A Beautiful Place to Die

by Philip Craig

  “Daddy says you were a policeman once.”

  “Not anymore. Now I’m just a guy on a medical pension.”

  She wandered to one of the almost-matched lawn chairs I’d salvaged from the Edgartown dump and had repainted until they looked almost new. I sat down in the one I’d just gotten up from. She ran her fingers over the chair’s plastic webbing. She was wearing shorts and one of those shirts with an animal above the left pocket. Restrained yet expensive, stylish in the Martha’s Vineyard summer mode. My shorts were from the thrift shop. It’s the way I like to live.

  “I don’t know how to say what I want to say. . . .”

  I got up. “Sit down. I’ll get you a drink.”

  I went inside and got a Coke from the fridge for her and another Molson for myself. I skimp on what I can, but one cannot skimp on one’s beer. Except toward the end of the month. I gave her the can and watched her diddle with it, then take a sip. I sat down and had a snort myself.

  “You’re going to think I’m a nut . . .”

  “Take a chance.”

  She gripped the can with both hands and looked right at me. “That wasn’t an accident. Somebody tried to kill my brother! I checked the Nellie Grey out the day before it blew up. There wasn’t a thing wrong with it. Somebody did something to it before Billy and Jim went out that morning!” She twisted the can in her hands. “Poor Jim. They didn’t care about him. All they wanted was Billy!”

  “Who wanted him? Why?”

  She was fierce. “Who do you think? Billy’s druggie friends, of course! They’re afraid he’ll turn them in now that he’s gotten straight!”

  Melodrama. Did I roll my eyes? I saw her looking at me with that furious expression youth wears when it’s speaking seriously and is taken lightly. She leaped to her feet.

  “Sit.”

  She sat, eyes aflame. I sucked down some more beer.

  “Don’t get put off. It’s my face. I play roles with it. I look the way I feel or sometimes I look the way I think I’m supposed to feel or the way I think I should pretend to feel. That’s probably why I never made detective. You got to admit your story sounds like television: ‘My brother’s gone straight, and the mob is afraid he’ll talk.’ ”

  “Why do you say ‘got to’? You know better!”

  True. “Sorry. It’s more game playing. Probably a bad habit. No more games, okay? Now, who’s after Billy? Why? How do you know?”

  She leaned forward. A nice young womanish body. If there was a God, some lucky fellow would one day benefit from it. But not middle-aged me. “I don’t have to tell you, do I, that this island isn’t just a happy summer resort, but that there’s a big drug trade here, too. You know that this place may be the drug capital of the East Coast. You know how easy it is for expensive boats and planes to come and go from this island without attracting any attention at all, and you know that every year or so they have a big drug bust involving people or houses down here for laundering money or other stuff like that.

  “My brother was very strung out for years right here on this island, and he knows that scene. It almost killed him, but now he’s going straight. He’s at Brown, you know. He’s not dumb. He’s on the dean’s list! But I saw him in Oak Bluffs last week, just outside the Fireside. Jim was with him. I saw one of the creeps he used to know shove Billy, and I ran over just as Jim stepped between them. But I heard the guy say, ‘You’ll get yours!’ before he ran off. I know a dopehead when I see one, and he was a dopehead. It was that Danny Sylvia, damn him! Damn him!”

  “You know him?”

  “I know him, all right. He’s the one who got Billy started. At the tennis club, would you believe it! Mom and Mrs. Sylvia played there and the next thing you know that damned Danny had Billy using first one thing, then the next. I hate him! I hate her!”

  “Her?”

  “His mother!” Susie’s face was hard and sullen. “She brought Danny there. She got him and Billy together. They played tennis. My mother never liked it.”

  I emptied my Molsons. “What do you mean? Never liked what?”

  Susie was suddenly evasive, the way people are when they believe something that’s unpleasant and hard to know for sure. “Mom just stopped playing tennis with Maria Sylvia, that’s all. I don’t know why. Ask her!” She stared down at her Coke.

  I thought that she did know why. “What about Billy and Danny?”

  “The Sylvias sent dear Danny off to take the cure, I heard.” Her lip curled. “By that time, of course, Billy was hooked!”

  “But he got unhooked.” I thought of something. “Maybe your mother blamed Danny’s mother for what Danny did to Billy, just like you do.”

  “Maybe.” Maybe not. She sensed my doubt. “You think I’m not telling you what I think, don’t you?”

  Everyone lies when he thinks it’s important. “It would help, maybe, if I knew what you think.”

  “No.” She shook her head back and forth. “If you want to know why my mother broke off from Danny’s mother, you can find out from her. I want you to find out who it was who tried to kill my brother, that’s all! Find out who killed Jim! I know it was that Danny Sylvia! I want you to get him!” And then suddenly she was crying. Great chest-heaving sobs. I climbed out of my chair and went over to her. She shook my hand from her shoulder and sobbed some more. I went into the house and got another beer. When I came out, she was walking to her car. “I knew you wouldn’t,” she said in a voice like broken ice. “First the police wouldn’t and now you won’t. I knew it!”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “I’ll give it a try. I’ll let you know.”

  She drove away, and I finished my beer.

  — 4 —

  I went down to Harborside Marine, where the manager met me with less than enthusiasm. He was wearing a clean shirt. His name was Joe Snyder. We’d had a go-around a few years back when his outfit had charged me $104 to replace a condenser in my outboard. As a result I’d learned to repair my own outboard and only went to Harborside Marine for parts. Joe knew my opinion of his prices.

  “I don’t think I have to tell you anything,” he said. “I’ve already talked to the cops and the Coast Guard and the Martins’ lawyer. Your lawyer can talk to my lawyer.”

  “I don’t have a lawyer,” I said. “I just want to check a story. Martin’s daughter says she took the Nellie Grey out the day before the explosion and that everything was fine. Did she do that?”

  “Yeah. She went out for a couple of hours. The boat was line. There wasn’t ever much of a problem with it. A loose connection, that’s all. I took the boat out myself before the Martin girl went out. There was nothing wrong with the boat. You a private investigator? You nosing around for the insurance company?”

  “No and no. Where was the boat put when Susie Martin brought it back?”

  “Right there at that dock. Why?”

  “Was it refueled when she brought it in?”

  “Yeah. We topped off the tank after she tied up, and there wasn’t any fuel leak when we did it. Look, I’m busy . . .”

  “Could anyone have gotten to the boat during the night?”

  “We have a night watchman. He didn’t report anything. What are—”

  “Could anyone have gotten aboard from the water? Come along in a dinghy or maybe swimming?”

  “Swimming? I suppose it’s possible. But the boat was still locked tight the next morning when Martin and Norris took her out. If there’d been any sign of tampering, young Martin would have let me know about it. He never lets us forget that his old man is paying us a good penny for looking after the Nellie—” He corrected himself. “That is, he never let us forget it when the Nellie used to be here. . . .”

  I doubted neither that George paid a pretty penny nor that Billy let Snyder remember it.

  “Did Billy Martin act worried or say anything about any trouble he might be in?”

  “No. He was pretty cheerful, as a matter of fact. He and Norris were heading for the Wasque rip to try for b
lues on the early east tide, and they told us they’d bring us some fish. What’s all this about? Why these questions?”

  “And the boat was fine when they went out?”

  “Motor ran like silk. What’s going on?”

  “Thanks,” I said and walked away. By not telling him what I was doing, I figured I got back about two cents of the $104 he’d charged me for the condenser. Revenge, as the Italians say, is a dish best eaten cold. If I refused ever to explain anything to Joe Snyder for the next several hundred years, I’d finally be even with him. Patience is important in such matters.

  Edgartown is a beautiful village of brick sidewalks and white or weathered gray shingled houses. Along Water Street the whaling financiers built their great white houses, each seemingly more splendid than the next. There is old money aplenty, and the harbor is filled with millions of dollars’ worth of power and sailing yachts in the summertime. It is a fashionable place to have a summer house, and the police force behaves accordingly. Of late a couple of bars have begun to disturb the evening quiet that was once so characteristic of the town, and the police have been increasingly obliged to haul noisy, mostly young drunks off to jail.

  I went to the police station. Helen Viera was sitting at a desk wearing her white blouse and blue skirt. Her badge was golden, but not gold. Summer colors. The tourist season had arrived, Helen said, smiling. I could find the chief downtown somewhere.

  There isn’t much to downtown Edgartown, so he wasn’t hard to find. He was at the four corners, where Main and Water streets cross, directing traffic. Beyond the parking lot at the foot of Main, tall sails were slanting out of the harbor against a northeast wind.

  I told him what Susie had told me and what Joe Snyder had told me. He glanced at me without expression, then watched traffic go by for a while. Edgartown is mostly narrow one-way streets, and traffic was already heavy. I’ve always wondered why there are so many cars downtown when the weather is as nice as it was that day. Why aren’t those people out at the beach or watching birds or something? The chief waved a hand and a young officer came and replaced him on traffic detail. A summer rent-a-cop. A Criminal Justice student at some New England college, no doubt.

  “I know Billy Martin,” he said. “Somebody on the island lost a good customer when he took the cure, but I don’t know anybody who’d try to rub him out. Why should anybody do that?”

  “The theory is that Billy is about to squeal on his old buddies. Danny Sylvia in particular.”

  “But Danny Sylvia’s taken the cure, too, from what I hear, so what’s Billy going to say that everybody doesn’t already know—that a couple of years ago Danny might have been Billy’s dealer. No news there. No reason for Danny to do Billy in. I’m afraid that Billy’s sister may still be in shock or some such thing, you know what I mean?”

  “Well, everybody says that the boat was running just fine, but it blew up for some reason or other. And Billy’d been into the dope scene, and some of those guys play rough. . . .”

  He nodded, his eyes floating up and down the street like cops’ eyes always do, even when they’re just shooting the breeze. “There’s a lot of dope around, all right. All kinds. You name it, we’ve got it. Back when people took marijuana seriously, there was a guy down here who called himself Johnny Potseed. He drove all over the island planting seeds for later public consumption. We knew who he was, but we never could catch him. Since then, the business has gotten a lot more sophisticated, and we don’t catch most of the new operators either. We’ve got boats and planes coming in here all summer long. Big ones. Little ones. Yachts, fishing boats, you name it. We got movie stars and bigwigs of all kinds and big money. All kinds of money coming and going and just looking for something to buy. The narcs make a big bust every now and then, but mostly we spend our time on nickel-and-dimers. Look at the report of the court sessions that they print in the Gazette—it’s almost two pages long, and half of it is possession arrests. When I first went to work for the town, there wasn’t a half page devoted to court. All we had were a few drunk drivers. Times have changed, all right.

  “The island police forces are straight out just taking care of the heart attacks, the moped accidents, the traffic, and the drunks. We don’t have the manpower to stop the drugs even if the public wanted us to. But it’s like prohibition, you know? There’s a market for drugs, and where there’s a market there’s an organization that’s going to service it.” He allowed himself a faint snort of frustration. “Anyway, I still don’t know of anybody who’d want to do in Billy Martin.”

  “You know any more about Danny Sylvia than you’ve told me?”

  “I hear he went out to California last week. Summer school at UCLA, or something like that.”

  While I thought about that, a car stopped and the driver beckoned. The chief leaned toward the window, listened, told the woman driving that there wasn’t any ferry to Block Island, and stepped back.

  “It’s amazing,” he said. “I had a driver ask me where the bridge was to the mainland. Can you believe it? I’ll be glad when Labor Day comes.”

  “What’s the latest on the explosion? Any theories?”

  “They’re going to leave the boat where it is. Pretty expensive to bring it up, and not any real reason for it, from what I’m told. There’s not enough left of the boat to be a navigation hazard. Jim Norris was dead when they got to him. Burned, and with pieces of gear blown into him and through him. Probably never knew what hit him. Everything says accident. Young Martin would probably have cashed in, too, but I guess he was up on the forward deck when everything went off. Blew him into the water. Anyway, I don’t think the daughter has a case.”

  “Billy have any special pals in town? Anybody he hung around with when he was walking on the wild side?”

  “No. Oak Bluffs was his stomping ground in those days. Edgartown was too quiet for bouncing Billy. If you insist on nosing around, you’ll have to do it in O.B.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He said I was welcome.

  * * *

  I drove up past the state beach to Oak Bluffs. The road was lined with parked cars on the beach side. Between the cars and the blue waters of Vineyard Sound the beach was crowded with June People, intent on tanning. By the time the July People came down, the June People would be brown and feeling healthy. The July People would be self-conscious about their pallor and would work hard at what I call Browning the Meat so that the August People would, in their turn, feel as conspicuous as the July People once had. One advantage about vacationing in June is that everybody is pale and wan.

  Circuit Avenue, Oak Bluff’s main street, is a mixture of honky-tonky shops and bars. The Day People arrive there, take the sightseeing buses around the island, buy souvenirs and snacks, get back on the boat, and go home. Oak Bluffs does quite well by this business. There are several other sides of the town, though. The island hospital is there, there’s some big money in big houses, the tabernacle is surrounded by wonderful gingerbread houses from Victorian camp meeting days, and the town is a major resort for well-to-do blacks, one of the few on the East Coast. I drove to the hospital.

  George was in intensive care. As she went out, the nurse told me not to be long.

  I sat down and looked around. “Where’s Billy? I thought you two might be sharing a room.”

  “No, he’s down the hall. He’s got some bruises and he lost some hair and skin, but he’s going to be fine, thank God. They’re just keeping him under observation for a while. He should be out in a few days.”

  “I’ll drop by and see him on my way out. He’s had his troubles. First drugs and now this.”

  George grunted in the affirmative. “Well, he got loose from the dope and he’s going to make it away from this, too. If I’d made him go to summer school, he’d be up at Brown now, instead of down here in the hospital. But you know how kids are. He wanted to be on the island for the summer. I only made him promise one thing—that he’d stay away from the Fireside. That’s where his old
buddies still hang out, and I didn’t want him mixing with them again.”

  I wondered if Susie had told him what she’d told me: that just last week she’d seen her brother right outside the Fireside, having an argument with an old buddy. I guessed she hadn’t.

  “Shame about Jim,” I said.

  He nodded. “They say he never knew what hit him, probably. I’ll miss him. He said he wasn’t planning to come back this way again, once he got back out west. Funny, when I was a kid the phrase ‘went west’ meant died. Jim went west, all right. Too damned bad. He was a good guy. I cared about him.”

  “You’ve still got your son. And your daughter. And your health.”

  “I know. I have everything, really, and I still feel bad. I’ll be out of here before long.” He tapped his chest. “The old clock skipped a few ticks, but it’s good for several more years. Lucky, though. Damned nitro pills didn’t help. I’m gonna get some fresh ones. Good thing Zee was there, or I might not be able to feel anything. Still, I’m damned if I intend to lie down for the rest of my life just to avoid dying. I plan to be on the beach again as soon as they let me out of here.”

  The nurse walked in, smiled at him, and waved me out.

  Down the hall I found Billy’s room. Billy had bandages wrapped around one arm and more on his head. The hair that I could see was singed short. He’d had a longish beach-boy kind of haircut, but it would take a while to grow another one. He was about twenty, a kid with his father’s features. Right now the features were covered with some sort of salve. His lips were split and he had singed eyelashes and brows.

  “How you doing?” I sat down.

  “I’m okay. What are you doing here?” He had reason to be surprised. We’d never been close. When I’d first met him he’d been strung out and snide, one of those users who think that their habit makes them superior to straight folk. I hadn’t seen much of him since he’d taken the cure.

  “I came to see your old man. He told me you were here. I want to ask you something I couldn’t ask him.”