Death on a Vineyard Beach

by Philip R. Craig

  Marcus pointed here and pointed there, happy with his home. “The president of the outfit that designed the place studied under Frank Lloyd Wright. You know about Wright? Quite a guy. I read a book about him, and when I decided to build here, I found this pupil of his and gave him the job. He did all right.”

  The architectural firm that had designed and built the house had indeed done its work well. It had taken great care to use the configurations of the land to maximum advantage when planning the house, toward the ends of not only grand and comfortable living, but security and complete privacy. For all its size and modern grandeur, the house, like the tennis court, was difficult to see from the public road that links Gay Head to Chilmark, or by most other houses in the area. Only from the direction of Squibnocket Pond could it clearly be seen: a white slash across the top of the green hillside. It presented no roofline, being built into the rock and soil of the hill, and only the winter smoke from its vast fireplace chimneys gave any sign, said Marcus, to people on the public roads or in neighboring homes that a house was there at all. There was, in fact, a lawn over part of the main house and over the attached guest house farther down the hill, and Marcus confessed to taking pleasure from the fact that even from that grassy roof, the buildings were next to invisible.

  The outer walls of the house were white, and the wood of the terrace and decks was natural in color. There were huge earthen pots of flowers on those decks. In spite of its modern design, there was something Aegean or Mediterranean, and a sense of antiquity or timelessness, about the place. Marcus, who believed that he could trace his lineage back to medieval Greece and Rome, savored this ambiance.

  His cellar was, as he had said, stocked with the wines of Greece and Italy, and his house had been decorated by New York’s second most expensive firm.

  “The most expensive did not have good taste,” confided Angela Marcus, with a smile. “I’m no interior decorator, but I know bad taste when I see it.”

  Throughout the house could be found classical pieces of sculpture. We paused before three particularly intricate panels.

  “These are Roman,” said Marcus. “They call ’em fourth style panels. They came into my hands in a business deal. Later on I learned that they came from a Roman villa excavated in Sardinia. I don’t think whoever took them did it quite on the up and up, if you know what I mean. But I like them, so I keep them.” He flashed me a veiled look.

  In the master bedroom, one wall was decorated with a floor mosaic of the second century, portraying scenes from the Iliad.

  “This came from a Roman villa outside of Toulouse, and was supposed to go to a museum in Paris. Instead, it got over here to a guy who found out that I liked things like that, and got in touch with me. Nobody ever came looking for it, so now it’s mine. You like it? Those old Romans were really something.”

  These classical works were not the only decorative arts in the house. Interspersed with them were maps, globes, and bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes that reflected Marcus’s interest in geography and political history.

  “I always liked maps,” said Marcus, touching an atlas. “Even when I was a little kid. And I like to read about why things happen. History. It’s interesting to me. Now that I got the time, I read. It’s good. Everybody should read. I wish I could get Vinnie to do it.” He shrugged.

  Paintings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century masters hung on the walls, and a Calder mobile floated in a corner of the living room that looked out upon the veranda and pool. The furniture of the house was modern, clean-lined, and comfortable. The rooms were large and uncluttered, yet never cold or impersonal since wherever my eyes roamed they found some object of interest or beauty to occupy them.

  The kitchen was huge, filled with work counters, ovens, freezers, and cabinets that held every sort of pot, pan, and appliance. It was capable of producing food for large parties at short notice, and was, at the moment, rich with the fragrances of cooking foods. The cook, however, was not in sight.

  “Jonas, that’s Priscilla’s husband, is our cook,” said Angela Marcus. “He must be up in the gardens, looking for some herb he needs. He runs this kitchen with an iron hand. When we were young, before we had much money, I used to do all the cooking, but Jonas is better than I ever was. He caters to Luciano and me and no one else. Mediterranean and American food, like we like.

  “When he can’t find what he wants in our gardens, he shops at island markets. He’s very picky. Only the freshest vegetables and meat and fish will do. If something he wants isn’t available on the island, he has it flown in from New York or Boston. He keeps a big account book where he lists all of his expenditures, and he gives Luciano a report every month. I don’t think Luciano even looks at it. He just pays the bills.” She laughed.

  In the garage were four cars: the black Cadillac sedan I’d seen in Boston and three identical green, four-door Jeep Grand Cherokees, like the one that had picked us up that evening. All four vehicles had darkened windows.

  “Like I told you,” said Marcus. “I believe in buying American whenever I can, except for Greek and Italian wines.”

  “And Greek and Italian olive oils,” amended his wife.

  He put his arm around her. “Yeah, except for that, sweetheart.”

  Zee, who approved of signs of affection between married folks, smiled up at me.

  “Privacy is hard to get,” explained Marcus. “We like ours, and I’m lucky that I have the money to buy it. Other people have to put up with a lot of long noses.”

  We walked out along a flower-lined pathway. Luciano Marcus had his wife’s hand in one of his. With his other hand, he gestured while he spoke.

  “We got about three hundred acres here, and men to take care of it. Angie and I like to walk, so we have these paths winding around. You almost can’t see them, but they’re there. It’s nice to walk on an evening like this.”

  Around us were rolling meadows and carefully tended trees and shrubs. The flowers lining the path smelled sweet. We paused at a small overlook, and Marcus pointed down the long hill below us.

  “We have blueberries down there. A lot of them. See the bushes? And beyond the bushes, bending out of sight beyond that rise in the ground, is my cranberry bog.” A hard note was suddenly in his voice. “That bog has produced cranberries for as long as anybody remembers. It’s a damned fine bog, and I plan to keep it.”

  I glanced at him, and saw Angela pat his arm and gently steer him on along the path.

  In various places on the property, there were native oaks, beetlebung trees, swamp maples, wild cherries, and ancient-looking apple trees. Although the grounds gave the impression of being in an informal, almost natural state, they were in fact so carefully designed and maintained that a crew of well-paid men would be needed to tend them. Those same men, I thought, would preserve not only the beauty but the security of the estate. Luciano Marcus, for all his apparent openness, was a man who made no bones about liking his privacy.

  We crossed the driveway and paused again. Marcus looked at me. “You notice the mailbox when you came in?”

  “I did.”

  “I thought you might have. You see the name?”

  “Gubatose.”

  “That’s right. Gubatose, not Marcus. That’s so people will think somebody named Gubatose lives here, not somebody named Marcus. It works, too. Not many people have come up my driveway. When they do, they come to that gate. When they get there, they mostly turn around and go back. Sometimes somebody climbs over the gate and walks on up the driveway. You know who they meet?”

  “An armed guard?”

  Marcus laughed. “No. They meet a pleasant guy who tells them he’s renting the Gubatose house for the summer, and then tells them that his Gubatose and their Gubatose are, too bad, different people, and who, gently but firmly, like they say, takes them back to their cars and watches them drive away. You know how we know to go down there and meet them?”

  “The video camera in the tree?”

 
“You saw that, too. Good. Not many people notice it. I have others here and there around the place, so people won’t come wandering through without me knowing about them. And at night we got dogs. My glass has been empty too long. Let’s go back to the house for a refill.”

  “We have gardens, too,” said Angela. “But we can look at them another day.”

  “Angie has the green thumb you hear so much about,” said her husband, proudly. “My thumb is black. Whatever plant I touch wilts and dies, so I stay out of Angie’s gardens, and let the men tend to the grounds.” He laughed.

  As we came up onto the great veranda, we found two men were standing on its west side, looking down the rolling meadow toward Squibnocket Pond. Vinnie the driver held powerful field glasses, and the other man was bent over a telescope. Both the binoculars and the telescope were directed at the pond. Beside them, mounted on a tripod, was a camera with a long telephoto lens.

  “Birders,” said Vinnie, as we walked out behind them.

  The man with the telescope grunted. “Probably.” Hearing us, he turned. He was the bodyguard I’d seen in Boston.

  “Thomas,” said Marcus. “Meet Mr. Jackson. Mr. Jackson, this is Thomas Decker. You met briefly in Boston, and Thomas spoke to you on the phone the other day.”

  Thomas, not Tom, Decker was a medium-sized man with red hair and freckles. I remembered his gun as well as his face. His face was hard and he had a firm grip. “How do you do? Let me add my thanks to you for what you did in Boston.”

  “There’s no need for thanks.”

  “You have them anyway.” He showed a thin smile. “If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be out of a job.”

  Marcus laughed, then gestured toward the veranda railing. “What are you looking at?”

  Decker hesitated, looking at Zee and me.

  “It’s all right,” said Marcus. “As you know, Mr. Jackson saved my life. You can speak freely.”

  Decker nodded reluctantly. “There’s a man and a woman down at the pond, the other side of the blueberry bushes and cranberry bog. The guy’s got a floppy summer hat that makes his face hard to see, even with the binoculars. They have backpacks, and we’ve seen them take out books, water bottles, and sandwiches. They have field glasses and a camera with a telephoto lens like this one, mounted on a tripod. They act like they’re looking at the birds in the pond and along its shore. They jot notes on clipboards and look at the books they get out of their packs.”

  “Birders,” said Angela.

  “You know, Grandma,” said Vinnie, “I’ve been thinking of getting myself one of them bird books. There are a lot of birds around here, and I don’t know one from another.”

  “You should do that, Vincent,” said Angela. “It would give you a great deal of pleasure.”

  “I don’t know that they’re birders,” said Decker. “They look up this way now and then, instead of at the birds on the pond. What are they doing now, Vinnie?”

  Vinnie lifted his binoculars again and looked down the slope. “The woman just wrote something on the paper on her clipboard, and now she’s looking through her field glasses at something I can’t see.

  “And now she’s sort of turning, and now she’s turned her glasses right up here toward the house. Jees, it looks like she’s studying me just like I’m studying her. Weird.”

  “Excuse me for a minute,” said Decker, turning away and lifting his telescope. “You better get a shot of her face,” he said to Vinnie. “You get a good look at the guy yet?”

  “Not yet. That hat flops down and he’s wearing shades. Hey! Look. He just took his hat off, and he’s wiping his brow. I’ll get him now.” He put down the binoculars and went to the camera.

  “Well, well,” said Decker, looking through his telescope while Vinnie snapped shots with the camera.

  “I don’t know how much detail we’ll get at this distance,” said Vinnie.

  “No matter,” said Decker, “I know who the guy is.”

  “Who?” asked Marcus.

  “Joe Begay,” said Decker. “That Navajo guy that’s been nosing around. I should have known it would be him.”

  “Those damned Indians!” Marcus paled under his tan, and drew a small box from his pocket. He took out a pill and put it under his tongue. Angie gave him a worried look.

  I was pretty shocked myself. “Can I take a look?” I asked, and without waiting for a reply I picked up Vinnie’s binoculars and looked down the long slope. It was Joe Begay, sure enough, but now a middle-aged Joe Begay instead of the young man I had known. The woman beside him was younger, and as bronzed as he was. While I watched, the couple packed away their gear and moved toward the beach parking lot.

  Some small movement about halfway down the hillside caught my eye. I looked that way and saw birds fly out of a bush and soar away. I looked some more, but saw nothing else. When I looked at the pond again, Joe Begay and the woman had walked out of sight.

  I lowered the glasses. My past had become my present. More than twenty years had passed since Joe Begay and I had been blown up together in Vietnam. Now, after I’d almost forgotten him, he was back in my life. First at my wedding, and now here. I looked at Luciano Marcus and saw hatred in his face.

  7

  I turned and found Zee giving me an odd stare. I put the binoculars down, and walked back to her.

  Luciano Marcus seemed to be recovering his emotional balance. He gestured at the camera. “Vincent, take this stuff away, but don’t go too far. You’ll be taking our guests home later in the evening.”

  “Yes, boss.” Vinnie scowled, picked up the camera, telescope, and binoculars, and went away.

  “Thomas, you stay and eat with us.” Marcus turned to Zee and me. “Thomas is part of the family. Another son to me.”

  Angela’s mouth tightened as he spoke.

  “It would be my pleasure,” said Decker in his oddly formal fashion.

  “Our own children come for visits, but they don’t live here,” said Angela, moving away. “I just happen to have some pictures of the younger grandchildren, in the living room. Excuse me while I get them.”

  “We just happen to have about several albums of pictures of the younger grandchildren,” said Luciano. “Our youngest and his family were here last week. When the kids come, Angie and me get to spoil the little ones while their parents escape to the beaches by themselves. Of course, when the babies act up, we shove them right back at their parents and escape ourselves. It’s the great advantage of being grandparents.”

  “Oh, we do not,” said Angela, reappearing. “Don’t listen to him. He’s a total softy when it comes to the babies. He lets them get away with anything. Now let me show you these pictures. I just got them back from the developers. Did you ever see anything cuter?”

  We looked at the pictures and agreed that we’d never seen anything cuter, then we all went and sat beside the pool. In the gathering night we sat and sipped a second round of drinks provided by Priscilla.

  “Tell me about Joe Begay,” said Zee in an innocent voice.

  Decker glanced at Marcus, who took a sip of his gin and tonic before replying.

  “Mrs. Jackson, have you heard the saying that if you save someone’s life you must care for him afterward?”

  “I think that’s some sort of oriental wisdom,” smiled Zee.

  He smiled back at her. When Zee smiles at men, they almost always smile back. “Well, if it’s true, then you and your husband are now responsible for my life.”

  Zee laughed. “We’re pretty busy just taking care of ourselves.”

  “Of course you are. Still, my life is yours in the sense that I now exist because of you. That being the case, I should have no secrets from you.” A smaller, slightly ironic smile played across his face. “I’m not going to say that I will confide everything to you, but certainly I can tell you about Joe Begay. In fact, I want to do that.”

  I glanced at Angela Marcus, and saw again the worried look that I’d seen earlier.

  Marcus took
another sip of his drink, seemingly to gather his thoughts. Then he spoke. “They say that Joe Begay is a Navajo Indian from out West some place. Anyway, now he’s married to a Wampanoag woman who lives here in Gay Head. His wife is the daughter of a woman named Linda Vanderbeck. Linda Vanderbeck is one of those Indians who thinks that my cranberry bog belongs to the Wampanoags and not to me. Something about some illegal land sale a long time ago. Or maybe it was a treaty of some kind. My lawyers can tell you more about it than I can.

  “Anyway, this Linda Vanderbeck goes around making trouble for me any way she can, trying to get that cranberry bog, which, I can tell you right now, she’s never going to get. And now that this Joe Begay is in town, she’s got him helping her out.” He looked at Decker, then back at Zee and me. “We see him down there at the pond, don’t we, Thomas? And all around the edges of my property here. And they say that he’s down at the Historical Society in Edgartown, looking at records, or up here looking at records, or maybe even in Boston or Washington looking at records. All he does is snoop!”

  “He hasn’t broken any laws, yet,” said Decker. “But a couple of times he’s tried to get up here to the house. Both times, we stopped him at the gate.”

  “You mean, he tried to sneak up here?” asked Zee.

  “Yes!” exclaimed Marcus.

  “Now, Luciano,” said Angela in a soothing voice. “You know that’s not quite true. He phoned first both times.”

  “And I told him no both times, but then he came to the gate anyway, and climbed over and came on up the driveway, just like we’d invited him!”