Murder at a Vineyard Mansion (4 page)

“Are we going fishing, Pa?” asked Joshua as we got out of the truck.

“No. We're going to take a walk along the beach and look at a new house that's being built on top of the bluffs.”

On North Neck there's a path leading from the small fishermen's parking lot to the top of the bluffs overlooking Cape Pogue Gut, and a stairway leading down to the beach. Fishermen who don't have four-wheel-drive vehicles or lack the time to drive all the way out to the far beaches of Chappaquiddick can park in the lot and walk to the gut to do their fishing. A lot of fish have been caught in the gut, some of them by me.

When the idea of the lot was first proposed to the town selectmen, a number of North Neck homeowners howled to the moon. The neighborhood's ambience was going to be ruined by hordes of fishermen; ecological disaster would occur; the end of the world was at hand. Lawsuits were threatened; pious arguments were printed in the local papers; people who had their own stairways down the bluffs condemned the proposed stairway as a threat to the environment; searches for endangered plants and insects were demanded. Great was the hue and cry of CHOA people and others.

But all in vain. The town held firm and built the lot, path, and stairway, and, lo, the sun continued to rise in the east, North Neck land prices did not plummet, and the cry of the turtle was still heard throughout the land.

From the top of the bluffs, Joshua and Diana and I had a good view of the gut. There were a couple of fly casters working the water on our side, and on the other side three SUVs were parked. Their drivers and passengers were also casting into the fast-moving stream that was flowing into Cape Pogue Pond as the tide rose. I'd sailed in and out of the pond many times, and it could be very tough going if you were tacking against a strong tide and a weak wind.

To the north, beyond the Cape Pogue elbow and across the edge of Nantucket Sound, we could see the Oak Bluffs bluffs and beyond them, running to the east, the dim line of land that was Cape Cod. To the west was Edgartown, with its white lighthouse looking small against the higher background of houses on Starbuck Neck. There were sailboats on the blue sound and as always I wondered whither they were bound.

Immediately to our left the bluff was topped by houses, all of them modest when compared with the rising skeleton of Ron Pierson's mansion-in-progress. I was of two minds about the building of palaces on the Vineyard. On the one hand I wished their owners would settle for something simpler, but on the other I thought they had the right to build any size house they wanted to build.

My disapproval of some people telling other people what size houses they should live in was no doubt a by-product of my general dislike of people in positions of authority ever trying to tell me what to do and how to do it. The more commandingly they behaved, the less kindly I took to such folk and the more sympathetic I was to those half-mad hermits who go off and live in caves.

We went down the stairs and walked west, with the bluffs rising on our left and the waves slapping the shore on our right. It didn't take long to fetch the rocky stretch of beach below Pierson's Palace, where Ollie Mattes's body had been found three days ago lying among the stones.

I looked up at the steep bluff down which Diana had seen something falling as we'd come home from our evening sail. It was easy to imagine how the person who had caved in Ollie's head and tossed his body off the cliff might have hoped, even expected, that the death would have been ruled an accident. But as has happened with better plans than that one, the medical examiner had seen through it and now Ollie's murderer was being sought by the local law.

“You two stay down here,” I said to my offspring. “I'm going up to the top.”

“Oh, good! We'll come too!”

“No, you won't. I don't want to worry about you falling down and breaking your necks. You wait here.”

“We won't break our necks, Pa. We're good climbers.”

Better than I was, probably, but I was firm.

“Stay here until I get back.”

“What if you fall down and break your neck?”

It was not an entirely unlikely possibility. “Then you go back to the gut and get some help from those fishermen. But don't worry. I'm not going to fall, and I won't be long.”

“Whatcha gonna do up there, Pa?”

“Just look around.”

The slope was made of dirt and stone brought down from New Hampshire and points north by the last ice age glacier. The islands of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Block Island, and Long Island marked the southern end of its progress. All had once been only hills of earth piled up by the ice, but as the glaciers melted and the sea rose they had become islands.

The bluff was very hard going, and I had to climb carefully because of the treacherous footing. More than once I came close to sliding back down to the beach, and I wished for one of those staircases that led down the bluff from some of the older North Neck homes. Ron Pierson would no doubt have such a stairway of his own someday, but he didn't have one today. Where are you when I need you, Ron? As I climbed I was glad that I didn't have to do it during the rain or during the night, and I wondered just what it was I thought I might find at the top of the bluff.

When I reached it, I glanced down and saw that Joshua was showing Diana how to skip flat rocks across the water. It was a good thing to know, and I was pleased that my son was teaching his sister how it was done. Then I peeked over the lip of the cliff to see if anyone—workman, watchman, policeman, or other person—was there. No one was, but yellow police tape surrounded the partially built house and part of the grounds. I scrambled to my feet and studied the place.

A new driveway had been bulldozed through the trees, and trees and oak brush had been cut down to create a broad open space for the house and future lawns and outbuildings. Construction materials, both of stone and wood, were stacked everywhere, and a trailer for tools and other equipment was parked beside a large generator. I was alone on the grounds and aware of that odd silence you sometimes hear around an empty or unfinished structure. I guessed that the yellow tape was keeping workers away and that Pierson hadn't yet had time to find himself another watchman to keep an eye on things.

The first story of the house and part of the second were already closed in, and a third story had been framed. A wide porch surrounded the house and a large second-story balcony faced the sea. The house was being built in a Victorian style more typical of Oak Bluffs than of Edgartown, and it was going to be huge.

Every window in the house seemed to have been broken, including the leaded, stained-glass panes of a miniature version of the Chartres rose window over the front door. It had taken a good deal of time to do all that damage and must have made a certain amount of noise. I wondered if any of the neighbors had heard anything.

I ducked under the police tape and went into the house. Even though it was in the early stages of construction, I could see that it was going to be a first-class structure, with no money being spared by its owner. There was a massive cellar space, and a carved and curved staircase led to the second floor. The kitchen was big enough for a half dozen cooks, and its stove, refrigerator, freezer, sinks, and cabinets, all still in their boxes, were the finest made. There were two boxed dishwashers and the counters were topped with stone.

I went through the place from top to bottom, touching nothing but the occasional doorknob. I couldn't be sure, but the faucets in the bathrooms seemed to be made of gold.

I walked around the porch and looked at the grounds, wondering where watchman Ollie Mattes had encountered his nemesis. There was no way for me to tell. One thing was certain, though: there were blunt instruments aplenty near at hand, in the form of tools and lengths of wood and pipe.

I thought about Ollie Mattes, and about the gold faucets, and about Harold Hobbes.

Then I heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the driveway, and trotted back to the lip of the bluff, where I slid down out of sight then peeked back over. J. W. Jackson, master spy. The vehicle was a middle-aged station wagon driven by a woman. She parked and got out and looked at the house. I guessed she was about forty, but I can never really tell how old people are these days. Thanks to clothing styles, hair dye and makeup, diet, exercise, and plastic surgery, some daughters look older than their mothers, and some fathers look younger than their sons.

This woman's blonde hair was shoulder length and she was wearing casual clothes that were not new but that had been expensive when purchased. Two of the ways you can tell the difference between rich girls and poor girls is that poor girls have long hair and rich girls don't, and that poor girls like to wear the newest clothes they can afford and rich girls don't. Another difference is that rich girls walk like they're carrying field-hockey sticks and poor girls don't. Rich girls also have bigger chins a lot of the time but that didn't apply in this case. This woman's chin was normal, but there was no doubt that she was a rich girl.

I didn't know who she was, but then I don't know most of the people on Martha's Vineyard, especially the rich girls. I memorized the license plate on the station wagon then ducked down as the woman took her eyes off the house and swung them in my direction. It seemed a good time to retreat, so I did that, stepping carefully and doing some sliding down the slope, preceded by bouncing stones and small avalanches of dirt and sand. On the beach I dusted myself off and joined my children at the water's edge.

Diana had not mastered the art of skipping stones and was getting tired of trying.

Part of her problem was that her stones weren't flat enough. Nobody can skim a round rock. I found some flat ones.

“Here,” I said, giving her one that was the right size for her little hand. “My father called these ‘donies' when I was a kid. When we threw rocks he called it flinging donies. We called slingshots donie flingers. This game was called skipping donies. Watch the way Joshua is doing it. See? He throws sidearm and he rolls the donie off his trigger finger. Like this.” I showed her how to hold the donie, then flung it and watched it skip four times. “Now you try it.”

She did but got no skips. I gave her another donie and wrapped her hand around it. “Hook your trigger finger around the edge like this, and throw it so the flat side hits the water.”

She flipped it and it skipped. “I did it!” She was happy.

I looked up toward the top of the bluff. The woman was outlined against the sky, looking down. I waved and she moved back out of sight.

As we walked back toward the fishermen's stairway, Diana flung some more donies. Some of them skipped and some of them didn't. Joshua and I flung some, too, and also had both successes and failures. So it goes in the donie-flinging game. Now and then I found a way to glance back at Ron Pierson's palace, but I saw no more of the woman.

“Flinging donies is fun, Pa!” Diana was very pleased.

“Yes, it is. From now on you'll always be able to skip them. It's a good talent to have.”

Back in Edgartown I stopped by the police station again. The Chief, no longer surrounded by other lawmen, was in his office doing paperwork, his least favorite professional activity. He would much have preferred to be out investigating his town's two killings, but such is not the fate of police chiefs. He was, understandably, in a sour mood. I didn't improve it any when I asked him to tell me who belonged to the license plate number of the station wagon.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I'm just curious. But don't tell me if it makes you grumpy. I can find out some other way.”

“I'll be grumpy if I feel like it.”

“Okay, okay. Good-bye.”

“Sit back down.”

He went out and came back and handed me a scrap of paper. Even I recognized the name on it. It belonged to one of the Vineyard's socially elite families, the Bradfords, whose members were often featured in both the island's and Boston's newspapers. The Bradfords lived in Chilmark, where people talk a lot about affordable housing but the town doesn't have any. Chilmarkians are not, of course, the only Vineyarders to give lip service to the needs of the poor, as long as they live in some other neighborhood.

“You're involving yourself in lofty social circles,” said the Chief. “Why are you interested in Cheryl Bradford's Volvo?”

I had prepared my lie. “The kids and I were over on North Neck checking out the fishing. When we came back I saw the car headed into that driveway that leads out to Ron Pierson's new place. I wondered who was going in there, that's all. Is Cheryl Bradford a relative of Pierson's or something?”

He didn't answer. Instead, he said, “How do you know it was Pierson's driveway?”

“It's the only new driveway leading off the North Neck road, and it heads in the direction of Pierson's house. Why do you suppose Cheryl Bradford is interested in Ron Pierson's house?”

“Maybe for the same reason you're interested in her car. Nosiness. Or maybe she just wanted to eyeball the scene of the crime. In any case, nobody else but workmen will be going in there from now on because Ron Pierson is shipping down some company security men for a twenty-four-hour palace guard. They'll get here this afternoon, I'm told.”

“Too bad he didn't do that in the first place.”

“Yeah. Now, unless you have something else for me to do, I'll get back at this paperwork. Ever since we got computers I've had more paperwork than ever.” It was a familiar complaint, but one I didn't make because I was the last person in the Western world without a computer.