“You’d better call Vinnie,” said Zee. “He may not know about this.”
“Vinnie is the mastermind,” I said. “What do you care about Vinnie?”
“He’s a human being,” said Zee. “So far he hasn’t actually killed anybody. He should be told that Benny’s on the loose!”
I thought about that. Yeah. Maybe if Vinnie thought that Benny White was coming down to shoot him and shut him up, he might decide to help us find Benny before Benny found him.
“You’re right,” I said.
Priscilla answered when I called the Marcus’s number. Vinnie had his own phone. An unlisted number. She hesitated.
“Tell Luciano that I need to talk to Vinnie,” I said.
She went away and came back and gave me Vinnie’s number. “But I don’t think he’s in,” she said. “I think he went out.”
“Why? He have a date?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know that, either. I’m not his secretary.”
“When did he leave?”
“Not too long ago. A half-hour, maybe. I think it was him in the Cherokee.”
I dialed Vinnie’s number and let the phone ring. Vinnie, unlike Aristotle Socarides, had an answering machine. I left a message: Benny White is on the prowl, with the police after him; Roger the Dodger has been shot dead, maybe by Benny; call me right away.
I got out the ferry schedule. Several more boats would be coming in before they stopped running for the night. Benny might be on any one of them. Or none of them. Or he might be here already.
If Benny had called Vinnie, maybe Vinnie was planning to meet him, which meant, maybe, that Vinnie didn’t know about Roger the Dodger, and was soon to become Benny’s next victim. Or maybe it meant that Vinnie did know about Roger, and planned to help Benny find me and Zee, and make us the next victims, so he and Benny could both live happily ever after. Or maybe Benny never called him at all, and Vinnie was just out on a date, or was going to a movie, or to a bar.
Or maybe Vinnie still had Luciano on his mind. I felt stupid for not having thought of that earlier, and called the Marcus number again. This time Thomas Decker answered. Good. He could decide what to tell Luciano and Angela, and how to do it. I told him about the ties between Benny White, Roger the Dodger, and Vinnie, and about what had happened in Boston this afternoon. Decker listened without a word, until I was through. Then he said, “Are you telling me that Vinnie is the guy who tried to get Luciano killed?”
“It could be.”
There was a silence. Then he said, “That’s pretty strong stuff. Are you sure you’re right?”
“I’ve been wrong lots of times. But if I’m right, it could be dangerous for Luciano. Luciano’s got himself a sort of fortress up there on the hill, but Vinnie can drive in and out whenever he wants to and nobody even gives him a glance. It occurred to me that he could bring Benny White in with him.”
There was another pause. Then: “Luciano and Angela aren’t going to like hearing this.”
I was sure that was true. “Maybe you can just tell them the Benny White part for the moment, and leave out the Vinnie part. Tell them that Benny looks like the shooter, and that he may be on the island to finish the job. Tell them it’ll be safer if they leave for a few days.”
“Luciano won’t want to go.”
“Tell him that Benny may have found a way into the house. Bill Vanderbeck knows how to do it, so maybe Luciano will believe that Benny does, too. Tell Angela that Luciano is in danger, and tell Luciano that Angela is. Play one against the other. The three of you should get on Luciano’s boat and go to Block Island, or some place until the dust settles. I think you should go right now, because Benny may already be here.”
“It will kill Angela if Vinnie really is in on this.”
“Benny may kill her and Luciano both if they don’t get off the island.”
Decker made up his mind. “I’ll get them off. Later, I’ll phone you from the boat to find out what’s happening. I won’t be able to keep them out there very long.”
“You may not have to.”
I hung up, and looked at Zee, who had been listening.
“Where’s your pistol?” I asked.
She frowned. “It’s in its paper bag, where it always is.”
“Of course it’s not loaded.”
“Of course not. Loaded guns are dangerous. You know that.”
“I don’t suppose that under the circumstances I can prevail upon you to load it and keep it close to you.”
“You don’t suppose correctly. There are plenty of police on this island, and all of them have guns. They don’t need me or my gun to deal with Benny White.”
She was right about the number of police and police forces on the island. Aside from the six town police forces, there were state cops, environmental cops, registry cops, the sheriff’s department cops, and maybe even some other cops I didn’t know about. The fact that the six island towns don’t combine forces into one is yet another example of the rivalries that exist on the Vineyard. Every town is sure it will get worse service for more money, if an island force is created. Besides, who will be chief? Some guy in Oak Bluffs, or Chilmark? What will he know about how things are in Vineyard Haven or West Tisbury? So we have an island with ten thousand permanent residents and ten police forces to look after them.
“You’re probably a better shot than most of them,” I said.
“I shoot at targets, not at people. Now, let’s not talk about this anymore. Let’s have supper, and let the police do their job.”
So we had supper, and I said nothing more about her pistol. But after supper I had coffee instead of cognac, and when Zee went to bed, I stayed up. I turned the yard light on, and stuffed some shells into my 12-gauge. I leaned the gun beside the door, turned the inside lights off, and sat on the dark porch as the night deepened.
After a while, Zee came out. “Are you coming to bed?”
“Not right now.”
“Are you mad at me? Because I won’t carry the gun?”
I was surprised. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d think that. I got up and took her in my arms. “No. I’m just going to sit up for a while. Sit with me, if you will.”
So she sat beside me in the lounge, and we looked out through the screens at the bright stars and the Milky Way arching over us. A summer wind moved through the trees. Finally she said, “You’re standing guard, aren’t you?”
“It’s just that Vinnie’s not at home, and he knows where we live.”
“He won’t come here.”
“Probably not.”
A while later, she said: “You’re not coming to bed tonight, are you?”
“I may come in later. I’m not really sleepy. Too much coffee. You go in. No need for both of us to be out here.”
The stars turned in the sky. Finally, she kissed me and went in.
I stayed up.
No one came through our woods or down our driveway.
When the sun climbed out of Nantucket Sound, I went inside, rinsed my face in cold water, took a couple of aspirin, and peeked into the bedroom. Zee was looking at me with tired, red eyes.
I put a smile on my face. “You were supposed to get some sleep.”
“I got some.” She held up her arms and I went to her. She pulled me down on top of her. “We’ll have breakfast, then you come to bed, and I’ll stay up.”
“But you have to go to work.”
She rolled me onto the bed beside her, and feigned disgust. “It must be really nice to live a life where you don’t have to keep track of the days of the week. This is Saturday! I have the weekend off!”
I’d forgotten. I was overcome with weariness and felt like lead, as if I were sinking into the mattress. “Forget breakfast,” I said. “Wake me up for lunch.” The world went away.
I slept for six hours, then swam awake on the scent of coffee, ham, eggs, and something more. I followed my nose out into the k
itchen and found Zee, clad in Tevas, shorts, and a loose hanging shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Her hair was put up in the blue babushka she favored when we went fishing. She met me with a kiss, and waved at the table.
“Sit down. Here’s coffee and juice. The eggs Benedict are on their way.”
She served, and we ate. Delish! I felt the last of my fatigue fade away. Cholesterol is wonderful.
“I thought of something this morning,” she said. “We don’t have to find Benny. All we have to do is find Vinnie. If we find Vinnie, we’ll probably find Benny, and we should be able to find Vinnie, if he’s still on the island, because we know what he looks like, where he lives, who his island friends are, and what kind of a car he’s driving.”
“You are smarter than the average bear,” I said. “I think you should pass that on to the local fuzz.”
“I’m several hours ahead of you,” she said. “I talked to the chief this morning. He’s going to take care of it. I thought we should give him a chance to do that, so while you’ve been snoozing, I’ve been loading up the Land Cruiser for a run down the beach. We’ll get out of everybody’s way, while the wheels of justice grind exceeding fine. By the time we get back, all may be well. What do you think?”
“A good plan,” I said.
I brushed my teeth, climbed first into my daring bikini bathing suit, and then into my shorts and tee-shirt, and we went off to East Beach. There, beneath the warm August sun, we fished in vain for the wily bonito at the Jetties, then drove back to Pocha Pond, where Zee lay on the old bed-spread that we use for a beach blanket while I waded out and raked a basket of chowder quahogs before coming in and lying down beside her. The sun burned the tension out of me, and I napped. Tans replenished, we pulled clothes on over our bathing suits and left the beach in the late afternoon. We drove to the police station, to see if, as we hoped, all was, indeed, well.
All was not well. Neither Vinnie nor his Cherokee had been found. They had both been gone since last night.
“You know how many Jeeps there are on this island,” said the chief. “He could be parked on a street someplace, or on some dirt road, or even in a parking lot, and we’d never know unless we happened to see him. Everybody’s looking, and we’ll find him sooner or later, but so far no dice. You go home and sit tight. We’ll get him.”
A lot of life is a psychological proposition. The reality that seems so objective to us often in fact exists only in our minds. The world we see as full of terrors is the same as the world we might as easily see as full of joy. The troubles that keep us tossing late at night are often gone in the morning, although nothing has changed but ourselves. Wealth, fame, and political power, which seem so real, in fact exist only because we and others agree that they do. If they didn’t exist in our minds, they wouldn’t exist at all.
I thought again about Vanderbeck’s Axioms, and considered the possibility that the Benny White in my mind lived there and there alone. Maybe he wasn’t the gunman, maybe he hadn’t shot Roger the Dodger, maybe he’d never even thought about coming to the island.
Maybe the moon was made of green cheese.
I was suddenly tired of being pushed and pulled around by fear of some hood who might not even be there.
“Let’s drive around awhile,” I said to Zee when we left the station. “Maybe we can see something nobody else has seen.”
So we drove through the streets and parking lots of Edgartown, looking for a green Cherokee with darkened window glass. There aren’t a lot of streets in Edgartown, but there are enough to keep you busy for a while, even if you have nothing else to do, and the cops all had other things to do at the same time they were looking for Vinnie, which meant they didn’t have time to look everywhere. We saw a lot of Cherokees, but not the right one. We drove up and down street after street, but saw nothing.
We were about to give it up when I remembered Maggie Vanderbeck saying that some friends of Vinnie’s had once taken him clamming in the Eel Pond. Vinnie hadn’t liked the experience, as I recalled, but he knew where the pond was. There were two dead-end roads where people parked when they went to the Eel Pond: the road to the boat landing, off the Pease Point Way extension, and Gaines Way, off Fuller Street. Unless you drove down to the end of either of those streets, you wouldn’t know if anybody was there.
We drove to the landing. Two pickups were there, but no Cherokee.
We drove back to Cottage Street and took a left, then took another left onto Fuller and yet another onto Gaines Way. There, where the pavement ended, parked where the shellfishermen park under the trees, was a green Cherokee with dark-tinted windows.
I parked the Land Cruiser crosswise in the street, blocking it off, and set the emergency brake. Then I got out and dug under the seat for the pistol. I wished I could see into the Cherokee. If there was anyone inside, he could certainly see me. I put the pistol in my waistband, under my tee-shirt, and walked to the Cherokee. The driver’s door wasn’t locked. I took a breath and opened it.
27
No one was in the car. I exhaled. There’s a little path that leads through the trees and undergrowth out onto the marsh that lies along the southwest shore of the Eel Pond. You take that path when you want to go clamming, stepping over drainage ditches and sending the little crabs that live there scuttling into their holes. If you turn to the east once you get out onto the marshlands, you can cross to Little Beach.
I walked along the path until I was clear of the undergrowth, and looked both ways. Where would a couple of city kids go while they waited to make their next moves? To the beach, of course. I walked back to the Land Cruiser.
“We need some help,” I said. “If they didn’t just abandon the car, I think they’re out there on the beach. But there’s too much of it for us to cover alone. They could be out on the point, or they could be clear down to the lighthouse. Or any place in between. Time to call the cops.”
Zee ran a map through her head. “If they’re on the beach, they can only get off it in three places. Here, down at the lighthouse, and at the end of Fuller Street. I’ll find a phone. You stay here and make sure they don’t get away in the Cherokee.”
She went to the nearest house and knocked on the door. It opened and she spoke to the woman there, then went in. I went back to the Cherokee, opened the driver’s door, popped the hood, and pulled a few wires loose. Zee came out of the house as I moved the Land Cruiser to the side of the street.
“They’re on their way,” she said. “A couple of the guys will start working their way up from the lighthouse, and some others will be here right away. They said for us to wait.”
“You wait,” I said. “I’m going to cut around to the end of Fuller Street to make sure they don’t slip out that way while we’re waiting here.” I pulled the .38 out of my waistband. “Here. I know you won’t shoot anybody, but if they happen to come out this way, shoot into the air or something. That should stop them.”
“And what will you do to stop them, if they come out at Fuller Street? You keep that old revolver of yours.” She made a sort of strange face, reached into her purse, and brought out her Beretta .380. “If I have to shoot into the air, I have a better chance at hitting it with this. Go on, now.”
I wondered what my own face looked like when I saw her pistol. I put the 38 back under my shirt, turned, and trotted to Fuller Street.
Where Fuller Street ends, there is a path that leads over a short bridge to Little Beach. I’ve gotten scallops in the shallows beyond the beach, although it’s not my favorite scalloping ground. Sometimes, though, after a wicked nor’easter, the scallops are piled two feet high along the beach and the fish wardens abandon all regulations about limits, so that Edgartownians can salvage as many of the shellfish as possible before they die and become food for only the gulls.
In August, though, we were still two months away from scallop season, and were in the sunning season instead. I crossed the bridge and went out on the beach. Looking to my right I could see Edgartown Light, around w
hich were crowded the brown-skinned all-summer people, and the pale August people who were working to become brown themselves in spite of medical warnings that it was bad for their health. Between me and the light was a scattering of towels, blankets, and umbrellas.
I saw neither Vinnie nor Benny. I turned and looked the other way, toward the Eel Pond, and saw fewer sunbathers, including two pale young men in shorts, seated on beach towels. There was a gym bag sitting on the sand beside them.
Vinnie. And a friend. Benny White, without a doubt.
They were looking in the other direction, at a water-skier leaving the beach behind a noisy motorboat filled with laughing young people. The boat pulled away, and the skier rose from the water.
As I looked at Vinnie and Benny, their heads turned and they looked at me. I turned casually and looked back toward the lighthouse. When I turned back, they were still looking at me. I sat down on the sand and pretended to look out to sea. When I glanced at them again, they were walking away from me to the north, toward the towels belonging to the water-skiers.
It seemed certain that Vinnie had recognized me, but in case he hadn’t, I pulled off my tee-shirt and hid the pistol inside it, then pulled off my shorts. Wearing my manly bikini, and carrying my bundle of pistol and clothes, I strolled along the beach behind them. Maybe when they next checked behind them, my change of costume would deceive them. Probably it wouldn’t.
In not too long a time, they turned off the beach toward the spot where they’d left their car. I felt a little rush of adrenaline, as I thought of Zee waiting there. I slid my hand into my bundle of clothes and got hold of the .38. I began to trot. But at that moment Vinnie and Benny saw something in front of them, and turned back to the beach.
Death on a Vineyard Beach Page 22