Westfarrow Island

by Paul A. Barra

  The sheriff’s detective wanted to look at the actual hole the explosion made, so Tagliabue removed the temporary patch inside the cabin. He needed to take it off anyway to effect a smooth repair, he told himself, as he labored to jerk out the nails and pry off the boards. With bright sun streaming through the cabin hatch, he could see a few shadowy marks here and there around the splintered edge of the hole. Coleman touched his finger to them and remarked: “Powder burns. Amazing there’s any left after flooding and repairs.”

  With a penknife he scraped some of the residue into a small glassine bag. He took a Nikon digital SLR from a black carrier he brought with him and snapped a few photos.

  “Our plane brought the body back with it last night . . .”

  “So the trip wasn’t entirely wasteful.”

  Coleman shot him a black look and continued: “The ME thinks the vic was pressed up against the bomb when it went off, based on his wounds.”

  “You think he was knocked out and stuffed in there or something?”

  “There’s a gunshot wound in his back. He may have been killed by that, although the doc don’t think it was a mortal wound. More likely your friend saw the perps set the explosive device and crawled into that corner to try to dismantle it or something after they left. Maybe they wounded him first, I don’t know. If the bomb goes off without his body in the way, I’m thinking the cabin fills up fast once you start making a bow wave and the sea gets above the waterline. You maybe don’t get the water out in time. Some of the pieces the island constable found mighta been a timing device. It was maybe set to go off when you’re out on the ocean a ways. White sets it off early trying to defuse it or whatever the hell he was doing in the cabin. Plus, my guy tells me the damage to the boat could have been greater without his body shielding the blast.”

  Tagliabue stared at the cop. Coleman said, in a slightly quieter voice: “At least, that’s my working theory.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Tagliabue whispered.

  “Amen to that, pal. It’s good to have friends like Joshua White.”

  They looked around the cabin for a while longer and then went back to the station house where Coleman interrogated him. Tagliabue told him about Agnes Ann, the divorced wife of John “Jack” Brunson, a mob lawyer.

  “I know that mutt. You think he’s a mob lawyer?”

  “He’d like people to think so,” Tagliabue answered. “He represented Carlo Netherton in a civil case once and does his drinking at Pelham East. Y’know, D’Annunzio’s place? I’ve never seen him on the television speaking for any gangsters, but he wears shiny sort of suits and smokes cigars and acts like he’s connected. Same as Peter D’Annunzio. He’s purported to be close with Al Delgado and his bunch over in Portsmouth.”

  Seeing that Coleman was unconvinced, he went on: “First time I met him, he says, ‘Hey, how ya doin’, pal?’ People don’t talk like that around here. At that same cocktail party where I met him I overheard him tell a man that he knows a guy and maybe can find out something. When Agnes Ann filed for divorce he made some veiled threats.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “She won a racehorse in the settlement, a yearling filly. He saw the potential of the horse and wanted it badly, but so did she. He told her after the decree came down to, quote, check her feed bag every day.”

  “Mrs. Brunson told you that?”

  “Aye.”

  “Still,” said the detective, scratching at his head with the balls of his fingers, “be hard to prove that he meant it to threaten her, or the horse.”

  “Agnes Ann took it as a threat, serious enough to move out to the island with her horse and her son.”

  “She got a house out there?”

  Tagliabue nodded. “Her mother left it to her.”

  “She still live there?”

  “She does, although she’s on the mainland just now like I said.”

  “I probly need to talk to her.”

  “I’ll bring her over. You got a sheet on Jack Brunson, by the way?”

  Coleman looked as if he wasn’t going to answer, but then said, “The word is he’s dealing but we ain’t never got a thing on him.” “

  Why are you suspicious?”

  “He seems to have a lot of dough, got a cabin up in the Adirondack Mountains, and just bought a new big, expensive boat, but he never seems to be doing any work. He don’t even have a secretary at his office. How many cases can he be taking on?”

  Tagliabue thought about that while the detective hunched over his computer screen adding to his incident report.

  “You releasing my boat?”

  Coleman looked up. “In the morning. Forensics will be done with it by then. Just don’t take off on a world cruise or nothing. Bring the lady in tomorrow morning too.”

  Tagliabue ate a bowl of fish chowder and a hard roll at a kiosk on the square near City Hall before he Ubered down to Cronk’s to retrieve his Jeepster. He drove back to his apartment, arguing with his eyelids all the way. He made coffee and read his e-mail and cleaned the place a little, wasting time. It was too early to sleep. He heated a can of soup for supper, but by seven p.m. he gave it up. He fell into his own bed and slept for eight straight hours, dreamless every one.

  It was still dark when he woke up. It was disorienting at first, until he lay there replaying his day and thinking of the things he still had to do. He made coffee and went out into the cool damp street. Tom Sharkey’s blue television light was the only break in the darkness. Sharkey was his retired neighbor, a widower who filled his days and nights with the company of soaps and series. His slumped silhouette filled the shade on his living room window as Tagliabue got into his car.

  Navigating the quiet streets slowly in his Jeepster, Tagliabue made his way back to Cronk’s. The boatyard was silent in the still early morning. Gulls sat on bollards with their feathers fluffed against the chill, workboats rested in their berths, the dew on their superstructures shimmering in the yellow lamplight. He walked down to Maven and noted her tight lines and clean deck. He went below and observed that just a little water had splashed in through the holed hull. Back topside, satisfied all was shipshape, he stared at nothing for a while. He thought about Joshua, about the missing tooth behind his left canine, a gap that showed only when he smiled, and about the constant growl of discontent that issued from his mouth as he went about an onboard task. It was going to be a different life without him.

  He conjured up a scene when the mate arrived on the dock at Cronk’s Wednesday night and found someone in the cabin. Did Joshua try to escape when he was shot? Had he already discovered the explosive and was trying to disarm it when he was shot?

  Somebody must have heard something. Cronk’s was a commercial dockage and yard facility. People didn’t live aboard their boats as some did in marinas that handled pleasure boats, but it was practically in the city. Houses and businesses surrounded the place.

  “What the hell happened, Joshua? How’d you find the bomb?”

  Realizing he’d spoken aloud, Tagliabue left the docks. He started the Jeepster and listened to its soft, powerful, and even rumble. He put it in first and drove to Chad’s Deli, parking around back and thumping on the kitchen door. It was still an hour before the place opened to serve breakfast. His cousin Maurizio opened the battered tin door to his knock, letting out a cloud of damp heat smelling of baking bread and frying bacon.

  “Hey, Anthony. Come in, come in. Damn, it’s hard to believe it’s halfway through April already and this fucking cold at night still.”

  “Forty-five hardly qualifies as cold, Maury.”

  “Then why you rubbing your hands together, eh?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Hey, it don’t matter, Cuz. Good to see you, cold or not. Come in and talk to me.”

  Tagliabue sat in a wooden chair at a butcher’s block table while his cousin went back to work kneading and chopping, his hands moving constantly, surely.

  “You hear about Joshua, Maury?�
��

  “No, what?”

  “He was killed, on my boat.”

  Maurizio’s hands stopped: “You mean that was Maven? Your fucking boat was blown up?”

  “Not quite.”

  “It was on the radio this morning, but they didn’t have no names or nothing. What’s going on, Cuz?”

  Tagliabue told his cousin about the hole in his boat and how he found his mate’s body while he was steaming out to Westfarrow.

  “Holy shit. The radio said there was a casualty but didn’t give no details. The dead guy was Joshua, huh? That poor old bastard.”

  Maurizio went back to work, still shaking his head from side to side, thick hair wobbling like Moses’s burning bush.

  “Who did it, you got any idea? That shitbag Harris, I bet. That sounds like something he’d do, the piece of shit.”

  Marvin “Magpie” Harris was an associate of local wannabe hood Peter D’Annunzio who flogged some weed and stolen cigarettes, protected pool halls and waterfront bars, and ran a few prostitutes out of a tablecloth restaurant called Pelham East. D’Annunzio owned three Pelham restaurants, the main one in Bath, one in Portsmouth, and one on Westfarrow Island. Magpie was known for his quick temper and quicker fists but had never been associated with murder. In fact, murder was rare in Bath, the occasion usually a domestic dispute that got diseased. Still, Tagliabue knew, Marv Harris liked to play the ponies and had been upset when Jack Brunson lost the promising filly, Francine, in his divorce to Agnes Ann, especially now that she had reached racing age. A friend of Tagliabue had overheard Magpie bitching about missing out on a piece of the horse. It sounded to this friend as if Brunson planned to syndicate the racer and had invited Harris to get in on the ownership, as an inducement to maintain the relationship between the two men. At the time it hadn’t sounded serious enough to Tagliabue to warrant his intervention.

  People on the dark margins of Bath, the Magpies of the area, knew that Tagliabue and Agnes Ann were a couple—and they all respected his boundaries. But as far as anyone knew, Maven was merely supplying feed to her barn on Westfarrow Island when he sailed over to see her. Tagliabue couldn’t work out a connection among Marv Harris and the boat and the horse that would be worth trying sabotage. To say nothing of murder. Motives seemed in short supply.

  “You hear anything about Magpie getting into something new?”

  “Naw,” Maury replied. “He’s still pushing a coupla whores and running his book, far as I know. He’s a fucking mutt though. I don’t know what he had against poor old Joshua.”

  It sounded to Tagliabue that his cousin was convinced that Marv the Magpie had killed Joshua.

  Maurizio was back working, his chin wobbling, face dark. He took out a tray of plump chickens and began separating the joints with a cleaver. Tagliabue moved his chair back from the chopping block.

  An hour later Agnes Ann and Tagliabue ate bacon biscuits from Chad’s that Maurizio had made up for them. They sat in the tiny kitchenette of the motel where she was staying.

  “Jesse still in the bunk?”

  Agnes Ann made some muffled humming noises and moved her hands around in circles, long fingers floating in the air, until she finished chewing. “No,” she said. “Mr. Collier took him over to the regional airport yesterday afternoon once they got Francine settled. He still has a couple of months of school left. Auntie May-belle’s place is not far from us, as you know.” She smiled at him. “He’s a good kid, so she doesn’t mind looking out for him for a time. She may wonder what’s become of Francine though.”

  “What’s the cover story?”

  “Cover story? This ain’t Watergate, young man. It’s all legal and it even makes sense. Jacob Collier is a fine trainer.”

  “You don’t have to convince me.”

  “I know. Well, we are telling anyone who expresses an interest that we have taken the filly to Mr. Collier for training, which is true enough. Since we don’t know how well she’ll respond we are understandably vague about the timing. The meeting at Saratoga starts in three months, and the track is three states away, so I don’t expect too many people will link her training with that racetrack. What do you think?”

  “I agree. It’s all going to turn out to be an expensive proposition, but it has to be done sooner or later. You can’t expect to get the animal to top readiness on Westfarrow Island.”

  “Please let me worry about the money angle, Tony. It’s actually kind of fun spending some of Jack’s ill-gotten cash.”

  He nodded at her, relaxed and comfortable, returning her easy grin. Money issues were not something that bothered Anthony Tagliabue much. He made a fair and honest living hauling material in his boat, and he augmented his income with highly remunerative side work no one else knew about. No one who wasn’t involved, that is. He lived simply and paid most expenses in cash. The fact that Agnes Ann had land and a big bank account meant only that she could spend more than she usually did if she wanted to. If spending some of the loot from her divorce was fun for her, his only hope was that she enjoyed it.

  She looked at Tagliabue, her smile fading slowly. He was dressed in jeans and sandals under a blue fishing shirt that highlighted his eyes. His long legs were stretched out in front of him. He needed a shave but he often did. Her tongue slipped out of her mouth and licked her lower lip.

  “Speaking of fun,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”

  “Thanks, but I had a real good sleep last night.”

  Agnes Ann got up smoothly and grabbed him in a headlock. The two of them went to the bed that way, him laughing quietly and pretending to resist.

  They spent the rest of the morning naked and in the bed. She made an omelet for lunch before they departed, he for work and she for the sheriff’s office to see Detective Coleman and then over to Collier Stables to work out her filly. He offered her a ride but she had already arranged a long-term lease of a car. She seemed a bit defensive about the expense. Maybe money issues bothered her more than they did him.

  “It was not expensive and will be easy to just return it when I’m finished here and can get back to the island. It’s going to be cheaper than hiring taxis and the like, certainly more convenient.”

  She tootled off in her two-year-old Kia Soul and he drove to the Pelham East.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I got ten pallets of canned food and other supplies for the Pelham Island Restaurant. Nothing needs refrigeration. I also got a load of lumber, loose. You gotta tie it up.”

  The speaker looked at Tagliabue with his bushy brows up, waiting for affirmation. Tagliabue nodded: “Sounds okay, Max. Can you get it to the loading dock today?”

  “Yeah. We got Timmy O’Brien gonna pick it up at four, after work. That okay with you?”

  “I’ll be waiting at four thirty.”

  “Good. You going over to Westfarrow tonight?”

  “No, I think I’ll catch the early tide and be at the town dock by noon or so. I’ll radio Peters when I’m close.”

  Harry Peters was the kitchen manager of the Pelham Island Restaurant, a seasonal establishment on Westfarrow Island that catered mainly to visitors. The place was loading up for the summer business.

  “That’s done then,” said the other man, Max Shertzer. “Let me buy you a beer.”

  They went in through the kitchen and out to the bar. The lunch crowd was thinning out. The bartender was Timmy, the young man who would moonlight driving the cargo down to Cronk’s for the transit out to Westfarrow Island on Maven. He raised a palm.

  “Say, Anthony.”

  “Hullo, Tim. How’s the family?”

  “All doing fine, thanks. You okay?”

  Tagliabue nodded as he and Shertzer took stools at the kitchen end of the long glossy black bar. Glassware twinkled in the glow from hanging lamps. The carpet and the wall panels were a rich blue. The place was highlighted by gilded mirrors behind the stick and hundreds of gallons of salt water in aquaria dividing the bar from the dining room. Blue and yellow angelfish glided
through the electric turquoise of the tanks. Timmy served Tagliabue a draft Stella and Shertzer had his usual seltzer and lime.

  “Magpie been around, Max?”

  “You know me, Anthony. I just work here, run the kitchen, keep all the joints supplied. I don’t know who frequents the place.”

  The Pelham East was Peter D’Annunzio’s flagship restaurant, entirely different in motif from the Pelham Island on Westfarrow where Tagliabue was headed with the supplies. That was mainly a summer business, open, airy, and done in weathered wood. It was closed in the winter. The third D’Annunzio establishment was a French bistro in the Portland business district called Pelham Paris. Pelham was the name of the first subdivision D’Annunzio ever built, twenty years ago, and the original source of his wealth.

  Shertzer drank in silence for a minute and then made his excuses. Tagliabue hadn’t expected any serious response to his query; he knew Max pretended his job was an ordinary managerial position in a fancy restaurant. It paid well, according to local scuttlebutt. There was no way he was going to jeopardize it by getting involved in any of D’Annunzio’s unsavory side efforts, and that included Marv Magpie Harris. The word was out now that he had asked about Harris, though, and sooner or later it would filter down to the street that Maven’s skipper was looking for Marv.

  The beer made him sleepy. He went back to his apartment for a nap that lasted less than an hour. At two thirty he drove to Cronk’s and moved his boat over to the commercial dock area where he repaired the bomb hole again. It still looked like repaired damage, but it would hold and would have to do until he could afford the time to have it professionally done by Cronk’s boat builders.