A Case of Vineyard Poison (24 page)

“Cecil Jones.”

“Who's Cecil Jones?”

“You never heard the name?”

“No.”

“Did you ever hear of the New Bedford, Woods Hole and Nantucket Salvage Company?”

She studied me carefully, then shook her head. “No. Should I have?”

“Probably.”

“Well, I never heard of them.” She moved away and served more beer to some men at a table. Beer was clearly the drink of choice among the noontime regulars. I was pleased to know that my Sam Adams put me in the social mainstream.

Denise came back. “Things are getting busy. You know everything you need to know?”

“There's only one other thing. The money.”

Her eyes changed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, where did you get a hundred thousand dollars? Why did you write a check for that amount to cash? And who did you give the check to?”

For the first time, Denise looked worried. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I know about the money that was in your
account. I mean I want to know where it came from and where it went and how you figure in the scam.”

Denise put her hands on the bar as if to steady herself. She dropped her head and put her lower lip between her teeth and stared at the floor. She took some deep breaths.

From down the bar came a call for service. Denise didn't move. The call came again, still good-natured, but louder. Denise looked toward the would-be beer drinker, then at me. “I can't talk about that now,” she said in a tight voice. “I'll tell you everything, but it's going to take some time. You'll have to see me when I get off work.”

“When do you get off?”

“Midnight.”

“I'll be here.”

“Hey, lady,” called the guy down the bar, “you lovebirds can bill and coo on your own time. How about a beer?”

Denise went to get his order and I finished my Sam Adams and went out. At the door, I paused and looked back. Denise Vale was watching me. There was no expression on her face.

I walked up to the corner, took a left, then another left, and walked until I was behind the Fireside. Bonzo was pushing trash barrels around. He beamed when he saw me.

“Hey, J.W., I seen you and Denise talking. She's back, just like I told you. Say, J.W., when can we go fishing again? I'd sure like to catch another fish. My mom likes to eat the ones I catch, you know.”

Bonzo's mother was a teacher at the high school. During the summer she waited tables. Sweet, mindless Bonzo was her heart's delight.

“We'll go fishing soon,” I said. “Say, Bonzo, how late are you working today?”

Bonzo frowned. “Oh, I can't go fishing today, J.W. I got to work until we close. Hey, I even got to work after that. Cleaning up, you know. I like to do some of the cleaning up at night so I don't have to do so much the next morning. I mean, look at all this work I'm doing right now. This is stuff that I didn't get done last night, and you can see there's a lot of it still to do.”

“I can see that. I want you to do something for me, Bonzo. I'm supposed to meet Denise here at midnight so we can have a talk. If she has to leave before that, I want you to call me right away. Okay?”

He nodded and gave me his childish smile. “Yeah, J.W., I can do that. It would be a pleasure.”

I thanked him and went home. Dave was now inside, out of the sun. He was reading the
Globe
and having a beer. Quinn was still on the phone.

“It's safe for me to go back to Boston,” said Dave, looking up. “Only one guy killed in town last night. Shot in the Drago Hotel by a woman thought to be a prostitute. Cops figure it for robbery. They're looking for her now. Since I don't even know where the Drago Hotel is, I guess I'll be okay.”

“Unless you hire the same hooker,” I said. Unlike Dave, Quinn and I did know where the Drago was. Back when I'd been on the Boston P.D., the Drago was already pretty seedy. It wasn't the kind of hotel the chamber of commerce talked about.

“There's a message for you,” said Quinn, putting his hand over the speaker, then pointing to a scrap of paper.

Helen Fine had called to say that Matt Jung had called her to say that yesterday afternoon Marilyn Grimes had
made a cash withdrawal of all but a hundred dollars from the New Bedford, Woods Hole and Nantucket Salvage Company account. If memory served me correctly, that meant that Marilyn had walked out with a tad over a hundred grand. All told, the company account had been emptied of two hundred thousand dollars in the past few weeks, all in cash.

When Quinn hung up, I told him about my day.

“Ah,” said Quinn. The old meet-me-at-midnight-and-all-will-be-revealed ploy, eh? As I recall, the naive investigator usually gets himself killed when he-goes to meet the informant, or else finds the informant dead and himself the suspect for murder. I've seen it a dozen times on the late show.”

“Hey,” said Dave, who had gotten to the Arts and Entertainment section of the paper. “Look here. A little story saying I'll be back in town tomorrow, and that the mystery of where I've been is expected to be revealed. Now how did the paper get that information, Quinn?”

Quinn took the newspaper and looked at the story. “Pretty much the way I phoned it in. And more to come tomorrow, when I will reveal all. A Quinn exclusive.”

My back hurt and I put a hand back there by my bullet. “I don't want any goddamned reporters coming down my driveway, Quinn. You tell everybody where Dave's been hiding out and there'll be pilgrims of all sorts crawling around this place.”

“Don't worry,” said Quinn. “When I say I'll reveal all, I don't really mean I'll reveal
all.
What I mean is I'll reveal almost all. Dave here will have spent his week staying with a reclusive Vineyard friend whose identity and location will be kept confidential. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Because,” said Quinn, “Dave and I may want to come back again someday, and we'll need some peace and quiet.”

“I'll be a married man by then, but I think Dave will be welcome anytime he wants to come. I don't know about you, Quinn. Zee may want me to start mixing with a better class of people.”

“Nonsense. Zee loves me. The only reason she's marrying you is so she can be sure I'll keep coming around.”

I had a thought, and took the paper from his hand. I read the Arts and Entertainment section through. There wasn't any rock and roll concert in Boston the coming weekend. Hmmmmm. I also read the story about the murder. There wasn't much. Name withheld until notification of kin. Room had been rented by the woman, who had been seen entering it with the man. She was missing. An investigation was under way. I was glad I had given up being a cop.

“You look pensive,” said Quinn. “While you're in that mood, I'll give you the results of my latest investigative reporting.

“When Denise Vale first went to college, she lived in a dorm. But during her sophomore year, she and another girl got in a brawl over some mutual boyfriend, and Denise belted the girl with a flat iron and put her in the hospital. After that, Denise lived in an apartment. All that's from her mom, by the way. While I was chasing that story down, I went after some more names in this case. Guess who also attended NYU? Cecil Jones and Marilyn Grimes. Everybody involved in this caper went to the same college at about the same time. Interesting, no?”

Interesting, yes. “Were you able to find out where
Cecil and Marilyn went after they graduated? Did they come to Cape Cod, for instance?”

“According to the notes you gave me, they're over there right now, running this phony-looking salvage company.”

“Yeah, but we know that the guy who calls himself Glen Gordon is the same guy who calls himself Cecil Jones. He can't really be both of them.”

Dave looked first at Quinn and then at me.

I rubbed my sore back. I didn't like it being sore. “If the real Marilyn knew the real Cecil and the real Glen Gordon at college, and if the real Marilyn is the person making deposits and withdrawals from the Zimmerman bank, and if she's not a crook herself, it means that the treasurer of the salvage company is the real Cecil and is just pretending to be Glen Gordon in his other life. But that's not likely, because the real Glen Gordon has been working for Frazier Information Systems for five years, and I'm sure that FIS must have checked up on Gordon's identity before they gave him the job. That means that the guy Marilyn knows as Cecil is really Glen, which means that either she didn't know Glen or Cecil in college, or she knows the man she's working with isn't the real Cecil, which means she's a crook, too.”

Quinn nodded happily. “Yeah. And the two other names in this case, Denise Vale and Kathy Ellis, are NYU people, too, and we know they knew each other and that both of them knew Glen Gordon. All these people seemed to know each other. I think I'll give the Alumni Office a call, and see if I can get current addresses for Cecil and Glen and Marilyn. This witches' brew is getting complicated.”

“Now, let me see if I've got this right,” said Dave.
“You've got one guy who calls himself by two names, and a woman who works with him when he uses one of those names, but who knows that it's a false one. They run a company that may be a fake, but have managed to get two hundred thousand dollars from the checking accounts of two island girls each of whom had no business having a hundred thousand dollars in her checking account, but who withdrew that money in checks made out to cash that were deposited in the Zimmerman bank by the guy with two names; then later the money was withdrawn in cash from the bank by the guy or the woman who knows one of his names is false.”

“You have a good memory,” I said. “Now I understand how you can play all those songs without ever looking at the music.”

“And one of the island girls is now dead.”

“Yes.”

“And nobody really knows where Glen Gordon or Cecil Jones or whatever he calls himself is?”

“We know where he isn't,” I said. “He's not in Boston attending a rock concert, like he said he was going to be.”

“That means he might be over here on the island. I think I'd be careful, if I were you. And I think that Denise Vale should be careful, too.”

I thought about that, and decided that Dave might be right. Before I left the house, I dug out my old police revolver and stuck it under my belt. To hide it, I wore my Black Dog sweatshirt. Deadly but stylish, that was me.

At a quarter to twelve I went into the Fireside. The place was loud, and the crowd was younger than the noon bunch. The smells of liquor and grass and sweaty bodies filled the air, and music blasted from the jukebox while voices tried to speak over it. I got a beer from Jackie, the bartender's wife, who clearly remembered the fight with Miles and wanted me to be happy. Down at the other end of the bar, Denise was earning her keep.

At midnight, Jackie rang a ship's bell, and service stopped. People who had finished their drinks and could get no more began to drift out. People who still had drinks stayed where they were. Denise took off her apron, got her purse, and ducked out under the bar. I finished my beer and met her at the door. We went out together.

She barely looked at me. “You have a car?”

“I have an aging Land Cruiser.” I pointed up Circuit Avenue. From other bars, noisy patrons were coming out onto the street.

“We'll take that. There's a housing development off the County Road. It never got finished. Nobody will bother us there, and we can talk all night if we need to, and we might.”

We walked up the street and got into the Land Cruiser and went out of the back of town. When we got to the County Road, she pointed left and we headed toward the
airport. She said nothing more until we came to a dirt road leading to the right. Then she said, “Turn here.”

I turned, and we drove over the bumpy road, passing branch roads that were more overgrown than the one we were on. It was dark as the pit.

We got to a circle at the end of the lane, and she said, “This will be okay.”

I drove around the circle until the Land Cruiser was pointed out again, then stopped and killed the lights and engine.

“Let's get out,” she said. “I can use some air.”

We got out. I got my flashlight and found us a log to sit on. The moon was thin, and it was very dark. The flashlight showed beer cans and other garbage around us.

“Kids come here,” she said. “Nobody bothers them. Nobody can hear them. If they could hear them, they'd bother them. That's the way people are. You have a cigarette?”

“No. I don't smoke.”

I flicked off the flashlight, and the darkness fell in on us. Gradually, my eyes adjusted. We were in a clearing cut out of the woods. At one time, some developer had spent a lot of money (someone else's, probably) to make himself rich, and instead had made himself and his backers poorer. He probably had plans for lots of houses back here in the woods, each on a dead-end road with speed bumps, each one snazzier than the next. But as had happened to more than one land developer on the Vineyard, his plans had gone awry, and all there was to show for his dreams were these overgrown dirt roads.

Denise's voice cut through the darkness. “You said you haven't told the cops anything.”

“Not yet.”

“I don't want them on my case. I'll tell you whatever you want to know, but I don't want the cops on my case. How many other people know what you know? How many other people do I have to worry about?”

“A girl died in my driveway. That's why I'm here. I'm not a cop. I got into this thing because of the girl. Your friend Kathy. If she'd died somewhere else, I wouldn't be here, but she died on my land. I found out she had a hundred thousand dollars in her checking account and it all ended up in a bank over in Hyannis. The same thing is true of you. Women your age d6n't generally have that kind of money in their checking accounts. And if they do, they don't work in places like the Fireside.”