Deadly Nightshade (3 page)

“What've you got for us, Mingo?” Chief Medeiros said when Domingo walked over to him.

“The body's tied up to the launch. Want to see it from down there?” Domingo hooked his thumbs into his uniform pockets, stood with his feet slightly apart, toes out. “We brought him in the way he was, floating facedown. Didn't turn him over.”

“Any idea who it is?” The chief placed his hand on Domingo's shoulder, which was damp from the ride across the choppy harbor.

“You tell me.”

The chief turned to go down the steep ladder and disappeared from view.

“Want me to go back down to watch his reaction?” Victoria asked, looking anxiously at Domingo, who shook his head.

“I think we'll find out what we need to know,” he said, so softly that only Victoria could hear. “You can sit on the bench, if you want, sweetheart. It's going to be awhile.”

“Shit!” The police chief's voice exploded up from the launch. “Jesus Christ!” Domingo looked at Victoria and raised his eyebrows, moved his lips in a faint smile. The chief appeared on the ladder again.

“Bernie,” he said to Domingo. “You knew it was Bernie, didn't you?”

“Who, me?” Domingo opened his eyes innocently. He spread his right hand across his chest, fingers splayed out. “How can I identify a corpse in the dark, a body floating facedown?”

“Shit,” the chief said again. “Excuse me, ma'am.” He turned to Victoria, then back to Domingo. “What's her role in this?” He jerked his thumb at Victoria. “Witness, you said? We need to get back to the station as soon as we get him into the ambulance.”

“You need the hearse, Medeiros, not the ambulance.”

The chief ignored Domingo and turned to one of the patrolmen. “Call Toby, will you? You know, the undertaker,” he said when the patrolman looked perplexed. Then, impatiently, he added, “He's dead, fool. He doesn't ride in the ambulance. Toby knows what to do.” The patrolman walked quickly back to the police vehicle, and Victoria heard a burst of static as he got on the radio.

“Can you get the launch up to the beach?” the chief asked. Domingo nodded, his thumbs back in his pockets, his feet apart. “Be easier to get him out there than to lift him up to the dock,” the chief said. “Jesus Christ. What timing.”

Domingo raised his eyebrows at Victoria.

Elizabeth started the motor, and a patrolman and medic passed lines down to her. She eased the boat toward shore,

then lifted the outboard motor into the boat as the water shoaled. The corpse grounded in the shallow water, and water sloshed over his head, ponytail, back. His bare buttocks shook.

Victoria looked down from her perch on the dock. She counted six people altogether, not including the harbormaster, her granddaughter, and herself. Lights circled around and around on top of the three vehicles—two police cruisers and an ambulance. Victoria thought of strobe lights in the disco she had once gone to with Elizabeth and her granddaughter's now ex-husband. People seemed to flick in and out of visibility, red, blue, red, blue. Someone moved a vehicle to light up the scene with headlights, illuminating the launch and Elizabeth, the body and its exposed bottom.

Victoria watched Elizabeth untie the body from the thwart. The medics and police waded into the water to turn it over. She supposed so they could load it onto the stretcher they had wheeled next to the shoreline. She couldn't see what they were doing because their backs shielded the body from her sight. She heard a splash. They must have turned it over, she realized. At the same instant, she heard mingled shouts, curses, grunts. She saw Elizabeth stand up in the boat, then sit down again quickly. Elizabeth leaned over the side of the launch, the side away from the corpse, put both hands on the port gunwale, and vomited into the harbor, over and over. She continued to heave even after nothing more came out.

Victoria stood up and walked stiffly down the dock, stepped down onto the boardwalk that crossed the sand, stepped off into the sand, and headed toward the group. Domingo blocked her way.

“No. You don't want to see this,” he said. “You don't want to see what they did to him. No, sweetheart. Sit on the boardwalk until they load him into Toby's hearse. Then you'd better take care of my assistant back there. She needs you.” He jerked his head toward the launch. “We've got a long evening ahead of us.”

"I've put a password into the computer program/' Howland Atherton peered down his nose at Elizabeth, who was sitting who was sitting next to him in the harbormaster's shack. Sunlight reflections danced off the water, glistened on Howland's high cheekbones, and flickered on the computer screen.

It was two days after Victoria, Domingo, and Elizabeth had found Bernie Marble's disemboweled, emasculated corpse floating in the harbor. Elizabeth was back at work, although nothing seemed normal to her anymore.

She could tell by Howland's expression – his turned-down mouth and the way he sneered at the computer – that he was irritated, probably with himself.

“Domingo pretends he's Denny the dunce.” Howland leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair, silvery on the sides, dark on top. “Then when you agree to help the poor guy, he springs the trap –
snap
– and you're caught up in whatever scheme he's got going.” He keyed in a few numbers with his two forefingers. “And I fell for it. I did exactly what he wanted. He wanted to computerize the harbor.”

Elizabeth shook her short hair off her forehead. She was dealing out a handful of receipts like a deck of cards.

“I'm sorry I got you involved in this job”, Howland continued. “He can't be much fun to work for.”

Elizabeth looked up from the receipts in surprise. “I love working here. It's what I needed after getting rid of my creepy husband.” She returned to the receipts. “Domingo's hard to take sometimes, but I like him, sort of.”

Howland's smile made his mouth turn down, not up. 'Two mature people, you in your thirties, me in my fifties, groveling before a Latino tyrant.”

Elizabeth laughed. “You didn't know my ex.”

The harbormaster's shack, set high on pilings driven into the harbor floor, moved gently in the tidal current. Water swashed past clumps of seaweed on the shack's footings.

The two worked quietly. After several minutes, Howland said, “If it weren't such a challenge to design this program, I'd be tempted to walk away.” He moved the monitor slightly to cut glare from the harbor. “It's more complicated than I thought it would be, and Domingo doesn't make things easier.”

A powerboat came through the channel into the harbor. Elizabeth went out on the deck, cupped her hands around her mouth, and yelled, “Slow down! No wake!”

The sunburned man at the wheel, his nose blistered and peeling, waved at her and slowed. The boat's wake trailed off.

“I hope the password you're putting in will keep the dock attendants from messing it up.” Elizabeth came back in and sat down again. “Those kids think they know everything there is to know about computers.”

The shack trembled, and Elizabeth looked up, to see a couple in their sixties coming up the catwalk to the window.

“Customers.” She got up again to greet them, slid the window open, exchanged pleasantries, and handed the woman a clipboard with a form to be filled out. The man signed the credit-card receipt and put his part in his wallet. The woman gave Elizabeth the completed form, and they left.

“The dock attendants know only enough about computers to screw up my program,” Howland said after they'd gone. He typed in a series of words. “Maybe the password will keep them out, but who knows.”

“What's the password?” Elizabeth picked up a receipt and placed it on one of the piles. The wind blew through the open south window, which looked out over boats in slips around the edge of the harbor, fluttering the papers on Elizabeth's desk. She brushed away tendrils of hair that blew into her eyes.

“The password is the harbormaster's wife's nickname in Spanish.” Howland keyed another set of words into the computer, then moved the monitor again to shade it from flickering reflections.

“That should be easy to remember,” Elizabeth said wryly. She looked up from the receipts. “I have no idea what Mrs. D.'s nickname is in English, let alone Spanish.”

“ 'Woman.'” Howland glanced at Elizabeth with his turned-down smile.

“ 'Woman'?” Elizabeth slapped the receipts down on the counter. “That's what Domingo calls his wife? 'Woman'?”

“Yes.” Howland returned to the keyboard, held his hand over the monitor. “Still too much reflection.”

“That pig!” Elizabeth leaned back in the rickety chair. “I don't see how Noreen puts up with him. 'Woman'! He's not in Colombia now.”

“He never was.” Howland pushed his chair away from the counter with both hands. The chair scraped on the sandy floor, and he stood up, gradually unfolding his tall frame. “He comes from Brooklyn; his father came from Colombia. The password is 'Mujer.' Write it down somewhere safe.”

“Believe me, I'll remember that.” Elizabeth picked up the receipts from the countertop and started to sort them again. After a few seconds, she threw them down. “I can't think straight. I can't concentrate on anything. I keep seeing that obscene corpse.”

A sailboat came into the channel under power, and when Elizabeth saw the skipper, she waved.

“They're here for a week, all the way up from the Virgin

Islands, and this is their first stop.” The sailboat turned, under power, and backed toward a slip. “They've got a glorious day, and tomorrow is supposed to be just as beautiful.”

“They clear U.S. Customs before they get here, don't they?” Howland asked.

“Technically, they're supposed to, in Miami or Washington or New York or Boston. But most don't. That boat can carry enough fuel and provisions to cross the Atlantic easily.” She stood up and looked out the sliding window toward the boats and the Harbor House beyond them. “Where the devil are the dock attendants? They need to help with lines.”

“How is your grandmother taking the murder?”

“You know the way Victoria is.” Elizabeth turned to him. “She's more like a ten-year-old than a ninety-two-year-old. She loves action of any kind.”

Howland moved the chair back under the counter, and it scraped again, fingernails on slate. Elizabeth winced.

“I might as well sweep the sand out of this dump.” She got up. “The dock attendants are supposed to keep this place clean, but look at it.” She gestured around the small office.

The shack had windows on all four sides. The window on the south, now open, could be pushed to one side, so the staff could take in money or give information to boaters. From that window, Elizabeth could look over the harbor with its moored and docked yachts, could see the activity of guests at the Harbor House. Through the window to her right, she could see the narrow channel leading into the harbor, and, across the channel, the osprey nest high on its pole. On weekday evenings, when the harbor was quiet, she liked to watch the ospreys. She had seen the male arrive early in the spring, even before she had taken the job in the harbor, and had watched the pair fix up the nest, watched them sit on their eggs, had seen the hatch-lings when they emerged.

To the north, beyond the channel, she could see ferries coming and going on Nantucket Sound, from Woods Hole on the mainland to the Oak Bluffs wharf. The computer and printer were on a counter that ran under that window.

The fourth window faced the parking lot to the east. Across the lot, pastel-colored Victorian houses, festooned with wooden gingerbread, faced the harbor. A desk under the window looked out at the catwalk that led from the shack across a hundred-foot stretch of water to the parking lot.

A grimy T-shirt hung limply out of an open desk drawer, and a torn chips wrapper and a crushed soda can lay on the floor.

The windows made the shack feel larger than it actually was. Elizabeth had measured it, and it was smaller than Victoria's upstairs bathroom, which was only eight feet by twelve.

“Those hotshot kids can't even hit the wastebasket.” Elizabeth gestured at the rubbish on the floor, and Howland ducked to avoid her arm.

“Try to keep them away from the computer at least.” Howland leaned over the monitor and, still standing, entered a couple of numbers. “I have more work to do on the program before it's safe from them.”

“The program will never be safe from them. They've been playing with computers since kindergarten.” Elizabeth moved the aluminum lawn chair that served as office furniture to one side and reached behind the door for the broom. She pulled the T-shirt out of the open desk drawer and tossed it, the soda can, and the chips bag into the trash container.

Footsteps pounded on the catwalk, shaking the small building. Elizabeth looked up, to see two teenage boys tossing punches, hopping from one foot to the other, dancing toward the shack.

“Cut it out, you guys,” Elizabeth shouted at them. “Go back and get the sailboat's lines. Go on!”

“He don't need help,” the kid with green hair said.

“Go!” Elizabeth said.

“We need to get a pad of receipts,” the taller kid said.

“I already checked out a receipt pad to Louie.” Elizabeth nodded her head at the green-haired boy. Both were wearing khaki shorts and blue knit collared shirts with dock attendant across the back. Except for the hair and the difference in height, they looked identical.

“I don't know where it's at.” Louie avoided Elizabeth's eyes.

“Help the sailboat; then keep looking until you find the receipts. They're numbered. If you've lost them, you're fired.”

“Shiiit,” said Louie. “C'mon, Dewey. Creepy old lady.”

“Watch your mouth, or you're fired.”

“You can't fire me. You ain't my boss. My father is on the Harbor Advisory Committee.”

Elizabeth grabbed the broom and wrenched the door open, fire in her eyes.

“He didn't mean nothin',” Dewey said, backing away from Elizabeth, who was brandishing the broom. Both kids put their arms over their heads.

“Let's get outta here,” Louie said, and they turned and sauntered down the catwalk. When they got to the bulkhead, they looked back at Elizabeth, and the green-haired kid jerked his head toward her in an insolent way.