A Vineyard Killing (7 page)

Fox was standing behind his desk when I came in. Brad Hillborough was leaning on his cane beside a chair off to one side. In front of Fox, seated in chairs, were two other men. Everybody was wearing a suit and tie and looking at me.

At the far side of the room was a conference table. On the wall beyond it was a gigantic map of Martha's Vineyard. The small, colored flags stuck in the map reminded me of those used in maps in military operation centers: Here is the enemy, here is us, here is where we want to be; we're gathered together to discuss how to get there. When the discussion is over, I will decide what to do and you will go do it.

“Well, well, Mr. Jackson,” said Fox, “have you changed your mind about working with us?”

“No. I just have a question.” I glanced at the two men in the chairs.

“These are trusted colleagues, Mr. Jackson,” said Fox. “You can speak freely. Allow me to introduce them. Gentlemen, this is Mr. J. W. Jackson, of whom I have spoken. Mr. Jackson, this is Jonathan Burns and this is Samuel Jacobs.”

The men rose and put temporary smiles on their otherwise emotionless faces. As we shook hands and exchanged assurances that our meeting was a pleasure, they studied me with their entrepreneurial eyes.

“Now, Mr. Jackson, what is it you wish to know?” Fox glanced at his watch. Time is money.

“Yesterday,” I said, “two men in a green Range Rover with Georgia plates followed me until they realized that I'd spotted them and broke off their surveillance. Today, when they thought I wasn't looking, they put a tracking device on my car to make their job easier. I got a good look at the men before I got rid of the tracking device.”

Fox's eyes seemed to brighten. They moved to Jacobs and Burns and came back to me.

“My question is: Why are they doing it? I thought it might save us all a lot of time if you just told me what you want to know.”

Fox stared at me. “Are you sure of your facts?”

I nodded. “I switched the tracking device to a Tisbury police cruiser, so your two boys will be following the cops instead of me for a while, at least. I thought I'd use the time to have this chat with you. So, what is it that you think you'll learn by following me around?”

Fox looked silently at me. Then he said, “You're absolutely sure of what you're saying? You're not mistaken about anything you've told me?”

“I'm sure. Dom Agganis checked the car's ownership. It's one of yours. I'm curious about your interest in my travels.”

“I have no interest in your travels, Mr. Jackson.” He turned and looked again at Jacobs and Burns. “Do either of you know what this is about?” His voice was cold.

They seemed almost to squirm before his gaze. They flicked glances at each other beneath raised brows and shook their heads, then looked back at Fox and shook them some more. “I don't know anything about it, Donald,” said Burns.

“It's news to me,” agreed Jacobs with a nervous shrug.

“Nothing that our people do should be news to you two,” snapped Fox. “First someone tries to kill my brother, then Kirkland is murdered, and now this! And you two know nothing about any of it!”

Jacobs appeared to shrink in size. Burns was cooler. He looked at me. “Please describe the two men, Mr. Jackson, and provide me with the license number of the vehicle, if you have it.”

I did that. Burns frowned. “Sounds like Wall and Reston,” he said. “If you'll excuse me, Donald, I'll get right on this.”

“You do that,” said Fox in a voice like ice. “And you go with him, Sam. Try to do something right for a change!”

“Yes, Donald!” Jacobs scurried after the departing Burns.

Fox took a deep breath, sat down, and waved at a chair. “Please sit down, Mr. Jackson. I'm again in your debt, it seems. I hope you'll believe me when I tell you that this surveillance you've experienced was not authorized by me.”

I decided not to come to any conclusion about that, but I took the chair and nodded. “When you figure this business out,” I said, “I'd like to know what's going on.”

“I intend to find out. And when I do—” He broke off his speech and his mouth became a hard line across his face.

“And when you do, you might tell me about it if it doesn't interfere with business.”

He inclined his head slightly. “Knowledge is power. When I know the truth of this matter, I'll decide what information to share.” He put the tips of his long fingers together. “Does it offend you that I might decline to give you information after I've willingly accepted information from you?”

“No. You owe me nothing. I'm not interested in the kind of power you value.”

He studied me. “What other kind is there?”

“You'll get more from a book on philosophy than from me. There's power over other people and there's power over yourself. I'm not good at the second kind, but I work at it because it interests me; the first kind doesn't.”

His voice was cynical. “The second is only a tool to achieve the first.”

I said nothing.

He sat back, his eyes aglow, perhaps with anger. Then he seemed to will his ire away. In a neutral voice, he asked, “What do you make of this surveillance business? Why do you think you were being followed?”

“Maybe some loyal operatives of yours think I know somebody or something that you should know.”

“What, for instance?”

I shook my head. “I came here hoping you could tell me.”

“But perhaps you do know someone or something that I should know. Do you, Mr. Jackson?”

Beyond Fox I could see Brad Hillborough looking at me with interest, his head cocked slightly to one side.

“I can't imagine who or what that might be,” I said, “but maybe you've got some enemy action on your hands.”

Fox stared at me with thoughtful eyes.

“And,” I said, “maybe the enemy's living in your house.”

“What do you mean? Why do you say that?”

Brad Hillborough answered. “He says it because the surveillance team consists of Saberfox people.”

I nodded. “That's right. You seem to have a company problem, Mr. Fox. People under your roof are doing things you don't know about.”

Fox's face was grim. “Not for much longer. I've left too much of my business in the hands of people who apparently can't be trusted. My brother has been urging me to give him more responsibility. Maybe the time has come to do that.” He stood up. “Are you sure you won't work for me?”

“I'm sure.”

“Then I'll simply thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. If you'll excuse me now, I have work to do.”

I stood and Brad Hillborough did the same. “I'll escort Mr. Jackson to his car,” he said.

We went out past the desk and down to the main lobby. Brad Hillborough limped along silently until we were outside, standing by my old Land Cruiser. Then he looked around the parking lot and said, “You're in the middle of this somehow. Want to tell me about it?”

“Like I said upstairs, I came here so your boss could explain things to me. If I knew what was going on, I wouldn't have needed to ask.”

“If you know more than you're telling me and I find out about it, I'll take it amiss.”

I felt my eyelids lower slightly. “Fox is lucky to have somebody like you on his side,” I said. “That cane tells me how loyal you are. Tell me about Albert Kirkland. Why do you think he got himself killed?”

“Albert was a hardworking fellow,” said Hillborough, “but Donald trusted him.”

“Did you?”

He hesitated, then said, “I brought him into the company. Donald hired him on my recommendation.”

“Did Kirkland like to have a few at the local bars?”

Hillborough shook his head. “He didn't drink at all. I believe he was meeting someone in the last place anybody would expect him to be. I wish I knew who. The police haven't told us much more than's in the papers.”

“They don't know everything. Do you know anyone working for the company who drinks at the Fireside tavern?”

He studied me, then shook his head. “I had a beer there when we first came to the island. I haven't been back since. It's not my kind of place. If any of our people have been there, I've not heard about it. Why?”

“Because a man who may have been Kirkland met somebody driving a green Range Rover in that parking lot a couple of days before Paul Fox got shot and Kirkland got killed.”

Hillborough rubbed his chin. “Is that a fact? Well, well.”

“Another question: Do you know anybody in the Saberfox crew who carries a long-bladed knife and knows how to use it?”

He smiled wryly. “We've talked about that in the office. Donald likes to hire fencers. We have several working for us, including Paul and me, although none of us was ever in Donald's league. Even Al Kirkland could fence well enough to try out for the pentathlon team, although he never made it.”

“Were any of your other fencers mad at Kirkland? How about your boss, for instance?”

Hillborough's face darkened and he lifted his silver-headed cane and shook it at me. “You watch what you say about Donald, you hear me? I'll have no one speak ill of him. No one!” He leaned forward, his eyes wildly bright. “And if you try to harm him in any way, I'll make you sorry you were ever born!”

I looked down at the cane and after a moment he took it away. I got into the truck and left. As I drove I looked in my rearview mirror. He was still standing there, watching me, like some angry, lame berserker.

After Zee got home that afternoon I drove back to Airport Road, tucked the Land Cruiser out of sight, well away from the entrance to John Reilley's lair, and walked into the woods, taking a roundabout path to the site.

The hiding place under the crooked little fir was just right for my purposes. I could see out, but it would be hard for anyone to spot me. I arranged myself as comfortably as possible and got out my paperback car book. I didn't have a lot of reading light, but there was no use in wasting what I had.

Velikovsky was comparing some Mayan myths to Old Testament stories about earthly disasters when I heard the distant sound of a small engine from the direction of the road. Then the sound stopped. I put away my book, and a few minutes later heard someone coming along the little path I'd found earlier in the day.

I peeked out and John Reilley, pushing his moped, came into view. He paused and looked casually around. His eyes passed over my hiding place and moved on. Then he pushed the moped across to the patch of greenbrier, parted some of the vines, and entered it by some route I'd missed. I watched him cover the moped with the tarp. Then he came out of the briers, gave another offhand look at the forest around him, and disappeared into the cellar hole.

I was surprised by how quickly it happened. In one moment he was standing there, glancing around, and in the next he was gone.

I waited for him to reappear, but he did not, so after a few minutes I crawled out of my spy nest and walked to the cellar hole. It looked exactly as it had before, half filled with a jumble of stones and rotting wood. There was no sign of John.

I sat on my heels and studied the site. Leaning haphazardly against the far wall was a pile of broken and apparently rotting boards and timbers, seemingly the collapsed remains of what had once been the floor of the long-disappeared building above the cellar hole.

John had to have gone somewhere, and there was nowhere else he could have gone. Since, as Holmes observed, when all other possibilities have been eliminated, what remains must be true, John had gone behind that pile of lumber.

I climbed down and crossed to the jumble of rotten pieces of wood.

It was not, of course, a jumble of rotten pieces of wood but a carefully constructed doorway made to look like a jumble of rotten pieces of wood. When I looked where I figured there had to be hinges, there were hinges. When I looked harder I found what served as a door latch. I tried it. Nothing moved. Locked from the inside, certainly.

I put an ear to the door. I could hear nothing. I knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again, harder this time. After a while I heard a slight noise above my head and looked up in time to see a hole close in a beam above the doorway. I waited, then knocked a third time. Finally I heard a slight noise from the other side of the door. I stepped back. The peephole quickly opened and shut once again. Then, silently, the door latch turned and the door swung open.

John Reilley stood there, looking out at me. His expression was one of resignation.

“Well,” he said. “I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. Are there more of you?”

“Just me,” I said.

He looked beyond me and, seeing no one else, he nodded. “No matter,” he said, “one tongue is enough.”

“Only if it flaps,” I said. “Are you going to invite me in?”

“Why not? Come in, J.W. Shut the door behind you, if you will.” He turned and led me down a short, low hallway and into a small room lit by electric lamps. A bunk bed was against one wall and a table and chair against another. A doorway led to another room in which I could see a camp stove and some storage shelves. The walls and the ceiling of the cave were made of lumber scraps of various widths. He sat on the bunk and waved to the chair. “Sit there. I have only that single chair because I never have guests. Until now, that is.”

I sat down and looked about me. “Nice,” I said. “Cool in the summer, warm in the winter. Where do you get your electricity?”

He seemed willing to talk about his underground house. “There's a construction company just off the Vineyard Haven–Edgartown road. I've tapped into their line. They don't notice what little I use. I get fresh air from a pipe I ran up inside that tall stump you probably noticed. I've got a chemical toilet and I bring in water for cooking. I use the Laundromat for my clothes and I sneak showers after work in the houses I help to build. There aren't many public rest rooms on this island, but I know where every one of them is and I use them to keep clean between showers. I get my books from yard sales and the libraries and I have a TV and radio. The antennas are in trees. You can see them if you know where to look.”

“I didn't notice them. How long did it take you to build this place?”

“Three years, and it would have taken longer if I hadn't been able to borrow a pickup to haul the wood I needed. When I started, I was living in Vineyard Haven in an apartment that I had to be out of by summer, so I spent all my free hours that winter digging this first room and lining it with timber so it wouldn't collapse. It was hard work, especially hauling those two-by-tens I used for the ceiling, but by spring I could live here. I enlarged it for a couple of more years until I figured I had as much room as I needed.”

“You scatter the dirt out there in the woods?”

He nodded. “It took a lot of time and effort. I'd fill a gunnysack and haul it off and spread the dirt thin, then come back and do it again. I don't recommend it as a way to build yourself a house. You want some coffee? I'm about to brew some.”

“Sure.”

He went into his kitchen and soon the smell of fresh coffee filled the air. He came back with two cups.

I took mine and said, “I'd guess that one problem was hauling the wood and other stuff in here without being seen. There's a lot of traffic out there on Airport Road.”

He nodded. “It was easier in the winter because there weren't so many people around. I couldn't do much in the summer unless I waited till late at night when the moon was bright and I could move through the woods without killing myself. It was slow going. I did better off-season.” He sipped his coffee and looked around the room. “And now that the place is finally in shape, here you are and I'll be moving along.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “I'm guessing that you must have used that Vineyard Haven apartment to get your PO box and any other papers that required a street address.”

“That's right. Once I got the papers, all I needed was the PO box. How'd you know I lived in that apartment?”

“Because I went to the apartment looking for you. I got the address from a friend.”

He looked down into the coffee cup. “Are you some kind of cop, J.W.? Why were you looking for me?”

“I'm not a cop. Somebody asked me to find you, that's all.”

“Who? Why?”

“I may tell you later, after we talk some more.”

“How'd you find me, anyway?”

I told him and he shook his head. “It serves me right. I've been careless lately. Too cocky, too casual. A year ago I would have been watching my back. A year ago you wouldn't have found that tire track.”

“I wouldn't have found the track today if I hadn't been looking for it, but you're probably right about getting too sure of yourself. It's pretty common for people who drop out of sight to be very careful at first but then begin to make mistakes as they relax. I think you'd better pay more attention to your security if you plan to keep living here.”

He brightened, but it was a careful brightening. “You mean to say you don't plan to spill my beans?”

“I didn't take this job to blab about where you live. I took it to find out something about you.”

He sipped his coffee and studied me.

“You're sure you're not some kind of cop?”

“I used to be on the Boston PD, but that was a long time ago. Now I live here and I'm no kind of cop, but you're a mystery somebody wants solved, and I got talked into trying to be the solver.”

The brightening in his face went away. “What do you want to know?”

“You might start by telling me why you live here instead of in a house like everybody else.”

“I'm antisocial.” His stare was steady and he didn't smile.

“You're not so antisocial that you don't get along well with the people you work with, and you're not so antisocial that you don't visit your friends.”

He raised a brow. “Like who?”

“Like Dodie Donawa, for one.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding slowly. “So that's what this is about. Dodie Donawa.” He smiled a small, crooked smile.

“It's about Maria, actually,” I said. “She doesn't want her mother hurt. She likes you but she doesn't know enough about you to trust her mother to you.”

The smile stayed. “Role reversal, eh? Daughters, lock up your mothers; the Vietnam vets are in town for their convention.”

“Something like that. And there's another thing.”

“What?”

“For the past couple of days two guys who work for Saberfox have been tailing me. It's occurred to me that they may be doing it because I might lead them to someone else whom they can't find. It's also occurred to me that that someone might be you.”

The smile fled from his face. “Do you know their names?”

“Wall and Reston. Ring any bells?”

He drank the last of his coffee and held the empty cup in both hands. “You sure they're not cops?”

“Like I said, they work for Saberfox. This is the second or third time you've been worried about the cops. If you're worried about the cops, maybe Maria Donawa is right to be worried about you.” He said nothing, but only looked thoughtful and sad. I pushed on. “What's your concern with the police? Are the cops the reason you live in this cave?”

He nodded. “Yes.” Then he seemed to come to some agreement with himself. He looked at me. “Forty years ago I killed a man.”