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Authors: Philip Craig

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BOOK: Death in Vineyard Waters
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The chief was, typically, not in his office. When a town of 2,500 winter souls becomes a town ten times that big in the summer, nobody in the police department has much time to sit in the office except, in this case, Kit Goulart, ace woman-of-all-work, who was there five days a week making sure the system worked as well as possible.

“Nice badge,” I said, eyeing it appreciatively.

“If there was a law against leering, you'd be a lifer,” said Kit.

“Chief in?”

“He's on Main Street someplace,” said Kit.

“If I was chief, I'd stay right here,” I said, staring at her badge with wide eyes.

“Get out of here!”

“Will you marry me?”

“I already have one more husband than I can manage.”

“I doubt that,” I said as I left. I liked Kit. She and her husband Joe looked like twins, both six feet tall and weighing 250 or so. A matched team.

The chief was at the corner of Main and Water Street, watching a young summer rent-a-cop directing traffic. She wasn't doing too badly, either, and so the chief had time for me. We leaned against the wall of the bank and watched the cars creep by.

“Why they're here on a day like this, instead of at the beach, I'll never know,” he said. He'd been saying that as long as I'd known him.

I didn't know either. “They're city people,” I said. “They're uncomfortable unless they're in traffic jams. They feel unnatural at the beach because there's so much room there and so much clean air. They like exhaust fumes and horns honking and so they drive around Edgartown all day, down Main, back out past the A & P, around the Square Rigger and back past the A & P to Main Street again. It gives them a sense of using their vacations in a meaningful way. Everybody knows that.”

“Now that we've cleared that up,” said the chief, “we come to a tougher question. What are
you
doing here? You hide out in the woods all summer and only come into civilization for booze.”

“You wound me. Only last week I was at the library . . .”

“Astonishing. I didn't know that you could read.”

“You're confusing me with Edgartown policemen. I'm famous for my comic book collection, and when they're off work, all your crew come by to look at the pictures and ask me what the little letters say. I'm thinking of charging tuition.”

“Not a bad idea,” said the chief. “From the look of some of their reports, they could use some help along literary lines. You have a pained expression on your face. Have you been thinking of something?”

“As a matter of fact.”

“And . . .”

“And maybe you know the answer to a question.”

“We policemen are encyclopedias of information. Why, only this morning I was able to tell a woman from New York that there is no bridge between the Vineyard and the mainland. She seemed shocked.”

“I dare say she was. My question is also well within your scope, I'm sure. If Marjorie Summerharp went swimming at six in the morning, how come her body was
found six hours later a mile straight out from where she entered the water?”

The chief thought. “You got me. What's the answer?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe because that's where the
Mary Pachico
was trawling. If the boat hadn't been there, it wouldn't have collected her in its nets.”

“Very sharp. Now I know why they made you chief. The thing is, if Marjorie Summerharp drowned off the end of the Katama Road where they found her car, she shouldn't have been a mile straight out from that spot six hours later.”

“Why not?”

“Because the tide was dead low at six o'clock that morning and ran east for the next six hours. If she went in at six o'clock like the papers said, and if she drowned like the papers said, her body should have washed way off toward Wasque Point by the time the
Mary Pachico
picked her up. But the
Mary Pachico
netted her straight out from the end of the road.”

The chief watched his rent-a-cop stop traffic for a batch of tourists in sunglasses, shorts, and wild shirts who wanted to go from where they were to the other side of the street. Traffic backed up beyond the town hall. Then the rent-a-cop waved the cars ahead and the long line inched forward.

The chief looked up and down the street. Cops' eyes are always moving. “Maybe the
Mary Pachico
netted her down that way but didn't haul in until she was back off Katama.”

“Yeah. Maybe so. I didn't see anything about it in the papers. Did anybody ask?”

“I imagine somebody did. I didn't.” He looked at me. “I'll call the coast guard. It should be in their report.”

“Will you let me know?”

“No.”

“Not even if I kiss your foot right here on Main Street?”

His eyebrows went up. “Well, maybe if you kiss my ass.” He pushed away from the wall and went to help his rent-a-f-cop,
who had gotten herself into a problem she couldn't solve, a complex jam of cars and pedestrians that had created a kind of gridlock. “I'll let you know,” he said as the horns began to honk.

The next morning, as I was going into the station to find out where he was, he arrived in the cruiser and stepped out. He gestured toward his office. “ ‘ “Step into my parlor,” said the spider to the fly.' ”

I ogled Kit Goulart as we passed her and she clutched her heart in feigned passion.

The only soft chair in the chief's office is his. The rest are hard. I took one.

“According to the coast guard, the
Mary Pachico
was trawling west of Katama. She'd come east along the south shore and hauled just after making her turn to go west again.”

We looked at each other.

“There's no way Marjorie Summerharp's body should have been out west of Katama,” I said.

“So, maybe she just swam straight out for a mile. People do things like that. They just swim out so far that they can't get back. They do it on purpose.”

“You mean she may have committed suicide?”

He shrugged. “There was some talk. It could be. She was a good swimmer, they say, and maybe she could have gotten out a mile.”

“So she swam out a mile, then swam against the tide for six hours until she drowned. That's what she'd have had to do in order to get gathered into the
Mary Pachico's
nets.”

He got out his pipe, and I enviously watched him stuff tobacco into it. Except for an occasional cigar, I have given up smoking but will never, never stop missing my pipe. Knowing this, the chief lit up anyway, but gave me a look not totally devoid of sympathy.

“So how did she get out there?”

“She could have gotten there if she went into the water several miles to the west. The tides could have carried her
there in six hours. I don't know how far a body would drift in six hours, but the coast guard can probably figure it out.”

“Maybe I'll ask them to do that.”

“Another possibility is that she went into the water earlier than six o'clock and washed first west, then east. I figure that's what could have happened if, say, she went into the water about midnight. She'd have washed west fornix hours, then east for six hours, and ended up about where the
Mary Pachico
picked her up.”

“But she didn't go into the water at midnight. She went in at six o'clock, as she usually did.”

“How do you know?”

“It was no secret. She always went swimming then. Everybody who knew her testified to it.”

“If she wanted to commit suicide, maybe she went in at midnight instead so nobody would stop her.”

He nodded, puffing. “That makes sense, but it didn't happen. Ian McGregor was with her at the beach at six
A.M.
So she was alive then, which means that whatever happened to her happened afterward.”

“Maybe.”

“Unless somebody's wrong about something,” said the chief.

“Or lying,” I said.

“Or that,” said the chief, nodding and puffing. I inhaled the lovely fumes and wondered why a pipe made a man look more intelligent. I could really use one on those grounds alone.

“Maybe some fisherman saw her down there that morning. Maybe somebody saw her driving there. I'll ask around. If I don't come up with anything, we can put out a request for information over the radio station and through the papers. We might come up with a witness—the roads aren't busy that early in the morning, but there are people around. Somebody might have seen something.”

“You'll talk again with the crewmen on the
Mary Pachico?

He nodded. “Or the coast guard will.”

“And Ian McGregor?”

The chief blew a smoke ring and looked at me. “I thought I saw him in town a couple of times with Zee Madieras.”

“Could be.” Even I could hear the sourness in my voice.

“I'll talk to him again about when he saw Marjorie Summerharp that morning. I can't see him changing his story at this late date, but I suppose he might. Anybody else you can think of? Any other advice to us dumb cops?”

“You think you're smart just because you've got a pipe and I don't. No, unless there's somebody that we don't know about, the crew of the
Mary Pachico
and McGregor are the only ones who gave information about when the woman went swimming and when and where her body was found. Theirs are the only stories we have to check.”

“ ‘We'?”

“You.”

“That's right,” said the chief. “Me, not you.”

I inhaled a last lungful of his pipe smoke and left.

I was smoking bluefish a couple of days later when I heard the car coming down my driveway. I'd caught the fish the day before, soaked them in a brine and sugar solution overnight, rinsed them and air dried them this morning, and now was smoking them over hickory chips out behind my shed in the smoker I made out of a refrigerator and some electric stove parts I'd salvaged from the Big D. I have an illegal sales agreement with a certain elegant island eating establishment for my smoked bluefish. I get top dollar in cash and my client gets the Vineyard's best smoked bluefish. The Health Board, which would stop this free enterprise if it knew of it, on grounds that my fish preparation facilities do not meet government standards, has not been informed. Nor has the IRS.

Cars rarely come down my driveway, so each one that does is of interest. A few are cars driven by people who just like to know where roads go. I like to do that myself sometimes.
I have not put up No Trespassing or Private Property signs, since I don't like them, so nobody has any reason to think they can't come down my driveway if they want to. The explorers, seeing that they've arrived at a private house, sometimes with a naked man sunbathing on the lawn, beer near at hand, all turn around and leave.

This car stopped in front of the house and two doors opened and closed. I shook some more hickory chips into the skillet on the hot plate at the base of the smoker and shut the door. I heard a voice hallo and recognized it and went toward the house just as Zee and Ian McGregor came walking around it toward the back yard.

“Hi,” said McGregor, putting out a hand. I took it. Our grips were firm as ever. He squeezed. I squeezed. He noticed Zee watching and released his grip. “I hope we're not interrupting,” he said. “I wanted to see you, but didn't know where you lived, so I prevailed on Zee, here, to show me the way. I phoned a couple times first, but nobody answered.”

“I was probably out back.” I looked at Zee.

“Hi,” she said. “My nose tells me you're smoking fish.”

“Yes.” She looked wonderful in tan shorts and a greenish shirt tied in a knot at her waist. She wore sandals, and her thick dark hair was pulled back by a bright ribbon. Her skin was smooth and browned by the summer sun, some of that browning having been accomplished right here in this yard. “I'm about to have a beer,” I said. “Would you care to join me?”

McGregor cast a quick eye at the sky. “Somewhere the sun is over the yardarm,” he said. “Sure. A beer would be good.”

“You two go out to the front yard,” I said. “I'll bring out the beer.”

They did and I did and we sat in the fast-warming sunlight and looked across the garden at the distant sea. The beer felt cool and slick as I drank it down.

McGregor was in shorts, sandals, and an animal-on-the-pocket knit shirt. He looked very fit. He caught my glance and lifted his beer. “Cheers. Thanks for the beer. You have
a terrific view. Zee told me it was great and it is. I like your place, too. It's just the right size and just the right age and it has a good feel about it.”

“It's good enough for me,” I said.

“Maybe you can show Ian your dad's decoys before we leave,” said Zee, looking a bit ill at ease. “Ian does some woodcarving himself, and I think he'd like to see your dad's work.”

“I do some hunting,” he said, “and I do like hand-carved decoys. Zee says your father carved quite a few and that they're excellent. That was another reason for asking her to bring me down here.” He put a smile on his face. I looked at him.

“What was the first reason?”

He and Zee exchanged looks. Then he took a sip of beer. “Yesterday the chief of the Edgartown police came out to the place and asked me whether I was absolutely sure that I'd been with Marjorie at six
A.M.
the day she drowned. I said that indeed I was sure because I'd looked at my watch just before starting my run home. I run the bike paths every day about then, because there aren't many bikers up yet and I don't have to worry about being run over by some moped.” He paused and we both drank some beer. “I asked him why he wanted to double-check that time and he said it was because Marjorie's body couldn't have been picked up where it was netted if she had gone swimming at six. Something about the tides. He mentioned that you had brought the matter to his attention.” He glanced at Zee and smiled, then looked at me again. “I hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about when he spoke of the tides, so after he left, I phoned Zee because she goes fishing and I figured she'd know about such things.”

BOOK: Death in Vineyard Waters
12.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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