A Beautiful Place to Die (21 page)

“I'll get on the horn.” He slapped his hat on his head. “There are men up there who can check it out.”

“You might also tell the Coast Guard to look for the boat someplace else than on the swordfishing grounds.”

“Believe it or not, I already thought of that!” He frowned, gestured good-bye, and left.

Not much later, there was a commotion outside my door. Someone saying he damned well would see me and the policeman doubting it. After a bit, the policeman stuck his head in and said, “There's a guy named Quinn out here. Says you're supposed to take him fishing this afternoon.”

“Send him in.”

Quinn came in looking very neat in one of the Brooks Brothers suits he favors. It's his way of proving that not all reporters have to look seedy. He gave me a sour look.

“Don't tell me. You're reneging on the deal. Jesus Christ, Jackson, have you no shame?”

“None. If I did, I certainly wouldn't associate with you.”

“When are they going to let you out of here?”

“The sooner the better.”

“Well, you're not wriggling out from our deal. I'll be
expecting a call as soon as you're mobile and I'll be down before you can change your mind. You owe me a blue-fishing trip to Wasque!”

“Stop nagging. I'm a sick man. You'll get your trip.”

After a bit, Quinn went away. He was a friend of long standing. A man with a tough mouth but a soft heart, like a lot in his trade.

I really loathe being in a hospital. The food is dull, you can't have beer, everything is clean and smells funny. People are so nice so much of the time that you're almost relieved when one of them isn't. Of course, the knowledge that Zee was in close proximity much of the time did serve as a salve to my psyche.

She dropped in while she was working and visited when she wasn't and one day brought in some rolled flounder stuffed with mushrooms and crab. There was a sauce with dill in it and wild rice and baby peas on the side and a smuggled bottle of chilled Moselle, which the on-duty folks were pleased to ignore while we devoured the feast.

“It's the turning point,” I said afterward. “My will to live has been revitalized. I know that soon I'll walk in the sun again, hear the crash of waves on the rockbound coast, feel the wind on my face! You've saved me!”

“I've saved every poor soul who's had to listen to you bitch and moan, you mean,” said Zee, gathering up china and silverware and sticking everything back into her picnic basket. “They're letting you out tomorrow.”

“All thanks to you,” I said, taking her hand and pulling
her down. She came easily and her kiss was warm and gentle. When she sat up to get her breath, I felt faint stirrings where no stir had stirred for a few days. “You know,” I said, “that because you've saved my life you now have an obligation to care for me. I'm now your responsibility.”

“I'm Portuguese, not Chinese or Japanese or Korean or whatever nationality it was that spawned the thinker of that famous thought. The way we Occidentals figure it, you owe me.”

“How much?”

“This much, for a start.” She leaned down again and stayed awhile. My faint stirrings stirred some more.

“You're getting better, all right.” Zee grinned, glancing down the bed. She got up and moved to a chair. “I think I'll sit over here. I don't want you to hurt yourself on my account.”

“
La Belle Dame sans merci.
I recognized you from the start.”

“Well, it's certainly true that you're alone and palely loitering.”

“And in thrall, too. I want you to notice that. To you, of course.”

“Of course. I wouldn't have it any other way.”

Nor would I.

Later, the chief came by to tell me that they'd found the Buick in Menemsha but hadn't found any people to go with it. I wasn't surprised. He also said he'd taken the guard off my room. A waste of money, he said. I had to agree.

The next day Zee came by and took me home. The beach between Oak Bluffs and Edgartown was filled with
June People browning nicely, their cars lining the highway. Beyond them the sails were white against the blue of sea and sky. Life!

We bounced slowly down my long driveway and pulled up to the house. I got out and looked around, leaning on my cane. The Landcruiser was parked where it belonged. There was no pile of rotting clams in the front yard. Zee sat me on one of my lawn chairs, went in, and came out with a bottle of Samuel Adams beer and a frosted mug.

“Chilled the glass in the freezer just for you,” she said, sitting across the table from me.

The sun was warm and nice. Beyond Zee, my garden was perking up through the ground. I poured the beer and took a long drink. Ecstasy! Sam Adams is America's finest bottled beer. I thanked Zee for cleaning the place up. She bowed her head slightly and smiled. I had some more beer. When the bottle was empty, Zee brought me another one and one for herself and some crackers and cheddar and smoked bluefish. She pulled her chair around beside mine and we ate and drank beer and looked over the garden at the blue Sound. The sailboats leaned distantly in the wind and walked over the dark water. Cape Pogue lighthouse was a tiny white line against the sky.

“So Billy never showed up,” said Zee when we were on our next beers.

“Not that I heard.”

“Do you want me to get your pistol? I found it in the Landcruiser and put it inside the house.”

“No, I don't plan on shooting anybody today. Didn't you notice? I'm the shootee, not the shooter. Ours is an age of technological specialization. If a man wants to get ahead
he has to concentrate on his area of expertise. Mine is getting shot. I've been shot by people all over the world. I'm good at it.”

“Billy's never been picked up by the police. He may still be around somewhere, but you're not worried. Why not?”

“I've been thinking. Always a dangerous experience for me, I know, but I've risked it.”

“Don't clown.”

“All right.” I pulled off my shirt and let the sun shine on my scars. It felt good.

“I think they've deep-sixed Billy,” I said.

“Who?”

“Sylvia's crowd. They took him out to sea in the
Bluefin
and dropped him overboard with something heavy attached. They looked for him all night, and when they found him up in Chilmark they took him with them to Menemsha and they all went aboard the
Bluefin
and off they went. Mrs. Sylvia, too.”

“The
Bluefin
isn't back yet. Nobody seems to know where it is.”

“It's fast and it's got a great cruising range, so it could be anywhere between here and the Carolinas. It could be at the bottom of the ocean for that matter, but I doubt it. I think it will be back with everybody but Billy aboard and they'll be surprised as hell to find out the fuzz has been looking for them. If they admit they took Billy aboard at all, they'll say they dropped him off in Point Judith or New Bedford or somewhere and haven't seen him since. Then the cops will go over the boat with the same fine-tooth comb they used to go over Sylvia's house and they'll find just exactly the same nothing. There won't be a flake of grass or snow because the boat will have been scrubbed and vacuumed from bilge to mast top. And
Sylvia will walk away just like always. Later, I imagine, he'll arrange to have his computer records—floppy disks or whatever they are—brought back to his office from wherever it is he's got them secreted at the moment, and he'll be back in business just like before. It wouldn't surprise me if they're in a bank vault somewhere. Sylvia, being the good businessman that he is, would want them to be completely secure.”

“But why would they kill Billy? He never did anything to them. Why would they even be looking for him, for that matter?”

“It wasn't what he did, it was what they figured he might do.”

“What was that?”

“Talk. Spill the beans. Go state's witness in exchange for immunity. He'd testify and they'd go up while he walked away. So they croaked him.”

The sun burned down and sweat began to gather under my chin and run down over my chest. I was dotted with red spots and looked like I had the pox.

“Why did they think that Billy would do that? They had no reason.” Zee was leaning back, looking at the blue Vineyard sky.

“If they'd had no reason, they'd not have gone after him. But they did go after him. They picked him up in Maria Sylvia's car. They delayed their departure in the
Bluefin
while they looked for him. As soon as they got him, they left.”

Zee was watching a sea gull floating on the high wind. “But why did they think he'd talk. Why did they think he'd testify against them?”

“Because he said he would. I've got a tape of him saying that he would.”

“Yeah, but they don't know that. Nobody knows but you.”

“Wrong. I gave a copy of the tape to the chief in Edgartown. We played it in his office.”

“Oh, come on, Jefferson, you surely don't think that the chief tipped off Sylvia!”

“No, I don't think he did it____”

“Who, then?”

“Helen Viera.”

“Ah, what a fool I am. I should have guessed. Who's Helen Viera?”

“Helen Viera is a desk cop in Edgartown. There have been leaks to the bad guys before, and the local cops began to figure that somebody close to them was talking to the other side, but they haven't been able to figure out who it was. It was hard to figure because there are so many independent police departments on this island that security is hard to maintain. Just on this little island we've got the Edgartown Police, the Oak Bluffs Police, the Vineyard Haven Police, the West Tisbury Police, the Chilmark Police, the Gay Head Police, the Sheriffs Department, and the State Police, to say nothing of the DEA or whatever other state or federal outfits that might be involved in, say, a drug bust. That's a lot of cops and cops' girlfriends and boyfriends and wives and husbands and friends of wives and husbands and girlfriends and boyfriends—the security leak could be anywhere.

“Look at this case, for instance. I knew a guy in Boston who had some contacts with the Boston cops. Somebody owed him a favor and gave him information about when this latest bust was going down. The cop trusted my guy and my guy trusted me, and if I'd wanted to, I could have
tipped Sylvia myself. I didn't, but Sylvia found out anyway. Just in time—by the skin of his teeth, almost—to grab his records and take a boat ride and to take Billy away at the same time.”

Zee was watching me. I thought she looked sleepy and particularly sensual. “But why do you think it was Helen Viera?” she asked. “If she's been the double agent all along, why hasn't she been caught before. The cops aren't fools, after all.”

“Because this time she didn't just tip off Fred Sylvia about the time of the bust, she also tipped him off about Billy threatening to squeal on Maria Sylvia. The only people who knew about that threat were Billy himself, me, and whoever listened to that tape. The only person I played that tape for was the chief, but if Helen Viera has ears as sharp as I imagine she has, and if she keeps them as open as I think she does, she could have listened through the chiefs door and heard the whole tape. It had to be her.”

“You have a nice bod,” said Zee. “It's pretty sorry-looking right now, I'll admit, but on the other side of those bullet holes I'll bet it's not bad at all. Why do you think she tipped anybody off?”

“You have a nice-looking exterior yourself which I wouldn't mind exploring in further detail, but I want to impress you with the beauty and clarity of my mind so you won't just think I'm only another empty-headed Greek god type, so try to keep your hands off me while I babble on.”

“I'll have my crew tie me to the mast as I listen to your siren song. Consider me tied.” She lay back and crossed her wrists above her head. Her breasts announced their
freedom from the restriction of a bra. After what seemed a while, I cleared my throat and went on:

“I think she tipped them off for the same reason even honest people tell secrets—because she has lots of loyalties and her loyalty to the police force is only one of them. I think she tipped them off because everybody on this island seems to be related to everybody else or knows everybody else and she didn't want some friend or relative to get arrested. I think that's what they'll find out when they question her. Helen's a perfectly nice person, and as far as I know she's always done her work well. Except for this. When they dig around, I think somebody with a bad habit will be found in the woodwork, somebody that Helen Viera loves or wants to protect.

“Maybe that someone is Sylvia himself. Maybe not. But it was someone close enough to pass the message along in time for Sylvia and company to get away. Before they went, though, they wanted Billy. So did the cops, of course, but the cops were looking for him in his own little sportscar, which smart Billy was no longer driving because he'd borrowed his pal Tim Mello's red M.G. Sylvia, on the other hand, knew what Billy was driving because, no doubt, Tim Mello told him. That made it easier for the Sylvia gang to find Billy, and that's what they did. They used Maria's car because they knew the cops would be hunting for Fred's black Caddy. When they found Billy he was in bad shape and probably ready to go anywhere to get away from the fuzz and you and your fishing rod. That was a great cast, by the way. I don't think I'll ever forget it.”

“Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

“Watch this, then.” She pulled her wrists apart and
swung her feet to the ground. “Ulysses bursts her bonds.” She took my arm. “Ulysses leaps from the ship and seizes the slightly cratered siren and drags him into a cave and slams the door.”

We got up and walked into the house.

“Do caves have doors?”