Vineyard Stalker (14 page)

“I sure will! You can trust me, J.W.!”

I left and went on to the Noepe Hotel, so called, I presumed, in honor of the original Wampanoag name for the Vineyard. It was not far from Ocean Park, and was one of those multicolored Victorian structures that make Oak Bluffs such a lovely, gingerbread town. A little bell rang in my brain as I walked into the lobby.

The lobby was nicely decorated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings of the sea, Victorian lamps, leather chairs, and oriental carpets. The woodwork was hand-carved and polished. On either side of the front door were stained-glass windows in the Pre-Raphaelite mode, and on one side of the front desk a curved staircase led up to a second-floor balcony. As I entered, a cleaning woman carrying the tools of her trade reached the top of the stairs and went silently out of sight down a hallway.

From behind the desk, a clerk came through a doorway that was curtained with strings of Victorian beads. She smiled at me in spite of my clothes.

“May I help you?”

I smiled back. “I hope so. I just learned that a couple of friends of mine are on the island and I'm trying to track them down. You wouldn't happen to have a couple of Boston guys staying here, would you? A young guy with dark hair and one a little older, beginning to gray? Fred and Angie? Been here maybe a week?”

The smile stayed on her face. “I'm sorry, sir, but it's our policy not to reveal the names of our guests. I hope you understand.”

I nodded and looked around. “Sure. Privacy should come with a place like this. So this is Al's Vineyard property, eh? He said it was nice and he was right. Small and personal with everything first class.”

The clerk's expression was slightly changed when I looked back at her.

“You're a friend of Mr. Cabot, sir?

I grinned. “I like to think so, but you know what the old poem says: ‘The Lowells speak only to Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God.'”

Her smile returned. “I take it that you're denying that you're God?”

“You take it correctly. Well, when I see Al I'll be sure to tell him that you're defending the gates. Say, can I leave a message for Fred, just in case he happens to come by? Do you have a sheet of paper I can use?”

She dimpled. “Of course, sir. Just in case he comes by.” We shared a jesting, conspiratorial smile as I took the paper.

I wrote: “Fred, sorry to have missed you. I'll catch up with you later.” I signed it “J.W.,” folded it, wrote “Fred” on the outside and handed it to her.

“No last name?” she asked.

“If he comes by, just Fred will do.” I winked.

“I'll make sure he gets it.” She grinned. “If he comes by.”

I thanked her and headed for the door, then turned and said, “Say, Al isn't around, is he?”

She beamed some more. “I'm afraid I can't comment on who's staying here.”

I smiled in turn. “Of course.”

I went out, then stepped quickly along the porch and peeked in through a window. The clerk had opened my note and was reaching toward a telephone on the counter. I walked on around to the back of the building, where I found the parking lot, the rear exit, and the narrow fire stairs leading down from the second and third floors. From the back, the hotel looked less smashing than from the front, but it still cut a good figure.

There were four cars in the lot: a VW Rabbit, a forest-green Hummer in a private parking spot, a dark-windowed white Mercedes sedan, and a nondescript middle-aged Chevy pickup. I guessed that the pickup belonged to the cleaning lady and the VW belonged to the clerk. Of course I knew I might be wrong since there are more millionaire plumbers than doctors on the Vineyard these days and, for all I knew, cleaning ladies and desk clerks might be driving Cadillacs.

I walked back to my truck and drove around a few of the many narrow, one-way streets that wind between Oak Bluffs' lace-trimmed cottages until I found a parking spot where I could keep an eye on both the hotel's front door and the parking lot exit.

Nothing happened for a while, then the Mercedes came out of the lot and drove away. I followed it.

The car moved slowly, which is the proper way to navigate in Oak Bluffs. In this case, hesitations at side roads and excessively long pauses at stop signs also suggested that the driver was unfamiliar with the town's streets. I stayed well back until the Mercedes found its way to the Oak Bluffs–Edgartown Road and turned right toward the state beach. Then, to make sure I wouldn't lose it in the heavy flow of traffic between the beach and Sengekontacket Pond, I moved closer.

Under the high blue summer sky the beach was full of bright umbrellas. The beach side of the highway was lined with parked cars, while on the pond side the bike path was busy with walkers and bikers. The highway itself was a slow-moving parking lot, crowded with cars, motorcycles, scooters, and mopeds moving in both directions and slowed still more by people creeping along looking for parking places or trying to back their cars into those spaces when they found them. When we got to the big bridge, I found it crowded with the traditional laughing and screaming teenagers jumping off the railing into the water, and noted that the channel was, as usual, lined with fishermen who probably didn't care whether or not they caught anything.

The driver of the Mercedes moved cautiously along and I followed suit, careful to brake for street-crossing beachgoers and ever alert for children who might dart into the road. It was a cheerful picture, all in all. Very Vineyardish. I wondered if the person I was following appreciated the noisy innocence of the scene.

Traffic picked up speed a bit after we crossed Crab Creek. The Mercedes drove into Edgartown, crept through the Stop & Shop/Al's Package Store traffic jam, then turned right onto the West Tisbury road.

I paused before turning onto the road to give the driver a good start, then followed. To my surprise, he wasn't too far ahead of me and seemed to be loafing along.

Hmmmm?

He turned left onto Meshacket Road and I wondered briefly if he was going to do some shopping at Morning Glory Farm, but he kept on going. I turned after him and followed the winding road. He turned into the Island Grove housing development. I drove past the entrance, turned around and drove back to the farm's parking lot.

Island Grove has only one entrance, so unless the driver was really going to an address there, which I didn't believe because I was pretty sure he'd spotted me and was double-checking to make sure he was right, he'd have to come back out the way he came in. Not seeing me on his tail any longer, he'd have to decide whether he'd been right about me and then he'd have to decide whether to return past the farm or go on along Meshacket to Clevelandtown Road and eventually on to where he actually wanted to go.

My guess was that being unfamiliar with the island he'd come back past the farm where, if he'd noticed me at all, he might have been fooled into thinking I'd been after fresh veggies all the time. If he went the other way, of course, I'd lose him.

About ten minutes later the Mercedes came past the farm and turned left toward West Tisbury. The car's darkened windows prevented me from seeing the driver, but didn't prevent him from seeing me if he was looking, which I imagined he was since I certainly would have been in his place.

I pulled out after him but this time didn't find him dawdling along in front of me. Instead, he'd apparently decided to take advantage of the fact that he had a Mercedes and I had an ancient, rusty Land Cruiser and had put the pedal to the metal. I saw his car disappearing over a far hill and by the time I got to the top of the same hill he was out of sight.

There are a lot of side roads and driveways leading off that highway, including those leading to Oak Bluffs and into the county airport itself, and he could have taken any or none of them. My tailing skills were obviously not up to snuff and now I was paying the price. I mentally flipped a coin and drove on to West Tisbury on the off chance that he might be returning to the scene of the crime for some reason.

But I didn't find him near Roland Nunes's place or anywhere else in the neighborhood. Unfortunately for me, even if I'd been right in following him that far, he might have taken any of the several roads leaving West Tisbury, including the three leading through Chilmark and the two you could follow back toward Vineyard Haven. I drove up Music Street, where I admired David McCullough's white picket fence, then followed Panhandle Road around to Scotchman's Lane where I took a right and then a left, and was headed back to Edgartown. Alas, the driver's destination, wherever it was, was going to remain a secret from me for the time being, at least.

Still, all had not been in vain. I had the Mercedes' license plate number.

In Edgartown I stopped at the police station where, as a bow to Homeland Security, you now had to punch a button to gain admittance through the front door. I punched and was admitted by Kit Goulart, who had not grown smaller since last I'd seen her. She was my height and outweighed me by several stone. I asked her if the chief was in and she allowed as how he was.

I went to his office and tapped on the open door. He was sucking an empty pipe and looked up from a pile of papers.

“Don't tell me,” I said. “I already know that computers have created more paperwork than you had before they were invented and that you think you'll move to Nova Scotia for the summer. Have you ever actually been to Nova Scotia?”

He sat back. “We went up there one fall, in fact. Great place. Bright-colored houses and all the lobster you can eat. Bagpipes and fiddles. We loved it. Like the island was forty years ago. What are you doing here again? I just saw you yesterday. I thought you spent the summers either up there in the woods or out on East Beach.”

“I need a favor,” I said.

“I should have known. Something legal, I hope.”

“I want to know who owns a white Mercedes sedan.” I gave him the license number.

“This wouldn't have to do with the business up in West Tisbury, would it? Naturally, you're probably mixed up in that somehow.”

I admitted as much and told him about Zee and the kids being gone and being bored and everything except the part about Roland Nunes's desertion.

Of course he picked up on that and eyed me over his pipe. “How come Carole Cohen didn't want you to go to the police in the first place?”

“You'll have to ask Carole Cohen.”

“You don't know?”

“Would you believe client confidentiality? Anyway, the police are involved.”

He snorted. “And so are you. You just can't keep your nose in your own business. You know, about half of my work would end if two or three families would move off this island. Yours is one of them. Not because of Zee or the kids, just because of you. Wait here.” He got up and went out of the room.

It wasn't the first time I'd heard the two-or-three-
families statement, because it was almost as true for Edgartown as it was for most small towns: A few people from a few dysfunctional families caused half the grief in their communities, with trouble passed down from one generation to the next. The drunken father produces a drunken daughter; a son beats up his girlfriend and steals from his mother, and both women lie to the cops about who did it; the kid who drives his car too fast and kills his buddy when they hit a tree is the same kid who deals coke in the high school halls and has a baby or two in the junior class. When the police get called out to tend to trouble in any of its many forms, they're rarely surprised by who they find at the scene.

The chief came back into the office and tossed a piece of paper to me. I caught it in the air.

“There,” he said. “Does that help?”

The car had been rented in Boston by Frederick McMahan of Charlestown.

Fred.

“Do you know anything about this Fred McMahan?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you think you could find out?”

“I could if I had some time to waste, which I don't. Maybe your reporter pal on the
Globe
can help you out. Anyway, you should be dealing with the West Tisbury cops, not me. That's where you got in trouble and the Carson woman was killed.”

“I think this is one of the guys who put that stun-gun shot into me. If that was him making the phone threat I told you about, he may use a real one the next time.”

The phone threat had come to someone in his town, which made it his business. He chewed his pipe stem and I knew he wished he was still puffing tobacco, because years after giving up the weed I, too, sometimes still had an urge to stoke up my corncob.

“I'll see what I can learn,” he said finally.

“While you're at it, see if he's tied to the guy called Angie. And maybe you could spread the word about that Mercedes. We have ten police forces on this little island and one of their minions might see it somewhere and have a chat with the driver.”

“Anything else you want to tell me to do that I was going to do anyway?” asked the chief. “If not, good-bye.” As I left, he added, “Be careful.”

I drove back to Oak Bluffs and checked the parking lot behind the Noepe Hotel. The Hummer was gone but the VW and the pickup were there along with a couple of cars I hadn't seen before. The clerk and the cleaning lady were still at work and they had some new customers to deal with. I was sorry I hadn't written down the Hummer's license plate number and compensated by writing down those of the two new cars in the lot. Maybe Fred had imported a couple of friends to help him.