“Delighted,” I said. “Absolutely delighted.”
Later, while we walked under the cliffs and Begay explained their origin and significance, I was thinking thoughts having nothing to do with multicolored clay.
Chapter Twenty-two
Brady
After I left Olive Otera at the state police headquarters, I had a tuna sandwich and a mug of coffee at an outdoor cafeteria in Oak Bluffs and tried to figure out how I could pry Christa Doyle away from Alain Duval’s compound.
Trying to break in again seemed like a bad plan. My best hope was to catch her when she was away from the place. I was beginning to suspect that she might come willingly.
My other hope was that the police would decide to bust up Duval’s cozy little family. Olive Otero had hinted they might do that if they could connect Princess Ishewa’s death to that dented Range Rover. The problem was, the police, unlike citizens such as J.W. and I, needed what they called probable cause to enter private places to search for evidence of a crime. All J.W. and I needed was probable suspicion…or improbable cause.
It was a breezy, cloudless day on the Vineyard, and from my table at the cafeteria I had a good view of the harbor. It was studded with watercraft. Sailboats skittered around like water bugs. Fishing boats threw big wakes behind them as they headed off for whatever secret spots they had in mind.
I lingered at my table after my sandwich was gone, sipping coffee in an effort to give my system a boost. I hadn’t slept much the previous night, and already, at a little after one in the afternoon, it was catching up with me.
After a while, the caffeine did its job. I paid my bill and headed for the Four Winds Trading Post, where, a few days earlier, I’d had a fateful encounter with Anita Montgomery, aka Princess Ishewa. I wanted to talk to the princess’s business partner.
But when I got there, I found the inside of the shop dark and a sign in the window that said CLOSED.
I pondered that. It seemed that the blonde woman who worked there had decided that mourning the death of her partner was more important than selling Native American wares to Vineyard tourists. Good for her.
Next to the Four Winds Trading Post was a shop that sold women’s clothing. A bookshop was on the other side. I went into the bookshop. It was narrow and cramped, and a dozen or so shoppers were wandering around, picking up books, thumbing through them, putting them back. Bluesy music was playing softly from hidden speakers. Stevie Ray Vaughan, if I wasn’t mistaken.
A teenage girl sat behind the counter. She was twirling a strand of hair with her index finger and reading a magazine.
I went up to her and cleared my throat.
She looked up. “Help you?”
I jerked my head in the direction of the Four Winds Trading Post next door. “Any idea why the Indian shop is closed?”
The girl closed the magazine on her lap. “One of the owners died,” she said.
“Anita Montgomery,” I said. “I heard about it.”
She nodded. “You knew her?”
“Yes. I was hoping to pay my respects to her partner.”
“Viv,” said the girl.
“Viv…?”
“Vivienne Boyer. I hear she’s pretty broken up. Awful accident. The police are investigating it. I guess they think it was a hit-and-run. They won’t even let Viv arrange a funeral. They need to keep Anita’s body or something. She was a pretty cool lady. Everybody’s awfully sad about it.”
“Any idea when they plan to reopen the shop?”
“I hear they might not,” said the girl. “They didn’t make much money anyway.” She looked past my shoulder and smiled. “Can I help you, ma’am?”
I turned. An elderly woman stood behind me holding a book.
I thanked the girl, left the shop, and headed down the street. I found a pay phone inside the doorway to a restaurant. I remembered Olive Otero mentioning that Anita Montgomery shared a house in East Chop with her partner. The bookshop girl had given me Vivienne Boyer’s name, and the Information operator gave me her phone number. I dialed it.
It rang five times before the answering machine clicked on. “It’s Viv and Anita,” came a cheerful woman’s voice—Vivienne’s, if I remembered correctly. “We’re not home, but if you leave your name and number after the beep we promise to get back to you.” Then, sure enough, came the beep.
I started to hang up, then thought better of it. “My name is Brady Coyne,” I said. “I need to talk with Ms. Boyer. It’s about what happened to—”
“I’m here.” The voice was the same one that had recorded the message.
“Ms. Boyer?”
“It’s Viv, yes. You’re the lawyer who gave me that girl’s picture. You had a session with Anita the day before she…”
“That’s right,” I said.
“What do you want?”
“I was hoping we could talk. About what happened.”
“Why?”
“I feel…responsible. The princess had a picture of Christa Doyle, like the one I gave you. She had it in her pocket when…when she had her accident. I can’t help feeling there was a connection.”
Vivienne was silent for so long that I thought we’d lost our connection. Then she said, “I’m sure there was.” She paused again, then said, “Mr. Coyne, would you like to come over?”
“I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“I’m inviting you to my house. It wouldn’t be intruding.”
“I’d like that very much,” I said.
She gave me directions, and fifteen minutes later I pulled into a sandy driveway beside a little square bungalow with an open front porch at the end of a winding road. A narrow rectangle of lawn in front needed mowing, but roses and annuals bloomed profusely in the gardens. Goldfinches and chickadees flitted in and out of half a dozen bird feeders hanging from the fruit trees bordering the yard.
When I got out of J.W.’s Land Cruiser, the front door of the house opened and Vivienne Boyer stepped out onto the porch. Her gray-streaked blonde hair was piled on top of her head, and she wore a shapeless ankle-length cotton dress. She looked older than I remembered. Grief will do that to a person.
She stood there with her arms folded across her chest, watching me, neither smiling nor frowning.
I went to the foot of the steps that led up onto the porch. “Are you sure this is okay?” I said.
She nodded. “Please. Let’s sit out here.”
There were two wooden rocking chairs on the porch. I took one of them.
“Something to drink?” she said.
I waved my hand. “That’s not necessary.”
“Let’s have some iced tea,” she said. She went inside, and a few minutes later she was back with two tall glasses and a pitcher.
She poured the glasses full and handed one to me. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said.
“Me?”
“Anita was very disturbed by your session. I’ve rarely seen her so affected.”
“Did she say why?”
Vivienne shook her head. She was gazing out into her front yard. “After you left, she just mooned around the shop. It wasn’t like her. I guess I got a little impatient with her. Finally I told her if she didn’t want to work, she might as well go home. I didn’t make the connection until…until afterward.”
“What connection?”
“The connection between her session with you and what happened to her.”
I sipped my tea and waited.
“Anita had a gift,” said Vivienne after a minute. “She really did. I never understood it, but sometimes she was downright spooky. I could be thinking about somebody she didn’t even know, and she’d tell me all about that person. She always knew what I wanted, or what was making me unhappy, things she had no way of knowing, things I didn’t even consciously know sometimes. She could tell me the dreams I had at night or things that happened to me when we weren’t together. She could tell me what was bothering me before I figured it out myself.” She reached over and pu
t her hand on my arm. “It wasn’t you. It was the picture of the girl. When I came home that afternoon, I found Anita sitting at the kitchen table. She had that picture in front of her, and she was touching it with her fingertips and crying. I asked her to tell me what was wrong. She kept saying it was too awful.”
“She mentioned an explosion to me,” I said.
“Yes,” said Vivienne. “Explosions and death. That’s what she said to me.”
“Her accident,” I said. “She foresaw her own death.”
Vivienne shook her head. “That’s not how it worked. She couldn’t see into the future, predict events. It wasn’t like that. What she could do was, she could get into people’s minds. She saw the images they saw, heard the noises and voices they heard, smelled what they smelled. All of it.”
“I’m sure I had no thoughts or images of explosions when I was with her,” I said.
“No. It was the girl. She got it from the picture.”
“So from Christa’s picture,” I said, “Anita got images of explosions and death. As if those things were in Christa’s mind?”
She nodded. “That’s how it worked for her. It doesn’t mean Christa was consciously thinking such thoughts. But it means those thoughts were there, in her mind somewhere.”
“Just from a picture?”
She shrugged. “Anita could do that.”
“So that evening…?”
“Oh, the police asked me about it a hundred times in a hundred different ways. Where did she go? What was her purpose? Who was she going to see?” Vivienne smiled quickly. “The police had no interest in Anita’s gift. I told them about that girl’s picture, the images Anita got from them. Explosions and death and a big eye in the sky.”
“That eye,” I said. “She mentioned that to me. Christa has an Eye of Horus tattoo on her hip. Could that be what she saw?”
Vivienne nodded. “I bet it was. The police, though, being police, they insisted there had to be a more rational explanation for what Anita did.” She shrugged. “If there was, I don’t know it. Rationality doesn’t account for Anita’s gift. I’m sure the police thought I was lying to them.”
“You don’t know where she went, then?”
She shook her head. “I’ve gone over that afternoon a million times. She never gave a hint. After supper, she just said there was something she had to do, and she got into that beat-up old Pinto of hers, and…” She brushed her hand across her eyes. “And I never saw her again.”
“I’m very sorry,” I said lamely.
“Now I don’t know what I’m going to do. The shop, this house, my…my whole life. Everything was all about us. Anita and me. I feel like my heart has been ripped out of my chest.”
I took a sip of iced tea. “The police are saying it wasn’t an accident.”
“I know,” she said. “I find that hard to believe. There wasn’t a gentler, sweeter person on earth than Anita.”
“But if she really saw something…”
“Yes. And if she confronted somebody about it.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “If we knew who that somebody was, we’d know who killed her, wouldn’t we?”
“Not Christa,” I said. “She wouldn’t kill anybody.”
But, I thought, Alain Duval or one of his loyal Simon Peters might.
There were no cars in the driveway at the Jackson house when I got there. I saw the perfect opportunity for an afternoon nap, and I seized it.
I slept fitfully, vaguely aware of the hiss of the breeze in the trees outside my window and the constant barking of some distant dog, and when cars drove into the driveway, I heard them without really waking.
Sometime later when J.W. banged on my door, I was in the middle of a very pleasant trout-fishing dream.
“Martini time,” he said. “Interested?”
“I’m more interested in coffee.”
“I’ll put some on. Dinner’s in an hour.”
I took a quick shower, got dressed, poured a mugful of coffee in the kitchen, and took it out to the balcony, where Zee and J.W. were sipping martinis and watching the birds.
“Feeling better?” said Zee.
I slouched into an empty chair. “Ask me after I finish my coffee.”
She put her empty glass on the table and stood up. “I’ll do better than that. I’m off to the kitchen. Be grouchy with J.W. to your heart’s content.”
“I’m sorry,” I grumbled.
She came over and kissed the back of my neck. “Don’t worry about it. I’m used to crabby men.”
After Zee left, J.W. said, “Any adventures today?”
I told him about my visits with Buster, the tattoo artist, and Olive Otero and Vivienne Boyer.
“You’ve been busy,” he said.
“I’m not sure it adds up to anything.”
“So the fortune-teller got images of explosions and death from Christa’s picture?”
I nodded. “That’s Vivienne’s conclusion.”
“You buy it?”
I shrugged. “Buy it or not, if Princess Ishewa believed it and pursued it and it got her killed, it means there’s a connection between her death and Christa.”
“Christa Doyle didn’t kill anybody,” said J.W.
“I don’t think she did, either,” I said. “But somebody did.”
He looked at me. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I’m thinking about Frank Dyer.”
“Me, too,” he said. “What’re you doing tonight?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m not doing. I’m not getting whacked on the head and thrown into a locked room. How about you?”
“I’m hoping to get together with a friend of mine named Joe Begay. He’s trying to get some information about Dyer for me.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Can I come?”
“That’s why I mentioned it. I figure you’ve got an equal stake in this…whatever it is that’s going on. Dyer brought Christa Doyle to work with him the other day.”
“At the site of the Celebration?”
He nodded. “Dyer’s in charge of setting up the speakers. Guy named Harry told me that Christa’s going to be there backstage during the performance.”
“That’s my chance right there,” I said. “That’s when I can help her escape.”
“Assuming she wants to escape.”
“I assume she does. That’s why she helped us last night.”
“Assuming it was she who helped us.”
I looked at him. “I assume that, too. Now I’ve just got to find a way to get into the damn Celebration.”
J.W. grinned. “Me, I’ve got tickets.”
“How many?”
He held up two fingers. “Me and Zee.”
“Can you get me one?” I said.
“Sure you wouldn’t rather try to sneak in?”
“I’m sure. Last time I tried to sneak in somewhere I ended up with a splitting headache.”
“Well,” said J.W., “let me see what I can do. I happen to be on friendly terms with the headline performer.”
The telephone rang somewhere inside the house, and a minute later Zee came out to the balcony and handed a portable phone to J.W.
“Who is it?” he said.
“Joe Begay. When you’re done, dinner’s ready.”
J.W. put the phone to his ear. “Any luck?” He listened for a minute, then said, “Okay. Brady Coyne will be with me…. Right. He’s a lawyer.” He listened for a minute, then a smile spread over his face. “No, don’t worry. He’s nothing like those lawyers. We’ll be there around eight.”
Chapter Twenty-three
J.W.
I drove the old Land Cruiser, and on the way to Aquinnah I told Brady what I knew about Joe Begay.
“Who do you think he works for?” asked Brady, when I finished. He shook out a cigarette and dug for a lighter.
“I’ve often wondered but never asked. He says he’s retired.”
“All right, who do you think he doesn’t work for?”
“I have no idea, but he knows a lot of people. Still, I’m surprised that he got back to me this fast.”
“Maybe he picked up some chatter when he asked about Dyer and what he heard made him decide to speed things up.”
“Or maybe Dyer was just easy to trace.”
“Or maybe both.”
“Do you think that maybe we’re using too many ‘maybes’ in this conversation?”
Brady looked out his window. “Maybe,” he said.
The road behind us was empty of cars. Above us the night sky was darkening, disdaining all that man is, all mere complexities, the fury and the mire of human veins.
Toni Begay met us at the door and gave me a kiss. “Joe’s reading bedtime stories to the kids. He’ll be out in a minute. Come in.”
I introduced Brady to her and her to him. “Toni runs a tourist shop up on the cliffs,” I said. “What makes it different from some other shops is that most of her Native American stuff is actually made by Native Americans instead of Koreans and Chinese.”
“J.W. is a bit behind the nominal times,” said Toni to Brady. “In this house and in my shop we’re in a post–Native American period. We’ve decided to be Indians again, and to sell Indian crafts. Joe says Native Americans are any people born in America. He’s not high on political correctness.”
“Hear, hear,” said Brady. “Me neither.”
Joe appeared and shook Brady’s hand. “You’re not wearing a tie. You sure you’re a lawyer?”
“My clients sometimes wonder,” said Brady. “No doubt about you, though. You look like an Indian’s supposed to look.”
“I thought the same thing the first time I saw him!” said Toni with a smile.
Joe Begay was tall, with wide shoulders and not much in the way of hips. His hair was black as ebony. He looked at me. “I don’t remember what I thought the first time I saw you.”
“Just another seventeen-year-old wannabe warrior you had to try to keep alive, probably.”
Begay nodded. “Probably something like that.” He waved us toward the door. “Let’s go outside where I can smoke while I tell you about Frank Dyer.”
We sat on the porch, where Begay rolled a cigarette and lit up. In my marijuana days I had learned to roll a good joint, so I recognized Begay’s work as first-class.
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