I nosed the car onto the dirt shoulder of the road just before we reached the Bite. Karen saw me first and practically squealed with excitement.
“Alex, what are you doing here? You told us you wouldn’t be back till the weekend we close.” She realized as soon as the words were out that she knew the connection. “Oh, I’m sorry. Isabella Lascar was staying at your place. I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks, Karen. We’re up here trying to help Wally. This is my friend Mike Chapman.”
“She was here, Alex. She was here on Wednesday.”
“Isabella?” I should have known I could get a pretty good scouting report from the Quinn sisters. They were enthusiastic, hardworking young women who loved celebrities, and if they trusted you with the information, they could tell you when Vernon Jordan or Billy Joel or Mike Nichols or Princess Di had his or her last order of clams and oysters.
“Yeah, did you send her to us?”
“Well, of course, you’re on the top of my list, Karen, and I would have sent her here, but I actually never got to speak with her on Wednesday.”
Mike casually began to ask for more details. “Do you remember what time she was here?” was how he started, and when he found out it was between two and three in the afternoon, he moved on to whether or not she was alone.
Jackie had joined in the conversation, too, and both were quick to respond that Isabella had been with a man. No, he didn’t seem at all familiar to them, and yes, they had both checked him out, simply because they assumed he might also be a movie star.
“He was a looker,” Jackie offered. Taller than Mike, also with dark hair, and probably in his forties. “They had a medium order of clams with some fries, and both of them had bottled water.”
“Did you happen to hear anything about where they were coming from or what they were up to?” I knew from lots of experience here that the deep-fryers were against the windows, right over the picnic table. My father once came close to bringing the girls to tears, unintentionally, by sitting below that window and grousing that there were too many potatoes and too few clams in the chowder. So I tried to make it easier for them to admit an overheard by urging, “It’s really important, girls. It could really help us a lot.”
Karen was eager to be useful. “It sounded to me like they were on their way to the ferry. He had to be somewhere else and she was going to stay on the island. I’m telling you, she was all over him. I’m pretty sure she was driving him to the ferry, or maybe it was the airport. But they were in a hurry and they ate pretty fast.”
“Thanks, Karen. I’m going to ask Wally to come up and take some more details from you, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Meanwhile,” Mike smiled at the sisters, “let’s have a large order of clams, some Bite fries, and two cups of chowder.”
While the order was cooking I walked Mike around the bend to show him the fishing dock and the remains of the ever-shrinking fleet of commercial boats that worked off the coastline. The Quitsa Strider and the Unicorn were both moored in the picturesque harbor, but no sign of their two island captains, brothers who are descendants of original Vineyard settlers, who still caught their swordfish by harpooning them rather than dragging a gill net at sea for days.
We came back, picked up our food, and sat at one of the tables, barely talking as we devoured our late lunch. Mike inhaled the soup and ate two thirds of the clams before he came up for air.
“You’re right, Coop, this is great stuff.”
“We may have stumbled on an important bit of evidence. Was Isabella killed before her lover left the island… or just after? Thank goodness you wanted fried clams.”
“As Mae West would say, ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it,’” Mike responded.
I reached for another clam belly as I asked Mike what he meant.
“I was all set to eat your friend Primo’s pizza for lunch. Then Wally told me about the autopsy report. Looks like Isabella got knocked off within an hour or so of her last meal…”
I gagged on the delicious morsel as Mike finished his sentence. “Fried clams—undigested, sitting in her stomach—big, juicy ones, with a little batter on them. I knew I could count on you to tell me who served the best ones on the island.”
He grinned as he raised his beer can to click mine: “Here’s looking at you, Coop. Hope you’re not still hungry—that fried food is lousy for your diet.”
Chapter
10
I had promised Wally that I would pack and ship Isabella’s belongings to Los Angeles to save his deputies the trouble of going back to the house another day, so Mike and I returned there after lunch to finish that chore. He turned on the CD player, slipped one of my Smokey Robinson discs in place, and sat in the rocking chair next to the bed as I began to fold the clothes that were so casually strewn about.
“I’m tossing these half-used candles,” I said as I walked behind Mike to reach for the one next to the bed.
He picked up the movie script and thumbed through it as I worked. “Why don’t you keep one of those silk pajama things for yourself, kid? Nobody would begrudge you that.”
“Thanks for the thought. Isabella sent me an identical set for my birthday this spring. The tags are still on it—somehow it just doesn’t have ‘me’ written all over it.” I stroked the silky fabric of the champagne-colored lingerie as I fitted it into the already crammed duffel bag, guessing from Isabella’s descriptions of her pudgy cousin that these gorgeous indulgences of La Lascar would find their next life in some charity’s thrift shop in Sherman Oaks.
When the three bags were zipped and locked, I called my caretaker’s answering machine, leaving a message for him to get a house cleaner in to get rid of the dust left by the investigators.
“C’mon, Mike. Let’s lock up and get on the road.”
“This would have been a pretty good movie,” he said, still carrying the screenplay, which he had obviously decided to take with him as his keepsake of the deceased. “Lucrezia Borgia was an interesting broad for the sixteenth century. Politics, war, intrigue, religion, sex, poison—some things never change. Izzy was hot for this one—she’s got stars and exclamation points in red ink drawn all around her entrance and opening salvo. She’s even written in her own poetry in the margin—or maybe one of her friends wrote it. You know a Dr. C.? It’s got a few lines of poetry, then it says ‘Dr. C.’”
I turned off the CD and the lights and set the alarm system.
In his most dramatic drag imitation, Mike swept out the door reading Isabella’s poem to me:
What beckoning ghost, along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps… tell,
Is it, in Heaven, a crime to love too well?
“Whoa, Chapman, maybe they didn’t teach you this stuff at Fordham and certainly not at the Police Academy, but any self-respecting English literature major from a woman’s college could tell you that Isabella didn’t write that. It’s a very famous poem by Alexander Pope,” and I shuddered to think how sadly appropriate the title was as I said it to Mike, “‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.’”
“Well, she must have liked it a lot to write it in here herself. Maybe Dr. C. is the shrink she was complaining to you about—you know, maybe C is one of his initials.”
“Sounds more like Dr. C. is from the Psychic Friends Network. A ‘crime’ to love too well? Is some guy—one of her exes—so jealous that he killed her because she was with another man? Or did she love someone too much? Was this psychiatric advice or just the coincidence of someone’s taste for classic English poetry? If poor Isabella had only known the rest of this verse, she might not have liked it quite so much.”
“Why?”
“’Cause it’s about the untimely death of a beautiful young woman, who once had wealth and fame, and now all that remains is ‘a heap of dust.’ That’s why. You better read through the rest of the script and see if anything else has been added to the margins.”
“And we’d better get a han
dle on Dr. C. Let me tell you—British poetry, Motown lyrics, movie trivia—with all the stuff you’re good at, I don’t know why Battaglia thinks you’re so useless. Let’s get going.”
I took a last look around at the house and then started the car out the driveway. As we headed down-island, I continued to point out all the sights to Mike—friends’ houses, working farms, and beach roads.
“How did you find this place, Alex? I mean, why did you start to come to the island?”
“Can you stand a love story? A short one. Sad ending.”
I think Mike was sorry the moment he asked. Most of my office friends had some idea of what had happened to me in law school, but I had never talked much about it. I doubt he had connected it to the Vineyard or he would not have raised it at that moment.
“I’m taking one last detour on the way to the airport,” I said, turning off State Road onto a dirt path that led through two miles of thick brush before reaching an area of wetlands and saltwater ponds. Beyond the dunes, guarded only by gulls and shorebirds, stretched miles of sandy white beach covering practically the entire south coast of the island. I knew when we reached it there would not be a soul anywhere in sight on Black Point Beach, just the great surf of the Atlantic Ocean, constantly throwing up waves to meet the shore.
I started to talk as we drove down the winding road. “You know that I went to law school in Charlottesville, at the University of Virginia, right? I loved it there and I loved everything about the law school experience, which is quite unusual, as you’ve heard. It’s a great school and it’s also one of the most beautiful places in the country. From my first semester I knew that I wanted to go into public service, and I knew that I wanted to be a prosecutor—they were a natural overlap—and Paul Battaglia had the reputation for running the best District Attorney’s office anywhere.
“So I was off on the right foot academically, from the start. School was interesting, the friends I made there were fantastic—it was a long time since I’d been in classes with men—and I was playing as hard as I was working.
“One Saturday afternoon my friends Jordan and Susan”—whom Mike knew well—“invited me out to the house they rented to go horseback riding… a big mistake for a Jewish girl from Westchester whose only experience on a horse had been at the Bronx Zoo. We were just doing a trail ride, but my horse got spooked by a snake and threw me. I went straight to the University Hospital Emergency Room with my left hand kind of dangling—three fingers badly fractured.”
We had reached the end of the dirt path and I parked the car so Mike and I could get out and walk over the dunes. He followed my lead as I kicked off my shoes and left them in the car.
“Enter Adam Nyman—the resident on duty in the Emergency Room. He splinted my fingers, convinced me that law students—male variety—were pedantic and boring, and took me to dinner. I fell madly in love and we spent every free moment together from that weekend on. Fill in the details—I’m sure you can.”
“Was he a Vineyarder?” Mike asked.
“No, but he’d been coming here with his family all his life.” We stood at the top of the sandy walkway up to our knees in the tall, reedy grass and stopped to look at the incredible sweep of ocean and sky, with not a human in sight.
“This is what Adam lived for—to sail on that water from the first light of day till the sun set beyond the Gay Head cliffs. Every vacation, every long weekend, every space in our lives we scrambled to get here.
“We became engaged and set a date to get married, right after the bar exam the summer I graduated from law school. We bought the house together and started to fix it up. Adam had known the old lady who lived in it—widow of a fisherman from an old island family—and had promised her he’d never tear it down or modernize it the way so many people have done to the original farmhouses.” We were walking westward, as sand crabs scurried to get out of our way and birds hovered behind us to see if we had scraps of food to drop for their dinner.
“Most of my family and friends had come up to the island the week before the wedding. There were beach picnics and cocktail parties and Sunfish races and clambakes and I never thought there could be an end to my happiness.
“Adam was the one with the inflexible schedule, so he was the only person we were waiting for those last days. His final shift was over at midnight on Thursday—he was working in New York City by then—and he got in his car to make the drive up to the ferry so he could be here at daybreak on Friday.”
I was doing fine. I was telling the story so flatly that I knew I could get through it okay—there wasn’t enough emotion left in me this week to squeeze out much for these memories, mixed as they were with such swings of joy and agony.
“I never saw Adam again, never heard his gentle voice or felt the warmth of those wonderful hands on my body. Everyone who loved him as I did stayed on the island for his funeral. There was no wedding, and I never got to be his bride.”
My voice was still strong and I wasn’t even conscious of the tears streaking down my cheeks, till Mike grabbed me by the shoulders. “C’mon, Alex, sit down for a minute. I didn’t mean to get into this. Sit down and catch your breath…”
“Whew. I haven’t said it out loud in so long—I just can’t be here without thinking of Adam,” I said, crossing my knees to sit in the sand. Mike joined me and watched as I picked up a stick and mindlessly drew a heart and arrow with Adam’s initials in it, as I used to do so many years ago. He was too polite to ask me what happened and I was top self-absorbed in the story not to go on.
“It was an accident, Mike, a terrible one. Someone on the highway sideswiped Adam’s car. They were crossing one of those bridges in Connecticut, the ones that go over the rivers, and Adam’s car crashed through the guardrail and went over the side of the bridge. It was demolished—completely crushed by the impact.”
“Did they get the guy who did it?” asked Mike, as only someone in our business would, I think, since it mattered so little to everyone else once Adam was gone.
“No. It was the middle of the night. No one was around to see what happened. The police didn’t find the car till hours later. But you’re like Adam’s mother. She was sure it had been done on purpose, convinced that he had been working on some secret medical research for the government. She couldn’t let go and accept that it was accidental.”
“But you could?”
“The police gave it a hard look—it didn’t make sense that anyone needed to kill Adam for anything, for any reason at all. You know me. I just assumed that the gods don’t like to see me too happy. Adam had given me the future—he was smart and funny and warm and loving, and the happiest person I ever met. As my mother would say, ‘It just wasn’t meant to be.’
“So instead of dancing in a white tent on our hilltop, we all came to this beach—Adam’s favorite. His father and sister went out on his sailboat, brought it around from Menemsha to this point, and scattered his ashes where they thought he’d want them to be. And this is where I come to talk to him, Mike, like some madwoman in a bad novel, you’re probably thinking. But I’ll never let go of him. It’s where I always come to find him and love him, and know that he loved me better than anything on earth. That’s the thing that killed him—driving all night to get here to marry me.”
Mike let me sit there alone for five or ten minutes while he walked farther down the beach, before returning with an outstretched arm to pull me up from the sand.
“Give me the keys, kid, and let’s get to the plane. It would be my luck to get marooned here overnight at a time when you’re this maudlin, and stuck on another guy.”
We walked back to the car and Mike drove the short distance to the airport, where we turned in the rental car and waited in the terminal for the perky pilot to come back for the six o’clock Cape Air flight to Logan. There was no wind to speak of, so even Mike stayed calm on the short hop into Boston.
I was leading him from the exit gate of the commuter plane to the corridor for the connecting shu
ttle flight, when I heard Mike call out for me to stop. He was standing still, staring at the television screen that was facing out at him from the airport bar, and gesturing excitedly for me to walk back to him.
“Hey, Coop, can you believe it? ‘Jeopardy!’ must be on earlier up here than in New York. C’mon, they’re about to do the Final Jeopardy question.”
I reminded myself of a mother talking to a five-year-old kid as I shook my head in annoyance and called out to him, “No, Mike. Move it—let’s not miss the seven o’clock shuttle.”
“Wait a minute. What’s your hurry? There’s another plane in half an hour. The category’s the Oscars. What do you say, blondie? I’ll bet you twenty-five dollars.”
Mike and I were both addicted to “Jeopardy!,” although I rarely got home in time from the office to see the seven o’clock show. There were some subjects I wouldn’t bet him on—like the Bible—because he beat me every time. And I had a few topics that he wouldn’t touch. But we usually passed our ten dollars back and forth from week to week, challenging each other on our known weaknesses, when the ante could rise considerably. Mercer Wallace swears the worst time to get killed in Manhattan is between six fifty-five and seven-thirty in the evening. He has known Chapman to stand in an airless tenement in the middle of July with three bodies strewn around a homicide scene, listening to Alex Trebek recite the answers to the Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy rounds while calling out the questions in response, as the medical examiner silently probes the corpses for clues.
I turned around and reached for my wallet, since we both knew the movies pretty well. “It’ll cost you fifty if you make me stay.” I could see he wasn’t leaving in the next three minutes, in time to make the flight, so I put my money on the bar and told Chapman to do the same.
He pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, ordered us each a drink, and turned to me with a sheepish grin on his face.
“I’ve only got twenty bucks—I have to pick up my paycheck at the office when we get in. Trust me?”
Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy Page 10