Vineyard Enigma (8 page)

Would Connie Duarte be staying in the house where her husband was murdered? I doubted it. Later, maybe, she could live there again, but not right now; not yet.

Which meant she was somewhere else.

In West Tisbury I stopped at the police station, beside the millpond. There were two swans and some ducks on the pond, and the scene looked charming and pastoral, as usual. Death has little negative effect on the beauty of nature. Given time, as the poet noted, the green grass does its work and covers even the ruins of war. Today, the ruins of Matthew Duarte were not visible.

Inside, I found the young police officer who had guarded the door of Duarte’s house, and asked him if Connie Duarte was back on the island and, if so, where she was staying. She was back, but he didn’t know where she was.

Any leads on the case?

I’d have to ask the chief.

Where was the chief?

Out.

A laconic cop. Or maybe, like some other cops, he just didn’t like talking to me.

I drove back the way I’d come to the general store, where I used the public phone. Al Butters answered and, reluctantly, I thought, told me that Connie Duarte was staying with West Tisbury friends, Millie and Sam Hopewell. Long ago, when Al was young, Joseph McCarthy must have had quite an impact on his psyche.

The Hopewells, according to Al, lived not far from the cemetery where fans of Nancy Luce keep her grave decorated with plastic chickens. Nancy, idiosyncratic mid-nineteenth-century Vineyard citizen and author of “Poor Little Hearts,” a poem mourning the death of her hens, Ada Queenie and Beauty Linna, was a better poet than many, and deserves the attention she still gets. No one, I’m sure, will leave plastic chickens on my grave.

The Hopewell house was one of those ancient farmhouses hooked to its barn by connecting sheds, such as you can still find throughout New England. I drove into the yard and stepped out to the smell of horses coming from the barn and the sound of a small dog yapping at me from a window of the house.

When I’m king of the world, I’m banning small dogs, yapping and otherwise, left turns, pay toilets, and high heels. I’m keeping fire, pestilence, war, poverty, and misery because, although they’re bad, they’re not as bad as the four things I’m banning.

The woman who opened the door was about my age, and was wearing loose slacks and an untucked, loose shirt, such as many broadening women wear. She had a nice round face and a pair of rimless glasses balanced on her nose. Her hair was short and tidy, with little streaks of gray mixed with the brown. The wretched little dog in her arms looked at me with angry, Napoleonic eyes.

“My name is Jackson,” I said. “I’m looking for Connie Duarte.”

She gave me a wary look. “Are you a friend of hers?”

“We’ve never met. I’m hoping she can give me some information.”

“Are you a police officer?”

I considered suggesting that I was, but was sure that ploy would come back to haunt me. “I used to be.”

She frowned. “You’re sure you’re not the police? Are you the press? Connie really isn’t up to giving any interviews. She’s exhausted.”

“I’m sure she is,” I said. “Sorrow saps our strength. I’m not with the police or the press or an insurance company. I’m one of the people who found her husband’s body.”

“Oh.” She put a hand to her mouth. The little dog growled.

“I just need a few minutes of her time,” I said. “I’m hoping she can answer the questions I was planning to ask her husband when we went to his house. I’m interested in some works of art that he may have handled.”

She stroked the dog. He continued to glare at me. “Well, as far as I know, Connie didn’t have much to do with Matthew’s business, but wait here and I’ll ask her if she’s up to seeing you. You’re sure you only need a few minutes?”

“Yes.”

She frowned and went away, then came back.

“This way, please.”

I followed her down a hall and into a sitting room, where a younger woman rose from a chair. The woman had that look of fatigue that you often see on the faces of survivors.

“Connie, this is Mr. Jackson. I’ll leave you two alone.” She gave me a mother-hen look. “Now, don’t be too long, Mr. Jackson.”

“I’ll be all right, Millie,” said the woman. She gave me her hand as Millie Hopewell and her teeny dog left the room. “I’m Connie Duarte. Millie says you want to talk with me about some work of art my husband may have handled. I’m afraid I really don’t know much about the details of his business.”

I showed her the photo of the eagles, and explained what they were. “I know that Daniel Duarte’s firm sold these birds, and it’s possible that your husband may have been the sales agent. I’m trying to find out who bought them. Have you ever seen them or heard of them?”

She studied the photo then shook her head and handed it back to me. “I’ve never seen these pieces, and I don’t remember any talk of them. But then, my husband never discussed much of his work with me. He said it was too boring to be the subject of conversation. I’m sorry.”

“Your husband never talked about the art he bought and sold?”

“I wouldn’t say never. He showed me certain pieces he was proud to handle, and spoke of others that pleased him. But he didn’t speak about a lot of his work.” She hesitated, then added, “Lately he was away from the house a good deal. Seeing clients, he said.”

“Do you know any of their names? One of them might have purchased the eagles.”

Her face was weary. “Well, I know some of the local people. I know he sold to Georgie Hall and Gerald Jenkins. And I think Charlie Mauch bought from him. I’m sure there are records of all his clients. Sam knows more about it than I do.”

“Sam?”

She looked at me with tired eyes. “Why, yes. Sam Hopewell. Millie’s Sam. Sam goes in…went in, I suppose I should say, once a week to do Matt’s books. Matt wasn’t much of an accountant. Haven’t you talked with Sam?”

“No, but I’d like to. Is he here?”

She shook her head. “Actually, I think he’s at the office. Matt’s death has left the business in limbo, just like it’s left me.” She touched her brow with her hand. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to help you.”

“I thank you for your time,” I said. “Get some rest.”

I left the room and found Millie Hopewell in the kitchen. The dog was somewhere out of sight. “I need to talk with your husband,” I said. “Is he at Duarte’s office?”

“You seem to need to talk with a lot of people, Mr. Jackson. Sam is helping the police. Can’t your questions wait?”

“A protective wife is a blessing,” I said. “I won’t take up much of his time. I’m looking for something Matthew Duarte may have sold. Your husband may know about it.”

Her eyes drifted toward the sitting room, then came back. She picked up a dish towel and began to polish an already clean glass. “The office is in the barn behind Matthew and Connie’s house. The police have asked Sam to go over Matthew’s papers to see if any of his business dealings might be related to his death. An angry client, or something like that. I’m not sure he has time to see you right now.”

“I’ll ask him.”

I drove to Matthew Duarte’s house, which was still closed by yellow tape, parked, and went to the front door of the office in the barn. Today the door was unlocked and I went inside. I was in a hallway adorned with paintings. At the far end was another door. Yet another door opened from the side of the hall. I went to the closer, side door first and knocked. Nothing. I tried the knob. Locked. I went to the end of the hall and knocked on that door. A voice told me to come in.

The room was a large office decorated with small, primitive wall hangings and pieces of sculpture, and fitted with antique furniture, including two desks, each with its own computer, of course. A man was sitting behind the smaller desk. The other I took to have been Matthew Duarte’s domain. There were carved oak file cases all along one wall and shelves filled with books along another. A window looked out over a green field where horses grazed. The room exuded an aura of unostentatious wealth, knowledge, and taste.

The man who stood as I came in was middle-aged, slightly bald, and dressed in old, casual clothing. He had keen eyes behind old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses.

“You must be Mr. Jackson.” He put out a strong hand and shook mine.

“Your wife called you.”

“Yes. She thought I’d prefer to know who was visiting. I hope this won’t take too long. The police have asked me to go over our books in hopes of finding something that might be related to Matthew’s death.”

“Any luck?”

He smiled slightly. “That’s for the police to know, Mr. Jackson, but I don’t mind telling you that so far I’ve found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.”

“What are you looking for?”

“I really don’t know. Some unusual transaction, perhaps, or an unhappy letter indicating an angry client. The appearance or disappearance of some significant amount of money. That sort of thing, I suppose. I’m an accountant, not a policeman. I might not recognize a clue if I saw one.”

“But you would recognize any unusual business record precisely because you are an accountant and not a cop.”

He nodded. “Perhaps. In any case, I can give you a few minutes. What can I do for you?”

“I have two questions. The first has to do with these stone eagles.” I gave him the photo and told him what I’d learned about the birds.

He held the photo up to the light from the window and nodded. “Fascinating. But if Matt had handled the sale, I’d have known about it, and the record would be in our ledgers.”

He handed the photo to me. “In this business we have certain clients who don’t want other people to know what they own, but in this case client confidentiality be damned. The police want to know anything that might help them.”

“Most of the time, client confidentiality must make it easier to buy and sell illegal goods.”

His brows came down. “I hope you’re not suggesting that Matt engaged in unlawful practices.”

“I’m only pointing out the obvious: that secrecy is the home of crime. Thieves hate bright lights.”

“Great nations and small businesses have their secrets, too, Mr. Jackson, and they value them highly.”

“I’ve been convinced for some time that most classified information serves to protect the asses of the people making the decisions rather than the nations or stockholders involved.”

His smile came back. “You may be right, but in this case client confidentiality isn’t going to protect anyone who might have wanted Matt dead. I liked Matt, and besides, I have my own reputation to protect.”

“There may not be a record of the sale of the eagles, but you were close to Matthew Duarte. Have you heard any talk of them?”

He shook his head. “None. I think I would have remembered if I had.”

“I seem to be at a dead end. I do have another question, though. Perhaps you can answer it: When I asked to speak to Connie Duarte, your wife asked me if I was a policeman. Why?”

He studied me, then shrugged. “It will come out eventually, I suppose. My wife considers herself to be Connie’s best friend, and she wants to protect her.”

“From the police? Why?”

“Because Millie thinks that Connie will be a suspect in Matthew’s killing. Connie had nothing to do with it, of course. She was on Nantucket when it happened.”

“Why would Connie be a suspect?” I asked, looking for confirmation of what I’d already heard.

Hopewell gave it. “Because Matthew was about to divorce her. Oh, it hadn’t gotten to the lawyer stage yet, but he’d spoken of it to me, and he planned to leave her as little as he could. Matthew Duarte could be charming but you wouldn’t call him a moralist.”

Sam Hopewell glanced at his cluttered desk. It was a polite hint that I had interrupted him long enough, but I stayed and pushed him a bit.

“Are you saying that your wife thinks Connie Duarte is capable of murder?”

“Of course not. But she thinks the police might.”

And she’d be right about that. The police think anyone is capable of murder.

“Did he leave a large estate?” I asked.

“Large enough, I suppose. But Connie Duarte wouldn’t hurt a fly. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body, and she doesn’t care about money as much as I think she should!” His eyes were hot. “Besides, she was over on Nantucket when it happened.”

I wondered if his apparent anger was rooted in simple friendship with the woman, or in some deeper passion or desire. More than one man has fallen for the wife of a business partner. Then my brain did a turn and I was thinking how women, too, could be caught up in feelings for men other than their own husbands or lovers. I remembered Zee and Mahsimba arm in arm in our garden.

“Was there another woman?” I asked.

“It’s all just nasty gossip,” said Hopewell, making a sharp gesture. “I’ll say no more about it.”

But I shook my head. “You probably will say more, actually. The police aren’t fools. They’re bound to learn of everything you’ve told me and they’ll want names. It’ll be in your own best interests to tell them what they want to know.”

He was tired of me. “You may be right, but I’ll deal with that issue when it arises, if it arises. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

Instead of leaving, I said, “The press will be digging around, too. The public will love a story like this: Murder and scandal on tony Martha’s Vineyard. My own first guess is that the other woman is Rose Abrams.”

He looked startled. “What? How did you…?” Then he recovered. “What makes you think that?”

“I know she worked for Matthew Duarte and I saw her reaction when she heard of Duarte’s death. She fainted, and she doesn’t strike me as a woman who faints easily. Does Connie Duarte know about her?”

He drummed his fingers on his desk. “She knows there was a woman. I suspect she knows who it was. I don’t like the idea of these private matters becoming public scandals. Connie deserves better than to have her name bandied about in the press.”

“The more they dig, the more they’ll find,” I said. “They’ll probably resurrect the Headless Horseman story while they’re at it, since now we have two unsolved murders here in Eden.”

He gave me a wary look. “There’s no link between the Headless Horseman and Matthew’s death. That’s nonsense.”

“Two killings have taken place within miles of each other on an island where murder is rare. And so far, at least, the killers are unknown. In small towns, and this island is like a small town, when a killing does happen, the cops almost always know who did it as soon as the deed is done. The state police and the press may not find any link between Duarte and the Headless Horseman, but the possibility will cross their minds, and some writer will speculate about it.”

Hopewell shook his head. “No one even knows who the Headless Horseman was. Whoever he was, he certainly wasn’t a Vineyarder or someone would have reported him missing. I can’t imagine that what happened to him had anything to do with what happened to poor Matthew.”

“You may be wrong. A man who was looking for the Zimbabwe eagles in California has been missing since just before the Headless Horseman was found. Daniel Duarte’s firm sold the eagles, and Matthew may have been the agent.”

He stared at me, then ran a hand over his thinning hair. “That’s quite a leap in logic, isn’t it? A man goes missing on one coast and his body is found three thousand miles away on another coast? Besides, Matthew wasn’t the agent. If he had been, I’d have known about it.”

“Maybe not. Maybe Matthew didn’t let you in on all of his business arrangements. You said yourself that he wasn’t a very moral man. If he was immoral in his dealings with others, maybe he was with you, too. More than one business partner has cheated another.”

“I wasn’t his partner, I was his accountant. If he’d sold the eagles, it would be in his books, and there’s no such sale. I keep the accounts very carefully.” His voice was almost pompous, but it contained that suggestion of uncertainty that you can sometimes hear beneath loud words.

“Maybe he kept another set of books,” I said.

“Impossible.” But he was frowning as the word was spoken.

I’d been using a lot of
maybe
s, but I tried one more. “Maybe Matthew was crookeder and smarter than you think. Isn’t it possible that he was selling art objects of dubious ownership, like the eagles, or even stolen objects without your knowledge?”

“Where do you get these absurd ideas?” Hopewell walked to the door and opened it. “I’m a very busy man, Mr. Jackson. I’m afraid I can’t give you any more time right now. Good-bye.”

As I went out, I said, “I may want to talk with you again, Mr. Hopewell.” To that he gave an abrupt nod, and shut the door.

I was hungry, but West Tisbury is a dry town, so I headed for Oak Bluffs, where you can get a beer with your lunch. In the Fireside, a popular Circuit Avenue bar of dubious reputation, I ordered a Sam Adams and a fish sandwich.

The place was pretty busy with a combination of regulars and mostly young summer people. At the back of the room Bonzo was pushing a broom, about the highest form of employment he could manage since, I’d been told, he’d blown out his brain on bad acid years before I met him. He was a sweet, dull boy who loved his mother, birds, and fishing, more or less in that order. Good old Bonzo. Too bad he didn’t know anything about the Zimbabwe eagles, because I trusted him more than I trusted most of the people I’d talked to that morning.

The beer, America’s finest bottled brew, was cold and good, and the fish had just enough grease in its batter to be delicious. I’d made it even better by slathering it with a thick layer of tartar sauce. Yum!

In the last few hours I’d talked with at least three people who claimed to know nothing about the eagles but who conceivably had motives to kill Matthew Duarte: Gerald Jenkins, whom Duarte had cheated out of a valuable work of art; Connie Duarte, who was about to be divorced; and Millie Hopewell, who was Connie’s best friend and who might have bumped Matthew to protect Connie from being left destitute.

And Sam Hopewell could probably be added to the list because of his strong feelings about Connie. Passion has pulled many a trigger.

And while I was at it, I thought I might as well toss in Georgie Hall and Charles Mauch, because Duarte, who I knew had cheated Jenkins, might very well have dealt badly with other of his customers as well.

Everyone’s a suspect but thee and me, and I’m not sure about thee.

I wondered how Mahsimba’s inquiries were going and what efforts, if any, were being taken to determine whether the Headless Horseman and David Brownington were one and the same. If they were, the discovery would focus a lot of official attention on the island art scene. If they weren’t, well, the Horseman would be no less identified than he was now. DNA evidence would be the best proof one way or another, but I imagined that any DNA Brownington had left behind was probably in England or Africa, in the form of a relative. A long plane flight from the body of the Headless Horseman.

Around me the voices of other diners murmured and droned through the beer- and marijuana-scented air. I doubted if any of the speakers knew orcared that there was a subsociety of artists, art dealers, and art collectors on the island, any more than most tourists were aware of the other minicultures that coexisted here: the nude bathers up in Chilmark and Aquinnah, the pond people living along the shores of the Great Ponds on the south side of the island, the fishermen who roamed the beaches in their four-by-four trucks, and the others.

The only private Vineyard society known to most of the public was that of the rich and famous summer people whose names and faces appeared in the gossip columns and on the pages of popular magazines. And I was acquainted with just enough of such people to know that public imaginings about them and their lives were none too accurate.

The more I thought of things, the more it seemed that the river of new money that was flowing over the island in an ever-widening stream had washed aside restraints that previously might have inhibited certain people from doing certain things. What once might have been unimaginable had become quite possible and attractive. A person with a wad of new bills and boundless confidence in an endless, continuing supply of the same could do almost anything: sail around the world in a small boat, buy a Vineyard mansion and tear it down and build a bigger one, climb Everest, found a college or museum, play with dynamite. Or perhaps loot a foreign land, or his own, of its ancient artifacts.

Such a person would do those things because he or she could afford to. And it might be fun.

Would some commit murder for the same reason? It was conceivable, and anything that’s conceivable has probably been done.