Death on a Vineyard Beach

by Philip R. Craig

  “My family, you mean.” His voice was hard.

  “Who inherits, is what I mean.”

  “Everyone inherits.”

  “Cash or businesses or both?”

  “My sons will control the businesses. There will be trusts. And there will be cash.”

  “A lot of cash?”

  He shrugged. “What is a lot? There will be considerable.”

  “So everyone in the family has a motive.”

  He put a pill under his tongue. “I think you should spend your time looking someplace else. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “Another question, then: When did you make arrangements to attend the performance of Carmen?”

  He thought for a moment. “Late last winter. March, I believe. My wife doesn’t care for opera, but I like it and Thomas goes where I go. I get mailings of upcoming productions in New York and Boston. I’m sure that I ordered my tickets at that time. Why do you ask?”

  “The guy up in Boston knew you were going to be there. I want to know how long he had to find out.”

  He touched his chin with his forefinger and looked at me. “Four months,” he said. “Quite a long time.”

  “Yes. I’d like to talk with Vinnie.”

  His eyebrows raised slightly. “Vinnie? Why do you want to talk with Vinnie?”

  “There were three of you in Boston. I’ve talked with you, and I’ve talked with Thomas, but I haven’t talked with Vinnie.”

  He frowned, but nodded. “Okay. You’ll probably find him down at the garage.”

  “And some time or other I’d like to talk with your wife.”

  This time, his brows gathered together. “My wife? I don’t think that Angela can help you.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “But I won’t know that until I talk to her.”

  But now he was frowning even more. “I don’t want Angela involved in this.”

  I stood up. “You’re paying me to find out what’s going on. As for not wanting your wife to get involved, she already is involved. She’s been involved with you since you were married, and you’ve been married a long time. That’s a lot of involvement.”

  His hand strayed to his chest. His frown didn’t go away, but he nodded again. “All right. You can talk with her. But be gentle.”

  Like many men, he thought his wife was fragile, and needed protecting. I’d made the same mistake myself.

  I went out of the house and down to the garage. Vinnie was polishing the already polished hubcaps of the black Cadillac. He clearly took pride in his cars.

  I got right to the point. “Vinnie, I get the impression that you get along with your grandmother better than with your grandfather. Am I right?”

  He gave me a shocked look, then shook his head. “Nah. What do you mean?”

  “I mean you call your grandma Grandma, but you call your grandpa boss, and you frown when he tells you what to do.”

  Vinnie ran all that through his head. It took a while. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, sullenly. “I don’t hate Grandpa. I don’t hate nobody at all. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “She gives you money, he gives you work. That’s what I mean.”

  Vinnie thought some more. “They got me out of some trouble,” he said. “They brought me down here.”

  “But you’d rather be back in the city.”

  He shook his head. “Nah. Who told you that?”

  I studied him. He stared back. There was not a lot of intellect in his eyes. I changed the subject.

  “Vinnie, you’ve dated Maggie Vanderbeck a few times. Do you remember ever telling her about Luciano’s plans to go up to Boston to see that performance of Carmen?”

  Vinnie rubbed his handsome jaw. He frowned and looked at some spot of empty air. Then he smiled and shrugged. “Maybe. It wasn’t no secret or anything. I don’t remember telling her, and I don’t remember not telling her. I don’t know why I would have told her, but maybe I did.”

  “While you were at UMass Boston, you met some of the other college kids who live here on the island. Aside from Maggie, do you date any of the other UMass girls down here, or hang around with them or the guys? You know, at a party or a dance or the movies? Anything like that?”

  Vinnie nodded and ran a hand through his hair, smoothing an errant curl. His smile was white. “Sure. I date some of the girls. And I been to parties, or we go to the Connection there in Oak Bluffs.”

  “You ever mention that Luciano was going up to the opera?”

  “Jeez,” said Vinnie. “Like I say, maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t. Why you want to know?” Then it came to him. I could almost see the lightbulb brighten in his brain. “Oh, I get it. You think maybe I told somebody about the boss going to that opera, and that’s how those hoods in Boston knew he’d be there. Sure, I get it now.”

  “You’re smart, Vinnie.” I gave him an approving smile. “I’ve talked a little with Maggie Vanderbeck, but I’m going to talk with her again. And I want to talk with the other people you might have told about Luciano and the opera. I want you to tell me who your friends are.”

  Vinnie got wary. “I don’t know. My friends ain’t killers. They go to college. I don’t know if I should tell you who they are. I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. Besides, what’ll they think of me when they find out you’re asking them questions because of me?” He shook his head. “Nah. I don’t know whether I want to do this. You know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “But I’ll tell you what might have happened. You might have told one of them, and that person told somebody else, just talking, you know, and that person told somebody else until, finally, the guy up in Boston heard it. You understand? So I need to talk to the people you might have talked to.”

  Vinnie fidgeted. “I don’t know. You know what I mean?”

  “You know I’m working for Luciano,” I said as smoothly as I could. “I just finished talking with him, and he told me I could talk with you. You don’t want to give me the names, I want you to go up to his office right now, and ask him what you should do.”

  Vinnie hesitated some more, his handsome face full of indecision.

  “There’s another thing,” I said. “The cops are investigating this case, too. If you don’t help me, you may have to talk with them. Would you rather have your friends talk with me or with the cops? I think it’s going to be one or the other.”

  Vinnie gave me names. I recognized two of them.

  I assured Vinnie that he’d done the right thing, got into the Land Cruiser, and drove out of the sunshine down into the fog.

  18

  I found Toni Vanderbeck at her shop on top of the Gay Head cliffs. By sheer chance, a car full of tourists, no doubt frustrated by the fog that blocked their view of the cliffs, of Cuttyhunk, and of points beyond, had backed out of its slot on the side of the road just as I had arrived, so I had been able to park immediately. When you can’t do that, you have to drive around in circles watched by the eagle-eyed Gay Head traffic cops who patrol the town’s miles of no-parking areas, or, worse yet, pay the outrageous fee required to use the town parking lot, down by the even more outrageous pay toilets—an abomination in the eyes of man and God.

  The cluster of buildings at the famous clay cliffs is made up of eating places and souvenir shops, all dedicated to separating visitors from their travel money. The restaurants offer classic American fare such as hamburgers and hot dogs, and Vineyard specialties such as fish chowder, clams, and stuffed quahogs. The souvenirs mostly consist of quasi-Indian goods from Taiwan or other Eastern civilizations: Chinese bows and arrows, Korean rubber tomahawks, Japanese feather headdresses. Mixed with these are genuine Vineyard and Indian crafts. Toni Vanderbeck’s shop specialized in the latter.

  “I’m looking for your sister,” I said.

  “You came to the right spot,” she said. “She’s working here today.”

  Maggie Vanderbeck came out of a back room, bringing with her wha
t looked like an Acoma pot. She smiled her pretty smile.

  “Hi,” she said. “You want to see me?”

  “I have a couple of questions.”

  “Ask.” She put the pot on a shelf.

  “When you and Vinnie Cecilio were dating, did he ever tell you that Luciano Marcus was going up to Boston to see Carmen?”

  She looked surprised. “If he did, I don’t remember it.”

  “Another question. Do either of you know these people?” I gave them the names of Wally and his friend.

  “I know them,” said Toni. “Macho types. They side with Mom a lot when the arguments start.”

  “Bullies?”

  She frowned. “Maybe. They’re a couple of hotheads. I know that much. Why?”

  “I had a talk with them this morning. I just wanted to know what kind of people they are.”

  “Did they try to bully you?”

  “Maybe.”

  She nodded. “They found out that you and Mom had words, didn’t they? And they tried to scare you off. Goons!”

  “Nothing came of it,” I said. “No blood was shed, no scalps were taken. One last question. If you don’t want to answer this one, I’ll understand. What kind of a guy is your uncle Bill?”

  She and her sister exchanged looks.

  “Why do you ask?” said Toni.

  “You know I’m trying to figure out who took a shot at Luciano Marcus. I’m asking all of the questions I can think of. Your uncle Bill is helping your mother out with this cranberry bog business. I’d like to know as much about him as I can.”

  She frowned, and when she did, she looked more like her mother. “Uncle Bill had nothing to do with that shooting. He was at home when that happened.”

  That was probably what Mrs. James said about her son, when the sheriff claimed Jesse was robbing banks.

  “Anything you can tell me will be fine,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you about him,” said Maggie Vanderbeck. And for the next half hour, between customers, she did that. After a while, Toni joined in.

  He was a strange person to them, not at all like his brother, their late father, who had been plain as dirt and solid as stone. Uncle Bill looked ordinary enough, but somehow he wasn’t. One thing was, of course, that even if you were looking for him, you might not see him. He had the ability to be there and not be noticed. Another thing was that even though he never talked about it in particular, you got the idea he’d been a lot of places and seen a lot of things, and that he knew something you didn’t know. Maybe that was why some people called him shaman; because he was different and hard to understand, and because he sometimes spoke in riddles.

  Like Vanderbeck’s Axioms. Both of them, when they were little girls, had listened to Vanderbeck’s Axioms. They would go to see Uncle Bill and Aunt Polly for an afternoon, and he would take them out to Squibnocket Point and then west along the beach.

  “You know how they call you a shaman?” the girls would say to him. “Well, if you’re a shaman, you must know the secrets of life. So what are they?”

  And he would say he didn’t know much about life at all, but he had worked out some axioms. “Vanderbeck’s Axioms,” he called them. When they’d asked him what an axiom was, he’d said it was a self-evident truth. Anyway, he’d say they didn’t have to believe his axioms, and it might be fun for them to try to come up with a few of their own. His were pretty odd.

  The first axiom was, “It’s hard to walk on a railroad track.” On the rail, that is. Uncle Bill had said he actually stole that one from a friend of his, a guy named Comstock. It was Comstock’s First Axiom. But since an axiom can belong to anybody who wants it, Comstock’s First Axiom was now also Vanderbeck’s First Axiom. Uncle Bill had said that if you didn’t believe the axiom, you should try to walk on a railway rail without falling off. For a person with a terrific sense of balance, it wouldn’t be an axiom at all, but for most people it would be recognized as a self-evident truth. Of course, there weren’t any railroad tracks on Martha’s Vineyard, so there was no way for the sisters to check the axiom out.

  Vanderbeck’s Second Axiom was, “It’s not what you think it is.” Toni, who was older than Maggie, had figured that this meant that when you thought you knew what something was, you were wrong because it was something else, and that it required even more thinking; Maggie thought that it meant that thinking about things didn’t necessarily help you understand them; that maybe, for instance, you should just see and touch and hear things and have feelings about them instead of just thinking about them. Uncle Bill had said he thought maybe both of them might be right, but he never said for sure.

  Vanderbeck’s Third Axiom was, “It makes no difference.” The girls thought that this meant that even if something wasn’t what you thought it was, it didn’t matter. Or wasn’t supposed to matter, even if it seemed like maybe it should. Or something like that. Uncle Bill had agreed. His agreeableness was one of the things they liked about him. They also liked the fact that he could disappear whenever he wanted to, even when there didn’t seem to be anything to hide behind.

  Vanderbeck’s Fourth Axiom was, “This is it.” That was a simple one. It meant that whether something was what you thought it was or not, and whether it meant anything or not, it was what you had to deal with, one way or another.

  There might have been more of the axioms, but those were all Toni and Maggie could remember at the moment. When Aunt Polly had died, Uncle Bill had gone away for a long time. Where he had been, they didn’t know, but they had the impression that it had been far. Then, just last year, he had come home, and their mother had gotten him involved in the business about the cranberry bog.

  “And he was the one that brought up the idea of the trade,” said Maggie.

  What trade? I wondered. “What trade?” I asked.

  “Oh, you don’t know about the trade idea?” Toni pursed her lips. “Well, there are maps and the deeds and the records of land sales here in Gay Head, and everybody argues over what they mean. You’d think, hearing them wrangle, that Marcus’s lawyers would be glad to meet Mom’s lawyer on the green at dawn with either swords or pistols. But Uncle Bill wants to go the let’s-settle-this-thing-out-of-court route. And he came up with the trade idea.

  “There’s a little stub of land up on the hill behind Marcus’s place that belongs to the tribe. It sticks down into Marcus’s land like a sore thumb. Bill thinks maybe Marcus would give the tribe the bog in exchange for the thumb. The thumb isn’t good for much. It’s mostly down in a gully where you can’t even see the ocean, so you wouldn’t want to build there. And it’s so rocky you couldn’t grow anything if you tried, so the tribe can’t use it for anything.”

  “Why would Marcus want to trade?”

  “Well, it would take a kink out of his property line, and it would make him a friend of the tribe instead of an enemy, and it would keep him out of court. If he goes to court, his name will be in the papers, and some people don’t like to have their names in the papers. Maybe he’s one of them.”

  Maggie nodded. “Uncle Bill says it’s good to avoid war, if you can. I think he’s right.”

  So did I.

  “Mom is talking this trade idea over with her lawyer and the tribal council. And I think that Uncle Bill is going to talk it over with Mr. Marcus.”

  I wondered how he was going to manage that, since Marcus lived inside a sort of fortress designed to keep visitors out, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I thanked them both very much, and told them they’d been a big help, and left.

  Martha’s Vineyard has little weather systems all its own. Mainland forecasts do not apply to it at all, and, moreover, small as the island is, consisting of only a hundred and thirty or so square miles of land, the weather is often radically different in one part of the island than it is in another. Today, for example, the fog hung heavy in Gay Head, but thinned to a mist in Chilmark, and was gone completely by the time I got to West Tisbury. In Vineyard Haven, the sun was shining brightly, just as it h
ad been on Marcus’s hilltop. I drove to John Dings’s house, and knocked on the door.

  Sandy Dings recognized me at once. She didn’t seem too happy about it.

  “I’d like to talk with your daughter,” I said.

  “Jean has to go to work in a little while. I’m trying to get her to get dressed.”

  “This won’t take long.” I stood there.

  Sandy Dings was not a very good doorkeeper. “Oh well,” she sighed. “Come on in. She’s out on the deck trying to get a tan. You can’t get a tan when you’re working almost every day as a waitress. I don’t think she should be getting a tan, anyway, what with all this skin cancer business. You wait here. I’ll call her.”

  “If she can talk and tan at the same time, I’ll talk to her out there,” I said.

  She hesitated, then said: “You wait a minute till I see what she’s got on.”

  She went out and came back, shaking her head. “That girl better start getting ready for work or she’ll be late again. She says for you to come on out. Don’t be shocked. I swear these girls wear less every year.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I think they were wearing bikinis when you were her age.”

  Sandy Dings’s face got red, but she smiled in spite of herself. It took about five years off of her. “You go on out there, now.” She waved toward the back porch. “But don’t keep her too long. She’s got to get ready for work.”

  I went out there and found Jean Dings, clad in dark glasses and a bit of cloth. She had zinc oxide on her nose. She had that young and juicy look.

  “Hi,” she said. “Mom says you want to talk to me. What about?”

  “Vinnie Cecilio says that you two have dated a couple of times.”

  She tugged at the bit of cloth, rearranging it in some microscopic way. “That’s right. We dated up in Boston, while he was still in school, and we’ve dated a couple of times down here. Vinnie’s not much for long thoughts, but he’s fun, and he knows how to dance.”