“Good. Have you met any stars yet?”
“They pointed some out to me, in the commissary, but I haven’t seen any close up. Or at least I don’t think I have. I’m afraid that I’m really not very good at recognizing them, to tell you the truth. Maybe we should go to more movies or watch more TV after I get back, so I won’t be such a hick.”
Zee, the hick. “I’d think that all the glitter and glitz would make it hard for a star to keep both feet on the ground,” I said.
“Stars aren’t supposed to be on the ground,” said Zee, faking primness. “They’re supposed to be in the sky! That’s why they call them stars! But really, Emily tells me that a lot of them are just ordinary people, even though a lot of others aren’t.”
“Isn’t Kevin Turner her brother? Have you met him yet?”
“No, but I’m going to this weekend. Drew and Emily are throwing a party and Kevin is supposed to come. Right now, he’s on the road, promoting his latest movie, which I guess is another swashbuckler. Did you notice that I call him Kevin, even though I’ve never met him? That’s because I’m in Hollywood, and out here we’re all on a first-name basis with everybody!”
“And what does Emily say about him? Is he ordinary people, or the other kind?”
“Well, Emily is plain folks, but as a matter of fact she doesn’t have a lot to say about Kevin. So I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. Now tell me about you and Joshua. I can hardly wait to get home!”
So I told her about Josh and me going fishing on East Beach and getting a Spanish mackerel at the Jetties, and about the two of us taking the dinghy and fishing in vain for bonito off the Oak Bluffs dock, and about the trouble I was having with, of all things, our zucchinis, which seemed to be defying the laws of nature by dying instead of overrunning the earth as they usually did, and about everything except the Ingalls business, which she forgot to ask about before she rang off.
Three more days, and she’d be home!
The next morning, Joshua and I were at the A & P when the doors opened. A few minutes later, as we were piloting our carriage past the deli section, we ran into Manny and Helen Fonseca, who, like us, were shopping in the early morning.
“What’s the latest gossip?” I asked.
“Well, I guess Moonbeam is still hiding out,” said Manny. “Connie must really be mad at him this time.”
“It’s happened before,” I said.
“Yeah, but usually somebody sees him somewhere. I hear they found his pickup in the St. Augustine’s parking lot up in Vineyard Haven. Some people park there when they take the ferry to Woods Hole, so maybe he went over to America till she calms down.”
“What’d he do this time?”
Manny shrugged. “Don’t ask me. They’re both strange birds. How’s Zee?”
“Zee is in California,” I said, and told them what she was doing out there and when she’d be back.
“She’s certainly pretty enough to be a movie star,” said Helen. “Wouldn’t it be something if she got to be one! You could live in a Hollywood mansion instead of up there in the woods.”
“How about me?” I said. “Do you think I’m star material?”
She laughed. “Sure, J.W., sure you are!”
“When she gets back,” Manny said, “you have her give me a call so we can do some more practice. October ain’t far away.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
Josh and I were putting our groceries in the Land Cruiser when I saw Barbara Singleton get out of her car and walk toward the store. She didn’t seem to see me, and I felt a little tingle.
I drove home and got my lock picks, then, with Joshua still in his car seat, headed up-island, wondering how long Barbara would be gone and whether Connie Berube still felt that she was in charge of security at Lawrence Ingalls’s house.
It seemed to me that if Barbara had just wanted to do some grocery shopping, she’d have done it at the Up-Island Market, which was a lot nearer home. But she hadn’t done that. Instead, she’d gone all the way to Edgartown. Which probably meant she had some other business at that end of the island, and wouldn’t be home until she’d taken care of it. And since it was still early, and a lot of places wouldn’t be open until eight or nine o’clock, she might not come home until mid- to late morning.
Which meant no one was in Ingalls’s house and that no one would be for an hour or maybe two.
That left Connie the watchdog. How would she respond to seeing me heading up to the house? Especially since she’d no doubt seen Barbara leaving it earlier in the day, and knew nobody was home.
I turned off North Road and followed the winding drive-way. Passing Moonbeam’s place, I noted that the old back-hoe had been moved a bit and that the sewer trench had more new dirt in it. Maybe the job would finally get done someday. Maybe not.
The eldest boy, Jason junior, watched me pass, his lovely, pale, empty face turning on his slender neck as I went by. Two smaller children, as white and delicate as their older brother, stopped playing in the patch of mud that they squatted in, and watched as well. I didn’t see Connie.
I parked in front of Ingalls’s house, got Joshua into the sling I used to carry him on my chest, and went up to the front door. I knocked and listened and knocked and listened some more, then went around to the back of the house and raised my voice.
“Anybody home?”
No answer.
I walked over to the path that led down to the beach, and called again.
Still no answer. And no one in sight, either. I went back to the rear door, opened its lock, and went inside the house. I was getting pretty good with locks. Maybe I had a potential vocation in crime.
I went to the desk in the study and picked the simple locks on the drawers. I didn’t know what I expected to find, but I didn’t find it. Apparently, Lawrence Ingalls was just a guy who liked things locked. There are people like that; they lock their houses, lock their cars, lock their desks, lock everything. I’ve never understood them, being the kind of person who almost never locks anything but my gun cabinet. And even then, the key is on top of the cabinet, where anybody can find it. Besides, I am of the school that maintains that locks only keep out honest people, a theory supported by the fact that I was now pawing through the papers in the drawers of Lawrence Ingalls’s desk.
And the papers were just papers: files having to do with the work of the DEP, a file with a record of the money paid to Connie Berube for housekeeping duties, another one with a record of money (a pretty generous amount, I thought) paid to Jason Berube, Sr., for keeping up the grounds, files of past and future income tax materials, files containing those guarantees and forms that come with equipment you buy: your radio, your washing machine, your computer, all of which come with folders and papers that list model numbers, and tell you what to do if you have problems, where to call, and who to write.
I never keep those papers, but Lawrence Ingalls kept them all in neat files in the locked drawers of his desk. There was nothing there to suggest a motive for his murder.
I locked the drawers again and went to the file cabinets. Again the locks opened easily, as such uncomplicated locks are inclined to do, and again I found myself looking at neat files of papers. Records of visits to doctors, all routine, as far as I could tell; records of credit card transactions; records of the costs of building the house; records of travel expenses; records of auto and truck purchases and repairs; records of Lawrence Ingalls’s whole life, it seemed. Hadn’t he ever thrown a piece of paper away?
There was a lot of empty space in the file cabinets, but that wasn’t too surprising, since all of the bills and other dated material, except for some older papers about ongoing environmental affairs, were less than three years old, clearly having been accumulated since Ingalls had built this house.
Early on, therefore, I was fairly certain that my search wasn’t going to reveal anything having to do with his more distant past, but I looked at everything anyway, just in case. Finally I did find a travel
folder advertising the charms of a Costa Rica resort area called Playa de Plata, a place I had never heard of. It was for deluxe vacations, quite beyond the reach of sunseekers in my economic class, and was, I guessed, a reflection of Ingalls’s holiday interests before he had built his Vineyard house and given up foreign travel. The brochure was printed on costly paper, and was filled with beautiful photographs of beautiful people doing things in beautiful places. It promised the kinds of services and activities available to those sorts of people who were content with only the very best, and for whom expense was not an issue.
I put the folder right back where I’d found it, and locked the file doors. Then I remembered something and opened one of them again and took out the folder containing records of car and truck purchases and repairs, which I’d only glanced at before.
The key word was purchases. As far as I knew, Ingalls’s own Vineyard vehicle had been a three-year-old Ford Bronco. I’d seen it in Joe Begay’s yard, and the last time I’d looked, after Ingalls’s death, it was garaged out in the barn behind this house. Ingalls had used a DEP pickup when he was on company business, as had been the case the day I’d found him on the beach.
But the folder contained not only a record of the purchase of the Bronco, bought new the year Ingalls built his house and began vacationing on the island, but, at about the same time, the record of the purchase of an almost new 4x4 Chevy pickup, color gray, low mileage, and the record of the transfer of ownership to Jason Berube, Sr. Ditto for Connie’s four-wheel-drive Subaru sedan.
Lawrence Ingalls had bought both vehicles.
I wondered why. Were they part of the deal that had made Moonbeam into Ingalls’s groundskeeper and Connie into his housekeeper? If so, Moonbeam and Connie had struck a good bargain, because he also paid Moon-beam a particularly liberal salary to mow the lawns and trim the shrubs, especially for a man not known for high-quality work.
I rechecked the money paid to Connie for her house-keeping. It was a very correct salary, but in no way as generous as that paid to Moonbeam.
As my sister Margarite, who lived out by Santa Fe, might ask: Qué pasa aqui? Why would Ingalls pay a hardworking, dependable wife less than her lazy and untalented husband? Surely straight-arrow, ironed-shirt-and-shorts, always proper and in control Lawrence Ingalls hadn’t thought that Moonbeam was worth that much more than Connie. What was with the big salary? And with the pickup and the Subaru?
Maybe Ingalls had just been a terrible male chauvinist who believed that man’s work was always worth more than woman’s work.
Or maybe I was doing Moonbeam an injustice. Maybe he was worth every cent, and more.
Maybe I was the Grand Duke of Russia.
I locked the cabinet doors and went out of the house.
— 26 —
“They like me,” said Zee. “Or, at least, that’s what they say. They say I’m photogenic.”
“You’re at least photogenic,” I said.
“Tonight’s the party, and tomorrow Drew and his family and a bunch of us are flying to the island,” said Zee. “I can hardly wait! I haven’t seen you and Josh for a long time!”
“Almost five days. Is this the party where you finally get to meet the stars?”
“Yes. Kevin Turner, at least. And maybe Kate Ballinger, too, and maybe Jack Slade, according to Emily. Jack is going to be the director. I guess it’s a sort of get-together for the people who are going to the Vineyard. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too. What have you been up to?”
She had been up to getting a snap course about the movie biz from Emily Mondry, who had been taking her around town, and with whom Zee had struck up a friendship. She was being told about such subjects as agents and actors; contracts and salary negotiations; the jobs of directors, cinematographers, producers, distributors, and writers; the meaning of all those credits that show up on the screen, and the importance attached to the size and placing of them: the logos of the studio and the distribution company, the names of actors, the executive producer (who, Emily had explained, could have his or her name up there for any one of lots of reasons, many of which had little or nothing to do with the actual production of the film), the production company, the producer, the associate producer, the director, the writer or writers (some of whom may have done a lot and others of whom may have done little or almost nothing), the composer, arranger, and conductor of the music, the film editor, the director of photography, the camera operator, and a bunch of other people like assistant cameramen, gaffers, makeup people and hairdressers, and others of whom there were too many for Zee to keep track of.
“You’d be amazed,” said Zee, “at how complicated it all is. No wonder movies cost so much money and are usually so bad. It’s a miracle any of them ever get made at all!”
“I’d probably be more amazed than most people,” I agreed. “But there’s a lot of money to be made, if it all works out.”
“For some people, but not for others. The bean counters out here are very good about showing that even movies that make hundreds of millions of dollars actually lose money; that way, the real money people don’t have to pay taxes or the suckers who agreed to work for a share of the profits!”
“Skullduggery in Tinseltown, eh? Is that un-American or just American?”
“Just business as usual, as Sir Winston said in his youth. The smart people take a percentage of the box office receipts, but you have to be pretty important to get that kind of contract. The best thing for most people is to get as much money as you can up front.”
“In that case, since you’re smart, you should demand a piece of the box office receipts. If they won’t give them to you, quit!”
She laughed. “I think you’d better reconsider your decision to become a Hollywood agent, sweets. Now I’ve got to go prepare myself for the big party. See you tomorrow afternoon at the airport! Be there! I love you! Good-bye!”
Good-bye, good-bye. Tomorrow was already bright and shiny even though the calendar and clocks said it was really still getting dark the evening before.
Joshua, tired from another August island day, was sleeping the sleep of the just. Since he was finally beginning to snooze through the night instead of insisting on a 2:00 A.M. meal, as he had done up till now, I was pretty sure I had my time to myself until sunup or so, when Josh would need my attention once again.
I used it to first brood upon what I did and didn’t know about Lawrence Ingalls’s life and death; then, giving up on that, did some reading from my living room book, which, at the moment, was the Bible, Revised Standard Edition. I was actually rereading it—sort of, because I was skipping the “begats” and some of the other genealogical records that were probably important but didn’t interest me, and was concentrating on the interesting stuff: war, romance, and mindless sex and violence, of which there is a lot and which explains why even us heathens call it a Good Book.
In our house, there were books in every room, so we never had to go looking for something to read. We had bedroom books on the bedside tables on each side of the bed; bathroom books (usually poetry or books of aphorisms, since we were never in there long enough to read novels or even short stories); living room books; kitchen books, read only while cooking or eating; and porch books, kept back away from the screens so they wouldn’t get wet during windy rainstorms. I had been thinking about making a waterproof book box for the balcony, but so far I hadn’t gotten around to doing it, so when we were up there we tended not to read, which was probably just as well.
And we had car books, so we could read on the beach or while in a ferry line, or while waiting for a spouse to come out of a store. By having books everywhere, it was possible to get quite a lot of reading done even though we were busy doing other things. The secret was to be able to alternately read pieces of a lot of books and not lose track of what was happening in any of them. People who could read only one book at a time would not benefit from our system, but both Zee and I always had several books going at once, with Dr. Spock
always at hand in case of unexpected baby problems.
With all this reading going on, why wasn’t I getting wiser or, barring wisdom, at least getting smarter? Was it a case of the more you study, the more you learn; and the more you learn, the more you can forget; and the more you can forget, the more you do forget; and the more you forget, the less you know?
Whatever it was, I was aware of my failure to grasp the truth of Lawrence Ingalls’s murder, even as I read of the Lord telling our Joshua’s namesake to appoint cities of refuge so that the manslayer who kills any person without intent or unwillingly might flee there, and they would be a refuge for him from the avenger of blood.
I didn’t think that whoever had killed Ingalls had done it without intent or unwillingly.
The next morning, right after breakfast, Quinn called. “Listen,” he said. “Charles Ingalls—that’s Lawrence Ingalls’s old man—belongs to a club here in town. He has friends there. Aristocratic types just like himself, all of them getting old together. They drink, they eat, they get away from their wives, they sit in big leather chairs and read the stock market reports. They been doing it since they were young guys. Larry Ingalls was a member, too, but he wasn’t the club type, I guess, because he never went there much. But the old man has always spent time there. After work, sometimes overnight, and like that.
“Now here’s the part that might interest you. Everybody drinks and everybody talks and listens, and over the years stories circulate. Some of them get outside the walls, and one of them got to somebody I know. It seems that the old man was straight arrow at home, but when he went abroad, it wasn’t just business, but it was business and bordellos. He liked Oriental meat, and when he took his boy over there to introduce him to the banking business, he introduced him to his other interests, too. Like father, like son. Well?”
A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard Page 19