A Fatal Vineyard Season (5 page)

“Or if it wasn't Alexandro, it was his big brother, Alberto,” said mad Mickey.

“That's enough, Mickey,” said Lisa in a voice that was less soothing.

Mickey opened his mouth, but then shut it again. “Yes, ma'am.”

Lisa said, “The guy cleaned the knife, but we'll dust things here and upstairs in case he touched something else. Of course there'll be dozens of prints and most of them will
belong to one Crandel or another, but we might get lucky. The important thing is that these ladies kept their heads and did everything right, so nobody got hurt.”

“But if scared was hurt, we'd both be in the emergency ward,” said Julia in a shivery voice.

“The neighbors are all up anyway,” said Lisa, “so we'll ask around and find out if anybody saw anything. Mickey, you and Howard and Jane go out and start talking to the people who are up and about.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Mickey, who was probably glad to have a reason to leave his chief's presence. He went out the door.

“I'll have somebody come by in the morning and fix that door,” said Lisa to Julia and Ivy. “Meanwhile, you can use the bolt to keep it shut.”

“You aren't just going to go away, are you?” asked Julia. “What if he comes back?”

“I'll leave an officer outside,” said Lisa.

Julia, who was still standing beside me, flashed a look up at me. There was real fear in her eyes, which I thought was understandable since if I'd been in her place, I'd have been thinking that the house had too many doors and windows for one police officer to watch.

“If you want,” I said to her, “I'll stay here for the rest of the night. Then tomorrow morning I'll have a guy I know, Manny Fonseca, who's a good finish carpenter, come up and fix the front door so you won't know anything ever happened to it.”

“Oh, we can't ask you to do that . . .” Julia's voice faded away.

“You didn't ask me, I volunteered. But it's up to you. I know you'd rather have somebody in the family do it, but your kinfolk are all gone away.”

“Yes, stay,” said Ivy. “I'd feel better. Then tomorrow we can decide what to do.”

I looked at Lisa. “Is that okay, Chief?”

“No objections, but I'm still going to leave somebody outside. Ladies, we've been through this house from top to bottom, and whoever was here isn't here now, so you're in no danger any longer. You both did exactly the right thing and should be proud of yourselves. We're questioning the neighbors right now, and we'll have some people inside here dusting for prints. We may find a witness or lift a print, but even if we don't, we'll be making a thorough investigation, and we have a good chance of catching this guy.”

And a good chance they wouldn't, but I'd have said the same thing she did if I'd been in her place.

“I'm certainly not going to be able to sleep,” said Julia, “so I'm going to make myself some tea.”

“I might have a shot of something in mine,” said Ivy. “How about you, Mr. Jackson, and you, Chief Goldman? Tea?”

“Nothing for me, thanks,” said Lisa.

“Call me J.W. I'll take the shot without the tea, if I have a choice.”

“You have a choice,” Ivy said with a small, crooked smile as she and Julia headed for the kitchen.

Some lab people came in and started to work, and Lisa stepped outside, glancing at the broken doorframe as she went. I followed her. It seemed as if every light in the neighborhood were on, and I could see a cop on the next-door porch talking with whoever lived there.

“Who are the Vegas brothers Mickey mentioned?” I asked.

Lisa gave me a sour look. “I'm surprised you never heard of them. The Vegas boys are two of the biggest, baddest scumbags on the island. Either one of them would make two of you. I thought we'd gotten rid of them years ago when they both went up to Cedar Junction for pretty good stretches. But thanks to the parole board, they're back home again and worse than ever. The main difference is that stir was grad school for them, and Alberto, at least, is smarter than he was before. And since he's the brains of the
family and Alexandro mostly does what he's told, they're both harder to nail.

“They've got a protection racket going, but we can't catch them at it because people are too scared to talk. So are their women, in spite of what these guys do to them. And they're a pair of racists to boot. Hate everybody with a skin darker than theirs. Hate about everybody else, too, for that matter.”

“Sound like a pair of real winners.”

“They make their money by slashing tires and smashing windshields and storefront windows, starting fires, kicking in doors, clubbing people from behind in alleys, and doing the other strong-arm stuff you mostly see in cities. Then they go around and collect money so it won't happen to their customers again. You know the game.

“And just for fun, Alexandro's beaten the shit out of several people in barroom brawls, but we can't do much about it because the other guy always swings first. Alexandro Vegas has a mouth like a cesspool and the other guys are drunk or let the words get to them. Alexandro is a tough cookie and likes to hurt people. He was a big, mean kid before he went up to Cedar Junction, but he was only a big kid and the real baddies in there worked him over so hard that he came back the best part of a psychopath. You stay away from both of them, if you have a choice. And if you don't have a choice, don't rile them or let them rile you because they'd as soon kick out your kidneys as look at you.”

“You say they have women?”

“Alberto is even married to one of his. She never divorced him, and when he came home from the slammer, he started beating her up just the way he did before they took him away. She won't get a restraining order against him. Says it would only make him worse. She could be right.”

“And Mickey thinks one of them was here tonight.”

“It's not a bad guess. Alexandro, probably. He's bound to have seen these girls around town. I mean, how could any
man miss seeing them? And Alexandro was in the Fireside earlier shooting off his mouth about black women who think they're God's gifts to the world and how they should be fucked till their eyeballs pop and then kicked off the steamer dock with rocks tied to their necks.”

“That seems like enough to haul him in for this bit of work here.”

“Oh, we'll haul him in, but a fat lot of good it will do. His current woman will swear that he was home in bed all night, peaceful as an angel. No, we'll need more than suspicions to nail Alexandro. I'm glad you're staying here for the night.”

“How about the other brother? Alberto. Could it have been him?”

Lisa shrugged. “Alberto cares nothing about anything, but, like I say, he's got most of the Vegas brains. He controls things, including little brother Alexandro. As much as Alexandro can be controlled, that is. Alberto doesn't kick down doors anymore. He lets somebody else do the rough stuff these days. No, this is more Alexandro's style of work.”

“Are you saying Alberto might have sent him to do the job?”

“I'd be more inclined to think that Alexandro did it on his own. He's a real head case.”

“How come I never heard about these guys?”

She gave a little snort. “They only got back to the island last year. You didn't hear about them because you're not a cop anymore. If you still carried a badge, you'd have heard of them.”

That was probably true. Cops, social workers, medical people, and schoolteachers know about the Vegases of the world because they meet them or their victims, including their children and wives, every day. The rest of us never know such people. To us, they're almost unimaginable, although they're very real indeed.

And some of them live on Martha's Vineyard, that island paradise that draws one hundred thousand tourists to its
golden shores every summer. They live under the rocks, like snakes in Eden, and every now and then one crawls out into the light, as the Vegas brothers had done. It's never a pretty sight.

By 2
A.M.
the lab people had left, the Crandel house was quiet, and most of the neighbors had gone back to bed. I looked outside the front window at the cruiser parked by the curb. As I watched, the officer inside got out with his flashlight and started around the house. He'd circumnavigated the place about once every half hour since he'd gone on duty. I waited till he got back into his car before finishing the drink that Ivy had poured for me when she and Julia had served themselves tea. The women were still in the living room with me. They seemed wide-awake and yawning at the same time.

“Go to bed,” I said to them. “Sleep in the same room if you want to, but go to bed. Things will look better in the morning.”

“What about you?”

“I'll flop on the couch here.”

Ivy's eyes flashed like dark fire. “I don't like having somebody doing this to me!”

“The cops are on the case,” I said. “You can talk about it tomorrow and decide what you want to do.”

“I spent a lot of summers here when I was little,” said Julia. “This house is almost like home. I can't believe that stalker followed us all the way here. I hate him!”

She apparently hadn't heard about the Vegas boys being popular suspects with the local cops. “If he followed you all the way from California,” I said, “he'll be a stranger in town, and the cops will have a good chance of spotting him since most of the summer people have cleared out by now.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Sure. And I also think you two should get some sleep.”

They went upstairs. I wondered if Ivy would sleep in the room with the words
nigger cunt
hacked and scratched on its door or would bunk in the next room with Julia for the night. Manny Fonseca could take care of that upstairs door, too, while he was here.

I turned off the lights and stood in the darkness looking out at the night, wondering why there were stalkers even while I knew there was no cosmic reason for their existence or for the existence of anything else. But even though there was no reason for anything, you didn't have to accept things. You could decide for yourself that some things were bad and others good, and you could work for the good as you saw it. Most people didn't have to go through that process, but I did, because I didn't believe in any of the gods or religions that gave other people solace and confidence in the significance of their lives and their values.

My world was just as beautiful and terrible as theirs, but it was also colder. It wasn't cruel, it just didn't care one way or the other, and I loved it beyond all things except Zee, Josh, and Diana.

Maudlin nighttime thoughts.

I walked around the house making sure all of the windows and doors on the ground floor were locked, then got a book about Oak Bluffs from a bookcase, lay down on the couch, and read.

Oak Bluffs, I was informed, had not become Oak Bluffs until the twentieth century; in 1907, to be precise. Before that it had been Cottage City, and before that it had been part of Edgartown until it successfully revolted and became its own town after the Civil War.

There hadn't been much of a population in the place before Methodism had become a popular religion in the early 1800s and had begun to enjoy several decades of evangelical success in the United States. All over the country,
preachers speaking from pulpits set up in groves of trees attracted hundreds and then thousands of worshipers, who lived in tents and formed camp-meeting associations.

The Vineyard's camp meetings were some of the most popular of their time, since their participants could combine religious fervor with a vacation escape to a romantic island. By the mid-1800s, the Vineyard's camp-meeting tents were being replaced by prefabricated wooden houses adorned with gingerbread decorations, surrounding a central tabernacle. The tabernacle and houses still stand, perhaps the best-preserved examples of their architectural types in the country.

From the time of Stanley Crandel's supposed ancestor, preacher John Saunders, there had been a more or less integrated population in the area, including Azorians, Cape Verdeans, and others, and by the early twentieth century a number of black families and businesses had established themselves in the town. One of these families was, of course, the Crandel family, who had money even then and had built themselves the house that had later been expanded into the present rambling place.

As the new century progressed, the town had played host to an increasing number of upper- and middle-class black families, including some who, having money, bought places during the Great Depression and settled in. The end result was that Oak Bluffs became the premier black summer resort in the Northeast, complete with a beach called the Inkwell and an integrated population that contrasted sharply with that of most other island towns, which only much later began to include citizens other than Caucasians.

Just as in its early days, Oak Bluffs still lives off its tourists. It catered to them then and it caters to them now, bowing to day tourists coming off the passenger boats from Falmouth and Hyannis, offering them fast foods and Taiwanese-made Vineyard souvenirs that they can take back with them after their bus tours of the island. Circuit Avenue, the main drag,
is a honky-tonk street full of noise and color. It sports several bars and restaurants including the Fireside, which is where a good portion of island fistfights still start.

The town is, in short, the opposite in looks, tradition, and temperament of Edgartown, which is sedate and, late in the twentieth century, still almost lily-white in both architecture and populace.

OB people like their place best.

I drifted off somewhere in the midst of a page and woke to find the book on the floor and morning light filling the room.

I looked at my watch. Six o'clock. I got up and worked the kinks out of my back. Down there where I carried a bullet against my spine, the last gift of a felon I had killed as I lay bleeding and frightened on the ground, I had a dull ache that made me worry in spite of my decision never to do that because it did no good. Doctors in Boston had left the slug there because they didn't want to risk crippling me. The operation, they said, would be more dangerous than the bullet, which would probably never move.