Death in Vineyard Waters

by Philip Craig

  “You can trust me. I won’t even look at prices. Maybe we can use the old restroom trick. I’ll go to the ladies’ and then just keep going. You go to the gents’ and do the same. After we eat, of course.”

  “Of course. We can meet afterwards in the parking lot.”

  “They’ll never catch us unless they remember that they buy fish from you sometimes.”

  “It’s a perfect plan, but I suspect that we have so much money that we won’t need to employ it.”

  “I think you’re right. What are you going to have?”

  “Only things prepared at the table. Flaming entrée, Caesar salad, anything that’s on the spectacular side. Nothing unobtrusive. Flaming dessert, flaming cordial, flaming brandy. That sort of thing.”

  “My, you must be feeling theatrical.”

  “I want everyone to see that I’m with you.”

  “Well, then, I’m going to have all that showy stuff, too, for the same reason. We’ll impress everyone in the dining room. They’ll think we just came in off one of the yachts.”

  “Precisely my plan. That’s why I didn’t wear socks. I want to look nautical.”

  “It’s too bad you don’t have one of those blue hats that say ‘captain.’ ”

  “I have an old Red Sox cap in the back seat. Will that do?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  The restaurant served up both a beautiful view and a fine meal. And we didn’t need spectacular food to capture many an eye. Zee did that all by herself. She was the most beautiful woman in the room. The women envied her and the men envied me, and I didn’t blame any of them.

  And afterward she told me to take her not to her place but to mine.

  I waited till next morning to mention Ian McGregor. We were sitting on the porch, looking out toward Nantucket Sound. It was a sky-blue day with a few white clouds hovering over Cape Cod across the Sound. The storm was gone and the island was clean washed and shiny. Zee’s hair hung loose around her shoulders and she was wearing my old bathrobe. We were eating smoked bluefish, red onion, and cream cheese on bagels, washed down with black coffee. Not a bad way to start any day.

  “Did you have a date with Ian the night before Marjorie was drowned?”

  She stopped chewing. “Do we have to talk about Ian?”

  “Do you remember whether you had a date with him that night?”

  “Why are you doing this? Let’s forget Ian.”

  “I’ll be glad to. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s okay. I don’t want Ian standing between us.”

  “Good. He’s ancient history.” I poured her some more coffee and she took a sip.

  “You want to drive down and look at the opening?” I asked. “It’s the first one we’ve had for several years. We can take inner tubes and shoot the rapids.”

  She looked at me over a bagel. “If I don’t tell you, you’re going to nose around until you find out anyway, aren’t you?”

  “Let’s forget Ian,” I said. “We can take a lunch and something to drink and a couple of books and make a day of it. My tan needs to be reinvigorated and I can use a day off.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I just want to know if he was driving around that night between midnight and, say four A.M. I think you’ve still got a bathing suit here, so we won’t need to go to your place first. I’ve got everything else we need.”

  “Why do you want to know if he was out driving around?”

  “Because I don’t think that Marjorie Summerharp went swimming at six in the morning. I think she probably went in about two or three at the latest. She had to get down there somehow, and Ian seems to be the best bet for the guy who did it.”

  “But he said he drove down with her at six that morning. And weren’t there witnesses who saw her driving with him?”

  “That story doesn’t fit the fact of where her body was found.” I told her the suicide theory and then, in part just to slander Ian, the murder theory.

  “Murder? Nonsense. Why would he murder her? Ian is a vain, ambitious man, but he’s not my idea of a murderer.”

  “You told me once that there’s a cruel streak in him. And he did punch out that young man from up island.”

  “There’s some meanness in me, too. And in you, too, Jefferson. But neither of us are murderers!” She took a sip of coffee. “All right, we were out that night. We had supper downtown—at the Navigator Restaurant, as I’m sure you’ll want to know—and then went out to the Hot Tin Roof and danced until the place closed. Ian is a wonderful dancer, unlike you, and we had a very nice time. He took me home quite late.”

  “How late?”

  “About two, I think.”

  “Did he come in for a nightcap?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “All right.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “He drove off about two o’clock.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re not only beautiful but brilliant, humane, compassionate, and articulate?”

  “All the time. I hear almost nothing else.”

  “How about omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, and completely good?”

  “People tell me that every Sunday.”

  “Do you want to talk about Ian McGregor anymore?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to spend the day on the beach?”

  “Only if you promise never to mention what’s-his-name again.”

  “Not today, at least.”

  She sighed and gave me a sideways smile. “Okay. But I have to get home in time to wash my hair.”

  We were at the opening by ten and played like children in our inner tubes, riding the tidal river as it flowed out from Katama Bay into the sea. The storm swells were gone, and only the normal surf beat against the south shore to give us a bumpy end to our inner-tube voyages. But we’d paddle to shore and run back upstream and do it again and again until at last, breathless and weak from laughter, we threw the tubes down and collapsed on our blanket. Being a kid is tiring work.

  After a bit we took our rods and fished. It was the wrong time of day, but it was fun and we didn’t mind catching nothing. Then we had lunch and lay on the warm sand and let the sun do its work on our skin while we read and listened to the Chatham radio station play classical music. At three, we packed up and drove to my place so we could change to dry clothes before I took Zee home to West Tisbury. As we pulled into my yard, I saw McGregor’s pretty sports car parked there. McGregor was standing beyond the car, looking darkly toward us as the old Landcruiser rattled into his view.

  Zee touched my arm as I pulled up and stopped.

  “I have a bad feeling about this, Jeff.”

  I stared out at McGregor. He stood in the middle of the scraggly lawn between the house and the garden, where there was room for action. There was a comfortable silky quality about him. He was almost smiling.

  “I want you to go into the house and stay there no matter what happens,” I said to Zee. “Don’t come out until this is over.”

  “I don’t like this,” she said.

  “It’ll be all right,” I said. “But I’d rather have you in the house where I don’t have to think about you for a little while.”

  “He’s going to fight you, isn’t he?”

  “I think that’s his plan. Please go inside.”

  “No.”

  “Have it your way.” I got out of the Landcruiser and walked out to meet McGregor. “Hello, Ian,” I said.

  “Hello, shithead,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you. I don’t expect your bitch will like what she’s going to see.”

  “You have dirt in your mouth,” I said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I’m sure.” He put up his hands. He was wearing leather gloves. Smart. No more skinned knuckles for Ian McGregor.

  I walked out onto the grass and he came quickly to meet me, left arm extended, right fist cocked. It was time to learn
something about him, so I led with an awkward right. He blocked it, tapped me with his left, then crossed with his own right. I slipped the worst of it but went down anyway and rolled, wondering where the kick would be coming from. But there was no kick. I looked at his shoes. Sneakers. He had stepped back. “Get up,” he said.

  I got up. He feigned a left, then a right, and as I ducked away kicked with his right leg. I took it on my arm but realized that the kick, too, was only another feint. He whirled and struck high with his left foot. I blocked a bit of it but went down again. Again he stepped back and waited.

  “Get up, you stupid, nosy excuse for a man.”

  I thought I had learned enough, but was not sure. I got up. He circled, then came in quickly and jabbed three times. They were leads to set up the right he liked. He had been trained in the manly art and was now putting that training to good use. When the right came I went backward, off balance, and he came after me with a flurry of punches. I went down on my rump and sat there. He danced on his toes, then stepped back again.

  “Get up,” he said.

  But I just sat there. I had learned what I needed to know about him and was soon to learn something about myself. I had a split lip, and I spit some blood onto the lawn. I don’t think that I was really mad at Ian, and perhaps never would have been, had he not then looked across toward where I’d last seen Zee.

  “You stupid whore,” he said. “How did I ever get mixed up with a slut like you and an asshole like this guy?” He looked down at me, shook his head in contempt, and walked past me toward his car.

  I had heard of people seeing red, but had not previously seen it myself. But when he, in his anger, called Zee by those names, a thin crimson curtain fell across my eyes. His words apparently triggered some primeval fury suppressed within my genetic codes—none too well, it turned out—by generations of civilized living by my more recent ancestors.

  I don’t know if I made some noise (a snarl, perhaps?), but he turned as I rose and even had time to put a small smile on his face as he prepared to meet me. But he was not facing the same person he had apparently downed so easily in the previous minutes. I was someone or something else, something too fast, too strong and feral for him. He raised his gloved hands, but I struck them aside as though they were of straw and hit him a terrible backhanded blow that knocked him flat on the ground. I was on him in a flash, like a leopard on a rat. Dazed, he tried to roll away but only succeeded in landing me on his back rather than his chest. I drove a knee into his kidney and then had a handful of his hair in my fist and was jerking his head back and driving it into the ground, once, twice, three times, four.

  There was a roaring in my ears like the sound of some great waterfall, and faintly through it I heard Zee’s voice telling me to stop, stop! Then I felt her hands on my arms words telling me to stop before I killed him, and slowly the red curtain dimmed and faded and I found myself atop a bloody, moaning Ian McGregor, my hand still tangled in his hair, my other hand bloody knuckled.

  “Stop,” said Zee’s voice. A great trembling overtook me, and I realized that my teeth were clenched and my lips curled back. The fist that held Ian’s hair did not want to release its grip, but I forced it open. His head fell face down into the ground.

  “Get up,” said Zee’s voice. I looked at the voice and saw her face, tanned, beautiful, framed with her long, black hair. “Get off him,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, and did so. She immediately knelt and rolled him over onto his back with that brisk strength that nurses use to manhandle large patients.

  Ian’s bloody face did not look too good. His eyes were dull and confused.

  “Get me some water,” said Zee.

  “Yes.” I turned my body and walked it into the house. At the kitchen sink I splashed cold water on my face, then put my head under the faucet. It seemed to help. I felt more sane. I found a pan and filled it with warm water and took a cloth and towel from a rack and went back outside.

  Zee took the water and cloth and began to clean Ian’s face. Slowly his eyes became clearer. They looked at me with something close to horror.

  I went and knelt beside him.

  “Go away,” said Zee.

  “No.” I looked down into McGregor’s frightened eyes. “There’s something about fighting that you should know. There are people like me who don’t fight fair or for fun. Until now you just never met one. The next time you do, you may end up dead or walking crooked for the rest of your life or brain dead or castrated. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Keep that in mind the next time you decide to punch somebody out. This time you and I were both lucky. Zee was here to break up our dance.” I looked at Zee. “Thank you, Zee.” I looked back at McGregor. “Say ‘Thank you, Zee.’ ”

  “Thank you, Zee,” he said.

  “Now apologize to Zee for the names you called her.”

  “I apologize,” he said. “I’m sorry. Jesus.” He was a big, handsome guy, but he wasn’t feeling that way just then.

  “I have more advice for you,” I said. “Don’t use women so lightly in the future, be careful about the names you call people, and stay away from me. In fact, I suggest that you stay away from Martha’s Vineyard altogether.” I looked at Zee. “How is he?”

  “He’ll live, no thanks to you. Superficial damage, I think.”

  I stood and stepped back. “Get up,” I said to McGregor. “Get in your car and drive away.”

  He got unsteadily to his feet, limped to his pretty little car, and drove away without another word. I watched him, then looked at Zee. She didn’t look too well.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She put a hand to her mouth, then took it away. “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought I knew you.”

  “You do know me,” I said, and immediately wondered if that was only wishful talk. I was more than a little shaken myself by what had happened.

  She gave me a troubled glance. “I don’t know,” she said. “You scared me. I’ve never been scared of you before.”

  “I’m sorry you decided to watch it. But it wasn’t as bad as it looked.”

  “You were going to kill him.”

  “No, I think that if I’d wanted to kill him I would have done it. Maybe this incident will lead him to change his ways. Maybe it will be for the best.”

  “You hurt him. He hurt you. He knocked you down.”

  “McGregor is a vain man, and he was angry and worried. He was mad because you left him and came back to me, and he was worried because I’ve been trying to tie him to Marjorie’s death and might be getting close to something. He wanted me to suffer and you to know that you were no good and had made a bad choice when you left him. He thought of himself as a macho guy and was going to prove it the way he has in the past, by punching me out.”

  “And he almost did.”

  “Not really. I fell down to find out what he’d do then. If he had a really savage streak in him, a murderous one, he’d have tried to kick my head in when I hit the ground. But he just stepped back and let me get up. I let him do it three times, just to be sure.”

  “But then you . . . I don’t know how to describe it. You knocked him down and . . . It was as though he was a toy. . . .”

  “Adrenalin rush, I think they’d say nowadays.” I put a smile on my face. “He said something that he shouldn’t have said.”

  She shivered. “I’m cold. I need some dry clothes.”

  After we had showered and changed, we had a quiet trip back to her house. On her porch I held her in my arms and kissed her. Her body pressed against mine and we stood there for a long time. Later, at home in bed, I lay awake and wondered and worried about the fight with Ian. Had I been accumulating anger for so long that a casual insult to Zee had triggered that red rage? Was I, deep down, mad at the warrior who had filled my legs with shrapnel in that faraway war, long ago? With the petty criminal whose bullet even now lodged near my spine? With the wife who had l
eft me because she could no longer bear wondering if her policeman husband would be coming home in a box? With a father and mother who had died too soon? With who knew what other insults and injuries, imagined or otherwise, I had encountered in half an alloted lifetime?

  I had long since decided that outrage and anger were destructive passions and had about convinced myself that I had rid myself of them. I knew that, modern war being the impersonal, faceless thing it often is, the soldier who had wounded me had not even known I was there, that the bullet I carried in my back was deposited there by chance (since the Boston shootist was firing wildly rather than with skill), that my ex-wife had twice seen her husband brought home in bandages and merited a happier life than I was giving her, that my parents had not died on purpose. I knew all that, but now it seemed that perhaps such knowledge was not enough; that my will to lead a peaceful and rational life could not be depended upon to achieve that end; that there was a beast within me waiting to be loosed.

  I didn’t like that notion and swore a private oath never to be so angry again. But I was a long time getting asleep.

  13

  The next morning I phoned Sanctuary and got Hans Van Dam himself. He ran my name through his memory and like any good salesman or front man dug me out of his mental files. Of course, of course, Mr. Jackson, he would be delighted to welcome me and give me a tour. He told me where to find the driveway and said he would inform the gateman and gave me a hearty goodbye. The flash of his teeth glowed from the receiver as I hung up. Then I phoned Tristan Cooper but got no answer. No matter. I got into the Landcruiser and drove to Chilmark.

  Two mailboxes stood beside the driveway entrance, and the dirt driveway led through one of the old stone walls that adorn Chilmark, relics of the days when the township was composed of working farms. A hundred yards farther along, out of view from the road, I came to a new metal gate. To one side was a neat little gatehouse just big enough for one or two people. Stepping from it were a small young woman and a large young man. Both were well scrubbed, tanned, and wearing T-shirts that said “Sanctuary” and bore a discreet emblem made, as near as I could tell, of some sort of conglomeration of traditional religious symbols. The couple smiled noncommittally.