A Case of Vineyard Poison (18 page)

“A perfect description of me.”

“Among other descriptions I've heard.”

“Everybody's a wise guy. I didn't even snicker when you rattled off that bit about honest bankers and didn't even mention the S and L guys, and now you give me the stick. Jeez . . .”

“Goodness me. I'd forgotten how sensitive you are, Jefferson. I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am for hurting your feelings. How can I possibly hope to make amends?”

“I'm afraid it may be too late for that.”

“I'm thinking of taking tomorrow off and catching the Hy-line over to the Cape. How about coming along with me? We can talk to my man over there and, with luck, maybe see some people at FIS, too. Maybe we can even find the salvage company. Perhaps we might actually locate Cecil Jones or Glen Gordon. What do you say? The boat leaves Oak Bluffs just after eleven and we can be back on the island by seven-thirty.”

“I say I'll make a phone call and rent a car over there. We'll need wheels.”

“No problem. My friend will pick us up at the boat, give us his car for the day, and take us back to the boat when we leave.”

“What a guy. And people say that bankers are all a bunch of tight-fisted, fishy-eyed, cold-hearted thieves who wouldn't help a blind child across the street unless they get paid for it.”

“They say that, do they? Damn! They've found us out! I knew we were wasting our money on those PR firms! I'll meet you at the Hy-line dock tomorrow, then.”

“I'll be wearing a red rose in my hair, so you'll recognize me.”

I rang off, and glanced at my watch. If Beth Goodwin's schedule was the same as the last time I'd visited her, she'd still be at home. I got into the Toyota and drove to her place. As I stopped in front of the farmhouse Peter Dennison came out of the front door. He looked puzzled, then recognized me and came over to the truck.

“Hi,” he said. “Beth said you came by yesterday.” He was wearing a white tee shirt and dark pants. Kitchen clothes for the afternoon shift at the restaurant where he worked, I guessed.

“I wondered if you happen to have a picture of Glen Gordon, Kathy's boyfriend.”

He leaned a bony arm on the door. “I don't think so. Kathy's folks came by a couple of days ago and took all of her stuff. If she had a picture of him, it's not here now.”

“I'm going over to the Cape tomorrow. I thought I might try to talk to him. What does he look like?”

He frowned the way people do when you ask them
impossible questions like “How did it taste?,” “What does he look like?,” and so forth. But also like most of those people, he gave it a shot: “I don't know. Let's see: shorter than me. A little under six feet, maybe. Sort of brownish hair, sort of average build, not skinny like me, but not fat either, you know what I mean. Lemme see . . . I don't remember his eyes. He's clean-shaven . . . That's about it. Sort of a normal-looking guy.”

The normal-looking guys are the worst kind to describe. If Glen Gordon had been seven feet tall, or if he'd had tattoos all over his face, Peter Dennison could have described him to a T. Oh well.

“Say,” said Peter, “that's Denise, isn't it? Nice picture.”

I followed his gaze down to the photograph of Denise Vale that lay on the passenger seat, where I'd left it so I wouldn't forget to return it to her father.

“You know her?” I asked.

“Well, not really. I saw her up here a couple of times. She was a friend of Kathy's. That's how I met her. Funny girl.”

“A friend of Kathy's, you say.”

“Yeah. I think they met at school in some play Kathy was in. She used to come up here to see Kathy.”

“What about?”

“Hey, don't ask me. They usually talked in Kathy's room. I only saw her coming or going.”

“They met at NYU, you say.”

“I think so. I never really asked and they never really said, but I got that idea somehow. Maybe Beth knows.” He glanced at the watch on his thin wrist. “Hey, I got to get to work. Nice seeing you again.”

He walked around the corner of the house and came back with a bicycle upon which he immediately pedaled
away. I looked after him, thinking, then went up to the door and knocked. No answer. I walked around to the back of the house, whistling the drinking song from
La Traviata,
so as not to surprise Beth in case she was sunbathing nude in the backyard. I sometimes work on my all-over tan in my own yard, so I knew how pleasant the experience could be. Personally, I never cared if I was surprised or not, but people have different ideas about such things.

Beth was there, wearing the same tiny bathing suit as yesterday. Apparently that was as near to naked sunning as she cared to come, which was pretty close, at that. She pushed up her dark glasses and smiled at me.

“Caught loafing once again. You must think this is all I do.”

“It looks okay to me.” I gestured over my shoulder with my thumb. “I just saw your friend Peter. He told me that a girl named Denise Vale used to come here to see Kathy. Is that right?”

“Yeah.” She frowned. “Why do you ask?”

“Her father is looking for her. I thought you might know where he could look.”

She slid the glasses back over her eyes and sank back down on her lounge chair. “She lives somewhere in Oak Bluffs, I think. I don't really know her.”

Both her tone and her action said more than her words. Beth didn't like Denise Vale.

“Peter called her a funny girl,” I said. “What do you think he meant?”

She shrugged. “I don't think “funny” is the word I'd use.”

“What word would you use?”

“I don't know. Bitchy? Cold?”

“How so?”

Again, the shrug. “Kathy was always sort of down after Denise's visits. And Denise never was what you'd call warm to Peter and me.”

“Peter said Denise and Kathy were friends.”

“They knew each other and Denise came up here every now and then, but I don't know if that made them friends. A friend is somebody who makes you happy. I never saw Denise make Kathy happy.”

I thought that was a pretty good definition. “What did they talk about?”

“I asked Kathy that once, after Denise went home. She said they just talked. You know, the stuff everybody talks about. Guys, work, school, that sort of thing.”

“Did they meet at NYU? I know they both went there.”

“Yeah, I think maybe they did. Denise was a couple of years ahead of Kathy. Say, do you mind if we talk about something else? I'm getting depressed.”

Life is suffering, as the Buddha said.

“One more thing before I leave you and old Sol alone together. Do you have a picture of Glen Gordon? I'd like to know what he looks like.”

“No. All Kathy's stuff is gone.” Then she thought of something. “Say, I think I have a snap of him and Kathy together. The last time he was here before she died. It's still in my camera.”

I dug out some money. “Look, if you'll take the roll out of the camera, I'll pay you to get it developed and buy you a new film to replace it. I'd really like to see what Gordon looks like.”

“Why do you want to know that?”

I told her what I'd told Peter Dennison, and that seemed to satisfy her. “I'm going over to the Cape tomorrow
morning,” I added. “If you can get that picture developed by mid-morning, I'll pick it up before I go.”

She took my money and I went home and punched down the bread again. With the fresh bread and a salad, I was serving coquilles St. Jacques “for supper, and that wouldn't take long to prepare, but. I wanted to start off with littlenecks on the half shell and clams casino, which meant that I had to go quahogging.

I got my rake and my small wire basket and headed for Katama Bay, where the littlenecks and cherrystones live. While I was raking, I could try to do some clear thinking. It seemed to me that I could stand to do a bit of that, for a change. One thing was certain: I had plenty of subject matter.

It took me an hour to get the littlenecks and cherrystones I needed, which was about the right amount of time since I had to go home then and give the bread its third punching. South of me, along the beach, there were dozens of four-wheel-drive vehicles, and the air was full of kites. The June People were down, working on the tans they planned to take home with them. There were blankets and umbrellas and coolers and gas grills, and balls and Frisbees sailed back and forth. A good time was being had by all, and not one person there was concerned about Kathy Ellis, Denise Vale, Maria Muleto, or any of the other people I had been thinking about. Maybe they were all smarter than I.

Quahogging involves wading out into shallow water with a floating basket tied to your waist, and scratching around on the bottom with a quahog rake. When you find a quahog, it feels and sounds something like, but not quite like, hitting a rock. After a while you know a quahog when you've found one, and you no longer get excited about hitting rocks. Conchs and the occasional horseshoe crab, however, often feel like quahogs and serve to make the game seem a bit chancier than it would otherwise be.

Quahogs are hard-shell clams that are true gifts from the sea. The smallest keepers are littlenecks, which are usually eaten raw on the half shell and which cost a shocking
amount if you buy them in downtown Edgartown, considering how easy they are to catch. Cherrystones are the next step up, and I use them mostly for clams casino—clams on the half shell, topped by garlic butter, some bread crumbs, and a bit of bacon, ahd broiled until the bacon is done. Delish! Even people who say they don't like clams like casinos, and no wonder. You can also french fry the little guys if you want to, and I often do. The bigger quahogs usually become stuffers or find their way into chowders. You can make a lot of different kinds of meals out of quahogs, and all of them are good.

Quahogging does not require much concentrated thought, so while your hands are raking you can send your brain off on business of its own. Alone out there in the water, while I scratched away, I sent mine back to that day when Zee had discovered an extra hundred thousand dollars in her checking account, then had it follow the pattern of incidents that seemed tied to that event. Because Kathy Ellis had happened to die in my driveway, I had gotten involved, whereas I'd not otherwise have done so. But now I didn't expect to get uninvolved until I either knew what was going on or I decided that I was never going to know. Whatever was happening involved some pretty big money and maybe murder, too. The money was only a curiosity to me, since money is too mysterious for me to take it seriously, but if someone had killed Kathy Ellis, I'd take that very personally.

And of course all of this was happening when I should have been thinking more than anything else of my wedding, for God's sake. In less than three weeks I was going to get married, and so far all I'd really managed to contribute to the celebration was to get the
Shirley J.
ready for the scheduled honeymoon trip to Nantucket
and to alienate Zee's mother. What a romantic devil I was turning out to be.

But if tonight's meal went right, my relations with my potential mother-in-law might improve. The way to the heart is through the belly, they say, whoever they may be. Zee, although slender and sleek as an otter, had an appetite like a horse. Maybe Maria was just as much an eater. If so, there was hope of regaining lost ground.

When I had enough quahogs, I drove home and punched down the bread again. Then I had a cold bottle of Sam Adams and a ham and avocado sandwich, and went, basket on my arm, out to the garden to pick the salad stuff I'd need. Since the Vineyard's mild climate allows for early garden planting, I had plenty of good things growing. If Maria didn't like this salad, there was something wrong with her.

Back inside, I rinsed and dried the veggies and made up a honey-mustard dressing. I put everything in the fridge, got another beer, and went to work on the St. Jacques. Some of the nice things about coquilles St. Jacques are that it's delicious, it's pretty easy to make, and it can be prepared ahead of time. The secret of its flavor is, of course, butter and cream, the magic ingredients in a lot of French sauces, and a couple I use in spite of our current national case of cholesterolphobia.

You can make St. Jacques with any kind or combination of white fish or shrimp, but since I still had a goodly supply of frozen scallops from last winter, I used those. I boiled mushrooms, butter, white wine, and onion, with thyme, a bay leaf, and some lemon juice, and then added the scallops and let the whole thing simmer for a couple of more minutes. Then I stirred up a sauce out of flour, more butter, juice from the drained scallops, egg yolks, some heavy cream, and just enough salt and pepper.

When the sauce began to coat my stirring spoon, I put the scallop mixture in a casserole, and spooned the sauce over it, extracting the bay leaf en route. A mixture of bread crumbs and grated Parmesan over the top, and a dribble of melted butter over that and,
voilà!

I put the St. Jacques in the fridge beside the salad, and made four loaves of bread and set them to rise.

Good work, J.W. I had another Sam Adams and set the table for five, using my best almost matching flatware and china. A classy meal deserved a classy setting. With luck, Maria would be so captivated by the food and company that she'd forget about religion. A consummation devoutly to be wished.

I heard the Land Cruiser coming down the driveway, and went out to meet Dave and Quinn. They were happy. And no wonder: there were a dozen nice seven- or eight-pound blues in the fish box.

“We're going to smoke these guys,” grinned Dave. “They'll love 'em up in Boston. I'm going to eat smoked bluefish every day as long as my supply lasts.”

“So you're heading back?” I said.

“The master musician has risen from the dead,” said Quinn. “It's time to return to the mortal world.”