Shooting Star (18 page)

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Authors: Cynthia Riggs

BOOK: Shooting Star
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Howland was walking his dogs on the beach below his house when Victoria reached him on the phone.
“There’s something to be said for cellular phones, I suppose,” Victoria said, when he told her where he was.
“What’s going on, Victoria?”
“I’ll explain when I see you.”
“It’ll take me about twenty minutes to get to the theater. See you then.”
Victoria thanked Nora for the use of the playhouse phone, went outside, and sat on the low stone wall to wait.
Where could Roderick be? What had he been thinking when he’d told her he had killed both Peg and Bob Scott? He’d seemed relieved that she’d insisted he go with her to the police. She simply could not believe that he had killed anyone, despite his confession.
Yet, obviously something was bothering him.
She shifted on the uncomfortable stone wall and thought some more. Perhaps Sandy could help. Dogs were intelligent. Look at the K-9 service dogs, the drug-sniffing dogs, the guide dogs. Someone had hurt Sandy, and that person was quite possibly the killer. Sandy might be able to identify him.
She took out a scrap of paper and a pen and made a note to retrieve Sandy from Doc. Atkins’s. Where would be the best place for Sandy to examine the suspects? At the police station? At the theater? At her house?
Actually, what suspects were there? According to Sergeant Smalley, it was too early in the investigation to point to anyone.
She shifted position once more, then stood and laid her baseball hat on the stones as a cushion, and sat again.
Was it even remotely possible that Roderick was the killer? She had to consider that he might be. He was a bit of a bungler, that was true. Might he somehow have killed Peg accidentally? And thought he’d strangled Bob Scott during the play? She was one of the select few who believed Bob Scott had been poisoned by some as yet unidentified substance. She shook her head and shifted on her not-that-well-padded seat.
Killers had to have motive and means, of course, but opportunity was crucial. Who among the theater people and Peg’s friends and relatives had opportunity?
Sergeant Smalley said Peg had been killed between the time she’d left the theater at eight and midnight, when Teddy’s mother called the police. Actually, Victoria realized, Peg was probably killed close to eight-thirty, because Teddy’s mother had started to call her house around then and had gotten no answer. And that was when Teddy had heard her cry out for him to run.
Victoria stood up, shook out her hat and placed it back on the stone wall, looked at her watch, and sat down again. Howland should be here shortly.
She noted on her paper to check where Peg’s ex-husband, Leonard Vincent, had been two nights ago, and where Teddy’s father had been. And who was Teddy’s mother’s mysterious boyfriend? She added Ruth Byron and her son, George, to her list, reluctantly. Ruth was certainly angry enough at Dearborn and Becca to sabotage the play, but that seemed far-fetched.
Aside from those five, the most likely suspects would have to be among cast members. Everyone who’d been at rehearsal during the second and third acts could be eliminated as Peg’s killer. Or could they? Peg’s home was less than ten minutes from the theater. Five minutes, if there’d been no traffic. Had anyone been missing for a half-hour or so. Even fifteen minutes, but that would be cutting things close.
Dearborn. She wouldn’t mind pinning the murders on him. Had he been at the playhouse the entire time? She recalled his striding back and forth in front of her, calling out directions and nattering on about how a professional cast would run through dress rehearsal without a break, unlike this amateur lot.
Victoria jabbed her lilac-wood stick into the soft dirt next to the stone wall. Much as she would like to cast Dearborn as the killer, she couldn’t imagine how he could have found the time. Was it possible that Peg had been killed later than the police estimate? She didn’t think so. The murder was probably somewhere between eight-thirty and nine o’clock.
Victoria went through the cast in order of appearance. Bob Scott. Had he killed Peg, then taken his own life in remorse? The poison apparently acted painlessly. Not a bad way to commit suicide. She wrote “Robt. Scott” on her paper with two question marks next to the name.
Howland? No, not Howland. Why, though? Because he was her friend and a law enforcement agent? No, Howland had been sitting in the second row, just ahead of her when he wasn’t on stage. In fact, when he’d realized the antennae on his monstrous head were blocking her view, he’d apologized and moved over two seats. Later, after the rehearsal, when he was driving home and the police picked him up, Peg must already have been dead.
What about Bruce Duncan? She couldn’t recall whether she’d seen him in the theater when he wasn’t actually on stage. His role was an important one, trying to reason with his friend, Victor. Bruce had been terribly upset when he’d learned of Peg’s death. But at the pet store, Bruce had said something that revealed how hurt he’d been by her rejection. He was a sensitive man. Perhaps that rejection was enough to cause him to kill. Victoria wrote Bruce Duncan’s name on her list and put an asterisk next to it.
Not Gerard Cohen. True, he lived close to Peg, but that didn’t mean anything. He was elderly, probably in his mid-seventies, not likely to dash around strangling people. In addition, he was
struggling to rebuild his own life after his wife’s death, concentrating on routine and normality.
Dawn Haines? She had been at the theater in view for the entire dress rehearsal.
This brought Victoria to Roderick again, and she reluctantly put an asterisk next to his name.
She made a note to find out more about Leonard Vincent, Peg’s ex-husband. More often than not, killers were members of the victim’s family, so she put an asterisk next to Leonard Vincent’s name. She’d never met him, as far as she knew. She would have to think of some way to cross paths with him accidentally.
She paused over Teddy’s father, Jefferson Vanderhoop. Then she put a small, faint check mark next to his name, just to be fair. She would have to find out what his alibi had been. But Jefferson Vanderhoop was a poet. Rough, but powerful. Someday, if he kept writing, he’d be quite good. She erased her check mark.
She crossed Teddy’s mother’s name off her list, then had second thoughts and wrote “stet”, the printers’ term for “let it stand,” next to Amanda Vanderhoop. Had Amanda’s call to the police really been from Los Angeles? With a cellular phone, she might easily have been calling from right here. Amanda claimed she had arrived by boat after the storm and had called Casey from the ferry terminal, but neither Victoria nor Casey had seen her disembark from the ferry. Victoria couldn’t imagine Amanda as a killer, though she had an uneasy feeling about her. Part of that feeling was because of Teddy’s reaction to his mother’s boyfriend. Could the boyfriend be the killer with some motive Victoria couldn’t now imagine? Even though rehearsals had been going on for almost two months, Victoria had never seen the boyfriend. He’d never picked up Teddy and Amanda, never sat in on rehearsals.
Who was he, anyway? An Islander? She wrote “Amanda’s b.f.” and put a large asterisk next to his name. She would have to ask Teddy more about him.
She hated to think that Ruth Byron or her son, George, had
any part in the killings, but in fairness, she put a small check mark next to each of their names.
Then, of course, there was Rebecca, Dearborn’s wife and Ruth Byron’s sister. Victoria could imagine Becca without compunction killing off anyone who annoyed her, simply to get herself cast in a starring role. Had she been on Island at the right time? Victoria punched a hole in her paper by putting a large firm asterisk next to Becca’s name. Rebecca, even more than Dearborn, had ravaged Victoria’s play.
Victoria put her notes in her cloth bag and was easing herself off the stone wall again when Howland’s old white station wagon pulled up the hill and stopped in front of her.
“Sorry, Victoria. It took longer than I expected. Summer traffic.” He escorted her to the passenger side and opened the door. “What’s going on?”
“Too much.” Victoria explained about Roderick picking her up at the coffeehouse because the audience was howling for the author. “He confessed to killing both Peg Storm and Robert Scott.”
“Really?”
“Then he tried, according to him, to commit suicide, and obviously failed. Someone had substituted a toy gun with a red flag for the stage gun with which he’d intended to kill himself.”
Howland laughed.
“It’s not amusing. From what I can gather,” Victoria went on, “Nora had loaded the stage gun with blanks. An unknown someone apparently took out the blanks and loaded the gun with real bullets.”
“Roderick.”
“No, not Roderick. He unloaded the real bullets, thinking they were blanks, and reloaded the gun with his own real bullets.”
“And after that, someone unknown substituted the toy gun with the gag flag? That’s hardly plausible, Victoria.”
Victoria shrugged. “That’s what happened.”
“Where would someone buy a gun with a flag that can be shot out of it?”
“Shirley’s Hardware, of course. We can ask Mary.” Victoria scribbled a note to herself. After a pause, she cleared her throat. “I suppose I need to tell you something else, too,” Victoria glanced at Howland. “You’ll find out when we get to my house.”
“Now what?”
“Teddy’s been hiding in my attic.”
Howland erupted. “For God’s sake, Victoria.”
An in-line skater suddenly appeared in front of them and Howland jammed his foot on the brake and swerved to miss him. The Rollerblader looked over his shoulder and continued skating, gliding from one side of the lane to the other.
“Taking up the entire right lane,” Howland muttered. “At six miles an hour, or whatever his top speed is. On the main road.”
Victoria had braced herself, with a hand on the dashboard.
Howland picked up speed again. “The police have been out in force, day and night, and the boy’s mother is understandably upset.”
“I suggested to Sergeant Smalley that he call off the search as soon as I discovered Teddy. He didn’t want his mother to know where he was.”
“Victoria, you can’t ignore his mother’s rights.” Howland turned abruptly onto Old County Road. A car coming toward him honked. Howland jerked his head at the driver.
“His mother’s boyfriend seems to be a problem for Teddy,” Victoria continued, once Howland was on the smooth stretch of Old County Road.
“His mother has rights, Victoria.” Howland emphasized each word. “You simply can’t hide her child from her.”
“Well, I did.” Victoria faced forward, her mouth set in a straight line. “I promised Teddy I wouldn’t tell anyone where he was.”
The cook, Red Callaghan, and his two colleagues got into the back of the county van. Gus Ferreira drove them as far as the airport entrance on the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road and dropped them off with a warning about how he’d be right behind them and don’t try any tricks.
The three wore their own jeans and T-shirts and the county’s fluorescent orange vests. They carried pointed sticks with which they were to spear papers and plastic roadside litter. Litter and things they had to bend down to pick up, like cans and bottles, they would deposit into burlap bags slung over their shoulders.
They walked steadily. The vehicle, on the other hand, lurched up behind them, waited until they got pretty far ahead, then lurched again at five or six miles an hour. It would catch up and wait. Boring.
The work crew was not bored, however. The two young trusties, one a white guy named Adam, one a black guy named Everet, called back and forth to one another, making jokes about items they found along the road. Chef Callaghan ignored the jokes as puerile. Occasionally, he’d pull up a stalk of tall grass and chew on the end until he got to the tough stringy part. Then he’d fling the spent grass off to the side and pull up another, spearing litter as he chewed. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
The afternoon was what Victoria Trumbull would call “typical Vineyard weather,” the kind of day that occurred once or
twice a summer. Dry and cool, with a brilliant blue sky that went on forever.
Chewinks rustled in the dead leaves beyond the bicycle path. Crows cawed messages to one another, giving the location of fresh roadkill. The air smelled of sun-baked pine, scrub oak, and the salt sea. The surf rumbled on the south shore.
Occasionally, Chef Callaghan would glance over his shoulder at Gus in the county van, and Gus would raise a hand in acknowledgment. The chef would wave back and continue spearing and chewing and bending over to pick up something or other.
They’d gotten as far as the place called Jimmy Green’s, where the last heath hen in the world had lived and had died its lonely death in the 1930s. Red Callaghan glanced over his shoulder. The county vehicle seemed farther away than usual, and Gus seemed to be resting his head on the half-opened window.
The cook pulled up another stalk of grass and continued to walk and spear and chew. The next time he glanced up, the vehicle was in the same place, and he could just make out, in the distance, Gus’s closed eyes and open mouth.
Callaghan waited until a car passed, then with a burst of energy, shucked off his vest and tossed it into the woods that had grown up since the heath hen died, tossed the pointed stick after the vest and the half-full burlap sack on top of the vest and the stick.
“I don’t know about you guys,” he called out to his fellow workers, “but I’m outta here,” and he took off through the woods on the north side of the road.
 
At the police barracks, Sergeant Smalley was dealing with more problems than he wanted. He had summarily dismissed both Bruce Duncan and Roderick Hill after the call from the sheriff. The sheriff hadn’t been able to reach Gus Ferreira, who was driving the county vehicle for the roadside detail.
“His radio okay?” Smalley had asked.
“Should be,” the sheriff replied. “We check them before use, and besides, Gus has a backup cell phone.”
“Could be in a dead reception area.”
“Possibly. The crew was working east from the airport along the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road.
State road,”
he added, with emphasis.
“Okay, you made your point.”
“Appreciate it if you’d locate the van, see what Gus is up to,” said the sheriff. “Stop by the jail first and I’ll give you details.”
Smalley stowed papers in his briefcase to work on at home. He felt sorry for himself. He’d have to cancel his dinner date with Alison. Damn. All because Gus was probably taking a leak in the bushes beside the road.
 
Roderick and Bruce Duncan left their names, addresses, and phone numbers with Tim Eldredge, downstairs at the front desk of the police barracks.
“I don’t suppose I can get a ride with you?” Duncan asked, outside.
“You suppose right,” said Roderick. “You wouldn’t let me get in a word edgewise.”
“You heading for the theater?”
Roderick pulled an enormous watch out of the depths of his costume. “The evening performance is scheduled in less than three hours.”
“I’m heading that way.”
“Thought you were avoiding the theater. You got something against my uncle and aunt? You think a serial killer is on the loose? Think you’re next? Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”
“Just a minute,” said Duncan, holding up a hand. “I only said I was
heading
that way. I don’t expect you to go out of your way for me.”
“Give me one good reason why I should give you a ride.”
“Save energy,” said Duncan.
“Oh, hell. Get in.”
“You can let me off in front of the theater.”
“Right.”
 
Once he had picked her up, Howland drove from the playhouse to Victoria’s. The news that Teddy had been hiding out at Victoria’s all along had put him in an evil temper. “Everybody has to be notified about Teddy being found, Victoria. The authorities, the parents, everybody.”
“Alison contacted everyone except his mother. She can’t seem to find her,” Victoria replied.
Howland braked for a string of mopeds. “Goddamned road hazards.” He blasted his horn and steered into the left lane. An approaching car pulled off onto the shoulder until Howland was safely past.
“Watch it, buddy!” the driver shouted.
“They’re all out of shape. Saving money by riding pillion.”
“‘Riding pillion’,” Victoria repeated. “How quaint.”
“Shorts and sandals and bare arms. Think they’re in an amusement park ride. Draining the resources of the hospital.”
Victoria cleared her throat again. “He’s got chicken pox.”
“Jeezus Christ, Victoria.” Howland slammed his hand on the steering wheel.
“I had nothing to do with the chicken pox.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you.”
They approached Whippoorwill Farm, and Howland slowed to let a truck turn out. The driver waved. Howland ignored him.
“Who was that?” Victoria asked, turning to see who was driving.
“Who knows. Who’s with Teddy?”
“Dr. McAlistair is with him.”
“Alison, yes. We have to find his mother. And his father.”
“His father is on the way. He was reading poetry at the coffeehouse.”
Howland braked to avoid three crows dining on fresh-killed
skunk. Victoria wound up her window. The car behind him honked.
“Following too close,” muttered Howland.
“Teddy’s father is a poet, too. Like Roderick.” Victoria glanced over at Howland. His face was flushed.
“So you, Madame Detective, have eliminated him from the list of suspects because he’s a poet?”
“Not entirely. I’m open-minded.”
 
Callaghan made his way to the bicycle path and hiked along it briskly, whistling a merry tune, hands in his pockets. He slowed briefly to check his watch, and continued. A half-dozen helmeted bicyclists came up from behind him.
“Nice day!” the leader called out.
“Got that right,” he called back to the waving orange pennant on the last bike.
After he’d walked a half-mile or so, he checked his watch again, and then cut through the huckleberry brush that separated the bicycle path from the road, waited a few minutes until a dark blue Toyota approached from Edgartown, and stuck out his thumb.
The car stopped. He opened the passenger door, and the driver, a young woman wearing sunglasses, leaned over the passenger seat. “Where are you heading?” she asked. Besides her sunglasses, she had on a skimpy bright orange bathing suit top and a towel knotted so her belly button showed.
“Vineyard Haven,” he answered. “Thanks for picking me up.”
“No problem. I’m going that way. You work there?” She glanced in the rearview mirror and took off with a squeal of tires.
He fastened his seat belt hurriedly. “Meeting a friend.”
“Girlfriend?”
He shrugged. He did not want to converse. He decided he’d better not call attention to himself by being surly. “Nice day,” he mumbled.
“Gorgeous.”
“Going to the beach?”
“I’ve just been. The water’s perfect.”
So they talked about the weather, swimming, beaches, the summer crowds, and she turned right onto Old County Road.
Callaghan saw, a moment too late, an old white Renault station wagon approaching, and turned his head away.
“You see something?” his driver asked.
“I thought I saw a wood lily.”
She slowed. “Want me to stop so you can take a look?”
“No! No thanks. I need to get to Vineyard Haven. Thanks for asking, though.” He could feel sweat trickling down his forehead and back.

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