Death on a Vineyard Beach (14 page)

“Sure,” said Manny. Shooting southpaw, he promptly blew the centers out of more targets.

“Manny's got the touch,” said Helen, nodding. “I'll never have it, but he's got it. He's a natural shooter.”

Manny was pleased about his skill, but not vain. “It's a gift,” he said, “like some people have perfect pitch. Me, I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, but I can shoot pretty good if I stay in practice. I can't teach anybody else how to be a great shot, but I can teach them how to shoot well. Helen here could be a lot better if she'd practice, but she's got other things she likes to do better, so she's not as good
as she could be. Her and me are going to shoot with some of these other pistols now. Each one's a little different, but the principle is the same with all of them.” He smiled and I knew his favorite wisdom was coming: “The secret is to stand in back of the gun when you shoot it.”

Zee gave him enough of a smile to make him feel good, and he and Helen blazed away some more, shooting with first this and then that pistol in Manny's collection. The calibers ranged from .45 to .22, and the noises produced made me glad to have earplugs.

“Now, then, J. W., let's try out that .380 you have in that lunch bag.” Manny got the Beretta out of the bag, checked it for safety, and slipped the clip into the handle. He glanced at me. “You mind if I shoot it first?”

I didn't mind, and Manny, squeezing off the shots, blew out the bull's-eye of his first target, then that of his second. He popped the clip and reloaded it.

“Nice little gun,” he said, handing clip and pistol to me.

I put on my glasses, assumed the two-handed stance he'd taught me, and emptied the clip into a target. The first shot went high, but the others were all on the paper. Not bad. If that had been a man out there, he'd have been pretty leaky by the time my clip was empty.

“Thirteen rounds,” Manny was saying to Zee. “That's a lot better than the six rounds in Helen's Lady Smith, but Helen likes the revolver and doesn't like a semiautomatic.”

“I can figure out how my Lady Smith works,” said Helen, “but I'm never sure what's going on with those semi-autos. I don't feel comfortable with them.”

“That's right,” said Manny. “When they were thinking about bringing out a pistol for women, Smith and Wesson did a study about what the ladies thought about guns. They found out that women thought semi-automatics were too complicated, and that they didn't think anything smaller than a .38 would stop a rapist. So the Lady Smith is a .38 revolver, and Helen likes it better than the other guns here. It's not too big and it's not too little, it's got a good trigger pull, and it's got stopping power.”

“Then how come you talked Jefferson into taking this Beretta?” asked Zee.

“You get six shots with the Lady Smith and thirteen with the Beretta. Six should be plenty, but thirteen is seven more than plenty, in case you miss the first six times. Besides, the new autoloaders are just as safe as any revolver and just as trouble free. More gun for your dollar, I think. And so do most police and military agencies I know of.”

“Then why is Jeff's police gun a revolver?”

“Because he was too cheap to buy an autoloader, I guess. A few old-timers still carry those police specials, but most law officers are wearing autoloaders of some kind these days. Just a matter of firepower. You don't want the bad guys to have better weapons than you do, like happened down in Waco with that wacky religious guy and his gang. Say, would you like to take a few shots with the Beretta?”

Zee hesitated, and I wondered which way she would go. I was pleased to discover that I really didn't care. Then she nodded. “All right,” she said. “I'll try it.”

“Good girl,” said Manny. “I'll show you some things about the weapon, and then we'll fire some rounds. I think you'll have fun shooting this gun. It's a nice little piece.”

I felt glad and sad at the same time, as they began to talk.

  
12
  

When Zee and I got home later that evening, she wasn't in the grumpy mood I'd half expected. Instead, she played with Oliver Underfoot and Velero, and was thoughtful and quiet for the most part, although an occasional frown crossed her brow.

I had anticipated a more irritable disposition, and had planned a counterattack at the supper table, since Zee, for all her sleek slimness, could probably eat a horse if she tried, and found it hard to be in a bad humor when she had a full belly. I wasn't serving horse, but something better: the Scandinavian fishbake that both of us could eat seven
days a week without complaint. I made mine with cod this time. Delish, as always.

Zee was properly impressed, and almost her normal self as she drank the last of her wine and wiped her lips.

“Now I know why I married you, Mr. Jackson.”

“Since we're hitched, you can stop that Mr. Jackson stuff and just call me J. W.”

After supper, while I washed and stacked the dishes, Zee made a phone call. As I hung the dishcloth over the spigot and dried my hands, she came into the kitchen.

“I just talked to Manny. We're going to shoot again tomorrow evening.”

I was surprised. “Fine. That gun is yours, by the way.”

“I don't want it! I don't know if I'm going to go on with this.”

“You don't have to if you don't want to. Manny will buy the gun back if you don't want it. I'm not going to say any more about it.”

“I know. But you'll be thinking about it.”

“Maybe.”

“It's all right,” she said. “I'm thinking about it myself.”

“Okay. The thing is, what I think about how you should live and what you should do doesn't make any difference. It's what you think that counts.” I poured coffee and carried two cups out onto the porch where we could watch the fireflies flicker across the garden and through the trees. “Of course, I reserve the right to give you wise advice.”

“Which I don't have to take.”

“Or even consider. You're a grown-up person. You get to decide what to do with your life.”

We sat and looked up at the stars through the screen that held the mosquitoes at bay. The fireflies sparked and gleamed in the darkness.

“I think you should know,” said Zee, “that sometimes I want to be given wise advice. Sometimes I probably even want to be told what to do.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“And I guess I want you to be the one to do that, sometimes.”

“Yeah. That's what I want you to do, too, sometimes.”

She took my arm and put her cheek on my shoulder. “Of course, I reserve the right to ignore your advice whenever I want to.”

“Well, of course.”

“And to tell you what I think about things whether you want me to or not.”

“I'm sure that was in our wedding vows somewhere. An ancient, sacred, wifely right.”

“I distinctly remember it because there wasn't any corresponding ancient, sacred, husbandly right.”

“I think I noticed that, too.”

I was in a good mood when we went to bed, but before I got to sleep Freddy Souza slipped into my head, and I found myself listening for odd night sounds and sometimes thinking I heard some. I made myself stay in bed, and finally got to sleep.

I had plans for the next day, but as the poet noted, the best-laid schemes gang aft a-gley. As I was right in the middle of washing the breakfast dishes next morning, the pump in the well stopped working and I was abruptly waterless. I tracked the problem down to the switch on the pump itself, which was ancient and had long since been functioning more because of the grace of the water gods than my maintenance efforts over the years. So things go in the investigation biz, as in all other work. Instead of solving the riddle of who wanted Luciano Marcus dead, I went to Vineyard Haven to buy a new switch.

I found one at a plumber's supply place, then drove down to the Dock Street Coffee Shop in Edgartown to have a coffee and Danish to build up the strength I'd need to do the repairwork. I had just come out onto the street again when the chief met me. He pointed at my rusty Land Cruiser, which was parked in the lot across the street in a spot that had miraculously opened up just as I'd arrived.

“You know, there's a petition being circulated to prevent you from parking that bucket of bolts inside of city limits between May and October. The argument is that the tourists take one look at it and cancel their hotel and restaurant reservations and go vacation on Nantucket instead.”

“And property values plummet. I've heard it all before.”

We looked across the parking lot. Out in the harbor beyond the yacht club, boats were hoisting sail, catching the morning wind, and heading out of the harbor. At dockside the charter fishing boats were loading clients aboard for the day's excursions to the bluefish and bass fishing grounds, and a couple of pot fishermen were already unloading their catches.

The streets were crowded with brightly dressed tourists who didn't seem to understand that these were actually real streets and not just wide sidewalks, and the summer cops were doing their best to keep them from being run over by the cars that a lot of walkers apparently thought were just make-believe. Overhead, the blue sky was clear and bright, and the sun was golden and warm.

The chief was looking at the boats unloading conchs. He shook his head.

“Hell of a way to make a living. Makes me almost glad I'm a cop.”

Actually, the chief liked being a cop. Like most cops, it made him feel good when he was able to do something that helped people out. But like most cops, too, he had to put up with a lot of grief from the very people he was paid to serve. I'd liked the helping part, too, but the grief had become too much for me, so I'd become a civilian again.

The chief was still going on. “Boats that leak, pots lost, cranky engines, bad weather, bad prices; you name the trouble, they have it. It's a wonder more of them don't give it up.”

“Why don't you give one of them your job?” I asked. “A lot of people here in town think you should have retired years ago. You're too grouchy, and all you do is drive around in that cruiser and give people like me a hard time.”

“It won't be long,” said the chief. “I'm going to hang up this badge and go to Nova Scotia every summer. Get away from these damned crowds. Come back down in time for scallop season. Live like a human being for a change.”

“Sure. How long have you been threatening to do that? You're all talk.”

He nodded at the boats. “Jimmy Souza, there. Drunk already.”

I looked and saw Jimmy helping Albert Enos unload his catch. Jimmy swayed while he worked.

“He's a nipper,” said the chief. “Keeps nips of vodka in his pockets. Expensive way to drink, but he thinks the vodka isn't on his breath and that if he sticks to nips nobody will ever know he's drinking at all.”

Over on the dock, Jimmy Souza tried to swing a gunnysack of conchs up into Albert's truck, but couldn't manage it. He dropped the sack and swayed toward the water. Albert caught him and put him into the passenger's seat of the truck, then put the sack of conchs into the back.

“Jimmy used to be a good man,” I said.

“Maybe he will be again. Meantime, though, his house is up for sale and his kid can't afford to stay in college. Booze is bad for some families.”

I decided not to comment on that one. “While you're here,” I said, “tell me more about that stolen shotgun. I'd guess it wasn't sawed off when it left the island. Who did it belong to?”

“Guy named John Dings. Lives off Lambert's Cove Road. Somebody got in to his place last spring, when he and his wife were out for the evening. Didn't steal anything but that shotgun. They figure thieves came in a back window that was open. They didn't take a lot of stuff that a pro would have gotten, and they didn't vandalize the place, either. Odd case.”

“Didn't take the CD player or the family silver?”