Death on a Vineyard Beach

by Philip R. Craig

  I looked, too, and saw a policeman come down the path by the Cherokee, and out onto the marsh. I looked back at Vinnie and Benny, and saw them looking at me. Then they turned and trotted along the beach to the north, passing the spot where the water-skiers had left their gear. I heard a rush of footsteps behind me, and whirled to find Zee at my back.

  “They’ve got themselves into a trap,” said Zee. “Once they get out there on the point, they’re stuck.”

  It was true. Little Beach hooks around the outside of the Eel pond, where I do some of my clamming and most of my musseling, and then ends, leaving a wide opening for boats to enter the pond and moor.

  “They’re stuck unless they want to swim,” I said. “If they don’t want to swim, they have to come back this way again. What are you doing here? You were supposed to stay on Gaines Way.”

  “The police are there.” Zee didn’t break stride. “You didn’t think I was just going to stand there while you were out here, did you? You know, I’ll bet these guys don’t know where they’ve gotten themselves. I’ll bet they think that they can get out of town along this beach, all the way to Oak Bluffs, if necessary. I’ll bet they’ve never looked at a map of this town.”

  That made sense to me. Nobody on the run would deliberately get himself trapped on a spit of sand that led nowhere, but neither Vinnie nor Benny knew where they were. I wondered if Vinnie had a gun, too. I had to presume that he did. I wondered how good he was with it, and whether Zee and I would need the pistols we were carrying.

  “Look,” I said. “We don’t both need to trail along after him like this. Why don’t you stop here and make sure the chief and the others are coming along. I’ll go ahead and keep an eye on them.”

  “You’re not a really champion patronizer like some men I know,” said Zee, “but you do have your moments.”

  “If a woman patronized a guy, is that matronizing?”

  Far ahead, Vinnie and Benny walked on. When they paused and glanced back, Zee and I stopped and pretended to be watching seagulls, just in case they really didn’t know yet who we were. When they went on, we followed. The more they looked back, the longer they looked. Every other look or so, Zee and I kept walking, so they wouldn’t wonder why we stopped every time they stopped.

  “I don’t think we’re fooling them,” I said. “I really think you should go back.”

  “They haven’t got much farther to go,” said Zee. “They’re about out of sand.”

  It was true. Vinnie and Benny had come nearly to the end of Little Beach and could now see that it ended with a last bit of sand covered with gulls, terns, and cormorants. Across the pond several small boats, both sail and power, were moored. But they were a long swim, almost as far as the other shore.

  We stopped and looked at Vinnie and Benny. What would they do? They were looking across the pond at the houses there, and looking at the boats. There were several catboats on moorings, ready to go, if you knew how to sail. Did either of them know how to sail? It would be ironic if they escaped in a slow-moving catboat.

  Then at the top of the launching ramp across the way, where I park the Land Cruiser when I’m shell fishing, a police car appeared. Then another one pulled alongside of the first. People got out and looked across the pond toward Vinnie and Benny. The sun glinted on a badge or two and what looked like some long guns.

  So much for swimming across to the land or to a boat. Vinnie and Benny turned back and saw us standing there, watching them. Benny made his decision and started toward us, his free hand slipping into the gym bag. Vinnie hesitated. I looked behind us and saw that the motorboat had come ashore, its crew clowning and laughing on the beach. There were police officers coming toward us along the sand, but they were quite far back, well beyond the boat. Benny was much closer.

  I read part of his mind. He’d take the motorboat, if he could get to it. But at what cost? What else, in this tight place, would he do? Would he be willing to shoot us, if we stood between him and the boat?

  Or would he, thinking that he could not escape, decide to shoot us anyway, before surrendering? Just for laughs? Massachusetts has no death penalty, so he wouldn’t be risking his life if he decided to take ours. Or would he decide to go out in a blaze of gunfire and glory, shooting until the cops shot him? Or, since nobody had yet proved he’d ever actually killed anyone, would he just surrender peaceably, knowing that he stood a good chance of walking away pretty untouched by the judicial system?

  Unless Vinnie Cecilio talked, in which case Benny was looking at long jail time. I thought of Roger the Dodger, who might also have talked.

  Vinnie lacked Benny’s toughness. I heard his voice say, “They got us, Benny. We gotta give up.”

  Benny’s face registered contempt. His hand appeared, holding a pistol. He turned and shot Vinnie in the chest. Vinnie went over backward. Benny let his gun hand swing by his side, turned, and came running toward us.

  “I think it’s retreat time,” said Zee, touching my sleeve.

  That seemed like a good plan, but since I didn’t fancy turning my back to Benny, I turned half away and shuffled sideways, like a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, trying to watch Benny and the beach under my feet at the same time, a hopeless effort that only resulted in my tripping and banging a knee on a rock. The pain was like a knife.

  Zee, faster than I was, looked back. “Get up! Come on, come on!”

  I looked beyond her and was surprised to note that the water-skiers apparently hadn’t even heard the shot. Rather, they were looking the other way, watching the policemen coming toward them.

  Zee’s eyes widened, and I looked back toward Benny and saw him racing over the sand, closing the distance between us with breathtaking speed. I was filled with a terrible fear for Zee. I got up.

  I cried, “Run!” and started toward her. But I already knew that the pain in my knee would not let me move fast enough. As she turned and fled down the beach, I stopped and turned and got the .38 in my hand. I sat on the sand, resting my elbows on my knees. I cocked the pistol and pointed it at Benny, as he came fast along the beach.

  When he was twenty yards away, I shouted, “Stop!”

  To my amazement, he did.

  “Toss away the gun,” I said.

  Instead, he lifted his pistol and fired.

  But he was panting from his run and his aim was off. The bullet kicked up sand to my right. I took cold and careful aim as he started walking toward me, firing again, and again missing.

  Then, as my finger tightened on the trigger, but before I could shoot, he spun around, staggered, and collapsed, the pistol dropping from his hand.

  From across the pond came the sound of the rifle shot that had felled him.

  I stood up and looked across the pond and waved my hand. In reply, someone over there lifted a long gun overhead. I thought the man looked like the chief, and the long gun looked like the new 30.06 he’d gotten for deer hunting in Maine.

  I limped to where Benny lay, his blood seeping into the sand. His pale face was peculiarly peaceful, the splinted little finger of his right hand looked oddly innocent in spite of the pistol that lay near it. I put a finger to his throat, but could feel no pulse.

  Then Zee was by my side, tucking away her little .380. Her hands were on Benny’s chest, working in vain to get him breathing again, as the police came running toward us.

  28

  In September, Zee and I signed up for the Bass and Blue-fish Derby, and headed for the beaches. As usual for that time of year, the blues were out where the boats could get them, but were scarce for surf casters. After the weigh-in the first night, we weren’t even close to the leaders. I compensated for this by retelling Zee about the twenty-one-pounder I’d once caught when I was the only one on the beach.

  “Yeah,” said Zee. “I remember you waving it under my nose. But as I recall, you didn’t catch it until the derby was over.”

  “Details, details.”

  We walked out of the
weigh station into a soft fall night. The Edgartown parking lot at the foot of Main was thick with fishermen and onlookers, and on the float behind the weigh station the filleters were busy with their knives, filleting fish for elderly and other people who could no longer go out and catch their own. No fish went to waste.

  Between the yacht club and the Reading Room, the Shirley J. swung at her stake, and beyond her, out in the harbor the last yachts of the season lay at their moorings. There was a police car in the parking lot, and the chief was leaning against it, smoking his pipe and looking pretty well recovered from having killed Benny White. In his decades as a police officer, it had been the first shot he’d ever fired in the line of duty, and it had taken him a while to get over it.

  Zee and I walked across.

  “Quite a mob,” said Zee, leaning on the car beside him, and looking at the crowd.

  “A mere nothing,” said the chief. “After Labor Day, the real crowds are gone. You can even find a parking place on the street, sometimes.”

  “I still see a lot of tourists around,” I said.

  “Only a few, by comparison. And none with kids over five. School has carried those folks off to America, and peace has once again arrived in Edgartown, more or less.”

  “Well,” said Zee, “you still have the local slimeballs around, so you won’t be bored completely to death.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, “we still have the hometown drunks and thieves and wife beaters and vandals and the rest, but we know who they are, mostly, even though we may not be able to prove it in court, so it’s not the same as when we have eighty or ninety thousand extra people on the island. Did you hear about Luciano Marcus?”

  The last time I’d talked with Luciano was on the phone, just after the shootings on the beach. He’d called from Hyannis, where they’d anchored for the night, to find out what was going on. I’d decided that telling the truth about Vinnie would be no benefit to him or Angela, so I’d told him that Vinnie had gotten shot trying to stop Benny from shooting me.

  The news of Vinnie’s death had stopped Luciano from thinking too clearly, but he’d listened while I told him something about bad Benny leading good but not-too-bright Vinnie astray, and about Benny stealing the shotgun that weekend he’d come down from Boston and exploiting poor naive Vinnie’s knowledge of Luciano and his fat wallet being at the opera that day in Boston, and then about my guess that once the cops were on his trail, Benny had decided to come down and shoot Zee and me so nobody could ID him, and about heroic Vinnie trying to stop him and getting himself killed in the process.

  Luciano had hung up the phone, breathing hard. I had imagined him popping another pill under his tongue.

  Now I said to the chief, “No. What about Luciano?”

  The chief removed his pipe from his mouth and looked at it.

  “They brought Luciano to the hospital this afternoon, then they flew him up to Boston. Heart attack. He’s in bad shape.”

  I felt a surge of sympathy for Angela, who had loved him all the years of their marriage, in spite of who he was or what he had done.

  “Poor Angela,” said Zee, echoing my thoughts. “I’ll call the house when we get home.”

  I thought of the fisher king in the Arthurian tales. The man who, because of spiritual sin, had brought ruin to his kingdom, and to those he loved.

  “You two win anything tonight?” asked the chief.

  “No triumph of justice for us,” said Zee. “We were skunked good and proper. My hubby here thinks it may mean there is no God.”

  The chief raised his eyes to the night sky. “As Sister Luke used to say, after we’re dead, all of this will be explained to us. Well, this crowd looks pretty peaceful, so I guess I can leave.” He got into the cruiser and drove away.

  “If we go home right now,” said Zee, “we can mess around awhile and still have time to get some rest before we hit Wasque early tomorrow morning.”

  “An excellent idea.”

  For the rest of the derby, we fished the Chappy beaches from Metcalf’s Hole to the Cape Pogue Gut, and when the blues came back close to shore we did our best to nail them. As the derby wore on, the truly dedicated fisherpeople became haggard from lack of sleep, and were occasionally testy.

  October 1 dawned clear and chilly, and presented us with a moral dilemma: whether to hit the beaches again, or take a scalloping break on the first day of that season.

  “Why not both?” asked Zee, checking out the tide tables. “We can go to Wasque early, then get home in time for low tide in Katama Bay. We can get our bushel of scallops and be home again by noon. We can have the scallops shucked by two, and be back on the beach by three.”

  “Done. But does that leave us time for sex?”

  “Let’s see. Maybe we can delay getting back to the beach until three-oh-five.”

  “I’m fast,” I said, “but I don’t know if I’m that fast.”

  “Actually,” said Zee, smiling up at me, “you’re slow. Very slow. It’s one of your charms.”

  “Would you like to list some of the others?”

  “Not right now.”

  That afternoon, on Wasque Point, just before sundown, some pretty big blues came in. The beach was shoulder to shoulder with fisherpeople, but they were regulars, so few lines were crossed and few tempers lost. Zee and I brought in big fish, as did everyone else, and about nine, the trucks began to peel away and head for Edgartown so their drivers could get to the weigh-in station before it closed at ten.

  “On the board at last,” grinned Zee, pointing. She was best of the day for shore blues, and I was third by a whisker. Happiness.

  “Hello, kid,” said a voice behind me. I turned and looked into Joe Begay’s eyes. He dropped his to Zee’s. “And hello to you, too, Mrs. Jackson.” His eyes came back to mine. “How were you lucky enough to win this woman?”

  “I didn’t get her by luck,” I said. “It was a combination of skill and lies.”

  “Ah,” said Begay. “The same time-honored technique I used to court Toni. I see you both made the board. Let me buy you two a drink to celebrate your fleeting fame as fisherfolk.”

  We went into the Wharf Pub and found a booth and beer.

  “Cheers,” said Begay. “This is my first derby. I figured that since I’m going to be an islander, I should join up and learn how to catch bass and bluefish. Turns out that I’m a very fashionable fellow. I can fly-fish.”

  “It’s all the craze,” I said.

  “When I was a kid, growing up out near Oraibi, my folks used to take a trip up to Emerald Lake in Colorado every year, for a week of trout fishing and camping. My dad taught me how to fish with dry flies, and now, all these years later, I’m using those ancient skills. I’ve been fishing up at the other end of the island.”

  “How are things up that way?” I asked. “It seemed like I lived up there last month, but I haven’t been back since.”

  “Interesting,” said Begay. “I’m getting some callouses from hauling pots, and I’m getting a lot more respect for the guys who go down to the sea in ships. Someday, I may even begin to make some money at it.” He paused and glanced at Zee then back at me, and arched a brow.

  “She knows everything I know,” I said.

  “Good grief,” said Zee, putting down her beer and looking at Begay. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those dare-I-speak-of-manly-things-in-the-presence-of-the-little-woman guys. If you are, it’s time you wised up!”

  “Jesus,” said Begay, laughing. “You sound just like Toni!”

  He sipped his beer and thought. “You’re right. It’s a bad habit. If it makes you feel any better, it isn’t a man/woman thing in my case, it’s just the result of the kind of work I used to do. In that work, you never told anybody any more than you had to.”

  “And what kind of work was that?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, Mrs. Jackson. I’ve begun telling Toni about it, but so far it’s just between her and me.”

  “Very mysterious,” said
Zee, intrigued. “I’m glad to hear that you’ve at least started to tell her things, but she must be going crazy, wanting to know everything.”

  “Does your husband know everything about you, Mrs. Jackson?”

  To my surprise, Zee blushed. A rather weak smile appeared on her face. “Well, almost,” she said.

  “And does your wife know all about you, J. W.?”

  “My life is an open book,” I lied.

  “There you have it,” said Begay, making a small gesture with a large brown hand. “Well, now, about things up in Gay Head. For one thing, you might be interested to hear that I’ve got myself a crewman. Jimmy Souza. Sober, and trying to stay that way. Guy knows a hell of a lot about pot fishing. If I make any money on the boat this year, it’ll be because of him.”

  I was pleased. Maybe the chief had been right; maybe Jimmy was again going to be a good man. I hoped so.

  “And another thing,” said Begay. “It seems that my mother-in-law, Linda Vanderbeck, got proposed to by Bill Vanderbeck.”

  Zee’s ears opened. “No kidding!”

  Begay smiled at her sudden interest. “Yeah.”

  “And?” Zee had both hands on her stein.

  “And she said no, she’d already been married to enough Vanderbecks for one life, and besides she didn’t want to get married again anyhow because she has enough to do trying to make sure the tribe—that’s the Gay Head Wampanoags, of course—get what’s coming to them from you European invaders. The job will take all her time, she figures, and she doesn’t have room for a husband in her plans.”

  “Shucks.” Zee sipped her beer. Then she brightened. “You and Toni will have to come down for supper. Jeff is a great cook, and the two of you can catch up on old times while Linda and I get to know each other better. You men can serve us drinks and goodies while we sit in front of the fire and talk about womanly things.”

  Begay faked a frown. “I thought it was politically incorrect for men to talk about manly things and women to talk about womanly things.”