Vineyard Fear (12 page)

“Yeah. Maybe. So instead, he parks on the road and walks through the woods and makes himself cozy in the brush and waits for his shot. What does that tell you?”

“That he's not a city slicker,” said the chief. “And that he got here after J. W. did, not before. Otherwise, he'd have shot a lot earlier.”

“Yeah. Guy knows how to move in the woods. Came here and made his nest without Jackson hearing or seeing him.”

“I was probably inside the house. If I'd been outside, maybe I'd have seen him.”

“Maybe,” said the corporal. “And if you did, he'd probably have seen you too and shot you on the spot. Sounds to me like maybe he spotted Skye's Jeep on the highway and followed you to the driveway and walked in after you. We got too many ‘maybes.' We'd better call Weststock and have them take casts of the prints in the flower bed, if they're still there, and check the house for signs of B and E. If those casts match the ones we'll get here, we'll know we're doing more than guessing. I think we'd better get after that car pretty hard.”

“I'll see how that's going,” said the chief, moving away toward his car.

“Guy hasn't had time to get off the island,” said the corporal. “We have a good chance of getting him, if he hasn't just abandoned the car.”

“Which is what I'd do,” I said.

He nodded. “Me too. But maybe somebody will see him do it and we'll get a description of him. One good thing: without a car, he'll be on foot. Less mobile.”

“If you find his car, maybe it will tell you who he is,” said Manny.

“Everybody's a cop,” said the corporal. “I know that I wouldn't try a hit and run in my own car. Stolen, probably. We'll contact New York and see if they can help us out. You watch your ass, Jackson. This guy is still out there and he still thinks you're Skye.”

He walked away. I looked at Manny. “Exciting times on Martha's Vineyard. You'd better call Helen and tell her where you've been. She'll think you fell into a band saw or something.”

“Damn! You're right!” He headed for the house.

An hour later, I was back at the station. Manny had gone reluctantly back to work. The wheels of island justice were turning, and there were a lot of them. It is one of the absurdities of Martha's Vineyard that on an island with a permanent population of ten thousand, there are at least ten different police agencies: six town police forces, the Sheriffs Department, the State Police, the Registry of Motor Vehicles, the Environmental Police, and probably one or two I don't know about. All of these were looking for the blue car and its driver, who was presumed armed and dangerous.

“What a summer” said the chief, sucking on a cold pipe and reaching for a tape recorder. “Now, what do you remember about the guy driving the car in Weststock?”

“Not much. Youngish face, maybe thirty. I have a hard time telling how old people are these days, what with everybody trying to look younger than they are.” I reached into my memory, but found very little. “A white guy. Tanned skin. Yellow hair. Shades. That's about it. The kids who saw the incident couldn't agree about much. I got the impression from what they said that the yellow hair might be a wig. Shades and a wig make a fast, easy disguise.”

“You get the names of any of those people?”

“Just one. Amy Jax.”

“And you think this blue car might have been that one, too.”

“I think so. I couldn't swear to it.”

“Okay. I'll have somebody drive you home. You think you'll be okay there? If not, I'll have an officer hang around with you for a while.”

“I'll be fine. If the guy thinks I'm Skye, there's no reason he'll come looking for me at my place.”

“Yeah. Now you may know John Skye better than I do, so tell me, why would somebody want to kill him?”

“I have no idea at all.”

“He never mentioned anything that might give us a lead? A woman? Gambling? An argument with a neighbor?”

“Not a thing. With Mattie and the girls he's got all the women he wants or can handle. He plays a nickel-ante poker game where he couldn't win or lose much if he tried. I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him.”

“A mad student he might have flunked? Some colleague who lost a committee vote somewhere along the line and blames John?”

“I don't know, but I doubt it. John's not the type to strike fire in people. He's a mild guy.”

“Save me from mild guys,” grumbled the chief, sucking his pipe.

I thought of Bernadette Orwell's journal entry. In the beginning, John Skye was a wonderful, wonderful person. By the following fall, Jonathan was beautiful and brilliant and she trembled at the very thought of his touch. That didn't sound too mild.

“You going to try to contact John and tell him what's going on?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet. So far, we're just guessing. Besides, we may nab this guy before he gets off the island. If we do, we'll know what's really going on. You're right when you say that a guy after Skye probably wouldn't come looking for you at your place. But what if the guy really is looking for you?”

“The only guy who might be looking for me is Lloyd
Cramer, and Lloyd's not going to be in shape to do me much damage for a while. I can look after myself, so don't plan on having one of your summer kids watching over me. If it turns out that I do need to protect myself, I don't want to have to worry about protecting your guy, too.”

“Famous last words,” said the chief. “I'm going to have people keep an eye out for Cramer anyway. If he comes onto the island I want to know about it, and I'll let you know.”

A young cop drove me home. She was very careful about her driving and very serious when she asked me if I was sure I didn't want her to stick around. She had a pistol at her belt which meant that she had taken the training and passed the tests which allowed her to carry the weapon. I thanked her and said no and she drove carefully away.

No assassin was waiting inside my house or in my shed or in my woods. I unlocked the gun case where I keep my shotguns and the rifle my father used for deer hunting in Maine. From a drawer at the bottom of the case I got out the old .38 I'd carried when everybody else in the Boston PD was opting for .357 Magnums. I'd bought the pistol cheap from a young cop who was moving up in firepower. I fired the weapon only once while on duty and it had done its job even though it was a mere .38. Like most cops, the kid who bought the Magnum never had occasion to draw his weapon. I hoped he never would.

I loaded up the revolver and went out and put it under the seat of the Land Cruiser so I'd have it in case I met the guy in the blue car while I was on the road. It struck me as a melodramatic act, but then again, people didn't try to kill me very often and I felt rather melodramatic.

I needed to think, so I got my rake and basket and headed for the quahogging grounds. Quahogs are hardshell clams which you can eat in a lot of excellent ways: as littlenecks on the half shell (with just a touch of lemon
or seafood sauce), as clams casino (broiled with a bit of garlic butter and bacon), as stuffed quahogs (Euell Gibbons' recipe is the best—next to my own, of course), or in chowder. There's not much bad about quahogging. Preparing them is pleasant work, eating them is joy, and raking them is a time for leisurely thought.

I was after chowder makings, so I drove down to Katama, turned east over the sand, and drove all the way to Pocha Pond, on the southeast corner of Chappaquiddick, where, for reasons known only to the Great Quahog in the sky, there were no little quahogs but only big ones. How the big ones got big without being little first is a cosmic mystery whose answer I do not expect to discover until I reach that Beautiful Clam Flat with Sands of Gold.

I saw no man in a two-wheel-drive blue car trying to follow me in my four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser. Even if he had somehow prevented me from noticing him, he would have been in sand up to his hubs as soon as he left the pavement, so I felt secure.

I put on my shellfishing hat, the one with a picture of a helicopter on the front and my shellfishing license pinned to the side, and waded out into Pocha, rake in hand, basket-in-inner-tube in tow. It was an hour before low tide, so I could get a long way out, where the big ones grew. When I got there, I began to rake. I rake in circles, pivoting until I've covered the ground all around me, and then moving a few yards away and doing it over again. In an hour I can usually get a basketful and during that same hour I can think without interruption and perfect my tan. Not bad.

I ran various things through my head. None of them made sense to me. One problem was that I couldn't see John Skye as the type somebody would try so systematically to kill. On the other hand, I'd never thought of him as wonderful or beautiful, either. But then, how much do we really know about even our close friends? How much do they really know about us? We all have private, even
secret, selves which we do not share. We all have dark parts of our lives, little shames, if nothing else, which we keep to ourselves. All of us, perhaps, have given offense, some of which we may not even be aware. All of us, perhaps, have committed at least petty crimes. Dostoyevsky was not the only one to note that there is little difference between prisoners and prosecutors. Perhaps some act of Skye had provoked these assaults on his life. Perhaps I had nearly died because of Skye.

Of course, the hunter could be after me. I wondered whom I might have so offended. Cramer? Or an agent of Cramer? Who else?

A few things were fairly clear. The hunter was systematic about his work, not merely a killer on impulse, as are so many murderers who, once the moment of rage has passed, are as confused by their acts as anyone else. Skye's nemesis, or mine, as the case might be, wanted his victim dead, was willing to stay at the job, was good in the woods, and possessed the sort of weaponry most people, including most killers, don't have.

What did he do for a living? How was it that he could spend so much time hunting his victim? Most people have jobs that would prevent them from going off for a week or two to kill somebody. If they did leave, they'd be missed. Or fired. This guy apparently had both time and money.

Was he a car thief? Most people wouldn't know how to steal a car unless the keys were left in the lock. All of us have heard about jump-starting or wiring ignitions, but how many people actually know how to do it?

Not many.

If he wasn't a car thief, where did he get the blue car? Where would I get one, if I wanted one to use in a hit and run?

When my basket was full of quahogs, my brain was still pretty empty. I drove back to Edgartown and went to the police station. The chief and the corporal were there.

“Well,” said the chief, “I see you're still alive, at least. Any new ideas?”

“Only two old ones,” I said. “Cramer is not the guy.

The corporal had a cigar in his mouth. It was unlit, but he had a match in his hand. He looked at me over the flame. “How do you figure?”

“The same way you two do. If Cramer was after me or had hired a hit man, I wouldn't have been attacked up in Weststock, because Cramer or his man wouldn't have known I was there. I didn't know I was going myself until the night before. Ergo, it was somebody after Skye.”

The corporal lit his cigar. “Keen thinking,” he said.

“I was really dumb before I met you,” I said. “But you're so smart that it oozes out of your pores and guys like me get smart just by being near you.”

The corporal blew a stream of smoke in my direction. “We called Iowa City, Iowa. They called back. Cramer is back home. His mommy is taking care of him.”

“We called Weststock, too,” said the chief. “They don't have anything on the hit and run, but they'll see if they can get a cast of the footprints in Skye's flower bed and get back to us.”

“You'll be famous soon,” said the corporal. “The
Gazette
has already called us.”

“How'd they find out about this?”

The corporal feigned innocence. “Keep a shooting quiet? When you got local cops with local friends? You got to be kidding.”

The local cops crack caused the chief to bite down hard
on his pipe stem. “I doubt if any of my people tipped them off, Dom.”

“Somebody did.”

“Yeah.”

“What did you tell the reporter?” I asked.

“That shots had been reported, that nobody had been hurt, that the police are investigating. The usual. Of course, they'll be back, looking for the details.”

“If they get them all, the shootist can read all about how he almost killed the wrong guy. Then he can start looking for the right guy.”

“We thought of that all by ourselves,” said the corporal. “Maybe you called them. Get the guy off of your ass and onto Skye's.”

“You read me like a book, Dom. I figured that once he knew about me, he'd leave the island. Then you'd be off the case and some real policemen could get on it and maybe we'd have a chance of solving it.”

Dom inhaled his cigar and seemed to grow larger. His face got a little red, as it tended to do when he was annoyed.

“You're a real convivial couple,” said the chief. “You want to call each other names, you do it somewhere else, not in my office! I've got work to do.”

“What was the reporter's name?” I asked.

The chief looked at his notes. “Patterson. New guy. Don't know him.”

“Neither do I.”

The phone rang. The chief picked it up and said, “Yeah.” After a while, he said, “Did he, now?” Then, “What was his name?” He listened for a while longer and then said, “I guess it doesn't make any difference now. Don't worry about it, but don't talk about it anymore, either.”

He hung up and looked at the corporal and me. “That was Manny Fonseca. Seems like Patterson called him at
his shop and got the details he didn't get from us. So much for official reticence.”