A Vineyard Killing (14 page)

A straight lunge is the fastest way to get the point of a sword into its target, if the distance is right. I'd learned that much in my brief experience as a fencer wanna-be. And the distance was right for Hillborough. But if the target is moving backward fast enough as the lunge comes, the point will arrive in empty air, and even as Hillborough's blade was hissing out of the cane, I was jumping away.

I was shocked by the blade because I'd been expecting Hillborough to strike a blow with the silver ball on the cane's handle, but my leap backward carried me to safety.

Hillborough cursed and recovered forward, impeded by his damaged leg but moving swiftly. He came slashing after me, the action showing me that his sword had a cutting edge as well as a point. I snatched the wooden chair and swung it up in front of me as a shield. Paint and wood chips flew as his blade lashed the wood.

The door to the living room was behind me and I backed through it. On my left was the door to the porch, but I didn't know whether or not Hillborough had locked it behind him. If he hadn't, I might make it outside. If he had, I'd have no time to open it before he was at me.

Hillborough lurched into the living room and lunged low, beneath my shielding chair. I avoided the thrust only by jumping back and to my right, and Hillborough scurried between me and the porch door.

But he couldn't be everywhere. Behind me now was the kitchen so little used by Albert Kirkland. On its far wall was a back door. The door was also surely locked, but the kitchen had other attractions.

For a moment both Hillborough and I paused and panted for oxygen that suddenly seemed scarce, then I retreated into the kitchen and finally had weapons of my own: knives both large and small. I plucked a large one from the magnetic holder on the wall as Hillborough came limping after me.

“Be careful, Brad,” I said, holding the chair in my left hand and the knife in my right. “I may not know anything about swords, but I'm a fisherman, and fishermen know a lot about knives.”

“Fuck you. A knife is just a short sword and I know more about swords than you do.”

He lunged but I caught the point on the bottom of the chair. I swung the chair to one side in hopes of snapping the blade but his recovery was too fast. He shifted his feet and studied me with cold, diamond-hard eyes, the tip of his blade making tiny circles in the air.

“You may have gotten Kirkland with that pig-sticker,” I said, “but I'm not Kirkland. I wasn't taken by surprise.”

“Albert was easy,” said Hillborough, taking breaths as deep as my own. “You'll not be much harder.”

I rued the locked rear door. It's always more frustrating to be close to your heart's desire than far from it.

Hillborough thrust at my chest, but halfway through his lunge, as I swung the chair as a shield, he dropped his point to my knee. I jerked my leg back too late and felt the point strike my thigh. I swung the big knife at his arm but he was too fast with his recovery. I glanced down and saw blood on my pant leg just above my knee.

“Touché!” said Hillborough mockingly. He extended his arm and pointed his sword at my eyes. Tiny lights seemed to dance from its needlelike tip.

I threw the knife at him, but as I did he bent his arm, lifted his point, and easily parried it aside. I snatched another knife from the rack.

“Was Kirkland threatening to name you as the mastermind of that botched try at Paul Fox?” I asked, panting. “Or did he just want more money to keep his mouth shut?”

Hillborough made another feint and I moved my chair in front of his point. He nodded as if that was what he'd thought I might do. “Neither,” he said. “Albert was perfectly loyal and he wasn't greedy. It's just that when the plan went wrong, he became concerned about discovery. He wanted to talk with me, to be reassured. It made it very easy to kill him. One thrust at close range.”

“You're pretty cold,” I said. “He trusted you.”

“Ah, but I didn't trust him. He had to go, and now so do you. Donald must never know about any of this business.”

He attacked ferociously, and amid flying chips of wood and paint, I was forced to leap back nearly to the door as I barely deflected the sword blows with the chair. It was getting heavier by the minute and I was getting slower swinging it. Hillborough stepped back and eyed me.

His voice was almost theatrical. “You have run out of retreating space and I am about to end the refrain and thrust home, as another swordsman once said. Good-bye, Mr. Jackson.”

I threw the second knife but again he neatly parried it aside as I grabbed a third one. He smiled without warmth, extended his arm, and stepped forward. I threw the third knife, and once more, seemingly almost bored by my unimaginative attacks, he bent his sword arm, lifted his point, and made an easy parry.

But this time as he parried I thrust at his sword with the chair and leaped toward him. The chair legs tangled with his blade, carrying it aside. He tried to jump back but his bad leg failed him, and in an instant I was inside the long reach of his sword. I dropped the chair and caught his sword wrist with both hands.

We swayed and fought and he beat at me with his free hand, but I was the bigger man and at last I tore the sword from his grasp and threw it across the room.

He caught up a heavy glass ashtray and crashed it against the side of my head. The world went gray and whirled around me. I hit him with a weak fist and he came back again with the ashtray. The gray turned black. I was in a room but I couldn't see it. I got an arm up in time to catch the next blow from the ashtray. What a fate: to save myself from a sword, only to be killed with an ashtray.

But he no longer had the ashtray. Somehow it had been separated from him. My vision came back enough for me to see him as he shoved me away and scrambled awkwardly after the sword cane.

I threw the wooden chair at him and it knocked him down, but he was up again instantly and hobbling swiftly to the far corner of the room. I got my feet moving and managed to get to the front door. It wasn't locked after all. I went out in a rush, slamming the door behind me. The cold air was a tonic. I made a shuffling run to the Land Cruiser, got in, and started the motor. Parked directly behind me was a green Range Rover.

I looked back at the house. Hillborough was lurching rapidly along the walk in front of the house, coming toward me, sword in hand.

I got the truck into gear, put the gas pedal to the floor, and left the smell of burning rubber behind me for Hillborough to inhale. In my rearview mirror I saw him heading for the Range Rover.

I drove fast to Saberfox's office, peeling off my rubber gloves en route and stuffing them into the pocket of my coat. Dana Hvide was at her desk. She was cool as ever but kept looking at my bloody face. No, she didn't know where Donald was. Paul and Brad knew and had gone to join him.

I didn't have time to be gentle. I reached over her desk and dragged her across it to my side. She opened her mouth to scream, but I covered it with one hand as I shook her with the other. I tried not to shout.

My bloody head was what convinced her I was telling the truth as I described my encounter with Hillborough. When I took away my hand she told me where to find Donald.

“Call the police and tell them what's happened,”

I said, “and don't let Hillborough near you. If you hear from Donald or Paul, tell them what I've just told you. I think they may both be in danger. Certainly Paul is. I'm going to try to get to them before Hillborough does.”

I ran down to the Land Cruiser and broke the speed limit getting to Katama. Naturally there wasn't a cop in sight to come racing after me, siren howling and blue lights flashing. I wished I had my pistol.

Donald Fox was at a development site not far from Herring Creek. From the deck of the house he was planning to steal, you could see South Beach and the Atlantic Ocean rolling over the curve of the earth toward the far-distant Bahamas.

I got there late.

There were already three green Range Rovers pulled up side by side in the driveway, and Brad Hillborough was lurching, cane in hand, toward the Fox brothers, who were standing on the lawn looking at him curiously.

I pounded on the horn and swerved into the yard, trying to get between Hillborough and the Foxes. But at the last moment I saw the trench of a new sewer system between the lawn and me and had to slam on the brakes to keep from sliding into it.

I jumped out of the truck and shouted, “Run, Paul! He wants to kill you!”

I leaped over the trench and ran after Hillborough, shouting words I don't remember.

But Paul Fox didn't run. He stood there, stunned, as Hillborough reached him, whipped the blade from the cane, and lunged at him.

But Donald was as quick as Paul was slow. As Hillborough lunged, Donald shouted, “No!” and stepped in front of the sword, taking it full in the chest.

The blade bent and Donald Fox fell. Hillborough recovered from his lunge and stared with horror as Fox's coat began to turn red.

“Run, Paul!” I shouted, as I closed on Hillborough. “You're the one he's after!”

But Hillborough seemed to have forgotten about Paul. He stared at Donald, who lay on the lawn, and stepped away as if in a daze. I got between him and the Foxes, but he paid no attention to me.

“What have I done?” he asked abstractedly. “What have I done?”

“Put down the sword,” I said, looking around for some weapon to enforce my demand but finding none.

“Christ,” he said. “Wilde was right.” He turned and walked off a few steps.

Then he put the silver ball of the cane on the ground and fell on his sword.

As I watched Hillborough fall, I heard a groan behind me and turned to see Paul Fox holding his brother in his arms while Donald touched a hand to his own chest and brought it away red with blood.

But Donald was alive.

In the distance I heard the sound of sirens. Dana Hvide had given the police both my story and directions to this location.

“Help is on its way,” I said.

Paul Fox cradled his brother in his arms. “Take it easy,” he said. His face was white.

“I think I'm all right,” said Donald. He gripped his brother's hand. “I've been wearing Kevlar for a week now.”

I opened his coat and there was the armor. Hillborough's blade had gone through it far enough to bring blood, but apparently not too far.

The brothers smiled at each other.

I rose and walked to Hillborough's body.

There's a thin line at best between the willingness to commit suicide and the willingness to commit murder, and sometimes there's no line at all. I had read about ancient warriors throwing themselves on their swords, but I had never imagined I'd see it happen.

For some reason I thought of Yukio Mishima, the Japanese writer who disemboweled himself when a regiment of soldiers laughed at his efforts to lead them into fanatical nationalism, and I wondered if most suicides were similar failures of romance. Maybe love had killed both Hillborough and Kirkland, and had come close to killing Paul and Donald Fox. It could be a dangerous emotion.

I walked back to the Foxes and stood beside them as the police cars and ambulance arrived.

I was home when Agganis called and asked me to come and see him.

Before nurse Zee would let me do that she sat me in a chair, took off the bandage the medics had put on my head wound at Katama, cleaned the area again, and applied a new dressing. Then she did the same for the puncture wound in my thigh.

“You should go to the hospital right away,” she said.

“I'll go after I see Agganis,” I said, standing up.

“You need to be X-rayed,” she said, “although I'm not sure they can x-ray a rock. I thought you told me you were going to stay out of trouble!”

I tried humor. “Because I did not stop for harm, it kindly stopped for me.”

Zee was not amused. “You're a terrible example for our children!”

“They still like me,” I said in a small voice.

“I think I'd better drive you up there. The kids can come with us.”

I put my big hands on her shoulders and looked down into her worried eyes. “I'm fine. I drove here and I can drive there.”

She put her arms around me. “I worry about you.”

“I'm glad you do.”

Agganis was in his office with Officer Olive Otero.

“You want to tell me what happened between you and Hillborough?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. I then lied about who'd gone into Kirkland's house first, didn't mention having written the note, but told him most of the truth about the fight between Hillborough and me and about what had happened after I had gotten away from him.

Agganis listened and then said, “So after you got away you went to the Saberfox offices first, to warn the Fox brothers, then went down to Katama. Is that your story?”

“That's it.”

“Paul Fox says you asked him how to get to Kirkland's house and that he didn't give that information to Hillborough until fifteen or twenty minutes later. Now you say you followed Hillborough into the house for fear he'd destroy evidence. Where were you for that twenty minutes?”

“Driving from the house to the Fireside parking lot. I wanted to know how long that took. After I got to the lot, I went back to Kirkland's house to do it one more time just to be sure. That's when I saw Hillborough going in and followed him.”

Agganis gave me a sour look. “I can't prove it didn't happen that way. Can you prove it did?”

I feigned innocence. “What do I have to prove? Maybe somebody saw me at the Fireside parking lot.”

“We'll ask. Why did you want to know how long it takes to get from Kirkland's house to the Fireside?”

“Because Kirkland met somebody in the parking lot in the other guy's car a couple of days before Paul Fox was shot. Bonzo saw him in the passenger's seat. But he was driving his own company car later when he got himself killed. The evening Kirkland got killed there wasn't another car in the lot, which probably means that whoever he met there was either a passenger or arrived on foot. I wondered if the guy on foot had called Kirkland and told him where to meet him and if he did, how long it would take Kirkland to get there. The answer is about ten minutes. Hillborough lived in the Martin's Vineyard, which is about that far away from the parking lot, if you walk.”

“That's true of a lot of the people who live in OB. Why did you think Hillborough might destroy evidence in Kirkland's house?”

“He was already on my short list. Besides, why else would he break into the house? And, remember, we did find something. We found that note.”

“Says who?” snapped Olive. “You say Hillborough put it in his pocket, but he wasn't carrying any note when we searched his body.”

I let my surprise show, but hid my relief. “He must have destroyed it. It was evidence against him.”

“So you say. Did you read it?”

“No. Hillborough grabbed it. But whatever it said, it was enough to make him try to kill me.”

Olive's face was full of skepticism. “You'd lie to God himself,” she said.

“You should train Olive to be more polite,” I said to Agganis. “People might begin to think that all cops are as obnoxious as she is.”

“Both of you, stop it!” said Agganis. Olive gave me a final glare and turned away. I coughed to cover a laugh. Agganis shook his head. “You two.”

He paused, then said, “I'm pretty sure that Hillborough stashed the gun in Rick Black's house, but I can't prove it. I don't know if we'll ever get all this officially straightened out. What we know for sure is that right here in Paradise in the last several days we've had one killing, one suicide, one attempted murder, and one stabbing that looks like an accident. I think we pretty much know who did what and why, but I doubt if the case will ever be closed.”

“Is Donald Fox going to make it?”

“The medics were there quick and got him to the hospital, and as far as I know the armor stopped most of the impact of the blade. Gutsy act, like him or not.”

I thought of the fear that had been in me when I'd stood in front of that blade, and had to agree.

I signed a document telling my side of the story of what had happened in Kirkland's house and what I'd done immediately afterward. God might get me for that later, but Agganis let me go. I waved at Olive as I left, but she didn't wave back.

I was longer at the ER than I'd hoped to be, but at the ER you wait around a lot unless you're bleeding on their floor, in which case they take you right away. An X ray showed that my skull was in one piece, and the puncture in my thigh was clean and not too deep, so I was rebandaged at last and sent on my way.

As I drove home I wondered if any good could come out of such madness and violence and how much I was responsible for the wounding of Donald Fox and the suicide of Brad Hillborough. I decided I could live with Hillborough's death, but I was bothered by Fox's wound. I didn't like Fox, but if I'd not had my confrontation with Hillborough, he might not have snapped and accidentally stabbed the man he loved more than he valued his own life.

Or had it really been an accident? Was it Freud who suggested that there are no accidents, but, rather, that what we do we do for reasons buried deep within us?

I thought back to my encounter with Paul Fox earlier in the day. He'd mentioned that he and Brad Hillborough were about to join Donald Fox at the site of a prospective purchase. If I'd asked him where that was, he probably would have told me, and I'd have known where to go to warn both of the Foxes that Hillborough was on the loose.

But instead I'd asked for the location of Kirkland's house, and because of that one man was dead and another stabbed in the chest. Thus large events turn on small ones. It was another case of the kingdom being lost for want of a nail.

The children were in bed by the time I got home, but Zee was up and wide-awake, full of questions.

I got us each a brandy and we sat on the living room couch in front of a dying fire in the stove I'd installed just before our wedding in an attempt to make my sometimes chilly old bachelor camp into a place suitable for a married couple to live during the winter.

I pushed my lock picks and practice locks to one side so we could put our feet on the hatch cover that served as our coffee table. I told her what I'd told Agganis and what Agganis had told me.

When I was through, she said, “So Brad Hillborough hated Paul Fox and got Kirkland to shoot him, then killed Kirkland to keep him from talking about it.”

I nodded. “So it seems.”

“And you figured that out.”

“I thought that the shootist was probably somebody in the organization, because he knew where Paul Fox was going to be and had established an escape route for himself ahead of time. If I'd remembered that Brad Hillborough actually admitted that he'd made the plan to go to the E and E, I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort, but I didn't.”

“It's a good thing that Paul was wearing that vest.”

“Amen to that, because the bullets that hit him were very accurately fired. When I learned that Kirkland was brought into the company by Hillborough and that he was a good pistol shot, I thought about Hillborough's fanatical dedication to Donald Fox.

“I don't know what the shrinks would call that kind of devotion, but they probably have a name for it. Whatever it's called, as far as Hillborough was concerned anybody who got between him and Donald or between Donald and what Donald wanted was an enemy.”

“And Paul fit that bill.”

“Yes.”

“Ten-cent psychology,” said Zee. “But then you found that note in Kirkland's house.”

“That's what I told Agganis,” I said. “There was a note and what it said was enough to push Hillborough over the edge. Apparently Hillborough destroyed it between the time he tried to kill me and the time he stabbed Donald Fox. But there's more to the story.”

“Tell me,” said Zee, and I did that.

She was quiet for what seemed like a long time, then she put her arm around me. “I'm glad you had that chair.”

I sipped my brandy. “It's too bad I couldn't have stopped Hillborough there in the house. He came within a whisker of killing Paul before he killed himself.”

“But Donald stepped in front of the sword and saved Paul just like Hillborough shoved Donald from in front of that car years ago. Crazy.” Zee laid her dark head against my shoulder.

“I believe that's a politically incorrect term these days,” I said, “but it seems appropriate. Shall we go to bed?”

“Yes. We can test whether the penis is mightier than the sword.”

“Is that an original pun, or did you steal it?”

“Do you care?”

“No.”

“Do you want to participate in the test?”

“Yes.”

“Well, come on, then!”

We went.