A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard (18 page)

I gave him a sour look. “Okay, you don't keep a gun in your bedside table. But if you did, would you wipe off every fingerprint before you put it there?”

“No. But maybe Ingalls did.”

“I can't see that, but somebody wiped the gun.”

“Maybe Beth Harper did it.”

“Why would she do a thing like that? She got her own prints all over it when she came after me.”

“Too many maybes for me, kid.”

“Did you ever go up to his house?”

“Couple of times. Cocktail parties with the Marshall Lea crowd. You were conspicuous in your absence.”

“He ever show you around the place? You know, upstairs, downstairs, and all around the town?”

“Yeah. I got the grand tour once, at least. It's quite a house, and Larry was proud of it.”

“He ever show you his guns?”

“His guns?” Begay frowned.

“Yeah. He got some guns from his father. Old rifles and
whatnot that belonged to some ancestor. The pistol was part of the package. He ever show you the rest of the stuff?”

Begay stared at the rain for a while. Then he said, “Well, there were old rifles mounted over some fireplaces. Huge things. Elephant guns used to belong to some big-game hunter in the family, he said. One was a seven hundred Gibbs. Double barrels. Looked like a cannon.”

I felt a little thrill. “How do you know it was a seven hundred Gibbs?”

“Because he told me so. Took it down and let me hold it. Weighed a ton. Kill an elephant for sure, or maybe even a tank. I never saw anything like it.”

“And then he put it back.”

He nodded. “That's right. Ah, I see what you mean. If he didn't mind getting his prints and mine on a fine old rifle like that, why would he have bothered to wipe off a pistol he kept right there by his bed?”

“Yeah. And if he didn't wipe off the gun, who did? And why?”

“I don't know the who,” said Begay, “but the why's easy. Whoever shot Ingalls wiped off the pistol so his prints wouldn't be on it, and put the gun back where it belonged.”

“Just in case anybody ever thought it might be the murder weapon.”

Begay nodded again. “Not a likely thing, really. If Beth Harper hadn't decided to kack you, why would anybody have tied that gun to the Ingalls shooting?”

“Well, it's tied now. I think I'm going to need some help. Are you interested in the job?”

He looked at me. “Make me an offer I can't refuse.”

“No problem: a six-pack of the beer of your choice.”

“Done,” said Joe Begay, putting out his wide brown hand and taking mine. “What do you have in mind, boss?”

“The child is father of the man,” I said. “I want to know all about your late friend Larry Ingalls.”

“I'll make what they call discreet inquiries,” said Begay. “You want to know anything in particular?”

“I want to know everything.”

“Oh, that.”

“That.”

“I'll be in touch.” He walked through the rain to the Dodge and drove away.

It was just after noon when Joe Begay left the Chilmark store, so I bought one of the good sandwiches they sell there and a bottle of water, there being no beer for sale in dry Chilmark. Only Edgartown and Oak Bluffs sell booze on the Blessed Isle, which is why the island's bar fights all take place in those towns. You can only have bar fights where there are bars.

Having no saloons in their towns doesn't, of course, mean that up-island rowdies don't have drunken brawls; it just means that they have to travel to Edgartown and Oak Bluffs to find their fights, or, after making whiskey runs down-island and back, punch each other out in the privacy of their own homes.

Since there was no booze for sale at the Chilmark store, there were also no fights there that day. All diners, including me, sipped nonalcoholic beverages and were at peace. We munched and looked out at the falling rain, and at the shimmering green glow it gave to the grass and leaves.

The glamour of the scene and the memory of Lawrence Ingalls's death and burial blended in my mind, and made me conscious, once again, of the paradoxical grandeur that is life, and of the ephemeral opportunity we have to walk through it. But I am no poet, nor was meant to be, and could find no images or phrases to capture meaning from my thoughts, so I let them go, finished my meal, and drove to Edgartown to see Manny Fonseca.

Martha's Vineyard doesn't have one general-use weather system, good for the whole island, but a number
of separate little ones having little to do with one another. It is never surprising, for instance, to find on the same day thick fog at Katama, bright sun in Oak Bluffs, and rain squalls in West Tisbury. Thus it was that I drove out of the rain as I passed the airport and found myself under blue skies when I reached Edgartown. All weather is local, just like politics.

Manny's carpentry shop was on Fuller Street. It was there that I found him, in a room sweet with the smells of wood, oils, and stains. He was working on a custom cabinet of some kind. Being barely better than a two-by-four carpenter myself, I marveled, as usual, at the quality of his work. Manny had magic hands.

He saw me and turned off the table saw he was using. “Hey, J.W., I hear you found that poor bastard on the beach. Potted with a thirty-eight, eh? No loss, if you ask me.”

John Donne would probably have disagreed, but Manny wasn't John Donne. Manny was one of the Vine-yarders who had been mad at Lawrence Ingalls for the last several years. In Manny's case, it was because he considered Ingalls to be a pointy-headed liberal, who, like all pointy-headed liberals, was always trying to ban guns or close off land to hunters, of whom Manny was one. Manny considered the Marshall Lea Foundation to be a hotbed of such people, and was at least theoretically happy every time something bad happened to anyone like Ingalls.

“Not just any thirty-eight,” I said, “but a particular one. The police have it. It belonged to Ingalls.”

Manny's brows lifted. “No kidding?”

“No kidding. But keep the information to yourself. It's confidential.”

Manny nodded. “Sure. Ingalls's own gun, eh? Well, isn't that something . . .” His voice trailed off as he thought about it. I could almost see the gears turning in his head.

“It's something, all right,” I said, “and it's why I came
to see you. You know about everybody who shoots on this island. Do you know if Ingalls did any shooting? Hunting or target shooting or anything like that?”

Manny snorted. “Never heard of it, if he did. Figure I would have heard, him being the popular fellow he was.” Manny's irony was pretty heavy-handed. “Course,” he added, “he could have, maybe, had some private shooting range I don't know nothing about. That could be.” He shook his head. “But somebody would have seen him if he was at any of the regular places. And word would have got around, 'cause most of the guys who shoot would have had their ears up if they'd heard he was shooting, because of all that liberal crap about banning guns and all.”

I had never heard Ingalls say one thing or another about guns and hunting, so I passed on that one. All I'd ever hated him for was closing Norton's Point Beach.

“He's got a couple of elephant guns in his house,” I said. “You hear anything about them?”

“Elephant guns? You mean them big old five-hundred-caliber or six-hundred-caliber rifles they used to use? He's got some of them in his house?” Manny's fascination with guns instantly overcame his dislike for Ingalls and his kind. “Say, I wouldn't mind having a look at weapons like that. You don't see too many of them around these days. You think there's any way I could get to see them?”

“You could ask his relatives, I guess. So you don't know anything about any of Ingalls's guns, and you never heard anything about him shooting any of them?”

“Nah. Say, now, about me seeing those rifles. You know who I could talk to? I sure would like to have a look at them.”

But I couldn't help Manny out, and took my leave, wondering if I'd learned anything useful. As I went out the door, Manny called after me: “Tell Zee to get in touch. We got that meet coming up in October, and she needs to get in some practice.”

“I'll have her call you.”

Zee and I, who probably did more target shooting than most people, kept our pistols locked away when we weren't using them, but Lawrence Ingalls had kept his .38 in his bedside table. I knew that a lot of people probably did that, for real or imagined reasons. What had Ingalls's reason been?

I guessed that the chief might be downtown, so I turned down main and, sure enough, saw him standing in front of the Bickerton & Ripley bookstore, Edgartown's best, keeping his eye on Main Street. The investigation of Lawrence Ingalls's murder in no way meant that the police could curtail their normal activities. It just added to them. The chief was making sure that traffic was flowing; that no one was being killed when the bicyclists ignored the No Bicycles sign farther up the street, and that they shared the narrow street with the cars, which always won the encounters between them; that the meter maids and the summer rent-a-cops were doing their duties; and that the tourists who filled the sidewalks were on reasonably good behavior.

Things were going so smoothly that after I miraculously found a parking place on Summer Street and walked back to him, he didn't even mention moving to Nova Scotia for the summer, which he had been threatening to do for as long as I'd known him. It was a popular notion among Vine-yarders that Nova Scotia was now what the Vineyard had been twenty or thirty years ago, back in the good old days before all these tourists started coming down. A lot of people besides the chief swore they were going to move up there, but I never knew anybody who actually did.

“What are you doing here?” he asked as I came up and stood beside him. “You're married to the prettiest woman on the island, and you have that nice, quiet place up there in the woods, and here you are downtown.”

“I wouldn't want this to get around,” I said, “but I actually came to see you.”

“I mix with riffraff all the time,” said the chief, “so
nobody'll be surprised to see us together. What do you want?”

“Manny Fonseca wants Zee to start practicing for a meet in October, so she needs her gun back.”

The chief, like lots of cops, is always looking at things, even while he's talking to you. Now his eyes were roaming up and down the street, just in case something might happen that he should know about.

“Tony D'Agostine tells me he ran into you up in Chilmark.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, things being what they are, you can have your weapons back any time you want 'em. They're at the station. Go by and pick 'em up.”

“I don't need a magic piece of paper?”

“I didn't need one to get 'em from you; you don't need one to get 'em from us.”

“Fine. You ever search Lawrence Ingalls's house?”

“No. It's not in my town.”

“I just thought that maybe if some of you minions of law and order searched the house, you might find something that would give you a slant on who might have shot Ingalls.”

He watched the street. “Gosh! You're a keen thinker, J.W. Why, I'll bet not a single law officer in Massachusetts would have thought of such a thing.”

“Does that mean that Dom Agganis or somebody has been up there and looked the place over?”

“It might mean that. But if Dom found anything interesting, he didn't tell me.”

“Well, learning that Ingalls's pistol is the murder weapon might change his mind, don't you think? The pistol was in the house until somebody shot Ingalls with it, then put it back. If I was a cop, which thank God I'm not, I think I'd go back to the house and look some more.”

“You're not the only one who thanks God you're not a cop. But I think you're right. I think that Dom or Olive
Otero or some other detectives might go back up there. I don't think any of the family would mind, even if they were there, which they won't be.”

Really? “I thought they were all staying there. Mom, Dad, the brothers and sisters and everybody.”

He shook his head. “Nope. They'll all be leaving tomorrow morning, the way I hear it. Busy people, and no real point in their hanging around. The ex-wife will be staying down and looking after things for them till the will is read and everybody knows who stands where. I don't think she'll mind having cops come in to look around some more, especially if they've got a warrant.”

The ex-wife. Barbara Singleton. Was she a curious choice for a caretaker, or a logical one, since everyone else in the family had places to go and things to do? I thought of the Old Masters, and how, about suffering, they were never wrong; how nothing stops for pain or death.

I said, 'Joe Begay tells me that Ingalls has some old elephant guns hanging over his fireplaces, and that he let Joe handle one before putting it back.”

“So?”

“So Ingalls didn't care if there were fingerprints all over his elephant guns, but his pistol was wiped clean before Beth Harper and I handled it.”

That brought his eyes from the street. He looked at me. “Of course, that person could be her or you. But it wasn't her because Beth Harper was with a bunch of Marshall Lea people when Ingalls bought it, and it wasn't you because you say it wasn't and of course you'd never lie about a thing like that.”

“I went up to Ingalls's house last Wednesday, but nobody was there. Connie Berube lives on Ingalls's road. Ask her if I was ever up there before that or since. She's got eyes like a hawk, and so do those kids of hers. Somebody would have seen me if I'd gone up there and gotten the gun, then taken it back again after I shot Ingalls. And I already know that Beth Harper didn't shoot him, either.”

“Oh, yeah? How come you're giving her a clean bill of health? She tried to shoot you, remember?”