Murder at a Vineyard Mansion

by Philip R. Craig

  The Chief opened the door of his office and waved me in. Dom Agganis was seated in one of the hard chairs in front of the Chief’s desk. He nodded to me as the Chief sat down behind his desk. His chair was padded.

  “What can I do for you, J.W.?”

  “How about telling me who killed Ollie Mattes and Harold Hobbes.”

  “No comment. Do you know?”

  “Not yet. Do you have a list of the dates when the Silencer did his work?”

  “Why do you want to know?” The Chief and Dom exchanged tired looks.

  “It might help me figure out who he is. You gave me that job, remember?”

  “I didn’t give you the job. I just wanted you out from under our feet. My plan obviously didn’t work.”

  “Maybe not, but I think I know how the Silencer does his work, at least.”

  “Oh? How?”

  I told them about microwave weapons. “I think he fries sound systems with HPM radio frequencies,” I concluded.

  Dom and the Chief again exchanged looks. “How’d you come up with this notion?” asked Dom.

  I told them. They expressed amused amazement. “Sounds good,” said Dom to the Chief. “We can round up the usual suspects and eliminate everybody who doesn’t own a microwave weapon.”

  I said, “If I knew when the Silencer did his work, I might be able to narrow the list of candidates.”

  The Chief studied me. “You know something you’re not telling us. What is it?”

  “Your suspicions injure me deeply. Can I have the list of dates?”

  He thought about it, then went to a file cabinet and got out a folder. “Most of this information’s been in the papers, so it’s no secret,” he said. He went to the door and said, “Kit, will you make a copy of this file for me? Thanks.”

  She did and brought it to him. He leafed through it and extracted a few pages he didn’t think were any of my business then handed the others to me. They were reports about police responses to angry citizens complaining about disabled sound systems in their cars and homes.

  “If you zero in on this guy, let me know,” said the Chief.

  “You can trust me,” I said, heading for the door.

  “Sure I can,” said the Chief.

  24

  At home I studied the papers the Chief had given me. Most of the dates meant nothing to me, but two did. I got on the phone and called Cheryl Bradford, figuring I had an even chance of getting her instead of her mother. I was wrong; I got their answering machine. I hung up without leaving a message.

  Everybody in the world but me had an answering machine, and my friends and family had long thought that I should get one too. Maybe so. After all, we already had a cell phone, and now that I’d belatedly entered the computer age, maybe I should go another short step into the twenty-first century. Buck Rogers would be flying around with Wilma in only another four hundred years. Time was zipping by.

  I considered and then rejected the idea of phoning Ethan Bradford, because I had just enough time to make another drive to his place and I wanted to have a look at his Jeep. I’d spent so much time up-island in the last few days that pretty soon Chilmark and West Tisbury were going to want me to pay residency taxes.

  Were there such things as residency taxes? If not, there probably soon would be, and Chilmark, ever on the alert to the danger of poor people living there, would be among the first to impose them.

  I was pleased to see Ethan’s old Jeep parked in his yard. I parked beside it, got out, and studied the contraption in the passenger seat. It looked less like modern sculpture to me this time, and more like something Rube Goldberg might have built.

  But it wasn’t a piece of junk. Even though I had no idea about exactly what its wires and attached devices were intended to do, there was an unmistakable orderliness to its construction. It was the size of a suitcase, and down there on the floor was what looked to me like an antenna of some sort.

  I heard the sound of Baroque music and looked up. Ethan Bradford, shotgun in hand, stood in the open door. His expression was, as usual, angry, but it was also wary and questioning.

  “What do you want this time? Am I going to have to put up a locked gate to keep you away from here?”

  “This may be my last visit,” I said. “Do you meet everyone with that shotgun in your hand?”

  He looked at the gun, then leaned it against the wall. “It discourages most people. When I want company I invite it. I don’t want it the rest of the time.”

  “Do you have a lot of uninvited people coming down here?”

  “Not a lot. You’re the first one who’s come back. What do you want?”

  I pointed a finger at the machine in his Jeep. “Would you like to tell me what this gadget is?”

  He rubbed his chin. “It’s a pile of junk.”

  “No, it isn’t. You’re an electrical engineer. It’s a machine.”

  His eyes became careful. “It’s a pile of crap I’m taking to the dump. You want to come along?”

  “Sure. I’d like to watch you throw this away.”

  He stayed at the door, eyeing me. “You an electrician?”

  “No, but I can read.”

  “You a cop of some kind? You working for somebody?”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Connell Aerospace. Don’t they have anything better to do than stay on my back? I’ve been gone from them for over a year.”

  “I don’t work for Connell, but I know something about you getting through there. This gadget left with you, they say.”

  “To hell with them.”

  I leaned against the Jeep and crossed my arms. “Let me tell you what I think. I think this machine is a portable HPM weapon. You were working on some kind of an RF weapon when you were at Connell, and when the prototype disappeared you got through. They thought you stole it, but couldn’t prove it. I think they were right. I think you brought it here and that you use it to melt sound systems blasting music you don’t like. I think you’re the Silencer.”

  There was a Silencer-worthy silence while we eyed each other.

  I went on. “You don’t like the way technology is being used these days and you’re a Baroque music man. Vivaldi, Bach, Telemann, and those guys. You hate the crap that passes for modern music and the sound systems that fill the air with it. To you, it’s noise pollution. So you drive around like Robin Hood and fry the electronic systems that boom it from cars and from houses where people are partying. You do it with microwaves or electronic pulses or whatever you call them.”

  More silence.

  “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I agree with your view of that noise that passes for modern music. And I think the island’s better off without those cars with the sound wound up and windows wound down, and houses bouncing off their foundations and neighbors being deafened.”

  “I didn’t steal anything from Connell,” said Bradford. “I designed this machine and if I don’t own it, who does?”

  “Connell thinks it does and they probably have a battalion of lawyers who can make their case.”

  “Fuck them and their lawyers too. Their prototype didn’t even work when I left Connell. I personally built this machine. Connell has other prototypes but I’ll give you odds that they haven’t solved the power problem yet. They’re probably still fooling around with compact explosives. All the power I need I get from my car’s cigarette lighter. That would raise a few eyebrows at Connell, you can be damned sure.”

  There was pride in his voice.

  “So it is an HPM weapon,” I said.

  His smile was a sneer. “You’ll never prove it. While you’re off rounding up cops to arrest me, I can take it apart and you won’t find anybody who can put it together again.”

  “That would be quite a sacrifice,” I said. “You can probably patent this design and sell it back to Connell for a fortune. They’ll do a lot of forgiving for a portable RF weapon that works.”

  He shook his head. “A fortune won’t do me any good i
f I sell this to Connell and then they decide to charge me with theft, or you convince the local cops that I’m the Silencer and I end up in jail. Besides, I already have a trust fund. I don’t need any more money than I have.”

  “I haven’t said anything about talking with the cops, and I think you can have a contract written that’ll keep Connell from double-crossing you. Brady Coyne is a smart lawyer up in Boston and he’s a friend of mine. He can write a contract that God couldn’t break. What did you do to get yourself fired from Connell?”

  His voice grew hard. “Nothing! That bastard Ron Pierson found out I was working there and canned me. Didn’t want his labs polluted by the likes of me. My side of the family is trash as far as he’s concerned. The Piersons have a long memory for slights.”

  “He hired Ollie Mattes to guard his house, and Ollie’s kin of his, just like you.”

  “I hear Ron’s wife put the squeeze on him to hire Ollie. Nobody did that for me. Besides, Ollie was working a slave shift and I was an engineer. Ron probably figured I hate his family as much as he hates mine and that I’d sooner or later rip him off. So he fired me.”

  “And he was right. You did rip him off.”

  “Like hell. Like I said, I built this machine. It’s mine.”

  There are no feuds like family feuds. “Your mother is a Pierson,” I said. “Maybe it’s more of that Pierson hate that accounts for her attitude toward men. Other women have had philandering husbands, but most of them don’t become man-haters.”

  “Maybe not, but you leave my mother out of this.”

  I studied him, wondering if I was reading him right. Just because his shotgun had been unloaded before didn’t mean it was unloaded today. I felt a little hollow spot in my belly when I spoke.

  “You didn’t like Harold Hobbes and after you got fired you had good reason not to like Ron Pierson. If the cops find that out, it’ll put you pretty high on their list of murder suspects. They’ll figure you knocked off Harold because you didn’t want him hanging around with your sister and that you knocked off Ollie Mattes when he tried to stop you from maybe torching Pierson’s house.”

  He opened his mouth but I held up an open hand and stopped his voice. “When we talked before, you said you could prove you were someplace else the evening Harold Hobbes was killed. How about the night Ollie was killed? Can you prove you were somewhere else then, too?”

  His eyes widened. “I didn’t kill anybody! I didn’t even know those guys were dead until they died. I was in Oak Bluffs both nights. I can prove it!”

  “How?”

  He hesitated, but the possibility of a murder charge was a far stronger threat than was a confession to lesser crimes. “Both times I was zapping boom boxes in OB! Both times! They can nail me for that, but they damned well can’t nail me for murder!”

  “The only way you can make that alibi stand up is to give the cops details that never got into the papers.”

  “I can do that. I will do that. Jesus, you don’t let up, do you? You can’t nail me for one thing, you’ll nail me for another. What is it with you?”

  I was trying to decide what to believe. As usual there was no way of knowing absolutely, and I had to make a leap of faith one way or another. Leaps of faith, if made sincerely, can lead to total conviction, which is a nice feeling that I distrust. I made my leap anyway but subtracted the pleasure of complete faith in my decision.

  “It’s nothing to me,” I said. “I don’t plan to tell the police anything. I already checked the dates the Silencer was active, and he was active in Oak Bluffs the nights of the two murders, just like you say you were. You couldn’t have been in OB and on Chappy at the same time, so you’re in the clear as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I can prove that without any help from you.”

  “Yeah, but then the cops can nail you for being the Silencer and that could put you away for a while, because you’ve burned out some very, very expensive equipment owned by some very, very mad people.”

  A hard smile crossed his face. “If you don’t tell’em, I won’t.”

  I returned the same sort of smile. “If I don’t and you don’t, the Silencer can just keep up his work until someday he makes a slip and gets caught. I don’t like the idea of that happening, but I also don’t like the idea of dropping a dime on him. So here’s what I think should happen. I think the Silencer should retire undefeated, untied, and unscored upon. I think he should return to the darkness whence he came. It will be a while before the noisemakers realize he’s gone, so we’ll get at least one quiet summer because of him. What do you think?”

  His smile warmed a degree or two. “I really hate that din that they call music. It wouldn’t be so bad if they just kept it turned down and closed their windows, but—”

  “I couldn’t agree more, but—”

  “I think I made the world better, and I had a lot of fun.”

  “And you gave a lot of people peace and quiet. You were the Zorro of the island music scene.”

  “All right,” he said. “The Silencer has retired.”

  “He’ll be missed, but I think it’s for the best.”

  “Maybe I will contact Connell.”

  “Why don’t you get in touch with Brady Coyne first? He can give you good advice about what to do and how to do it.”

  I found a scrap of paper in my glove compartment and scribbled Brady’s name and phone number on it. “Tell him I sent you to him,” I said, handing Ethan the paper. “Be absolutely straight with him, and he’ll give you good advice. Take it.”

  “Thanks.”

  I pointed at the shotgun. “And don’t wave that at people anymore. It’s illegal and someone might call the cops.”

  “It’s not loaded.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference.”

  He took a deep breath. “All right. No more shotgun.”

  I drove away wondering if I’d made the right decisions regarding Ethan and if I was right in my near conviction about who had killed Harold Hobbes and Ollie Mattes, and why.

  25

  The next morning as I cleared and washed the breakfast dishes I was aware that time sequences were eluding me, that I could not remember clearly when certain things had happened. When the last plate was stacked in the drain, I phoned Kristen Kolle. Her son answered the phone and told me where she worked: at a real estate office in Edgartown. I drove down to talk with her.

  The firm where Kristen Kolle worked was just off Main Street, and since it was still fairly early in the day, I actually managed to find a parking place within walking distance.

  Kristen was seated at a desk to my right when I came through her door. She smiled a realtor’s smile before she recognized me, and kept it on afterward. One of the reasons I’d be a flop as a realtor or any other kind of salesperson is that I can’t smile long enough to convince strangers that I’m their friend.

  “Mr. Jackson. How nice to see you again. What can I do for you?”

  “You can refresh my memory. Do the ladies who play the codger game play the same day every week or does the day vary?”

  “Every Tuesday afternoon, weather permitting, for about ten weeks during the summer. Mom wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Do they always play in the same place?”

  “Yes. Right there where you saw them playing earlier this week. The league arranges for a man to keep the field mowed and raked but the players do everything else themselves: putting down the bases, maintaining the backstop and benches, and all that sort of thing.”

  “How long do the games usually last?”

  “It depends. They’re usually over by five, but every now and then there’s an extra-inning game that goes longer.”

  “Good exercise. Any extra-inning games lately?”

  “Not so far this year, but the season is young.”

  “Can anyone play?”

  “They’re mostly regulars but I think anyone who’s the right sex and age can probably get on a team. You don’t qualify on either count.”


  “And you’re too young. Who provides the bats, balls, and gloves?”

  “The league buys the balls, but it’s every woman for herself when it comes to bats and gloves. Every team buys its own caps. You don’t need a uniform, but you need a cap so people will know whether you’re friend or enemy that day.”

  “Ya can’t tell the players without a program. They lose much equipment?”

  “Every now and then a ball gets lost in the pucker brush, but that doesn’t happen too often. If you break your bat, you borrow one until you can buy yourself a new one. It doesn’t take much equipment to have fun playing softball.”

  That was true of most good games; they were cheap. Poor kids played stickball or shot rubber balls at a fruit basket hung on a wall or kicked a tin can around. You should be wary of games that cost a lot of money.

  “And when the game’s over everybody goes home?”

  “Mostly. Sometimes a few friends get together for cocktails before they head for the shower. Why are you so interested in the codger game?”

  “My time line is fuzzy. I’m trying to clear it up. How are sales these days?”

  “Good but never good enough. It’s the curse of the real estate business. You don’t want to sell your place and buy another one, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I understand that you’ve got fifteen acres of land up there in Ocean Heights. Fifteen acres on Martha’s Vineyard, especially when some of it has an ocean view, is worth a lot.”

  “My father bought it cheap when the area was considered the boondocks and nobody else wanted it. If I get desperate for money I’ll let you know.”

  “You could sell a building lot or two and still have most of it for yourself.”

  “Right now I’ve got all of it for myself.”

  “Well, if you change your mind I do hope you’ll give me the first shot at selling it.”

  She had never lost the smile that had appeared when I’d come through the door. I gave one back to her and left.

  I walked to the town offices and found out who was on the Parks and Recreation Department, then made three phone calls before I found a department member at home. Fortunately for me, she actually knew what I wanted to know: that the plover-defending biologist who’d spoken to me down at Norton’s Point Beach went on duty at 8 A.M. and left at 5 P.M., just like a person with a normal, legitimate job. I asked if the biologist had been at work before the beach had been closed and was told that she had been on the job since spring.