Death on a Vineyard Beach (34 page)

In September, Zee and I signed up for the Bass and Blue-fish Derby, and headed for the beaches. As usual for that time of year, the blues were out where the boats could get them, but were scarce for surf casters. After the weigh-in the first night, we weren't even close to the leaders. I compensated for this by retelling Zee about the twenty-one-pounder I'd once caught when I was the only one on the beach.

“Yeah,” said Zee. “I remember you waving it under my nose. But as I recall, you didn't catch it until the derby was over.”

“Details, details.”

We walked out of the weigh station into a soft fall night. The Edgartown parking lot at the foot of Main was thick with fishermen and onlookers, and on the float behind the weigh station the filleters were busy with their knives, filleting fish for elderly and other people who could no longer go out and catch their own. No fish went to waste.

Between the yacht club and the Reading Room, the
Shirley J.
swung at her stake, and beyond her, out in the harbor the last yachts of the season lay at their moorings. There was a police car in the parking lot, and the chief was leaning against it, smoking his pipe and looking pretty well recovered from having killed Benny White. In his decades as a police officer, it had been the first shot he'd ever fired in the line of duty, and it had taken him a while to get over it.

Zee and I walked across.

“Quite a mob,” said Zee, leaning on the car beside him, and looking at the crowd.

“A mere nothing,” said the chief. “After Labor Day, the real crowds are gone. You can even find a parking place on the street, sometimes.”

“I still see a lot of tourists around,” I said.

“Only a few, by comparison. And none with kids over five. School has carried those folks off to America, and peace has once again arrived in Edgartown, more or less.”

“Well,” said Zee, “you still have the local slimeballs around, so you won't be bored completely to death.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “we still have the hometown drunks and thieves and wife beaters and vandals and the rest, but we know who they are, mostly, even though we may not be able to prove it in court, so it's not the same as when we have eighty or ninety thousand extra people on the island. Did you hear about Luciano Marcus?”

The last time I'd talked with Luciano was on the phone, just after the shootings on the beach. He'd called from Hyannis, where they'd anchored for the night, to find out what was going on. I'd decided that telling the truth about Vinnie would be no benefit to him or Angela, so I'd told him that Vinnie had gotten shot trying to stop Benny from shooting me.

The news of Vinnie's death had stopped Luciano from thinking too clearly, but he'd listened while I told him something about bad Benny leading good but not-too-bright Vinnie astray, and about Benny stealing the shotgun that weekend he'd come down from Boston and exploiting poor naive Vinnie's knowledge of Luciano and his fat wallet being at the opera that day in Boston, and then about my guess that once the cops were on his trail, Benny had decided to come down and shoot Zee and me so nobody could ID him, and about heroic Vinnie trying to stop him and getting himself killed in the process.

Luciano had hung up the phone, breathing hard. I had imagined him popping another pill under his tongue.

Now I said to the chief, “No. What about Luciano?”

The chief removed his pipe from his mouth and looked at it.

“They brought Luciano to the hospital this afternoon, then they flew him up to Boston. Heart attack. He's in bad shape.”

I felt a surge of sympathy for Angela, who had loved him all the years of their marriage, in spite of who he was or what he had done.

“Poor Angela,” said Zee, echoing my thoughts. “I'll call the house when we get home.”

I thought of the fisher king in the Arthurian tales. The man who, because of spiritual sin, had brought ruin to his kingdom, and to those he loved.

“You two win anything tonight?” asked the chief.

“No triumph of justice for us,” said Zee. “We were skunked good and proper. My hubby here thinks it may mean there is no God.”

The chief raised his eyes to the night sky. “As Sister Luke used to say, after we're dead, all of this will be explained to us. Well, this crowd looks pretty peaceful, so I guess I can leave.” He got into the cruiser and drove away.

“If we go home right now,” said Zee, “we can mess around awhile and still have time to get some rest before we hit Wasque early tomorrow morning.”

“An excellent idea.”

For the rest of the derby, we fished the Chappy beaches from Metcalf's Hole to the Cape Pogue Gut, and when the blues came back close to shore we did our best to nail them. As the derby wore on, the truly dedicated fisherpeople became haggard from lack of sleep, and were occasionally testy.

October 1 dawned clear and chilly, and presented us with a moral dilemma: whether to hit the beaches again, or take a scalloping break on the first day of that season.

“Why not both?” asked Zee, checking out the tide tables. “We can go to Wasque early, then get home in time for low tide in Katama Bay. We can get our bushel of scallops and be home again by noon. We can have the scallops shucked by two, and be back on the beach by three.”

“Done. But does that leave us time for sex?”

“Let's see. Maybe we can delay getting back to the beach until three-oh-five.”

“I'm fast,” I said, “but I don't know if I'm that fast.”

“Actually,” said Zee, smiling up at me, “you're slow. Very slow. It's one of your charms.”

“Would you like to list some of the others?”

“Not right now.”

That afternoon, on Wasque Point, just before sundown, some pretty big blues came in. The beach was shoulder to shoulder with fisherpeople, but they were regulars, so few lines were crossed and few tempers lost. Zee and I brought in big fish, as did everyone else, and about nine, the trucks began to peel away and head for Edgartown so their drivers could get to the weigh-in station before it closed at ten.

“On the board at last,” grinned Zee, pointing. She was best of the day for shore blues, and I was third by a whisker. Happiness.

“Hello, kid,” said a voice behind me. I turned and looked into Joe Begay's eyes. He dropped his to Zee's. “And hello to you, too, Mrs. Jackson.” His eyes came back to mine. “How were you lucky enough to win this woman?”

“I didn't get her by luck,” I said. “It was a combination of skill and lies.”

“Ah,” said Begay. “The same time-honored technique I used to court Toni. I see you both made the board. Let me buy you two a drink to celebrate your fleeting fame as fisherfolk.”

We went into the Wharf Pub and found a booth and beer.

“Cheers,” said Begay. “This is my first derby. I figured that since I'm going to be an islander, I should join up and learn how to catch bass and bluefish. Turns out that I'm a very fashionable fellow. I can fly-fish.”

“It's all the craze,” I said.

“When I was a kid, growing up out near Oraibi, my folks used to take a trip up to Emerald Lake in Colorado every year, for a week of trout fishing and camping. My dad taught me how to fish with dry flies, and now, all these years later, I'm using those ancient skills. I've been fishing up at the other end of the island.”

“How are things up that way?” I asked. “It seemed like I lived up there last month, but I haven't been back since.”

“Interesting,” said Begay. “I'm getting some callouses from hauling pots, and I'm getting a lot more respect for the guys who go down to the sea in ships. Someday, I may even begin to make some money at it.” He paused and glanced at Zee then back at me, and arched a brow.

“She knows everything I know,” I said.

“Good grief,” said Zee, putting down her beer and looking at Begay. “Don't tell me you're one of those dare-I-speak-of-manly-things-in-the-presence-of-the-little-woman guys. If you are, it's time you wised up!”

“Jesus,” said Begay, laughing. “You sound just like Toni!”

He sipped his beer and thought. “You're right. It's a bad habit. If it makes you feel any better, it isn't a man/woman thing in my case, it's just the result of the kind of work I used to do. In that work, you never told anybody any more than you had to.”

“And what kind of work was that?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, Mrs. Jackson. I've begun telling Toni about it, but so far it's just between her and me.”

“Very mysterious,” said Zee, intrigued. “I'm glad to hear that you've at least started to tell her things, but she must be going crazy, wanting to know everything.”

“Does your husband know everything about you, Mrs. Jackson?”

To my surprise, Zee blushed. A rather weak smile appeared on her face. “Well, almost,” she said.

“And does your wife know all about you, J. W.?”

“My life is an open book,” I lied.

“There you have it,” said Begay, making a small gesture with a large brown hand. “Well, now, about things up in Gay Head. For one thing, you might be interested to hear that I've got myself a crewman. Jimmy Souza. Sober, and trying to stay that way. Guy knows a hell of a lot about pot fishing. If I make any money on the boat this year, it'll be because of him.”

I was pleased. Maybe the chief had been right; maybe
Jimmy was again going to be a good man. I hoped so.

“And another thing,” said Begay. “It seems that my mother-in-law, Linda Vanderbeck, got proposed to by Bill Vanderbeck.”

Zee's ears opened. “No kidding!”

Begay smiled at her sudden interest. “Yeah.”

“And?” Zee had both hands on her stein.

“And she said no, she'd already been married to enough Vanderbecks for one life, and besides she didn't want to get married again anyhow because she has enough to do trying to make sure the tribe—that's the Gay Head Wampanoags, of course—get what's coming to them from you European invaders. The job will take all her time, she figures, and she doesn't have room for a husband in her plans.”

“Shucks.” Zee sipped her beer. Then she brightened. “You and Toni will have to come down for supper. Jeff is a great cook, and the two of you can catch up on old times while Linda and I get to know each other better. You men can serve us drinks and goodies while we sit in front of the fire and talk about womanly things.”

Begay faked a frown. “I thought it was politically incorrect for men to talk about manly things and women to talk about womanly things.”

“Not quite,” said Zee. “It's only incorrect for men to talk about manly things when their women want them to talk about something interesting instead. The woman-to-woman part is entirely okay, if that's what the women want to do. If they don't want to do that, they don't have to.”

Begay looked at me. “With this wife, I think you're going to have your hands full, buddy.”

I leered at Zee. “I certainly hope so.”

“One other thing you might want to know,” said Begay. “Linda found out about Wally Madison and his pal trying to work you over. I hear she tracked them down and gave them such hell that they both went to the mainland just to get away from her.” He laughed.

In Friday's
Gazette
we found our names in the weekly summary of the derby results, and read that Luciano Marcus, of Gay Head and New York, had died in Boston. I
thought of stupid, amoral Vinnie. If he hadn't gotten greedy and had just waited a few weeks, he'd have had his inheritance and been alive to spend it. Life is quirky some times.

Then, for some reason, I thought of Aristotle Socarides, the PI over on the cape who never answered his phone. Did Aristotle read the
Gazette?
Did he know his onetime boss was dead? A lot of lives had been changed because of silly, venal Vinnie Cecilio: Roger the Dodger and Benny White and Vinnie himself had been touched hardest, but Zee and I had been affected, too, as Jason Thornberry had been, and the Marcus family, and Gordon R. Sullivan, and the Edgartown cops, particularly the chief, and the Dings, and the Vanderbecks, and God only knew who else. The tree of evil throws a long shadow.

December. The wind was cold, Main Street in Edgartown was decorated with Christmas lights, and Zee and I, bundled in our down coats, were window-shopping along the almost empty street, when the chief pulled over beside us, stopped the cruiser, and rolled down his window.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

“And to you.”

“Are you two trying for the red nose championship of the island? All of the sensible people are inside by their fires.”

“We're fearless in the face of howling winds and driving snow,” I said.

The chief shook his head, and put an envelope into Zee's hand. “Here,” he said. “A Christmas present.” He rolled up his window, and drove on.

Zee opened the envelope. It was her license to carry.

“Oh, good,” she said. “And Manny will be very happy, because now I can't be arrested for carrying weapons. Did I tell you that he wants me to go with him to some competitions?”

“No.”

“Well, he does.”

“When you win the gold medal, you'll be able to protect me better than ever from scary things. Not that I'm ever scared, of course. I'm as brave as a barrel full of bears.”

“Me, too,” said Zee. “I chase lions down the stairs.”

“I'm like a tiger in a rage.”

“I'm even braver than that.”

“No, you're not.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Want to bet?”

“Anything. A million dollars.”

“You don't have a million dollars.”

“I don't need it. I'm going to win.”

“No, you're not. What else do you want to bet?”

Zee thought about that. “We can't bet money, because it wouldn't mean anything since all our money goes into the same account.”