A Fatal Vineyard Season (17 page)

Ditto for the Hawkins case. Hawkins had been run down as he tried to stop the theft of his own car in front of his own apartment house. After the hit-and-run, the car had been found in a parking lot not too far away. There were no prints and no one had seen anything conclusive or even helpful. The driver could have been either a man or a woman, according to the only witness, an elderly lady walking her dog.

Hawkins was the grandfatherly type who liked women. He rented his apartments to them, protected them and cared for them, and hovered over them closer than some of them liked. Had he been younger, more of the women who rented from him might have told him to mind his own business, but he was an old guy, so most of them put up with him, and only a few moved out or told him to keep away from them.

I wondered if some boyfriend or ex-husband of one of the women had run him down out of spite or anger or jealousy. Or had one of the women in his building done it to keep him away from her? Or had it just been an accident: speeding car thief hits car owner while making getaway?

The police had wondered the same things and had rounded up the usual suspects and asked the usual questions. As far as I could tell, they were still asking them and hoping for a break in the case.

The last faxes were copies of a couple of Mackenzie Reed's letters to Ivy before the killing, and of a couple received after Reed was in prison. They were typed on different machines, but they were of a kind, speaking of the same longings, describing the same desolation of spirit, and giving the same graphic descriptions of the sex he and Ivy would enjoy when at last she was his. Ivy had reason to be nervous.

I thought about that, then read the letters again, and then again. Spooky stuff.

It was noon. I got out a Sam Adams and made myself a sandwich out of homemade white bread and cold bluefish fillet, left over from stuffed bluefish I'd cooked a few days earlier.

Delish!

I thought about everything I'd read, and about everything that had happened since Ivy and Julia had arrived on the island. Back in my brain somewhere a little computer was clicking and humming, but it was a Jurassic machine and hopelessly slow. I left it to its work and drove back to Oak Bluffs.

The only thing I was pretty sure of was that Julia was financing me and Thornberry Security out of her trust fund. She sure wasn't doing it out of her earnings as a grocery clerk or an actress.

First I went back and had another look at Alexandro's house. It was on the dead-end loop of a road in an expensive development off County Road. Neither the house nor grounds looked any better cared for than when I'd last seen them, but I hadn't come by to do an assessment of Alexandro's lifestyle. I looped the loop once and drove away, after noting the forest in back and on both sides of the house, pretty much isolating it from his nearest neighbor, who lived several hundred yards away. The neighbor's place, like others along the road, but unlike Alexandro's, was neat and polished looking, and I suspected that the owners hoped that slovenly Alexandro would soon sell to someone who would be more inclined to keep up the place.

Not many people seemed to be home, which wasn't too surprising since a lot of the houses were summer places, and the year-rounders' kids would be in school while mom or dad or both were probably working. Parked in front of one house was a guy sitting in a car reading a newspaper. I thought it looked like the
Vineyard Gazette
, and I thought the guy looked a lot like a West Tisbury cop I'd seen around. He looked at me as I drove in and again as I drove out.

When I got back out near County Road, I pulled off to the side and parked and got out a map. The forest behind Alexandro's house reached back quite a distance before it touched the road of another development off Barnes Way. I imagined that if Alexandro was so inclined, he could probably sit on his rear porch and see an occasional deer go by. A
lot of deer were on the island, and they probably liked the woods back there.

I wondered who had moved the curtain in Alexandro's house the first time I'd seen it. His wife? A child? A girlfriend?

Could be. When I was first a cop, it had surprised me to learn just how many terrible people had homes and families and friends in spite of meriting love from no one. There were women who loved brutes, and men who loved vicious women, and many such couples produced children who were traumatized from birth but loved their parents in spite of beatings and unspeakable abuse. Alexandro was the product of such a home, as were most of the truly violent people I had met. The surprising thing was not that such people were produced by such histories, but that so many people overcame such childhoods and became normal citizens.

Which gave rise to the eternal nature-nurture question: Are we born with sealed fates, or do our situations determine those fates?

I chose a third option, holding that in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can choose how we shall act and are, therefore, responsible for those acts. And that it was particularly important to be responsible in a universe without moral form, where there was no God to establish and uphold ethical law.

Ivan Karamazof would, of course, disagree.

Such erudition.

I put the map away and drove to Alberto's house. Not far from his house, pulled off beside Barnes Road, there was another car with another man in it. We looked at each other as I drove by. Another up-island cop. Alberto's house on the bluff overlooking Lagoon Pond was a big, modern place, complete with two-car garage, large front lawn, and a little barn to one side where Alberto could keep his tools and toys. Behind the house, a drive led down toward the dock
and boathouse. I parked in the driveway and knocked on the door with the brass knocker shaped like a scallop shell.

Nothing happened. Mrs. Alberto was, of course, at the office, and Mr. Alberto was no doubt out on the road drumming up business. I drove back to the cop in the car and stopped across the road. He eyed me warily. I got out and went over to him. He rolled down his window.

“Where's Alberto?” I asked.

He studied me. “Do I know you?”

“J. W. Jackson. Alberto's not home. Do you know where he went?”

“I'm afraid I can't help you, mister.”

I dug around in my brain and came up with a name. “You're Fred Sierra. You're with the Chilmark PD.”

“I'm off duty. Sorry I can't help you.” He started to roll up the window.

I pointed at my sling. “I think Alexandro did this, and I want to talk to Alberto about it.”

“Oh, yeah. I heard about you. How you doing?”

“I'm okay. Luckier than Larry Curtis, anyway. You know where I can find Alberto?”

“You should probably leave this to the police.”

“I don't plan on shooting anybody. I just want to talk to Alberto.”

“What about?”

“His little brother's wild ways. I want Alberto to rein him in.”

“Ha! Fat chance of that! Alexandro's his muscle.”

“I'll reason with him.”

Sierra gave a little snort. “Sure.”

“I saw one of you guys over near Alexandro's place. There are a lot of you around. If you keep the Vegas boys under a microscope, maybe you'll slow them down. Not even Alexandro is going to burn down somebody's place or break their bones with a tire iron if there are a bunch of cops watching his every move.”

“Actually, I'd kind of like to have him try, just so I could throw his ass in jail.”

I drove into Oak Bluffs and found a parking place on Circuit Avenue without any problems. I can even do that in the summer, sometimes, but rarely as easily because more people come to the Vineyard every year.

Vineyarders constantly fuss about the increasing numbers. The merchants and hotel keepers need the money they bring, but on the other hand if you're not a merchant or somebody else living off tourists, you want to be the last person off the ferry. It's an old problem for resort areas everywhere: you need visitors, but if you get too many, you begin to destroy the very charms that the visitors come to enjoy. No islanders wanted the Vineyard to become a mini–Cape Cod, but nobody seemed to know how to keep it from happening.

Neither did I.

I also didn't want it to be controlled by Alberto Vegas or anybody like him. I couldn't do much about the tourist problem, but maybe I could do something about Alberto. I walked upstairs to his office. Sylvia Vegas, still sporting a puffy face and still reading her romance novel or one that looked a lot like it, stared at me from behind her desk.

“You remember me? John Appleseed? I was in here just a while back.”

She was chewing gum. Her jaws worked while she studied me. “You're a liar,” she finally said. “Your name ain't Appleseed. It's Jackson.”

“Gosh. You got me. I admit it.” I looked around the room. It was empty. I looked back at her. “I want to talk to your hubby. You know where he is?”

“You got one arm busted already. You must be trying for two.”

I examined my sling. “Did your husband do this? Is that what you're saying, Mrs. Vegas?”

She put her book aside. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Because if he did, maybe you should talk with the police before he gets into more trouble.”

“A wife don't have to testify against her husband.”

“You might not have to, but you might want to.”

She frowned. “Why would I want to do that?”

“To keep from being an accessory after the fact, maybe? I think you should talk with your lawyer. Ben Krane, isn't it?”

She eyed me from under heavy lids. “Get out of here, or I'll call the cops.”

I went to a window and looked down onto Circuit Avenue. “You won't have to call very loud. They're watching everything you people do, just hoping one of you will make a mistake and they can throw the whole bunch of you in jail where you belong. Take a peek. I think one of Oak Bluffs' finest is right across the street there, looking up this way.”

“Get out of here.”

“Where's Alberto?”

“How the hell should I know?”

I reached across and picked up her novel. It looked like the same cover I'd seen before, but I couldn't be sure. The woman's breasts and the man's muscles looked about the same size, at any rate, and their faces had the same bored look. “I'm in no rush. You won't mind if I read this while I wait. I'll answer the phone if you want to go up the street and get yourself another one.”

I put a chair against a wall and sat down.

“You'd better get out of here while you can still walk.”

“I'll wait.” Then I added what I hoped was a useful lie: “Several cops know I'm here, so I doubt if Alberto will want to work me over and throw me out the window or anything like that.”

She glared at me, but said nothing.

I began to read the book. It wasn't bad. A beautiful, passionate young woman, traveling by sea to meet an older, rich, aristocratic husband-to-be to make a marriage that would save her father from financial problems brought about by evildoers, is taken captive by a bold, handsome pirate who lusts after her lovely bod and who, in spite of his lordly buccaneer airs, makes her heart beat faster.

I was pretty sure that I'd seen similar stories on late-night TV, staring Errol Flynn and Maureen O'Hara or Paul Henreid and some other fair damsel. No matter. It was a story always worth the telling, even though I knew from the first that the husband-to-be would turn out to be the very villain who had ruined the young woman's father and that the pirate would turn out to be another of his victims who, in fact, was the legitimate heir of the fortune the wicked duke controlled and that everything was going to turn out well in the end, although not without considerable danger and near heartbreak.

We don't read such stories or watch such movies so we'll be surprised; we do it so we won't be surprised. The seven-foot shelf of trash literature holds our favorite books. The leather-bound classics are rarely opened.

I had just gotten to the part where the woman daringly seizes a dagger to defend her virtue against the apparently forthcoming ravages of the manly pirate, when the door of the office opened and Alberto Vegas came in.

He looked at me and then at his wife and then at me again, wondering where he had seen me.

“It's that Jackson guy who said he was Appleseed,” said his wife, pointing at me. “He's been here an hour. He won't leave.”

“He won't, eh?” said Vegas, eyeing me. “I seen you someplace. Oh, yeah. Down at the docks in Edgartown. You got something to say before I kick your sorry ass downstairs?”

“Maybe you can kick it and maybe you can't,” I said, closing the book and dropping it on the floor.

Someone else followed him into the office. A refrigerator, or maybe a small tank. Alexandro. He stared at me. If there was going to be any kicking done, I was now pretty sure who would be doing it. It wouldn't be me.

I felt as if I were in a cage with two angry hippopotami, but tried not to show it.

“You've got a problem,” I said to Alberto, acutely aware that a psychiatrist might call the phrase a classic case of transference.

Alberto, unaware of the clichés bandied about in Psych 101, looked at me through narrowed eyes. “No. You've got a problem. You come in here telling lies about who you are, then you bad-mouth me to Eddie Francis, and now you won't leave my office when my wife asks you to. Alex, throw this bum out.”

Sylvia's voice had a warning note in it. “He says the cops know he's up here, Al. He says they're watching the place.”

But Alexandro only smiled. “So what? I think he's gonna fall downstairs.” He started for me.

I pointed a finger at the oncoming train. I also stayed right in the chair, in part because there was nowhere else to go. Seeing myself tumbling down the stairs, bones splintering, I said, “Your brother is your problem, Alberto. You have a pretty good thing going, but Alexandro, here, is fucking it up for you. He's all muscle and no brain. I heard you were smart. I guess I heard wrong.”