Murder at a Vineyard Mansion

by Philip R. Craig

  We told each other about our days. When I finished telling about mine, she said, “You’ve been busy. Trying to decide what computer to buy must be relaxation after trying to remember who’s related to who among the Bradfords and Ollie Mattes and all.”

  “Maybe if I had a computer I could keep a scorecard: who fathered who, who hates who, why who hates who, who loves who, who’s whose sister or half brother, and so forth.”

  “You could at least do that. Maybe you can use it to figure when the fish will be hitting at Wasque. If you can do that you can be a rich man and you can retire.”

  I put my arm across her shoulders. “I have a working wife. Because of that, I already do so little work that nobody would be able to tell if I’m retired.”

  “There is that.”

  “You could retire, too. Do you want to retire?”

  “No. I like being a nurse. For me the big difference would be that I’d be a rich nurse instead of just a regular nurse.”

  “There aren’t too many rich nurses around these days. We could build a bigger house. One that doesn’t have a leak in the northeast corner of the living room.”

  “I guess we could do that, although this house is just fine and that leak only leaks when there’s a hard northeast rain. Besides, I know you’ll be able to stop it one of these times. It can’t get the best of you forever.”

  “It has so far. Maybe my computer will tell me how to fix it.”

  “True. Maybe it will tell you who the Silencer is.”

  “I hope not. I’m on the Silencer’s side.”

  “Aiding and abetting a criminal is a crime, Jefferson.”

  “The music he’s shutting down is the real crime.”

  “You crank Pavarotti up pretty loud when he sings ‘Nessun Dorma.’ ”

  “Apples and oranges.” I emptied my glass. “We have to decide what computer to buy. Do you want to look at the reading material I brought home, or do you already have a good idea about what we should get?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I have some ideas, but I’ll look at the stuff before we decide. We should talk with the kids, too, because they’ll be using whatever machine we buy.”

  So we went downstairs and she and I studied the book I’d gotten from the library and the papers I’d gotten from the computer store. Then, after supper, we sat with the children in the living room and talked. Which is to say that I mostly listened while the other three talked, using words still new to me but familiar to them. When the talk was over, they seemed pleased and we all went to bed.

  The next morning, which was Saturday, I made some early telephone calls to find out where Harold Hobbes’s funeral was being held. But Ed had been misinformed. Harold was being cremated and Maud wanted no services. I didn’t think Harold cared one way or the other, but I would have been interested in seeing who came to the church and to the graveside.

  But that wish was not going to be granted, so instead my family and I went to the computer store and bought a computer, a monitor, a printer, and a scanner and arranged to have a technician come to the house in the afternoon to set everything up and get us hooked up to whatever we needed to be hooked to. Then we went to the thrift shop and bought two two-drawer file cabinets.

  At home again Zee and I rearranged the furniture in the guest room, then went out to the shed in back of the house and got an eight-by-two piece of one-inch plywood that I’d been saving since building the tree house in our big beech and that, by a miracle, was already painted. Deck Gray, a good traditional Vineyard color. We put the two file cabinets against one wall of the guest room and put the plywood across the two file cabinets and, lo, we had a desk to put the computer stuff on.

  That evening I watched as first Zee and then the two kids clicked keys and pushed the mouse around. They played bits of games and experimented with playing music and motion pictures and entered and returned from the mysterious Internet. Zee was careful, but Joshua and Diana were unafraid and seemed to remember everything they did.

  Such was not the case with me when I was prevailed upon to take a turn. I forgot everything I thought I knew and was sure that I was going to destroy the machine if I hit the wrong key.

  “Don’t worry, Pa,” said Diana, “if you make a mistake you just unmake it and go on.”

  She told me how to get onto the Internet.

  “Now what do I do?”

  “It’s like a library, Pa,” said Joshua. “You use your mouse to put your cursor right here and then you type in what you want to know.”

  I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to know, but I knew I had to do something so I said, “How about opera?”

  “That’s good. Type in ‘opera’ and then click your mouse right here.”

  I typed and clicked and immediately my monitor screen informed me that it was listing the first ten of over eight million sites pertaining to opera. I couldn’t imagine eight million sites pertaining to anything.

  “What next?”

  Diana knew. “Just click the first one, Pa. Put your cursor right here and click.”

  I clicked and found myself face-to-face with more information about opera than I knew existed. I read some of it.

  “Okay, how do I get out of here?”

  “Just click on that X up there in the corner, Pa.”

  I clicked and the page listing opera sites reappeared.

  “Now what?”

  “Click the X again.”

  I did and I was back where I’d started. The children gave me looks of congratulation. In exchange I gave up my chair to Joshua.

  “You did very well,” said Zee, patting my knee. “See, both you and the computer survived.”

  As I watched Joshua I decided that we’d done the right thing to buy the machine. Not only was I feeling better than I’d imagined I would, but my wife and children were happy and there seemed to be an almost unlimited amount of information available to us right there in our own house.

  It was too bad that none of it had to do with the investigation I was making. I had bitten off a hard chaw and wasn’t using my time well, as was clearly shown by the fact that although Harold Hobbes’s murder was the subject of my inquiries, I’d somehow learned more about the Bradfords, the Piersons, and Ollie Mattes.

  It was time to get back to Harold. I wondered where he had been the night that Ollie had died. He wouldn’t tell his mother, even though he’d been afraid he might be accused of killing Ollie. I thought of the long black veil and of the man who’d been hung for murder rather than admit to having been in the arms of his best friend’s wife at the time of the killing. Had Harold been in someone’s arms that night? Was he so foolish or noble that, like the guy in the song, he’d die rather than reveal her name? And how about the best friend’s wife? She hadn’t said a word when they hung her lover.

  Was there a link between Harold’s mysterious night journey and his death? I watched as Joshua gave his chair to his little sister and thought how nice it would be if I could go on the Internet and type “Harold Hobbes’s murder” and learn where he’d been that night, who had killed him, and why.

  My computer couldn’t tell me that, but some human could.

  12

  During the summer there are over one hundrd thousand people on Martha’s Vineyard. Of these, fifteen thousand, more or less, are year-round residents, which is about the same number as in a medium-sized town. As is the case in most such towns, the island’s citizenry is a collection of different social groups, many of which know little about the others. On the Vineyard the separateness of these groups is emphasized by the fact that the island consists of six different townships, among which there are historical conflicts and ancient animosities. There are ten different police forces, six different fire departments, and a half dozen school systems, town offices, and highway departments. The regional high school, which was only built after decades of argument, is still the subject of passionate contention among citizens who favor it and those who think it never shou
ld have been built. The island also has groups of people who can be differentiated by vocation, avocation, interests, and proclivities.

  Harold Hobbes had belonged to one or more of the various subdivisions of Vineyard society, the most obvious being that group of Chappaquiddick residents who, given their druthers, would have made a gated community of their peninsula. His mother, Maud, was chief among these defenders of Chappy turf, but she had already told me that she knew nothing of her late son’s private life other than that he had had many women and his confession that he was the window breaker at Ron Pierson’s mansion-in-progress. I’d have to go to some other guardian of Chappy to seek additional information about Harold’s private life.

  This plan posed two problems for me. First, the police, during the days since Harold’s death, would almost certainly have already interviewed the Chappy people I might want to talk to and those people might see no good reason to talk to me, too. Second, even if the police hadn’t talked to those people, they might not want to talk to me, since it was not a secret that I was in favor of open beaches on Chappaquiddick and everywhere else on the Vineyard. This was one of my two public postures in a life otherwise devoted to staying out of arguments, the other being opposition to the closing of open land to traditional uses such as hunting, hiking, and picnicking, and it was probably enough to get me viewed by the Chappy privatizers as an enemy.

  I would have to give some thought to how to infiltrate that fortress mentality, but meanwhile there were other people I could talk to. One of them was Dennis Wilcox.

  Dennis was a fisherman who worked out of Edgartown, usually with Silas Look as crew. His boat was the Lucy Diamond, a forty-footer he kept on a stake between the Yacht Club and Reading Room dock, not far from where we kept the Shirley J. He had a string of conch traps and did party fishing during the derby. Now and then, just to keep his hand in, he’d mount a pulpit on the Lucy’s bow and go with a few friends down to the Dump, south of No Man’s Land, looking for swordfish. He wasn’t the best harpooner on the island because he didn’t get much practice, but he wasn’t bad, and I’d gotten many pounds of fresh swordfish from him over the years.

  I went down to the docks early the next morning, to catch him before he went out, because traps need to be tended whether or not it’s the Sabbath. I saw that he was already on his boat, so I got my dinghy and rowed out there. There wasn’t much wind and the water was almost like glass.

  Dennis looked down at me as I pulled alongside. “J.W., what brings you out here? You going sailing?”

  “No, I wanted to see you.”

  “You want to go conching?”

  “No. My mind is weak but it’s not that weak. It’s about Harold Hobbes.”

  He glanced at me curiously while he coiled a line. “What about him, aside from his being dead?” He looked toward shore. “You see Silas? He’s supposed to be getting us coffee.”

  “I didn’t go by the Dock Street.”

  “Probably gabbing with somebody there. We should have been under way by now.”

  Dennis hadn’t bothered shaving that morning. He was a broad-shouldered young guy who could haul a trap better than most, and being a worker he was characteristically anxious to get moving.

  “Did you know Harold?” I asked, moving my oars slightly to keep the dinghy steady on the flat water.

  He looked back at me. “I knew who he was. Why?”

  “Harold was off someplace the night Ollie Mattes got himself killed. He wouldn’t tell his mother where. I wondered if you might know.”

  His voice changed. “Why should I know?”

  “He was somewhere he didn’t want to talk about. It occurred to me that he might have been in the closet. If he was, I thought you might know about it.”

  Dennis had stopped coiling his line. Now he completed the job. “The island is a small world, but I can’t claim to know everybody in it.”

  “Did you know Harold?”

  He looked toward shore. “There’s Silas, finally. Come on, Silas, we’re losing half a day!” His eyes came back. “No. Only that he was one of those letters-to-the-editors writers who are always bitching about overdevelopment and golf courses and like that. I doubt if I ever said two words to him.”

  “You ever hear about him living the life?”

  “No. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t, though. I don’t subscribe to a dating service, y’know.”

  I said, “I’m not trying to corner you, Dennis. It’s just that two men are dead and I’m trying to find out where Harold was the night Ollie was killed. Somebody knows and I’d like to talk with him.”

  He finally let his anger show. “You think we’ve got one of those gay killers on the loose? Is that it? Well, all I can tell you is that I’ve never heard any of my crowd mention Harold Hobbes’s name except when they read his letters in the papers and said they thought he was another one of those rich guys who never had to work for a living and didn’t know shit from sardines.” He turned and shouted toward shore, “Come on, Silas, we’re burning daylight!”

  “Will you ask around and let me know if you hear anything?”

  He took a deep breath. “Sure, J.W., but if there was anything to hear I think I’d have heard it by now.” He turned away and touched a key and the deep growl of the Lucy’s engine rumbled in my ears.

  As I rowed back toward Collins Beach, I watched Silas arrive at the Lucy, hand up a thermos of coffee, and climb aboard. As I rounded the Reading Room dock, Dennis and Silas were headed out to sea.

  I drove back home and found that a line had formed at the computer. Zee, as senior member of the users, was in front of the monitor screen and seemed to be reading something about Mongolia, while our children anxiously waited their turns. Mongolia? I decided not to ask why. Instead, I went to the phone book and looked up Roger Avila’s number. Roger wasn’t home. I guessed where he might be and phoned Helga Mattes. No one was there, either.

  I looked at my watch, which I’d gotten for a dollar at a yard sale. You should never pay more than $9.99 for a wristwatch, and you can usually get a good one for less. Expensive watches get lost and broken just as often as cheap ones. They don’t keep time any better and you worry about them more. All you need is a watch that runs, that’s water resistant, and that’s fairly shock resistant. Most fit that description. According to mine, a lot of people were at this moment probably in church.

  Since I obviously wasn’t going to be missed by my family, I went into the bedroom and got my old Boston PD shield out of the box where I keep mostly unused items like cuff links, tiepins, my ancient and long unused Zippo lighter, and a little water pipe left over from my pot-smoking days. I put the shield in my wallet then drove to the cemetery where Ollie Mattes’s new grave was still covered with flowers and greens. There were no mourners, so I drove to Helga Mattes’s house, which was as devoid of life as was the cemetery. I parked across the street and waited.

  After a while two cars came down the street. One pulled into the driveway and the other stopped in front of the house. Helga Mattes and the children I’d seen at the funeral got out of the car in the driveway. A man I remembered seeing at the funeral and grave service got out of the other car. He had stood apart from the widow and her children at the burial and had still been there when I’d left. The smart money said he was John Lupien. He and Helga and the children went into the house.

  I was listening to the country-and-western station in Rhode Island. Some new singers whose names I’d mostly not heard before were singing unfamiliar somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs. Their bands were too loud for their voices so I missed a lot of the words, but it was music you could dance to, which I guessed was the point. Personally I preferred to hear the lyrics when I listened to C and W, but that seemed less fashionable now than when Emmylou and Dolly were at the top of the charts. I listened to two more songs and then crossed the street and knocked on the door. Helga Mattes opened it.

  I said, “Mrs. Mattes? My name is Jackson. I’d like to offer my condolences t
o you. I was at the funeral.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Thank you. Were you a friend of Ollie’s?”

  Did Ollie have friends? I said, “Not a close one, but no man is an island and one death diminishes us all.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes. John Donne wrote it.” I looked beyond her and saw a man watching me from the far side of the room. I dropped my eyes back down to hers. “I know this probably isn’t a good time, but I’d like to talk with you about your husband. I’m one of the people investigating his death.”

  Her face seemed to stiffen. “Oh. Well, I’ve already talked with the police.” She didn’t ask me in.

  “I know,” I said, “but I’m interviewing people again on the chance that somebody might have remembered something they didn’t mention before. Some name, maybe. Somebody who had reason to want to harm your husband.”

  “I’ve told the police everything. There are no other names that I can think of. Ollie didn’t have many friends, but I can’t think of anyone who would want to kill him. Don’t they think he might have been killed by mistake? By someone who went there to burn down that big house or something and who fought with Ollie then panicked and pushed him off of that cliff to make it look like an accident and then ran away?”

  “Yes, it could have happened just like that. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe somebody wanted him dead. That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “But who would want him dead? My husband wasn’t easy to like, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting that. We don’t just kill people because we don’t like them.”

  Some people do, of course. “Usually people have a reason or think they have,” I said. “Planned killings usually involve money or sex or fear, but the motive can be almost anything. It can be a political assassination or it can be as simple as getting rid of somebody who’s inconvenient, or it can be love.”

  Her eyes grew wary. “What do you mean?”

  I made a small gesture. “It’s a commonplace event. A lover kills a husband to get the wife. A wife kills a lover who threatens to tell her husband about their relationship. A husband kills his wife so he can marry his mistress. A mistress kills a wife so she can marry the husband. Whenever there’s a killing, spouses and lovers are always prime suspects.” I flicked my eyes at the man behind her, then brought them back down to hers again.