Murder at a Vineyard Mansion

by Philip R. Craig

  She never hesitated. “Yes. It was me. Harold was very emotional about people wrecking Chappy, and he was set on showing Ron Pierson he wasn’t wanted by smashing those windows, and I was worried about him so I went too. Then when he started crashing all that glass and making all that noise, I was afraid someone would hear and come and find him, so I found another hammer in his car and went and broke as many windows as I could as fast as I could. I know I was wrong but I did it because I wanted us to get away.”

  “So you weren’t his only passion.”

  She let go of her horse’s neck and looked at me. “No. But I was his best.” Her eyes were red but there was something like pride in her voice. “Do you think I should have told the police what I did? I didn’t tell them that when they talked with me. I caused a lot of damage.”

  I thought about Ron Pierson’s money. He could afford to replace his windows. “If you do that,” I said, “you’ll have to tell the police that Harold was involved too. And then you’ll have to tell them about your relationship. And then your mother will learn about it if she doesn’t already know. I think I’d keep my mouth shut, if I were you.”

  “You’re not going to tell them?”

  I’ve done worse things than vandalize windows. “Not unless I have a better reason than I have now,” I said. “You were seen later at the Pierson place. The police must have asked you about that. Why did you go back?”

  “They did ask me. I told them it was because my half brother, Ollie, had been killed there and I wanted to see where it happened. The real reason was in case Harold or I had left some clue that could be traced back to us. Who saw me?”

  “No one who knew who you were.”

  “Good.” She began to move the currycomb over the horse’s shoulder. “Thanks for agreeing to keep my mother in the dark.”

  “Are you sure she doesn’t already know?”

  She nodded. “I’m sure. I’d have heard about it by now. She’d have harangued me and made him miserable like she’s done with every man who wanted to date me. But she’s said nothing. She definitely doesn’t know.”

  “Did Harold have any dangerous habits that you know of? Did he do drugs, for instance? Or was he a gambler?”

  “Neither. Why?”

  “People in those trades sometimes get violent.”

  “He drank too much and some people didn’t like his politics and he probably left angry women behind him, but he wasn’t violent and he didn’t have violent associates.”

  I thought of what Kristen Kolle had told me and took a short intuitive leap. “What did your brother think of you and Harold being together? You two met at his house, didn’t you?”

  She looked at me in surprise. “How did you know that? Nobody knew that.”

  It had been a shot in semidarkness but had hit home as such shots sometimes do. “Someone saw you together on Old County Road, coming from the direction of your brother’s place,” I said. “Why did you meet there and what did your brother think of your relationship?”

  She hesitated but she had told me too much to stop now. “We couldn’t meet at my house or at Harold’s. But Ethan’s place is private and we could be alone together. Ethan didn’t like it but I’m his sister and I begged him and he let us come there for a few hours at a time. He’d go away and leave us alone and we’d try to be gone before he came home.” She touched her knuckles to her mouth. “I’m glad it wasn’t Ethan who told you. Except for Anita, Ethan was the only one who knew about us.” She frowned up at me. “He promised he’d never tell anyone, but even before Harold was killed I thought he was gettingantsy.”

  “Secrets are hard to keep,” I said.

  “But who would he tell? And why? He’d never hurt me and he knew how much Harold meant to me.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “All I know is that he didn’t tell me.”

  Her mood changed. “Harold and I were happy at Ethan’s house. We could make love and have a glass of wine on the porch and talk and listen to Vivaldi tapes. Ethan said that Vivaldi wrote four hundred concertos, and he must have had all of them there on his shelves. We listened to them whenever we were there. Do you like Vivaldi, Mr. Jackson?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But a wag once claimed that Vivaldi really wrote one concerto four hundred times.”

  She tried but failed to smile at the timeworn jest. “I don’t know much about music,” she said, “but I know I’ll never hear Vivaldi again without thinking about Harold.”

  Like Margaret in the Goldengrove, it was Cheryl that she mourned for.

  19

  Passions ran high among the Bradfords, but since Sarah apparently knew nothing of her daughter’s love affair with Harold, her general hatred of men seemed an unlikely motive for his murder. Ethan, on the other hand, still seemed a possible suspect, since he did know and disapproved of Harold’s liaison with his window-smashing sister.

  It was far from impossible that out of love for Cheryl he had coshed Harold to save her from one of the island’s most notorious womanizers. People have killed for less reason.

  I drove down to the Edgartown Police Station on Pease’s Point Way and was told by Kit Goulart, who was tending the desk, that the Chief was in but that he was buried in both routine paperwork and the additional paperwork having to do with the still unsolved murders on Chappaquiddick.

  “No problem,” I said. “He loves me like a son and will be hurt if I don’t drop in to say hello.”

  “And I’ll be fired if you barge in on him, and I’ll whack you with my nightstick if you get me fired, so stand right there while I tell him you’re here.”

  Kit and her husband, Joe, both stood over six feet tall and weighed in at 250 or more. You wouldn’t want Kit whacking you with her nightstick, if indeed she actually had one. I hadn’t seen a nightstick for years, but I wisely took no chances.

  “Tell him I’ve been nosing around in police business,” I said as she picked up a phone. “That should get a rise out of him.”

  “I can imagine,” said Kit. She spoke into the phone then put it down and waved toward the Chief’s closed office door. “Your father awaits you.”

  The Chief’s desk was piled with paper. As I shut his door behind me he voiced an oft-heard complaint. “Ever since we got computers I’ve had more paper to deal with. I thought computers were supposed to make paper obsolete.”

  “You’ll be interested to learn that I am now a computer owner myself,” I said. “So far I’ve barely learned how to turn it on and off, but Zee and the kids can make it dance and play games.”

  “Kids can make them do that without even reading a book,” he said. “My grandchildren can probably learn how to build atomic bombs if they want to. Say, maybe I should hire them to come down here and computerize this mess on my desk.”

  “Nepotism is not unknown in Edgartown,” I said, “so why not? They can make a couple bucks and you can go fishing.”

  He put his hands behind his neck and yawned. “Kit tells me that you’ve been snooping. No surprise there. What have you learned that I don’t already know?”

  “Probably nothing, but I’ll tell all if you’ll do the same.”

  “Well, I won’t, but if you know something I should know you’d better cough it up so I won’t be obliged to throw you in jail for some reason or other.”

  “Being in jail is a pretty good deal these days,” I said. “Duane Miller turns out the best meals on the island and I can crawl out a window after supper, spend the night with Zee, and be back in time for breakfast.”

  “The window has bars on it now, I’m told. Did you hear about the counterfeit bills they found on Mickey Gomes when they collected him in Oak Bluffs?”

  “I didn’t think Mickey was bright enough to be a counterfeiter.”

  “And you’d be right. Turns out he got them from a fellow inmate. The story is that while he was outside the walls, Mickey bought some of those prepaid telephone cards for his cellmates and one of them paid him off with queer bills.”
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  “Tsk. So it’s true about there being no honor among thieves.”

  “And guess where the guy got the bills: he made them himself on the jail’s computer. No wonder us poor cops are the laughingstock of half the island. If I wasn’t wearing the uniform I’d be laughing myself.”

  “I take it that this means that when you toss me in jail I won’t have a computer to play with in my idle hours.”

  “You got it. No escape window and no computer. Hard times have come to the County of Dukes County Jail.”

  “Has any inmate sued yet?”

  “No, but it’s bound to come. Inhumane treatment, police brutality, and all that. They’ll probably win their case, too, what with the times being what they are. Now, what do you want? You never come smiling around unless you want something.”

  “Like I said, I had an info trade in mind. Just to show I’m playing an honest game I’ll start by telling you what I know. Then you can do the same.”

  “I’m promising nothing but I want everything.”

  “And that’s what you’ll get,” I lied, and told him almost everything I’d heard or seen in my investigation. Among other things, I didn’t burden him with the knowledge that Cheryl Bradford was a window breaker.

  “So she and Hobbes were lovers, eh? She didn’t tell us that when we interviewed her.”

  “Was her mother there with her?”

  “Yes. So what?”

  I told him what Cheryl had told me about hiding the relationship from Sarah. I said, “If you talk with Cheryl privately she’ll probably tell you the truth.”

  He had been a cop a long time and had seen and heard a lot. Like most cops he had considerable sympathy for most people in trouble and an understanding of their fears and weaknesses.

  “I’ll ask her to come and see me. We can have a private talk. You don’t think she killed him?”

  I shrugged. “No, but I’ve been fooled before.”

  “What about Hobbes’s other women? What about their husbands and boyfriends?”

  “The only men I’ve talked to are John Lupien and Ethan Bradford. I haven’t scratched them off my list, but I can’t link Lupien to Harold Hobbes and I can’t link Ethan to Ollie.”

  “The ME says Mattes and Hobbes were killed with similar weapons by similar assailants. A club or maybe a piece of pipe swung left to right by somebody about middle height. How tall are Lupien and Bradford, would you guess?”

  “Both about six feet, I’d say.”

  “Too tall, according to the ME. We’re looking for somebody built lower to the ground. Another thing: Ollie had a fractured skull but he may have still been alive before he got pitched off the cliff. He was only hit once.”

  “How about Harold?”

  “Oh, Harold was very dead before the killer was through with him. Mashed his skull pretty good. Blood all over the place. Harold was a pretty big man, but he was hit first from behind and was probably unconscious when he got pounded some more. What do you make of that?”

  “What you make of it, I imagine. The killer either wasn’t as mad at Ollie as he was at Harold, or he kept pounding Harold because there wasn’t any cliff to toss him off of.”

  “What do you think of the theory that the killer didn’t mean to kill Ollie and tried to make his death look like an accident?”

  “I can see that, but whoever killed Harold didn’t try to make it look like an accident.”

  The Chief nodded, then opened a drawer in his desk and brought out an ancient briar. He stuck it in his mouth and chewed on the stem. I eyed the pipe enviously. If I’m ever diagnosed as having an incurable disease I’m going to stoke up again.

  “No,” said the Chief, “Harold was no accident. The killer wanted him dead. Probably wanted to get it over fast, too, so he could get gone before Maud came home. Which raises another question.”

  “How he knew Maud would be away from home?”

  “Yes. Of course he might not have known. He might have been willing to kill Maud, too, if she’d been at the house. It’s possible that Harold got himself killed just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe Ollie got killed for the same reason.”

  “The idea of these two guys being killed almost by accident is a little hard for me to swallow,” I said. “You come up with the murder weapon?”

  “No. If you find a bloody club or a bloody piece of two- or three-inch lead pipe I want you to tell me right away.”

  “You’ll be the first to know. You get anything useful out of Maud Mayhew? Harold’s enemy list or his hate mail or anything like that?”

  “She didn’t have any illusions about him even though he was her son. But she was no help when it came to naming anyone who hated him enough to beat him to death. Whoever did it was either a very professional killer or a very angry amateur. There wasn’t much left of Harold’s skull.”

  “A professional hit, you think?”

  He shook his head. “He wasn’t in debt, he wasn’t a gambler, he didn’t do drugs. We can’t come up with any reason a hit man would whack him. I think it was a private matter and that the killer is right here on the island. We’re out asking questions and talking to people who might know something, but so far nothing.”

  And when the police finished talking to everyone, they would start from the beginning and talk to them all again, looking for a break, for a detail someone had neglected to give them before, for a line on someone who had motive and opportunity and a willingness to beat Harold Hobbes’s skull into pieces.

  They might never find the killer, but murder cases are never closed until someone is convicted of the crime. As far as I knew, the Jack the Ripper case was still open, and this case wouldn’t close either, until the killer was nailed, whether or not the Chief and I lived to see it ended in court.

  I sat there in the Chief’s office, thinking about everything I’d been told, wondering how much of it, if any, consisted of lies and how much of truth, how much meant something and how much meant nothing.

  I was looking at a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. It was a picture of Martha’s Vineyard covered by a spiderweb. Little people, dead and alive, were tangled in the web and linked by its strands one to another. Here and there a missing piece prevented me from seeing a connection. I could see two bodies and a number of living women and men whose names or faces I recognized. In the center of the web was a spider linked unmistakably to the two bodies, but whose human face was on a missing piece.

  I searched my memory for those missing pieces, but I couldn’t find them.

  “This was supposed to be a trade,” I said. “I tell you what I know and you tell me what you know.”

  “In your dreams,” said the Chief. “All right, here’s something for you: Harold Hobbes had a vasectomy not long before he died. What do you make of that?”

  I tried to find a use for that information but failed.

  “You have a pained expression,” said the Chief. “Tell you what: you leave this murder business to us professionals and you concentrate on catching the Silencer. That way you’ll be out of my hair, and, who knows, maybe we’ll both get lucky.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, getting up and heading for the door. “The Silencer is your problem, not mine. If I find out who he is and turn him in, I’ll have everybody in the Chamber Music Society and the community chorus on my neck because they like what he’s doing. No, you chase him if you must, but leave me out of it. I’m on his side.”

  “Sure, you are,” said the Chief, chomping on his pipe stem. “But will you still feel that way when he decides he doesn’t like Beethoven either and melts your Missa Solemnis?”

  Melt my Missa Solemnis?! Maybe the Silencer really was a danger to Western civilization. Maybe I really should stop him while he still had good taste in music.

  First, though, I wanted to talk again with Maud Mayhew.

  20

  I got several chapters of my car book read as I waited in the ferry line to Chappaquiddick and willed another
pox upon the Fish and Wildlife people. That week the book was Prehistoric and Roman Britain, which had a lot of good pictures.

  Maud Mayhew’s pickup was parked in front of her house. The place had a vacant feel about it, as though no one had lived there for a while, and I wondered if Maud had gone away.

  But she had not. When she answered my knock, though, I saw in her lightless eyes that the vitality that usually animated her was missing, and I realized that it was the lack of this life force that gave the farm its abandoned air. Maud’s body was there but her son’s death had made it an almost empty shell.

  “Come in,” she said in an emotionless voice, and she turned and led me into the house. Although the rooms were clean and neat there was no sign of human life in them, no feeling of habitation other than by ghosts.

  I wondered if Harold’s death was going to kill his mother, if his murderer would be hers as well; or if, as women have done through the ages when their men and children die, she would rally and go on living, tougher and stronger than most men would be if bereft of wife and children.

  She waved me to a chair and said, “Would you like some tea?”

  “If you’re having some.”

  She nodded and went to the kitchen. While she was gone I looked around the room. There was no dust on the floor and furniture, but I felt like there was. I could feel white sheets covering chairs and sofas.

  Maud came back and poured tea into two cups. She sat and looked at me, saying nothing. It had been a week since Harold’s murder.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “I’m tired.”

  “Are you getting any sleep?”

  She shrugged.

  “Your doctor can probably give you something that will help you sleep.”

  “I don’t like pills. Never did.”

  “Do you have a friend who might come and stay with you for a while?”

  Another shrug. “I’d be bad company.”

  “I want to ask you some questions. I’ll come back later if you’re too tired.”