Death on a Vineyard Beach (20 page)

I wasn't sure whether I thought that was good or bad. I
packed up lunch and beer, put our clamming buckets and gloves in the Land Cruiser, climbed into my bathing suit while Zee donned her red bikini, and we went off to the Norton's Point Beach. It wasn't yet noon, but already the July people were on the shore, topping off their tans for the last time before heading back over the sound to America, just as the pale August people were arriving.

“It's very odd,” said Zee, later that afternoon, as she lay in the sun, looking warm and sleek. “I still really don't approve of guns and shooting. In fact, I think that most handguns should be banned, because they're really not good for anything but shooting people. But even while I'm not approving of them, I love to shoot them. And Manny keeps saying that I'm really good.”

I understood. Similarly, neither Zee nor I approved of boxing, but we loved to watch a good match, especially in the smaller weights, where the guys have fast hands and can move. Ali was the only heavyweight who could fight like a middleweight. Other big guys might have bombs in their gloves and chins of steel, but none of them had Ali's fast feet and hands or his smarts and grace and humor. Now that we had Zee's little television in the house, we could occasionally see even a journey-man heavyweight bout that held our interest.

“You've got the right stuff,” I said to Zee. “You're a born gun moll.”

“You know,” she said, “I actually think you and Manny may be right about that. I know I have a lot to learn and that if I really want to be good I have to practice all the time, but even being no further along than I am I somehow can pretty much hit what I'm aiming at. I don't know how to explain it. Except, maybe, that it's the feeling you have when you're casting really well. You don't know what's different about that day and your usual days when you may be casting well enough or even very well, but there is a difference. You can get your lure out there farther, and you can get it exactly where you want it, and you absolutely know that if there's a fish there that he's yours. It's like that. And you know what? I can do it with either hand.”
She actually shivered a little in the hot sun. “It's almost scary,” she said.

But not so scary that she and Manny weren't going off to the shooting range again. I had been brooding about that since leaving home, and had decided that I was actually happy for them both. They had formed a bond that could be experienced only by people who shared a rare talent. Helen Fonseca and I might be married to the members of their small society, and might be invited to share their celebrations of their art, but we could never belong to their club because we lacked their talent. Helen and I could shoot, but we would never be shootists.

When the afternoon tide was low enough, we waded out into Katama Bay, got down on our knees, and dug ourselves a good mess of clams.

As with quahogging, you can go clamming and think about something else at the same time. I thought about what I'd learned and not learned during my inquiries on behalf of Luciano Marcus. As sometimes happens to me, I suspected that I might know something that I didn't know I knew. But, if so, I had no idea what it might be.

Home again, we were well clammed and feeling warm and good. While Zee used the outdoor shower, the one we use three seasons of the year, I drove down to the Sengekontacket boat landing, got a five-gallon bucket full of salt water, and brought it back. I put the clams into it to spit out their sand overnight, and took my turn in the shower. I could hear the pop-pop of firing down at the club. Manny or someone else was already at the range. I looked at my nine-dollar waterproof watch. Almost five-thirty.

Zee came around the corner of the house, carrying her paper bag of shooting stuff.

“Blasting time,” I said, drying off naked in the yard.

She paused. “You don't mind, do you?”

It was one of those questions women ask, but men usually don't. I was pretty sure that if I said I did mind, she would cancel the session with Manny.

I put my wet hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead. “I don't mind,” I said.

“Good.” I got a kiss back.

She climbed into her little Jeep, and drove away. The Rod and Gun Club was only a few hundred yards from our house through the woods, but the woods were full of poison ivy, thorns, and the grabbing branches of scrub oak, so when we went there we usually drove: up our long sandy driveway, along the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road, back down Third or Seventh street to the boulevard and then into the club.

As I was getting supper ready a little later, I heard the sounds of bigger and then smaller guns firing from the range, and guessed that it was Manny with his .45 and Zee with her .380 popping away.

I had just finished setting the table, when I heard a car coming down the driveway. Our driveway is a narrow one, and clearly not a public road. On the other hand, I don't like signs that say “
PRIVATE PROPERTY
,” “
NO TRESPASSING
,” and the like, so sometimes a stranger comes motoring into our yard, discovers his mistake, turns around and leaves. Since Zee and I occasionally work on perfecting our all-over tans in the yard, now and then our visitors encounter sights they perhaps did not expect to see.

Generally, however, things being as they were, the few people who came down our driveway were not strangers at all, but people who knew us and wanted to see us.

Thus, I was not too surprised when a police cruiser came into the yard and turned around. Through the open living room door and the screened porch door beyond it, I saw the chief turn off the cruiser's engine, open the door, and step out. He closed the car door, and put an arm on the top of the car while he looked around and listened to the shooting from the club.

I went out onto the porch. “You on duty, or do you want a beer?” Not to my surprise, he declined the beer. When the chief is in uniform, he will rarely have a drink, so it was safe offering one to him. You got brownie points for free, just for appearing generous.

He came up onto the porch and took a chair. The wind was blowing down the driveway, making the porch the coolest place in Edgartown on this warm July evening. I went into the kitchen and came back out with iced tea. He
sipped and nodded his head. “Nice place. Always was, still is. If I owned this place, I'd do like you do: hang out all summer and never go downtown till after Labor Day.”

He dug out his pipe and lit up, then waved toward the Rod and Gun Club. “Just down there. Zee and Manny are popping a lot of caps. I'm sort of surprised, knowing Zee.”

“Zee is sort of surprised herself,” I said.

“She isn't doing too bad.”

“So she tells me.”

“Just talked with that detective, Gordon Sullivan, up in Boston. They think they've found the car. In a tow company storage lot. Stolen, of course, then abandoned and towed away. Found a box of double-aught shells under the seat. Just like the ones in the gun you took away from the guy.”

“Any prints?”

“Too many. The owners, the tow company guys, the cops who finally found it, you name it.”

“Our guy was wearing gloves.”

“Just our luck.”

I told him my theory that the shootist was an amateur, since a pro, having the time to do it, would probably have killed the bodyguard first, then killed Marcus at his leisure.

The chief grunted. “I'll drop that bug into Sullivan's ear, for what it's worth.” He glanced around the yard. “Anybody hanging around here? Any odd phone calls? Anything like that?”

“Nothing.”

“You see anything of Fred Souza?”

“No. They ever trace that sweatshirt?”

“You have any idea how many places there are in Boston that sell sweatshirts? More than there are tee-shirt shops in Edgartown, even.”

“Wow!” I said. “That many?”

He got up. “I'll be on my way.” He paused. “How do you feel about Manny teaching Zee to shoot?”

I hesitated. “I approve, on balance. I think too many people have guns, but 1 want her to know how to use one.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

I watched him drive away. Behind me, the guns kept
popping down at the Rod and Gun Club range.

Later, in bed, I listened to the sounds of the night: the odd calls of nocturnal creatures, the swish of leaves, the groans of tree limbs rubbing together. One or twice I thought I might be hearing unusual noises in the yard, but when I slipped out of bed for a look, there was no one there.

The next morning, when Zee was home from her graveyard shift and asleep in the bedroom, another car came down our driveway. I didn't recognize this one, or the two guys who got out of it. They were young, bronze-skinned guys with dark eyes and muscular bodies.

“You Jeff Jackson?” the first asked.

I had the garden hose, and was watering the flowers in the boxes on the front fence.

“That's me.”

“I have a message for you,” he said, coming up to me. “Stay out of Linda Vanderbeck's hair!”

And so saying, he hit me in the jaw with his right hand and followed with his left.

  
17
  

Real fights don't look like the ones in the movies. People don't land those spectacular blows that send their opponents through windows or over tables. Real fights are usually sloppy and badly done. And there are no fair ones.

So when the guy hit me on the jaw, he didn't do as good a job as he planned. I saw the punch coming and was moving back when it hit, and his following left went whistling through the air. Still, there were two of them, and two guys can usually beat the crap out of one guy, so I didn't stand my ground.

Instead, I hit the first guy in the eye with the nozzle of the hose I was holding, shot water into the face of the other guy, then dropped the hose, and ran away around the house.
They came after me, but I had a good start, and while they were coming round the last corner of the house, back into the driveway, I had the door of the Land Cruiser open and had the paper bag full of .38 in my hands.

As they appeared, so did the pistol.

They stopped, wide-eyed and panting.

“I'm going to tell you something,” I said. “It's dangerous to pick fights with people you don't know. It can get you killed. Give me your wallets.”

“Our wallets?”

I cocked the revolver. “Your wallets. Toss them over here.”

The first guy looked at the second.

“Do it,” said the second guy.

They dug into the back pockets of their jeans, and brought out their wallets. They threw them at my feet. I picked them up and looked at the ID's, then tossed them back. They were two guys from Gay Head. Wampanoags on Linda Vanderbeck's side, for sure.

“Pick those up and go home. And keep in mind that I know who you are and where you live. If you give me or mine any more hard times, I'll give it back to you in spades. Does Linda Vanderbeck know about you two coming here?”

They exchanged looks.

“Well, does she? I doubt it.”

They exchanged more uneasy glances. Then the first guy said: “No. But we heard about you and what you think. You keep your nose in your own business, not in hers. Not in ours, either.”

I let down the hammer of the pistol, and lowered the gun. “You're a pair, you are. If Linda Vanderbeck ever finds out you came down here, she'll have your ears. She doesn't need the likes of you two defending her. Ye gods. Go home and grow up.”

“You stay out of Gay Head,” said the first guy, braver now that the pistol was pointed at the ground.

I looked at the second guy. “You better have a talk with your friend on the way home. Try to tune him in to planet Earth.”

“Come on, Wally,” said his friend. “Let's go.”

“And don't come back,” I said to Wally.

Wally and his friend drove away.

I put the pistol back in its bag and the bag back under the seat of the Land Cruiser.

When my hands stopped trembling, I went in and made phone calls. The first was to detective Gordon R. Sullivan in Boston. He was out, but would call back. Then I called Thornberry Security and asked for Thornberry himself. His cool-voiced secretary wasn't sure he had time to talk with me. I told her to give him my name. She did, and a moment later he was on the phone.