“No, he wasn’t involved with any women at work or even in Boston, as far as I know. Until he and I started going out, that is.”
“Had he ever been married?”
She paused. “A long time back, when he was still in college. I think they were both just too young. He never really talked about it.”
“How about his friends here on the island?”
“He had a lot of them. The Marshall Lea Foundation people, your friend Joe Begay, his neighbors. He got a lot of kids interested in the environment. Their parents, too, sometimes . . .”
Tears welled up in her eyes once more. They streamed down her cheeks. She stopped talking and stared through me at some image I could not see.
I put Joshua on my shoulder and got up.
“I’ll drop all charges,” I said. “Maybe they’ll try to get you on disturbing the peace or something like that, but they can’t nail you for heavy-duty stuff unless I go along with them, and I won’t.”
She was still looking into space. “I don’t know how anyone could have done it,” she said in a watery voice. “Everybody loved him.”
— 13 —
At home, I put Joshua in his crib and told him to go to sleep, and to my surprise, he did. What a guy. Then I called Joe Begay.
“Are you calling from your cell?” he asked. “Is this your one phone call? I heard about what happened to Larry Ingalls.”
I gave him the details.
When I was done, he said, “I can see why the fuzz like you for the job. Opportunity, motive, the works.”
Everybody’s a comedian. “Well, I didn’t do the job.”
“I believe you. But if you didn’t, who did? Besides Zack Delwood and a thousand other people who hated Ingalls’s guts, who’s as good a suspect as you?”
“I thought I’d better try to find out, just in case the law likes me so much that it doesn’t look anywhere else. There’s an election coming up next year, and the sheriff is planning on running again. He can use a good conviction.”
“You sound a little cynical, J.W., like you don’t have a lot of faith in the judicial system.”
As a matter of fact, while I’d been a cop in Boston I’d seen too many bad guys walk out of too many courtrooms to have total confidence in either cops or courts. Half the time it was the cops’ fault that the accused walked. Eager to solve a case, the police would grab the most likely suspect and go for the gold with him rather than pursuing other possible perps. And when the prosecution’s case was weak, as it often was, the suspect, almost always “known to the police” but not necessarily guilty of this particular crime, would be back on the streets almost before the cops were.
The sheriff of Dukes County was not a hanging sheriff by any means, but a conviction in a murder case certainly wouldn’t hurt his political cause; and it might do wonders for Olive Otero’s career.
I told Begay about my visit with Beth Harper. He listened, then said, “Are you sure you want her out there walking around?”
“No, but I’ll have an eye out for her next time. I think it was just a one-time thing. I think sitting in that cell may have given her second thoughts about being a gun moll.”
Begay gave a small grunt. “Your insights into women aren’t the keenest in the world.”
True enough. “Hogwash,” I said. “I landed Zee, didn’t I?”
“A fluke, just like Toni marrying me. Well, what can I do for you? You didn’t call just to bring me up to date on this business.”
“Like I say, I want to find out who done it, so people will get off my back. I don’t like having cops watching me all of the time.”
“Nobody’s been watching you, J.W. Don’t be paranoid.”
“You know what I mean. Knowing that somebody with a badge has it in his head that you might be a danger to society.”
And he did know what I meant. He was, I suspected, another one of those retired or supposedly retired operatives whose Vineyard addresses lead some to refer to the island as Spook Haven. One thing I knew Begay could still do was get information. In this case, he might have it firsthand.
“Ingalls had a house somewhere up Chilmark,” I said. “I’d like to take a look at it. Do you know where it is?”
There was a short pause on the other end of the line. Then he said, ’Just in case anybody ever asks me, I don’t think I want to know any more about your plans, but I can tell you where the house is.”
And he did. Ingalls’s place was at the end of one of those long dirt drives that lead off North Road. As Begay described it, I realized that I knew the road.
“Say, isn’t that the road where Moonbeam lives?”
“How do you know where Moonbeam lives? I didn’t know you two were pals.”
“We aren’t. We were trading scallops for a pig. A couple of years ago. I had the scallops and he had the pig. He raises pigs and slaughters them, in case you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised.”
Moonbeam was thought by some to be the Vineyard’s answer to the Snopes. His house was falling down, his wife was haggard and fiercely protective of their many children, his outbuildings were disintegrating, and his yard was full of the broken, rusty, rotting items that you see wherever you encounter the homes of the rural poor, who rarely throw anything completely away, just in case they might need it sometime.
Moonbeam kept chickens and pigs and an occasional sheep, and what he didn’t sell or barter, he ate. There was a roughly fenced garden behind his house, in which his wife grew potatoes, beans, and whatever else she could protect from the weeds no one else in the family would help her pull. And behind that was a still incompletely filled trench in which a sewer line led back to a septic sys-tem still uncovered years after it had been installed.
But Moonbeam could slaughter a pig as well as anybody, and that was all I had required. I’d cooked a lot of sate and other porcine delights that winter.
According to Joe Begay, Lawrence Ingalls’s island house was at the far end of the drive that first led past Moon-beam’s place.
Finding the house would be no problem, but since the Berubes had sharp eyes to go with their dim wits, my visit would not be a secret, and the illegal entry that I was contemplating would have to be done leaving no clue that I’d gone in. Bad enough that it would be known that I’d gone to the house at all, but on the other hand, what could anyone make of that, other than that I was nosy?
I thanked Joe Begay for the information.
“Look,” he said, “I wasn’t what you’d call a close friend of Larry Ingalls, but I knew him and had respect for the work he did for the DEP, and I want to know who killed him. So, if you need a Tonto, let me know.”
Joe Begay was part Navajo and part Hopi and, he’d once told me, probably part whoever else had passed through Arizona in the last four hundred years; but he didn’t strike me as any kind of Tonto.
“If things get complicated,” I said, "you get to be the Lone Ranger and I’ll be Tonto.”
“Keep in touch, Kemo Sabe.”
I looked at my watch. Now seemed as good a time as any. I’d be back before Zee got home.
I put my yard sale-purchased lock picks in my pocket. I was sorry that Eddie the Wire wasn’t coming along to give me pointers I might need, but I was getting better with the picks and hoped that I’d be up to the task alone.
Joshua was gone, gone, gone. I packed a bag for him, then wrapped him in his blanket and put him into his car seat, still sleeping. I wondered if I was the first would-be housebreaker to take a baby along with him when he went to work. Joshua was getting an early introduction into the life of crime. I almost, but not quite, felt guilty, and definitely decided not to tell Zee about my excursion.
Chilmark is arguably the loveliest township on Martha’s Vineyard. It has the island’s highest hills, is bounded by the Atlantic on the south, by Vineyard Sound on the north, and by Gay Head on the west, and it hosts the only nude beach on the island (reason enough for some peopl
e to live in no other town). It has three roads leading east to west: South Road, Middle Road, and North Road. Middle Road is the prettiest, but all three wind past farms, old houses, and stone fences, and all three have narrow, sandy lanes leading off through the trees to houses where people who like their privacy live. The lane leading to Moon-beam’s disintegrating home and outbuildings, and then on to Ingalls’s house, looked no different than any other, but was identifiable by the ramshackle Berube mailbox that fronted it. »
I turned onto the lane and passed through the trees and undergrowth until the rubble of Moonbeam’s few acres began to appear: two abandoned cars, long since stripped of anything useful; an aging backhoe by the sewer line (which had some fresh fill in it; quel surprise! Had Moonbeam actually been doing some work at home before taking off for parts unknown?); a broken plow from ancient days; a shapeless lump of cloth, stuffing, and springs that had once been a mattress; rusty buckets and tubs, full of holes and dents; unidentifiable objects and pieces of paper lodged in bushes and trees; the wretched refuse of a lifetime of poverty. Moonbeam had no need of the community dump. He lived amid his own. I wondered if the chief had ever caught up with him.
I passed his house, which was slowly settling into the earth, and waved at Connie Berube, who straightened from tending to her latest baby, and stared at my passing truck. Here and there in the yard, others of her children stood and gazed at my truck as well, all of them beautiful, all of them empty-eyed. Somehow they had all inherited their mother’s one-time loveliness and their father’s dull mind. Exquisite and delicate, their faces betrayed no sign of intellect. They were born to fail, to be victims. Only some kind fate could save them, and such fortune seemed unlikely.
Moonbeam’s pickup was not there, but Connie’s newish, blueish Subaru sedan was parked in the yard. In spite of their poverty, Moonbeam and his wife had pretty good wheels. A crooked antenna on the top of his house indicated that they also had TV. Cars and the tube; the necessities of modern living. Moonbeam’s until the bank repossessed them, at least. I wondered how he got financing, but let the idea go since no one understands less about money than I do, and I’ve given up trying to learn, convinced that my lack of money sense is akin to tone deafness or color blindness, that there is no hope for me, and that I’m wasting my time trying to make it otherwise. I grasp the barter system, but I leave all more sophisticated financial theory and practice to the experts, who, I suspect, don’t really understand such things, either. No wonder they call economics the dismal science.
The light blue eyes in those delicately boned faces followed me until the lane turned and I drove out of their sight. A quarter of a mile farther on, I came to the end of the road and to Ingalls’s house. I stopped and got out, understanding for the first time just how much money Ingalls’s family must have. For this was not a house built on the salary of a state biologist.
It was a big place, set high on a hill, overlooking Vine-yard Sound and the Elizabeth Islands. A sandy walk led down to a private beach where a Sailfish was pulled up above the high-tide line. There was a veranda on the ocean side of the house, a small barn in back that served as a two-car garage, and seemed to have a guest apartment on the second floor. Comfortable old lawn furniture sat in the shade of large trees beside a flower garden. The house was new, but with its traditional weathered-cedar shingles and gray trim, it looked like it had always been there.
I knocked on the door, then walked around the house calling hellos. No one appeared. I went back to the barn and knocked on the side door there. No one. I went to the back door of the house and knocked. Then I walked down to the beach and looked in both directions. No one. I went back to the rear of the house, looked around in the guilty way people do when they’re about to, say, urinate behind a tree, and got out my lock picks.
Lawrence Ingalls’s house was better than most, but his locks weren’t, and I was inside pretty fast, hoping that I wasn’t setting off any silent alarms in the Chilmark police station. I shut the door behind me and looked around.
What was I looking for? I wasn’t sure. Anything that might tell me who might have disliked Ingalls enough to shoot him. I doubted that I’d find any such thing, but like the jazz man said, “One never knows, do one?”
I was in a fair-sized mud room off the kitchen. It was neat and clean, with comfortable benches where you could sit down to take off your boots before going into the house. There were a couple of closets for coats and hats. I looked inside of them and found rain gear, work gloves, a couple of summer jackets, and some Bean boots.
I went into the kitchen. It was big and well laid out, the sort of kitchen I’d love to have. It was so clean that I wondered if Ingalls actually used it. I looked in the cabinets and in the big pantry and found the normal kitchen stuff: dishes, pots and pans, utensils, canned foods, flour, sugar, salt, a few spices, and such.
The fridge held milk and salad makings, a couple of beers, cans of soft drinks, several candy bars, and a half-full bottle of white wine. The freezer was mostly full of ice cream in several shapes and forms: on sticks, in sandwiches, and in bulk. Ingalls had apparently had a sweet tooth. There were also a couple of frozen pizzas in there with the ice cream. He’d been a snacker, too.
I went into the big combined dining and living room. There was a huge new television set against one wall, but the rest of the furniture was old and comfortable-looking. Rich people, they say, never buy furniture, they have furniture. When one of them gets another house, they fill it with furniture they already have somewhere else. Ingalls’s furniture was that kind. The room’s decor was Oriental in part, with statuary, wall hangings, and artifacts from India and points east, reflecting Ingalls’s interest in that part of the world.
The television set was placed on a cabinet beside a VCR. Inside the cabinet were dozens of videotapes, mostly of adventure films and children’s movies. Many had titles I didn’t recognize. There were also travel films, mostly about the Far East, and unopened boxes of video film. On a bottom shelf was a camcorder, another popular electronic item for which I somehow had never found a need, although I could see how one could be both useful and a lot of fun. Now that we had Joshua, maybe we should get one and record his childhood, so he’d have a record later on.
Or maybe not. I put the question in my Ask Zee file.
I went into what was a den or library. The walls held many filled bookshelves and there was a large desk. On its top were a computer, a printer, and what I guessed was a fax machine. Books and papers were stacked on both sides of the machines. Against one wall was a line of wooden file cabinets. A lovely, highly erotic Indian painting hung between two windows that looked out over Vineyard Sound.
I went to the desk and fingered through the papers. It was all environmental stuff: brochures, letters, memos, notes. The books were books about ecology, trees, animals, tides, waste management, aquafilters, birds.
I tugged at the drawers of the desk. Locked.
Hmmmmm.
I went to the file cabinets and tried them. Locked again. Hmmmmm, again.
I went to the bookcases. Some of the shelves were filled with books about environmental issues. Others held travel books, particularly about the East. Some of them were old. Older than Lawrence Ingalls, certainly. But other shelves held different material. Here and there I spotted a title I knew, because when I’d been in the Boston PD, I’d met a fellow who had quite a collection of such stuff. Ingalls had the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, and the Gulistan of Sa’di, and a copy of Chin Ping Mei. I browsed further and found a copy of The Perfumed Garden of Sheikh Nefzaoui. This classic erotica was mixed with more modern, generally less attractively illustrated books on the same subjects.
I have no fault to find with people for whom such writings and artwork are interesting, although I personally find real women, Zee in particular, more sensual and erotic than images or verbal descriptions of lovers and sex.
Still, the books and illustrations did cause me to pause and consider the locked drawer
s of the desk and cabinets.
I got out my lock picks and started toward the desk.
As I did, I heard a car drive into the yard.
— 14 —
Fear and guilt lend us wings. I was out the back door and locking it behind me before the car came to a halt. As I heard the car’s engine stop, I walked around to the front of the house, hands in my pockets.
I recognized the car as the one I’d seen in Moonbeam’s yard. The driver was Connie Berube. She was frowning, arms crossed in front of her, hands clutching opposite elbows. I ignored her and went right to the Land Cruiser, where I checked on Joshua. Tired Josh was still snoozing.
“What are you doing up here?” asked Connie Berube, glancing around as if she expected to spot some vandalism I might have performed.
I made a sweeping gesture, encompassing the whole property. “I wanted to talk to whoever’s here, but nobody’s home. I’ve looked on the beach and out back. Nobody.”
She stared at me with suspicious eyes. “Ain’t nobody here, mister.” The suspicious eyes narrowed. “Do I know you?”
It seemed a little late for subterfuge. “J. W. Jackson,” I said. “We met a couple of years ago. I traded some scallops for a pig. You may remember.”
She thought about that, then nodded. “I remember.” Her eyes were pale blue and there was a furtive, challenging quality to them. I thought that anyone living with Moonbeam would need to become feral to survive. I wondered where she’d come from, and how Moonbeam had persuaded her to marry him and produce that hoard of lovely, empty children.
“Mr. Ingalls is dead,” she now said. “You hear what happened?”
A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard Page 10