A Fatal Vineyard Season (19 page)

“The bone is cracked. Nothing serious, I'm told.” Then I looked at Ivy. “But I think I should bring you up-to-date.”

“That sounds pretty heavy,” said Ivy, who looked like an ebony naiad.

“You can decide how heavy it is.” I told them about how I'd been attacked and what had just happened in Alberto Vegas's office. When I was done, I said, “Alexandro is in a bad mood, so I think you should all be especially careful, just in case you bump into each other.” I offered them my view that they should stick together for safety.

“That'll be the day,” said Ivy. “No man is going to keep me from doing what I want to do!”

Buddy Crandel's face was angry. “You've made a fine mess of things! Goading those men like that! My God! Are you
trying
to cause trouble?”

Ivy looked at him, then at Julia. I could barely see her eyes behind her dark glasses.

“You're not the only people who have trouble,” I said to Buddy. “I have it, too. The Vegas brothers are trouble for a lot of people. We all have to be careful.”

“But you've made it worse!”

“You may be right.” I stood up. “It's spilled beans, in any case. Just be careful. I don't think Alexandro is too stable.”

Buddy was on his feet. “I think it would be best if you just get out of our lives, Jackson. You're more trouble than good.” He looked at Julia. “You hired him. Fire him before he does more damage. I'm here, and Mills and Harley are professionals. We don't need Jackson.”

Ivy was studying me. “Maybe you're right,” she said. “Is he right, Mr. Jackson?”

“You have two problems,” I said. “One is Alexandro Vegas, and the other is the stalker who seems to be trailing you around. I really didn't get hired to take care of Alexandro, I got hired to try to track down the stalker. I'll be glad to give back Julia's money anytime she wants. But as long as I keep the money, I'm also going to keep my nose in this mess.”

“And if Julia fires you, are you going to take your nose out?”

I heard a siren somewhere on the far side of town. Someone else with troubles and someone else trying to help out. Trouble is sure, but often succor follows. “If you fire me,” I said to Julia, “I won't owe you anything one way or the other. I'll do as I please.”

A little smile played on her lips. “You do as you please anyway, it seems to me, whether I pay you or not. I can keep my money and still get the same results.”

“Maybe it'll work out like that. Maybe not.”

She made up her mind. “Stay on the job a little longer. That way I'll at least get reports about what you're up to.”

“You're making a mistake,” Buddy said to her.

“It won't be the first one I've made,” said Julia, lying back down on her beach towel.

I looked at Mills. “Keep in touch. And be careful.”

“Sure.”

Sure. I walked away, feeling the sand grab at my feet as I went.

I drove through Oak Bluffs and went out along Newton Avenue. I approached the still smoldering ruin of Pete Warner's house and could smell the sour odor of smoke as I passed. An ambulance was coming up the driveway toward the road. Now I knew why I'd heard the siren. I pulled over and watched it go by me, headed for the hospital. A fire truck was still down by the blackened remains of the house, and a couple of firemen were hosing down a pile of rubble that was still smoking. I drove down and got out. The firemen looked tired.

“Where's Pete?” I asked.

“Hospital.”

My heart beat a bit faster. “I just saw the ambulance. That him?”

“His wife collapsed. They just took her out of here. Pete's riding with her.” The fireman tapped his chest. “Too much for her. Bad ticker, I guess. We kept her breathing.” He shrugged. “Not good, though.”

“I'll get out of your way.”

If Pete's wife died, Alexandro would have taken another step down his steep road. As far as I knew, he'd done a lot of damage to people and property, but up to now he hadn't succeeded in killing anybody. I wondered if it would make any difference to him if she died and guessed that it wouldn't. He struck me as one of those people who never figure that they've done anything wrong. They go to their
graves thinking their victims deserved what happened to them because we're all animals in a jungle, and that the law of the jungle is that the strong shall devour the weak, and you only get to possess something—life, property, whatever—as long as you're strong enough to defend it. When a stronger animal comes by and takes it away from you, it becomes his for as long as he wants it or can hold it against the next predator.

It is a popular theory among the criminal and the powerful classes, and what is called civilized behavior is a thin shield against it.

I drove back to Barnes Road and went on until I came to the newish dirt roads leading off to the left. I took the one that I remembered from my map reading. It led past houses on either side until it made a turn and headed off at a ninety-degree angle. I turned the corner and was pleased to see a summer house sitting amid the trees on the right. The grass was long and there was that feeling of disuse about the place that empty houses have. Better yet, there wasn't another house in view.

I parked in the driveway and knocked on the front door, just in case I was wrong about the owners of the place having gone away for the winter. But I knew I wasn't wrong. I take care of several houses during the off-season, and I know what they feel like. I got back into the Land Cruiser and drove around to the back of the house, where I parked out of sight of the road.

There, I got out the map again and studied it. I was about a half mile from the back of Alexandro's house. I got out of the car and walked through the trees and underbrush until I could see the house ahead of me. I scouted to the left and to the right, just in case some house was nearby that I hadn't noticed when I'd driven by earlier.

When I was sure that there wasn't, I eased closer to Alexandro's place and studied it from the deep shadow of a large oak.

The house was as disreputable from behind as it was from in front. An expensive-looking but rusting barbecue grill and a round plastic table with an umbrella opened over it were in the backyard. Plastic lawn chairs were here and there, one or two with broken legs and others lying on their sides. Beside a heavy wooden lawn chair was a wooden table with a large ceramic ashtray on it. Alexandro's chair, for sure, since no plastic chair would hold his weight. Beer bottles were scattered on the lawn, and a plastic rubbish barrel overflowed by the corner of the house.

As I looked, the back door opened and a woman came out. She had a beer bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She sat down by the table and looked right at me.

She wasn't seeing anything, she was just staring. I didn't move, and after a bit her eyes wandered off in another direction, while she sipped her beer and drew on her cigarette.

She was a youngish woman whose brown hair was loosely tied back in a ponytail. She wore a flannel shirt, jeans, and bedroom slippers. Her face was free of makeup. A bruise was on her forehead and others were on her arms.

Alexandro's wife? His girlfriend? The face behind the window shade?

She had a look of carelessness about her, as though neither what she did nor how she appeared mattered to her or to anyone else.

I wondered, as many have, why women stay with men who beat them. None of the answers—fear, love, economic dependence, self-loathing, and the others—gave me any satisfaction.

No toys or playthings were in the yard, and I decided that meant no children were in the house, since otherwise, things being as they were in Alexandro's yard, their gear would have been as abandoned and scattered about as everything else was.

After a while, the woman tossed the butt of her cigarette one way and the empty bottle the other and went into the house. The door slammed behind her.

I studied the place a little longer, then moved through the trees first to one side, then back around to the other,
and studied it some more, taking in the locations of the windows, the rear entrance to the basement, and, of course, the rear door.

I wondered if a dog was in the house.

When I had seen enough, I went back through the woods, got into the Land Cruiser, and drove home.

There, I called Peter Brown at Western Security Services. He was out. Rats. I left a message for him to call me. I wondered who else might be able to give me the information I wanted.

While I wondered, I made myself a sandwich out of the last of the bread in the fridge and some slabs of smoked chicken. Delish! I'd smoked the chicken out back of the shed, in the smoker I'd made out of parts from an abandoned electric stove and an old refrigerator, both of which I'd salvaged from the town dump, before the environmentalists had seized control of it and had transformed the best secondhand store on the island into a much more expensive and much less interesting place. Gone are the days of yesteryear. Alas.

A bottle of Sam Adams went well with the sandwich. When the bottle was empty and the sandwich gone, I got myself a second beer and made four loaves of white bread, using Betty Crocker's recipe from my tattered copy of her old, red cookbook. You can think of other things while you're kneading dough, and besides, whether or not I ever resolved my problems, we were going to need bread.

I considered my scouting trip behind Alexandro's house and recognized it for what it was: a step toward being predator instead of prey. I didn't feel bad about it, but I didn't feel good, either. I was facing an ancient dilemma: what to do when confronted by evil without becoming just as evil. I knew one thing: if one evil was to prevail, I wanted it to be mine.

O Socrates, O Kant, O Buber, where art thou when I need you?

I kneaded the bread and left it to rise the first time while
I made another phone call, this one to Mattie Skye, up in Weststock, Massachusetts, where, after a summer at their farm on the Vineyard, she and John and the twins were housed for the winter while John taught at the college.

“J.W. What a surprise!”

“I thought you might want to know that I've hauled
Mattie
and put her in your barn, and that I'll batten down your place in case it looks like Elmer is really going to show up.”

“Thank you. I'll tell John.”

“And there's something else. You're up there surrounded by intellectual types, right?”

“John might argue that, knowing the faculty and students as well as he does!” She laughed.

“I need some background information on a couple of people, and it occurred to me that some computer whiz might be able to get it for me.”

“I'm afraid I'm no computer whiz, and neither is John.”

“And neither am I. But you probably know somebody who is. Do you?”

“They're everywhere these days,” she said. “Let me think. Hmmmm, yes, I can think of a couple. Let me grab a pencil. Now, who are the people you're interested in?”

“Three young people out in Hollywood. Two actresses: Ivy Holiday and Julia Crandel. And an offscreen cousin of Julia's named Buddy Crandel. He's with a talent agency, or some such thing.”

“Ivy Holiday? Isn't she the one who dazzled the audience at the Academy Awards ceremony this past March?”

“That's Ivy, all right. But right now, all three of these people are here on the Vineyard. In fact, I just talked to them this morning. What I want to find out is everything possible about their backgrounds: where they were born, where they grew up, where they went to school, and particularly whether they were ever in any trouble, or in jail, or anything like that. I'll take anything your person can dig up.”

“Why don't you just ask them, since they're right there?”

“I may do that, but I want to know what they might not tell me. That's why I need your help.”

“Sounds serious. All right, I'll make some calls right now. But I warn you that you may not find out a lot, in spite of what you may have heard about the infinite information out there on the Internet.”

“I'd like a rush on this, if you can manage it.”

Kind Mattie was instantly concerned. “Is something wrong, J.W.? Are you in trouble of some kind?”

I put a smile in my voice. “Oh, no. My only problem is that Zee and the kids are on the mainland visiting her folks, and I'm over here sleeping alone in a double bed for a few more days. No, this business is about something else. But I do need a quick response, if I can get it.”

“I'll get right on it, then. Give Zee our love when you talk with her, and keep an eye on Elmer!”

“I will.”

I hadn't talked with Zee for a while, in fact, and had a sudden longing for her voice. I phoned her folks' house, over in Fall River. To my happy surprise, she answered the phone.

“We've just come back from the Whaling Museum in New Bedford,” she said.

“How are the tots?”

“The tots are being spoiled rotten by their grandparents, as you might guess.”

“And how are you?”

“Thinking island thoughts, more and more. And you?”

“Beginning to have erotic dreams. Hugging pillows in my sleep. Growing moody. Leering at sheep.”

She laughed. “Take a lot of cold showers. We'll be home soon.”

“I'll try to hold out.”

“Save some of your strength for when I get there.”

“I'll do my very best.”

When I hung up, I was aware of time compressing.

I phoned Peter Brown again. He was still out. I told the woman who answered the phone what I wanted: all the background I could get on Ivy, Julia, and Buddy, especially problems with the law, if any. She said she'd give Brown the message. I said it was important and that I needed the information ASAP. She said she'd tell him that, too.

I punched down the bread dough, divided it, put it into four pans, and covered them with a damp dish towel.