Death on a Vineyard Beach (12 page)

Begay looked semi-apologetic. “I can't quite kick the habit, so I roll my own to make it harder on myself. And I won't smoke indoors.” He lit up and inhaled and coughed. “It's dumb, but it's hard to quit.”

How well I knew. My corncob pipe still haunted me, and I was ever on the verge of taking it up again.

“So your mother-in-law doesn't care for my boss,” I said.

He looked off toward Noman's Land, where I could see a trawler working east, its outriggers spread like wings. “I think she's more worked up over that cranberry bog than she is about him personally. Sacred Indian ground, you know. Or traditional Indian territory, at least. He's the guy who's got it, and she wants it for the tribe.” He tried a smoke ring, but the wind took it away half formed. “On the other hand, I can't see her hiring some gun to knock him off. She's more the type to do it herself, if she thought it needed doing.”

“Any other mad Wampanoags that you know of?”

“There are a few. Some are on Linda's side, and others aren't. The feisty ones seem to spend more time picking on each other than on other people. Out on the res, we have the same thing. One faction lined up against another and nobody taking prisoners, when they'd all be better off getting along and ganging up on, say, you white eyes.”

It was not an unusual phenomenon for partisans to hate each other more than they hated their common enemies. It happened in Africa, Ireland, the Middle East, and everywhere else. Why not in Gay Head?

“Leave us pale faces alone,” I said. “We don't need you redskins wiping us out. We can do that by ourselves. I saw you and your wife wandering around down by Squibnocket Pond the other day, pretending to be bird-watching while you cased my boss's place. Just scouting?”

“You were up there, eh? They won't let me in, so I wander around the outskirts of the place, having a peek here, a peek there, and letting myself be seen doing it, just to let Marcus know that my mother-in-law is serious. Maybe you should meet her. She might know something about that business in Boston.”

“Would she tell me, if she did?”

He dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, grinding it into the sand. “She's the in-your-face type, not much on sneaky stuff. If she likes you, you know it; if she doesn't, you know that, too. She's short on lying, I'd say, so if she knows something she might tell you what it is.” He paused. “Of course, she might not, too. Nobody's honest all of the time.”

“Except you and me.”

“Yeah, except you and me.”

“I think I'll take you up on your idea,” I said. “You can introduce me to your mother-in-law.”

“Better yet,” said Begay, “I'll let my wife do it. Let's join the ladies.”

We went into the house, and Toni Begay said, sure, she'd be glad to introduce me to her mother. But not today. Today, Linda was busy with meetings about tribal business. Would it be okay if Toni called when her mother was free?

It would be okay. I thanked her and looked at Zee.

“There are bonito waiting for us down at our end of the island. Maybe we should have a go at them while we've still got some daylight.”

She got up and we said our good-byes. I shook hands with Begay. “Good to see you again, Sarge.”

“He's gotten a promotion,” said Zee. “Toni tells me that he's now a captain.”

I looked at her, then at him.

The corner of Begay's mouth flicked up, then down again. “I've bought myself a boat. For pot fishing. I'm going to go into the conch business. Maybe do some lobstering.”

“It's not the easiest way to make a living.”

“That's what Buddy Malone, the guy who sold me the boat, said. He went broke. But he's going to show me the ropes.”

“He's got two kids in college, and bills like everybody else,” said Toni. “Nice people. I know his wife. He's going to try getting on as a carpenter, but I'm afraid they're in trouble.”

Not too many of the tens of thousands of tourists who pour onto the Vineyard every summer realize that the island's permanent population is one of the poorest in Massachusetts. Vacationing mainlanders rarely see much other than the yachts, the golden beaches, the fashionable shops, the quaint streets, and the fine restaurants. They see the great houses of the whaling captains, and the flowered gardens of Edgartown, the gingerbread cottages of Oak Bluffs, and the lovely farms and winding roads of West Tisbury and Chilmark; but they don't see the shacks buried in the woods, surrounded by the clutter that the poor always save just in case they might need it—rusty cars, rotting wood, broken tools, empty cartons. Nor do they see the winter lines at the unemployment office, or the social workers and police dealing with the violence that is rooted in perpetual and hopeless poverty. On Martha's Vineyard, the poor are poor in private. The island's public face is the one most people know.

“Fishing and farming,” I said to Begay. “Two tough ways to make a living.”

“Hey,” said Begay. “Where I grew up, out by Oraibi, it almost never rained, and we used to plant corn with a stick. This can't be much tougher than that.”

It was a blue sky afternoon. The only clouds in sight were those that always hang mistily over Cape Cod, across the sound. Near the horizon, the bright arc of sky became pale and hazy.

Zee and I headed for Edgartown. As I drove, she gave me a kiss. “One beautiful day after another on beautiful Martha's Vineyard, and tomorrow I go back to work indoors. Maybe I should give up this nursing stuff during the summer, and become a gardener or a groundskeeper. When it gets cold, I could do nursing again, back inside where it's warm.”

“Makes sense to me,” I said. “But who would take care of the moped drivers when they self-destruct?”

“Somebody else.” She sighed. “But for the time being, I guess it's my job. Rats.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “consider my case: a grown man wasting his life in an endless round of fishing and beer drinking. You've got it good, by comparison.”

“Poor baby. Where are we going now?”

“I thought we'd drop the dinghy overboard in Oak Bluffs and fish by the ferry dock.”

“Ah, the classic bonito location.”

“I'm a classic kind of guy.”

We drove down to Collins Beach in Edgartown to get the dinghy. The log chain I used to secure it to the Reading Room dock was still doing its job, and no young gentlemen yachtsmen had stolen the boat to row out to his own.

The all-male membership of the Reading Room, the clubhouse at the end of the dock, seemed to be tending to business. No one read there, of course, but so what? The guys drank and talked instead. And occasionally they even let wives and girlfriends inside as guests. Normally, according to rumor, the only women allowed there were waitresses and window washers.

Out in the harbor, boats of all sizes lay at their moorings. Other boats, sail and power, moved up and down the channel, heading outside or up toward Katama Bay. Across the
water was Chappaquiddick, where, later in the summer, I would pick the beach plums I'd use to make the many jars of jelly I would then sell at outrageous prices to the farm stands that would in turn charge even more outrageous prices to the beach plum jelly fanatics who loved the stuff. My beach plum picking place is one of my most closely guarded secrets, one that I share willingly only with Zee. I have a couple of secret clamming places that I won't talk about, either.

I put the dinghy in back of the Toyota and we were about to climb back inside the truck when a police cruiser came down from South Water Street and parked in the Reading Room parking lot. I figured that there must have been police cars down there before, some time or other, but I couldn't remember seeing one. We paused and watched while the driver's door opened and the chief got out.

“Thought I saw you here,” he said, bringing his pipe out of a pocket and tamping it with a tobacco-stained trigger finger while he dug out his Zippo lighter with his other hand. The chief liked his pipe. He lit up and the smoke blew gently toward the northeast.

“You don't need a boat,” he said. “The bonito are all over Edgartown harbor. You can fish for 'em right off the town dock.”

“Yeah,” said Zee. “Shoulder to shoulder with a hundred other men, women, and children, most of whom don't have any idea what they're doing. No thanks. We're heading for O.B., where we'll have some space around us.”

He puffed his pipe and looked this way and that, the way he almost always did. Not seeing anyone who needed to be arrested or rushed to the hospital, he took the pipe from his mouth. “Got a call from Boston yesterday. Detective named Gordon R. Sullivan.”

We waited.

“He told me about what happened up there. How come you didn't?”

“It was in the Boston papers,” I said. “I imagine the news even got to Martha's Vineyard.”

“I missed the part about you two,” said the chief.

“Good. Maybe everybody did.”

The chief puffed a few more times. “If they think you two can ID them, they may come down here looking for you.”

“I doubt it,” said Zee.

His voice became slightly harder. He looked at me. “Lemme point something out to you, J. W. You're not just a single guy anymore. If you were, and if it was only your neck that was in a noose, I'd walk away right now. But you aren't a single guy anymore. You have a wife, and it's Zee's neck, here, not yours, that could be under the ax. You should have told me about this.”

I felt a little flush of color. I didn't like being told I was wrong. Especially when I was. But before I could speak, Zee did.

“Now, you just hold it right there, chief! Don't try to ignore me and feed that protect-the-little-lady line to Jeff! He's just macho enough to take you seriously! If you have something to say about us being in danger, you say it to both of us, not just to him! My God, you'd think this was the 1890s or something, and I was some sort of swooning damsel! If you think that, you just get the idea out of your head right now!”

The chief did not quite look abashed.

“Well, pardon me all to hell, Mrs. Jackson. And please take your finger out of my face.”

I took a deep breath. “You're right,” I said. “I should have told you.”

He feigned shock. “My God! Let me get out my pocket calendar and make a note of this. J. W. Jackson admitted he was wrong and I was right. Mrs. Jackson, you're a witness.”

“What did Sullivan tell you?”

The chief spelled it out. It was the story as it had happened, plus one thing new: Sullivan had traced the shotgun.

“Belonged to a guy up in Vineyard Haven,” said the chief. “Stolen in a housebreak last spring.” He knocked the dottle out of his pipe, blew through the stem, and stuck it back in his pocket. “Interesting, eh? Gives an island spin to things.”

It did, indeed. I looked at Zee. Her anger was gone.

“That changes things a little,” she said.

He nodded. “Yeah. Well, I don't have any brilliant ideas about what we can do, but I'll let the other police on the island know about what happened up in Boston. They'll keep their eyes and ears open, and maybe they'll see or hear something. You two start being careful. If anything happens that worries you, let me know.”

“You can count on it,” said Zee, taking my arm.

“I'll ask the OB police to keep an eye on you while you're at work, Zee, and I'll have my own people come by your place now and then. And we'll all keep our ears open in case anybody's asking about where you live or anything like that. Anybody call you and not give a name, anything like that, you let me know. In case I'm not in, you can call Dom Agganis or the sheriff. Keep in touch.”

He got into the cruiser, turned around, and drove back into town.

The day didn't seem as nice as it had when I'd left the house. The same blue sky arched from horizon to horizon, the same gentle southwest wind flapped the yacht club flags and filled the sails of boats coming in and going out of the harbor, the same sun shone bright.

But it seemed colder and darker to me.

And that night, late, I suddenly awoke to some sound out by my shed, and knew that Fred Souza was prowling around, up to no good. I eased out of bed and threw on the yard light. No one was there, and after a while I went back to bed, where I finally slept again.

The next morning, after Zee left for work, I drove to Manny Fonseca's woodworking shop.

Manny Fonseca was not only a fine-finish cabinetmaker, but one of the Vineyard's prime gun aficionados and a crack pistoleer. Once he'd thought of himself as a frustrated frontiersman, born a hundred years too late to tame the Wild West as surely he'd been created to do; but then he had discovered (initially to his horror) that he had just enough Wampanoag blood in him to qualify as an official member of the tribe, and since then had reversed his position and argued that the real tragedy of his life was that he'd been born too late to stop the Europeans from taking the country away from his ancestors.

He was the best shot I knew, and he bought and sold guns as fast as new ones caught his fancy and older ones bored him. He had all of the gun dealer's licenses that you can have, up to and including the right to handle machine guns.

I wasn't interested in a machine gun, but I did want to see Manny, so I went right into the shop, which smelled of sawdust and the oils and stains of Manny's profession. Manny was gluing a chair together. He looked up as I came in.

“Hey,” he said, smiling. “How's married life?”

“The one smart thing I've done.”

“You got it,” said Manny. “What brings you down here this time of day. I'd have figured you to be fishing for bonito.”

“You're right. I should be fishing. But something's come up.”

“What?” He put a last clamp on the chair and capped the jar of glue.