Death on a Vineyard Beach (18 page)

Begay was smiling. “And if your new profession proves to you that you really are inadequate, you stay; but if you find out that you can do it, you leave the second profession and enter a third. Right?”

“Etcetera, etcetera. It happens every time.” Uncle Bill looked at Begay. “And now you know why I said you were probably good at your business.”

Begay thought back, and remembered. “Because if I wasn't, I'd still be doing it?”

“Right.” Vanderbeck nodded.

I looked at him. “And what do you do?” I asked with an impulsiveness that surprised me. “What's your profession?”

The shaman smiled at me. “I'm retired. I don't do anything. I'm like you.”

How had he known that I didn't have a regular job? I felt frustrated by him, and the frustration drove another question out of my mouth.

“What were you doing there on Luciano Marcus's land?”

“Oh,” said the shaman. “I go by to look things over now and then. I take it that you're working for Luciano Marcus for the time being. Well, I'm working for Linda, my sister-in-law, for the time being. Next time you see your boss, tell him I'll be along for a talk one of these days. We should try to get this cranberry bog business settled out of court, if we can.”

“Marcus has men all over the grounds. How come nobody saw you and stopped you?”

The shaman drank his beer. “Beats me,” he said. “I've never understood why people ignore me as much as they do. Say, Toni, I think it's time for us to meet your mother for that walk. Let's get going.”

Joe Begay and I exchanged looks, got up, and followed his wife and her uncle out of the house. As we did, I said, “Someday maybe you'll tell me what you used to do when you weren't arranging for gidget sales.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But not right now.”

  
15
  

We met Linda Vanderbeck back at the Begays' house. I had seen her picture more than once in the
Gazette,
accompanying the ongoing stories about the Wampanoags' internal conflicts and efforts to influence Gay Head politics. She was an attractive woman, but not one who apparently tried to be. And she was full of vim. Her skin was tawny and her hair was long and black and tied back with a silver clasp that looked Southwestern to me, Navajo, maybe, or Zuni or Hopi. I could never remember which designs were from which people out there.

She had a firm handshake. “Toni says you wanted to meet me. We can walk and talk.” An elderly man came out of the house, followed by a younger version of Toni
Begay. “This is my father, Charlie Pierce. Dad, this is Mr. Jackson, from Edgartown.”

“Howdy,” said Charlie Pierce, shaking my hand. He barely filled up his clothes, and looked as if he were made out of leather. His hair was gray, but his eyes were bright.

“Call me J. W.,” I said.

“All right, J. W. You call me Charlie.”

“And this is my daughter Maggie.”

“Hi,” said Maggie. “We met at the wedding. Zee's beautiful! You're a lucky man.”

“Yes.”

Charlie took a stick that was leaning against the house. “Where we walking today, Linda?”

“Along the beach,” said Linda, and we set off along a path leading there. I fell in beside her. She glanced up at me. “Well, what can I do for you, Mr. Jackson?”

“Call me J. W. Everybody does.”

“What can I do for you, J. W.?”

“So you won't think I'm sneaking up on you, I'll do the first telling. I just took a job with Luciano Marcus.”

She didn't quite miss a step, but she almost did. “Go on.”

I told her about the incident in Boston, about the job Marcus had offered, and about the shotgun being stolen from John Dings.

“So I'm looking for anything that might help me figure out who done it,” I said.

“And you figure it was some Indian,” she said with a steely voice.

“I don't figure anything yet. But you and Marcus haven't exactly been hugging and kissing lately.”

We came out onto the beach. “I don't like this,” said Linda Vanderbeck. “I don't like being called a killer, or even being suspected of being one, and I don't like anyone who even thinks such things. I don't think I have any more to say to you. I think you should get away from me!”

But I didn't leave. Instead, I said: “I've seen the names some of your rival Wampanoags have called you in the letters they write to the
Gazette.
Compared to them, being a mere murder suspect seems pretty tame. You aren't just
being tender-skinned about this because I'm not a member of the tribe, are you?”

“Jesus Christ! The old reverse racism argument. No, I'd feel the same way if you were a full-blooded Wampanoag.”

“Well, I'm not a full-blooded Wampanoag or a full-blooded anything else, and I'm not calling you a murderer. Not yet. What I see in you is somebody with a motive, and somebody who probably knows other people who might be glad to see Marcus dead. None of that means anything yet, but all of it might mean something.”

“Have you got a badge of some kind, Mr. Jackson?”

“No.”

“Then why should I talk to you?”

“So some guy with a badge doesn't.”

“Bah!”

We were approaching the foot of the many-colored clay cliffs of Gay Head, the westernmost point of Martha's Vineyard. A century before, in a winter storm, the
City of Columbus,
running between New York and Boston, had wrecked on Devil's Bridge and spewed its human cargo along all the beaches of western Martha's Vineyard. Linda Vanderbeck's forefathers and many another Gay Header had exhausted themselves dragging the icy corpses, gear, and the occasional rare survivor out of the surf in the hours after that fabled wreck.

But today was another sky blue day, with no suggestion of a brewing storm except in Linda's face and voice.

“We don't have any killers in Gay Head. Our fight with Marcus is about the law. He's got land that belongs to my people, and we want it back. We'll beat him in the courts, if we have to. We don't need to shoot him. Besides, he's an old man, and he's got a bad heart. He could die any time. It would be stupid to shoot him, and we're not stupid.”

“Even Gay Head has its stupid people,” I said. “Its hotheads. Its stupid hotheads.”

She gave a bitter smile. “Yeah. Some of them wrote those letters you talked about. You should go talk to them, not to me.”

“But some of the hotheads in the tribe are with you on
this issue. Can you give me the names of any people I might talk to?”

She shook her head. “You won't get any names from me. I don't know any murderers.”

“Most of us probably don't, but none of us really knows. Almost every time a killer gets nailed, you can find some neighbors and family members who say he was a real nice guy, and that they couldn't be more surprised.”

“If you find a killer in Gay Head, I couldn't be more surprised. Your would-be killer up in Boston ran away. What I do, I do in the open. I don't think I can help you, Mr. Jackson.” She paused and her father and Bill Vanderbeck came up to us.

“I like being under these cliffs,” Bill Vanderbeck said to me, as we began walking again. “When I was a kid, my friends and I used come down to fish or take mud baths made out of the clay.” He smiled at his sister-in-law. “Now Linda and her friends frown on the mud baths.”

“They're harmful to the cliffs,” snapped Linda.

His smile was unchanged. “But people still sneak down here and take them anyway. I'm sort of on their side.”

Charlie Pierce nodded and muttered something that caused his daughter to give him an annoyed look. Then she turned back to her brother-in-law.

“You always were obstinate,” she said. “Worse than your brother, when he was alive, and he was stubborn as a mule.”

“You were a well-matched team,” said Bill, agreeably. “Likes attract, they say.” He looked out to sea.

“I have to be stubborn,” she said. “If I wasn't, the Luciano Marcuses of this world would take everything our people own. You don't give a damn about what's good for the tribe.”

“Maybe I'm just not as sure as you are about what that is.”

“You can go places other people can't go. You can help us.”

“Maybe.”

“Did you get a look at the place, like I asked?”

Vanderbeck nodded. “I did.”

She was impatient. “And?”

“Fence all around the estate. Six men working the grounds. I'd say they were sort of combined groundskeepers and security people. Marcus likes his privacy, like you said. One road in. Gate.
NO TRESPASSING
signs. Some sort of camera pointed at the driveway. Up in a tree. Two more cameras farther along, so anybody driving in can be seen. If anybody is watching the screens, that is, and somebody probably is, part of the time, at least. Dogs let loose at night.

“I didn't go up to the house, so I don't know about that. Lots of walking paths. Flowers. Well-maintained place. Looks good.”

“And nobody saw you?”

“Nobody stopped me, anyway.”

“You've seen the maps. What do you think?”

“Joe and I have both looked at them. The place lies on the land you thought it did. On what they called Indian Land a long time back. The house in what one map calls Gay Head Farm. The cranberry bog and most of the blueberries aren't on that hunk of land.”

“It's all on Indian Land,” said Linda. “Sacred land!”

Charlie Pierce gave a disapproving grunt, and swung at a clod of clay with his walking stick. “Sacred land, my eye! Nothing sacred about it. Just a ploy so some people can try to get their hands on land that ain't theirs.”

Vanderbeck's face showed no expression, but Linda's brows lowered. “Come on, Dad, you know as well as I do that we got robbed by the white men, and cheated out of that land. We intend to get it back for the tribe.”

“I've said it before, and I'll say it again,” said her father. “A lot of people up here in Gay Head didn't care if they was Wampanoags or not, until there was money in it. Till they found out they could get land and money by being Indians, they just wanted to be like everybody else. I don't think much of what that fella I met, that Manny Fonseca fella lives down there in Edgartown, used to call Professional Indians. Far as I'm concerned, all this stuff about the Wampanoags being a federally recognized tribe is just a
way to get into the government's pocket and into some of our neighbors' pockets to boot.”

“Dad, you're wrong as a bent nail. The Native Americans have got to fight for what's theirs, and I plan to be right there at the front of things while we do it!”

“And that's another thing,” said her father. “This Native American stuff. Bunch of bullshit, you'll pardon my saying, if you ask me. Time was people didn't even want to be called Indians unless they had to be. Now Indian ain't good enough. An insult, they say. According to them damned Harvard Indians and their like, anyway. Rather be called the same as… what's that guy's name, Bill?”

“Amerigo Vespucci,” said Bill Vanderbeck.

“That's the guy. Rather be named after some Italian sailor than be called Indians. Don't make any sense to me, daughter, nor to you, either, you think about it.”

“Dad, I don't care if you call yourself an Indian or a Native American…”

“You won't hear me calling myself that!”

“… or whatever. But you're a Wampanoag, whatever you call yourself.”

The old man was as stubborn as his daughter. “You call yourself a Wampanoag, Bill? You call yourself a Native American?”

“I call myself a human being,” said Vanderbeck, dodging the bullet.

The old man was on a roll. “And what does your son-in-law, Joe Begay, call himself, Linda? You ever catch him calling himself a federally recognized Native American or anything like that?”

Linda gave a great sigh. “I never asked him what he calls himself, Dad. The point is that…”