Dead in Vineyard Sand (7 page)

There was a short silence in the room.

I felt suddenly careful. “We didn't exactly duke it out, but I thought it was quite a coincidence myself.”

His hooded eyes looked into mine. “And it's just another coincidence that a beat-up old truck like your Land Cruiser ran Abigail Highsmith off the road a couple of days ago?”

My caution became a chill touched with anger. “I heard about Abigail, but Zee didn't mention a Land Cruiser. Before I confess, should I point out that there are a lot of old off-road vehicles on this island?
Or should I leave that up to my lawyer at the trial?”

Dom leaned forward and touched his tape recorder. “Maybe you'd better give me your version of what happened between you and Highsmith, and then you can tell me where you were when his wife was run off the road. Or would you rather wait until you get that lawyer you mentioned?”

“You going to Miranda me first?”

“Why not?” He turned on the machine and did that.

Any lawyer will tell you not to talk to cops without legal representation beside you, but I was irked and, like a lot of innocent people, saw no need to keep my mouth shut.

I began to talk.

The Boston dailies thought enough of the story to make as much of it as they could, emphasizing the murder-in-paradise theme, the bizarre burial, and the background conflict between the conservationists and the golf course promoters.

The Yale-Brown identities of the Professors Highsmith added spice to the tale, and the photos that showed Henry and their son to be classically handsome and Abigail and their daughter to be beautiful added still more fascination, for no tale is more intriguing to the American public than disaster overtaking the rich, bright, and beautiful.

The now-fatherless teenage children, privileged youth on summer holiday from New Haven's prestigious St. James Manor school, provided yet another focus of the tragedy as they bravely rallied around their sorrowing mother and with fetching innocence fended off the more outrageous intrusions of members of the media. It was easy to both pity and respect them. They were too young to have to face such tragedy, but were bearing up amazingly well.

The reports didn't mention me as a possible suspect in the crime, which suited Zee just fine. She was understandably more than annoyed with me.

“You never, ever talk to a police investigator without your lawyer!”

“I don't have a lawyer.”

“You have Brady Coyne!”

“Brady is in Boston. Besides, he isn't my lawyer, he's a fishing buddy, and he doesn't defend people, he tends to estates.”

“You have Norman Aylward!”

Norman Aylward had his law office in Vineyard Haven and had been recommended to us by Brady Coyne. Norman could, I supposed, be considered our family lawyer, since he'd done some work for us in the past.

“I don't need a lawyer,” I said.

“Your alibi for the time Abigail got run off the road is worthless,” said Zee. “The kids were in school, I was at work, and you were home alone.”

“I wasn't alone. The cats were here too.”

“Don't be flip. You can't prove you were here.”

“I don't have to. Somebody has to prove I wasn't.”

“That lady who saw the accident might identify that old SUV as yours!”

“But it wasn't.”

“She might say it was!”

True. Many an eyewitness has ID'd the wrong person as a perp. On the other hand, cops know that and the honest ones, like Dom Agganis, keep it well in mind. Of course, not all cops are honest and our local DA was ambitious, so Zee's point was well taken. When a DA is ambitious, no one is safe.

I put my hands on Zee's shoulders and looked down into her dark, long-lashed, fretful eyes. “Don't worry,” I said. “I'm not involved in any of this, and I don't plan on getting involved. Let's take lunch over to East Beach. We can swim and catch some sun and make a few casts, just in case there are still a few blues around.”

She sighed, but put her frown away. “Okay. Get the rods on the rack and collect the beach stuff, and I'll fix some food.”

I got the rods down from their hooks on the living room ceiling and went out to the truck while Zee headed for the kitchen. Outside, I peeked around the corner of the house and called the kids from the tree house, where they had lately been spending much time discussing the rope bridge. They came down with alacrity because the beach was just as much fun as the tree house.

The real summer season would start in July, but already, since most schools were out, many June people were wandering the streets of Edgartown, cameras in hand, eyeing the white houses and fences, the flowers and the green lawns, or gazing at the boat-filled harbor.

We drove slowly through the village to Daggett Street, so as not to run over any of the tourists, who used streets like sidewalks and sometimes looked startled to find that cars used them too. On Daggett, where the line forms for the ferry to Chappaquiddick, there were only a few cars and trucks ahead of us.

Most of the latter were filled with men and materials heading to some of the many new mansions being built over there in spite of the protests of longtime Chappy people, who wanted their peninsula to stay as it had been when they had moved there.

But reality is change, so new houses and people were appearing on Chappy as on the rest of the Vineyard, and they would continue to appear; the old days were gone with the wind, like the antebellum South.

More or less pleasantly unchanged were the tiny On Time ferries, so called, some say, because they have no schedules and are therefore always on time. These little vessels look the same as they did when I was a kid, and still sail the same route: crisscrossing back and forth across the channel between Chappy and Edgartown. The people who own the ferries have a gold mine and
know it. According to Edgartown lore, when the ownership of the ferry changes hands every decade or so, the sellers can immediately afford to retire.

Could be.

When we got across, we followed the paved road to Dyke Road and took it to the bridge, where I shifted into four-wheel drive and drove on to East Beach, passing the bright-colored kayaks beside the water and exchanging waves with the Trustees of Reservations people as we went by their little office.

“Garish,” said Zee. “Brash and tawdry.”

We shared a laugh. One of the many complaints the more reactionary Chappy people had, in the seemingly endless winter of their discontent, was that the kayaks rented by the trustees were tastelessly colorful, thus disturbing their peninsula's bucolic natural landscape. These same people maintained that there were too many cars and people on the Chappy beaches, that no bike paths should be built (because they would only encourage more bikers), that no houses bigger than theirs should be constructed, and that, in general, steps should be taken to return Chappy to a mythic, idyllic past when tourists did not visit.

Ah, the golden days of yesteryear.

We took a right on East Beach and drove down to Leland's Point, where we found a half dozen SUVs ahead of us and several fishermen making casts into an apparently empty sea.

We found a place for the big bedspread that served as our beach blanket, and lay down in the sun. The wind was gentle and from the southwest, and the sky above us was pale blue. Thin white clouds blew toward Cape Cod, and I watched some of them grow thinner and smaller until they disappeared completely. It was a cloud-eating sky, a phenomenon I can't explain but
have often observed and found entertaining. At a certain spot in the sky, clouds grow small and disappear while on both sides of the spot, other clouds keep right on blowing by.

I pointed out the cloud-eating sky to Joshua, Diana, and Zee, and all of the Jacksons happily watched it devour the clouds that blew into it. It's a gift to be simple, as the Shakers say.

By and by I took a swim, noting as I floated about that the tide was falling and gently carrying me south along the beach toward Wasque Point.

Back on shore, I got my rod off the roof rack and walked back down to the small surf. I had a redheaded Roberts on my leader and I laid it out and reeled it in. No fish. I made six more casts. Still no fish. I looked down the beach at the other fishermen. No one was catching fish. I walked back to the truck and stuck my rod in one of the spikes in front of the grille.

Beneath my feet, the pristine sand was growing hot in the nooning sun, and I thought of the sand trap and wondered how Henry Highsmith's corpse had ended up in it. Someone had gone out of his way to bury him there. Easier by far to leave the body wherever it had fallen.

Who would go to the trouble of burying a body in a sand trap? Was the killer some fanatic advocate of the proposed Pin Oaks Golf and Country Club, boldly showcasing the dangers of opposing the club's development? Or was the killer a clever biker who murdered one of his own and buried him in the sand trap in hopes of proving the evil of golfers? I ran other possibilities through my mind, to little avail. Nothing made sense.

Clearly, the burial had taken place at night, since otherwise the killer, or at least the gravedigger, would
almost certainly have been seen by some player or course attendant. That suggested that the killer was sufficiently familiar with Waterwoods to find his way to the fourth green in darkness.

The burial, not the killing, was the real curiosity. People kill other people regularly for all sorts of reasons, but not many corpses end up interred in sand traps.

There was something oddly comic about it all, some hint of cruel, contemptuous humor that twisted the whole affair into a kind of ironic fantasy.

“Come and eat,” said Zee, waving me to the beach blanket, where the kids were already gnawing at their food. “I saw you thinking up there,” she said. “You weren't thinking about fishing. You're not going to get involved in the Highsmith business, remember? Here.” She handed me a Sam Adams and a chicken and cheese and pesto sandwich.

“I'm not involved and I'm not going to get involved,” I said. “I mean it.”

“Good.”

After lunch I was doing some more fruitless fishing when one of the other luckless fishermen glanced at me and said, “Hey, J.W., I hear that guy you floored the other day just turned up dead. Maybe you hit him harder than you thought.”

“I didn't hit him at all,” I said.

“Sure, J.W. If you say so. You never laid a glove on him. Sure.”

He grinned and shook his head and made another cast.

Irksome. I made a half dozen more casts and went back to the beach blanket.

When we got home later that afternoon, the phone was ringing. Dom Agganis was on the other end of the line.

“I just talked with Joanne Homlish,” he said in his hard voice.

No bells rang. “Who's Joanne Homlish?”

“Joanne Homlish is the woman who saw Abigail Highsmith forced off the road. She gave me a pretty good description of the SUV that did the dirty work. Fits your Land Cruiser. Are you sure you were at home when it happened?”

“I'm sure,” I said. “Ask Oliver Underwood and Velcro. They can vouch for me.”

“I don't talk cat,” said Dom.

“The lady is wrong,” I said.

“What have you got against Abigail Highsmith?”

“I don't know her. I've never seen her.”

“Why don't you drive up here and see me? Now would be a good time.”

I wondered what burr was under Dom's saddle. Maybe he'd tell me. “I'm on my way,” I said.

“What was that all about?” asked Zee, frowning.

I told her, then said, “Don't worry. Dom is a smart guy. He knows I wasn't up-island when Abigail Highsmith crashed.”

“Dom is a cop,” said Zee, frowning still more. “You shouldn't be talking to him without a lawyer.”

“I don't need a lawyer to find out what's bothering Dom,” I said. “I'll be back soon.”

“If you won't call Norman Aylward, I will,” said Zee, and she was walking toward the phone when I went out the door.

The state police barracks is on Temahigan Avenue in Oak Bluffs, not far from the Martha's Vineyard hospital where Zee works. The building was for many years painted a rather garish blue but is now shingled in weathered cedar and looks much more Vineyardish. I parked in the lot in back and went into Dom's office. He
and his underling, Officer Olive Otero, were both there.

Olive and I, for some reason, had never hit it off. We were like oil and water, fire and ice, Rome and Carthage. Dom and I, on the other hand, had gone fishing together now and then.

Now, Dom waved me to a chair in front of his desk while Olive eyed me without affection.

“What's gotten your feathers ruffled?” I asked, sitting down.

“This,” said Dom. He handed me a stack of photographs of old and young jeeplike vehicles. “Joanne Homlish went through these and picked out your truck without even hesitating. She knows what she saw.”

I went through the pile and there, sure enough, was a photo of a Toyota Land Cruiser. The truck in the photo was new when the picture had been taken years before and it was painted yellow, whereas mine was ancient, rusty, and faded blue; but it was a picture of my vehicle model, all right. I looked in the small print and confirmed that the truck in the picture was a 1961 model. Bingo again.

“Where do you come up with this stuff?” I asked. “I thought you only kept mug shots and fingerprints.”

“The arm of the law is long,” said Dom. He leaned forward on his elbows. “Well, what do you say now? How many 1961 Land Cruisers do you think there are on this island, anyway? Do you still say you were at home with the kitties that afternoon?”

I glanced at Olive, saw a grim smile on her face, and looked back at Dom. “There are a lot of old off-road vehicles on the island and I was home with the kitties. Does Joanne Homlish wear glasses? Does she drive with them or just read with them?”