambition. But then I fell for you, and look at me now.”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the line.

  “Hello?” I said. “Hello? Hello? I think we’ve been cut off.”

  “I’ll see you tonight,” said Zee hoarsely.

  The next day I drove up to John Reilley’s work site and joined him on a pile of two-by-fours as he ate lunch under the noon sun. On the lee side of the house it was almost warm.

  I tol
d him about Hillborough and the Fox brothers, and about Maria and Paul.

  “So Hillborough and Kirkland played Iago and Roderigo, eh?” said John, shaking his head. “Well, they’re gone now and won’t be missed. I wish good luck to the kids. Maria needs someone to take her mind off her mother’s life, and young Paul may be just the man to do the job.”

  “Maybe you can do the same for Dodie. She fancies you and she’s going to need somebody to keep her from fussing about Maria and Paul.”

  He looked sad. “I fancy her, too, and I think I could distract her or maybe even get her to change her mind about Paul, but I suspect that I should be moving on. I’ve been on the run for forty years, and I’m tired of it, but I have my reasons for going and they’re good ones.” He bit into his sandwich.

  “Maybe not as good as you think,” I said. “The lad you ran through didn’t die. He got better and married the girl. You’re not a wanted man and never have been.”

  He chewed but had a hard time swallowing. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Juan Diego Valentine, who fled from Spain to the United States, thinking he’d killed a man, and disappeared.” I told him what I’d learned from Joe Begay.

  He shook his head as though in a daze. “You’re sure about this? Carlos didn’t die? I was never wanted for murder?”

  “Not for murder or anything else. No one involved wanted charges brought, apparently. The story of the duel got out, but the happy ending made it into a romance. The only bad part was that your parents and sister never heard from you again.”

  He ran a hand hard over his head. “I didn’t dare write. I thought I’d disgraced the family. I wanted them to think I was dead somewhere. I’ve been a complete fool.”

  “And you’ve more than paid for it by being on the run all these years. Your parents are in their eighties and your sister is a grandmother, but I’ll bet they’d be delighted to hear from you.”

  He brightened. “You think so?” But then he shook his head. “No. I don’t know if I can risk it.”