Murder at a Vineyard Mansion (16 page)

Crime never takes a holiday on Martha's Vineyard or anywhere else, and one case is never the only case for the cops. The big cases like the Chappy murders get most of the attention but there are always others, many of which never get into the papers.

I found out about one of these from Gabe Winters at the Newes From America, one of Edgartown's finer pubs, where I'd stopped for a late lunch of amber ale and calamari after talking with Maud Mayhew. Gabe was a cousin of Kit Goulart's and therefore the recipient of all the better crime gossip.

“You're a friend of John Skye's,” said Gabe, pausing at my table on his way out. “You hear about the Jaguar in his west pasture?”

“No. The animal or the car?”

“The car. You know those big houses in those new developments south of the West Tisbury road, down toward the Great Ponds?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it seems that a guy and his wife who live in one of those castles got into an argument that went on until the guy decided to get out of the house and get himself a cup of coffee while things cooled down. So he gets into their Land Rover and starts for Edgartown. But the wife decides she hasn't had enough of him yet so she runs down and gets into their Jaguar and goes after him.

“The cops figure, from the marks on the highway, that she was going about a hundred miles an hour when she comes to that little curve in the road opposite John Skye's pasture. She goes off the road, over-corrects coming back, crosses the road again, goes through John's fence, and rolls the Jag about a dozen times in his pasture, totally demolishing it. The car is upside down and the woman is trapped inside.”

“When did this happen?”

“Last week.”

“I never heard about it.”

“I'm coming to that. The husband sees what happened in his rearview mirror, turns around, and races back. When the cops get there they find him jumping up and down on top of the wrecked car screaming, ‘Look what that bitch did to my Jaguar! The bitch ruined my car! Oh, what a bitch!'

“The wife is still trapped in the car, but the cops get her out finally and she's not even hurt bad. The reason you never heard about it is that the next day hubby and wifey are all lovey again and say they never had an argument, that she was only going fifty, not a hundred, that the accident happened because she tried to avoid hitting a dog, that they're paying for a new fence for John Skye, and that it's not worth a news story at all. So it never made the local papers.”

“Wild. I imagine the Jag was pretty well insured.”

“Probably. You want to know the really funny thing? The car had one of those little computer screens on the dashboard that tells you when something needs attention. You know: ‘Your left brake light is out; fix it.' ‘Check your oil.' ‘Your windshield wiper fluid is low.' Like that. Well, when they get the woman out of this totally destroyed car, that little screen is the only part of it still working, only now it's saying, ‘Your engine block is smashed, your axles are broken, your drive shaft is in pieces, and your tires are all flat.' Funny, huh?” Gabe was still laughing when he went out the door.

Another reason to be glad I'd given up being a cop. There were lots of them. Someday, I thought, feeling a smile cross my face, Kit Goulart really should write her book about being a cop on Martha's Vineyard. A book like that could probably be written about every small-town police force in America.

In fact, Kit could probably write a book about just this month on the Vineyard, what with a double murder, the Silencer zapping sound systems, the adventures of Mickey Gomes, and this accident, all happening pretty much at once. No wonder the Chief's hair was gray. He was lucky to have any at all.

I took my time finishing my ale and thought about what Maud Mayhew and others had told me during the last few days. When the tall glass was empty, it was time for a second meeting with Ethan Bradford. I could do that and still be home before Joshua and Diana got off the school bus.

Being a parent definitely intruded on my detecting. No wonder Superman was single. Even though he was faster than a speeding bullet, having a wife and kids would have made it hard for him to find time to fight crime and hold down a steady job at the
Daily Planet
too.

As I drove to West Tisbury I didn't envy Superman's bachelor state, but I wouldn't have minded being bulletproof because I vividly remembered Ethan Bradford's shotgun. If he had murdered Ollie Mattes and/or Harold Hobbes, he probably wouldn't be as reluctant as most people would be to put me in the ground.

I wondered if I should have stopped at the house and picked up the old .38 Police Special I'd carried when I'd been a cop in Boston. The problem with having a gun with you is that you might be stressed into using it when you actually didn't have to. The problem with not having one is that you might actually need it. Why hadn't God made a less ambiguous world?

In West Tisbury I turned right onto Old County Road. When I found the side road leading to Ethan's house, I had a last chance to change my mind about seeing him but didn't take it. Instead, I drove to his house. His old Jeep was parked in the yard. I parked beside it and got out.

In the passenger seat of the Jeep was what looked like a box of junk but that might have been some sort of modernistic work of art or an arcane machine. Was Ethan Bradford some sort of sculptor? A guy who manufactured mobiles and static statements out of wires and tubes and other odds and ends from the dump? I'd seen photos of worse-looking stuff in the art pages of the
Globe.

The door of the house opened before I got halfway there and Bradford stepped out. He held the familiar shotgun in his hand. From the house behind him came the sound of a Vivaldi concerto. I didn't know which one it was, but you can always tell when it's Vivaldi.

“I thought I told you not to come back here,” he said in his thin voice. He stepped toward me, but I kept walking. He brought his other hand to the shotgun and swung the weapon across his body, but I didn't stop until I came close to him.

His eyes were the color of his sister's but his face, unlike hers, was tight-skinned and hard. He gripped the shotgun.

“If you're set on shooting,” I said, “you'd best get at it. Otherwise put that gun down and stop pretending. I don't have much time to spend here.”

I was surprised at how fearless I sounded, but my tone affected him. “What do you want?” he asked.

He still held the shotgun with both hands. I looked at it and said nothing and after a moment he released one hand from it and dropped the muzzle toward the ground.

“Your sister and Harold Hobbes used to come here while they were romancing,” I said. “You used to take off while they were here.”

“Who told you that crock?”

“Your sister. She said you weren't happy about the relationship. Were you?”

“None of your business.”

“The police might think it's theirs. If they find out you didn't like Hobbes but that your sister was in thrall, they might decide that you drove over to his place and smashed his head in. Noble brother to the rescue, like in the old melodramas.”

His eyes widened. “Jesus! The last time you were here you thought I killed Ollie Mattes. Now you think I killed Harold Hobbes. You're bound and determined that I killed somebody. Everybody knows that Hobbes was a womanizing bastard, but I didn't kill him.”

“Your sister says he'd changed. She says that they were going away together to start a new life.”

“My sister is a foolish woman and Hobbes was a con artist. But she loved him, and she'd never forgive me if I hurt him. I'd have broken them apart if I could have, but I couldn't because of her. I didn't cry a tear when I heard he was dead, but I didn't kill him. I've never killed anybody in my life!”

I nodded at the shotgun. “You threatened me with that.”

He clutched the shotgun. “I never did. You may have thought I did, but I didn't.” He broke the gun open. “Look. It's not loaded. It wasn't loaded then, either.”

I gestured at the sagging house and barn. “You live like a wild man, like one of those militia types out in Idaho. It's easy to think you'd kill somebody without too much thought. Hobbes was a natural target for you.”

“Yeah? Well, I didn't kill him. I can prove it. I was someplace else that night.”

“Where?”

He became careful. “None of your business.”

“You have witnesses?”

“I can prove where I was.” The care in his voice was colored with confidence. I changed tack.

“Who hated Harold Hobbes enough to kill him?”

“How about half the women on this island?”

“Your sister says it was getting hard for you to keep her secret. Who'd you tell?”

“Nobody. I told nobody.”

But a quaver in his voice said differently.

“You're a poor liar,” I said. “When the cops get you in an interrogation room, they'll get the truth out of you fast enough. Save yourself some pain.”

Vivaldi's violins danced over us as he tried to decide what to do. Finally he leaned forward and said, “I didn't tell anybody but my mother. I wanted to break them up but I didn't want to be the one to do it. I knew my mom could. She's done it before. She hates men and I knew she'd take Cheryl away from him.”

I had no sympathy for him. “I understand you're one of the men she doesn't like. Does she like you better now?”

His voice was so forlorn that my feelings unexpectedly reversed themselves and I felt compassion for him. “I wanted her to, but I don't know. I hope she does. She had a hard time with my father. She thinks all men are like him. But they're not. I'm not like him. I wish she knew that.”

I couldn't grant him that wish and the school bus would soon be stopping at the end of our driveway, so I left him there with Vivaldi and drove home, feeling almost light-headed as I thought about what I knew.

“Look at this, Pa.” Joshua was having his turn on the computer. I looked. On the screen was a document about microwaves.

“Are you learning how to cook?” I asked.

“No. We're doing this peace project at school,” said my son, “and one of the parts is about how to have a war without killing anybody so I'm finding out stuff about that.”

I hadn't expected summer school mostly about nature studies to include subjects like that, but why shouldn't it? Maybe naturalists could come up with a better way to have wars.

“I read once about some people up in the Arctic who fought their wars by facing off and yelling insults at each other,” I said. “The best insulters won the war and nobody ever got hurt.”

“I'll put that in my report, but I'm going to put this in too. Look, it says right there that high-powered microwaves can make somebody unconscious without doing any permanent damage to them. You shoot them with your high-powered microwave gun and they're knocked out and you capture them and when they wake up they're your prisoner. Neat!”

Neat indeed. “Do they actually have guns like that?”

“I don't know if they have any that work yet, but it says here that they're doing experiments with them and with other kinds of microwave weapons, too.” He scrolled down the page. “See there? They're making ones that will stop a tank or an airplane or a rocket or a cannon from working. The microwaves stop their motors, and the machines won't work.” He smiled up at me. “That's pretty good if you want a war where nobody gets hurt. You just stop their soldiers and their machines with your microwaves.”

I put my hands on his shoulders. “If you ever have to go to war, I hope it's that kind, but it's better not to have one at all.”

“Yeah, peace is best, but a microwave war would be better than the other kind. I'm going to say that in my paper.”

“Good.” Plato, who thought that only the dead had seen the end of war, would surely agree one without blood and gore would be an improvement.

“Pa?”

“What?”

“I'm going to say that if you'd been in a microwave war you wouldn't have all those scars on your legs. Is that okay?”

“A lot of soldiers got hurt worse than I did, Joshua.”

“I know, but I think it will be good if I can show how people right here on Martha's Vineyard would be safer if they only had microwave wars.”

“Put me in, then. You can say that I got wounded by shrapnel from a shell that killed some of the soldiers I was with, but that if we'd been in a microwave war, maybe no one would have been hurt.”

I suspected that most wars would continue to be fought the bloody, old-fashioned way and doubted that the gunner who had fired that fatal shell at my companions and me had ever heard of microwaves.

Until my talk with Joshua I had known about microwave ovens but had otherwise not been much better educated about electrical energy than that Vietnamese gunner. But Joshua had turned a light on inside my brain and I had that rush of happy certainty that comes when you suddenly see how to win a chess game in five moves or solve a puzzle that up till now totally eluded you. From the mouths of babes.

“Pa?”

“What?”

“How do you spell ‘shrapnel'?”

I told him how to spell it and what it was. I didn't tell him that even now, decades after I'd been hit, small pieces of metal still occasionally worked their way out through the skin of my calves, causing sores that continued to keep me from a profitable career as a Bermuda shorts model.

When the kids were in bed, Zee played adviser-if-needed as I took my turn at the computer and found my way single-handedly to the Internet, where I brought up pages and pages of information about electronic warfare. Most of it required slow reading, but I had time and Zee showed me how to print out the material I wanted to study most. It was late when we went to bed.

“You're wearing your thoughtful look,” said Zee, as we lay in bed with our books. “What's on your mind?”

“Your body.” I took a hand off my book and slid it under the blanket.

“No tickling! What, really?”

“A moral dilemma. What to do if I know who the Silencer is and how he does his work.”

“Give him a medal?”

“That's one possibility. He's improving the island as far as I'm concerned.”

“Do you really think you know who it is?”

“I think I know who it could be. I'll have to ask to be sure.”

She put a hand under the blanket and captured mine. “What if you don't ask? What if you just let nature take its course?”

“Like what? Letting him keep on destroying thousands of dollars' worth of sound equipment until he grows old and dies of natural causes sometime in the next hundred years?”

“Why not?”

“It's tempting. But the Chief asked me how I'd feel if the Silencer started silencing the music I like.”

Zee knew the answer to that one: “Silence Beethoven? Pavarotti? Vince Gill? No problem if that happens. Lock him up for life.”

I dropped my book onto the floor and got my other hand to work beneath the covers. “I love a decisive woman,” I said. “I can't resist one when I find her in my bed.”

“You probably couldn't resist a porcupine in heat,” said Zee, dropping her own book and turning toward me. “As for me, I like a man with slow hands.”

“You're in luck,” I said. “All truly manly men have slow hands and there's no man more truly manly than me.”

“Show me,” she said. “I have time.”

I did that and forgot about the Silencer.

The next morning I phoned Quinn, up in Boston. He wasn't at his desk at the
Globe,
so I left a message. I wondered how many times I'd driven up-island in the last week and decided to spare myself another trip if possible by making another phone call, this one to Cheryl Bradford.

The voice that answered belonged to her mother, Sarah. I gave her my name, reminded her of our brief meeting a few days before, and added that I'd had the pleasure of seeing her hit a homer in the codger game.

Her voice was not cordial. “Oh? Are you following both me and my daughter around now, Mr. Jackson?”

“No, but I might give it some thought if I wasn't already a happily married man. I was at the game for another reason.”

“To talk with Kristen Kolle. I saw the two of you together. Do you socialize with any men, or just with women?”

“It wasn't a social conversation. Is your daughter home?”

“Cheryl isn't available right now, Mr. Jackson. She's still recovering from a death in the family.”

“I have a question to ask her. Just one. I won't take more than a moment of her time.”

“Sorry, Mr. Jackson. Please don't call again.” The phone clicked in my ear.

So much for saving another trip up-island. I got into the truck and drove to the Bradford place in Chilmark. Both Sarah's SUV and Cheryl's Volvo were in the yard. I parked between them and went to the door of the house.

Sarah Bradford, her face filled with anger, opened it. Her voice was as cold as her face was hot.

“I told you not to call. I meant it. Go away and don't come back, or I'll call the police and charge you with stalking my daughter!”

“I want to speak with Cheryl,” I said. “She's a grown woman who doesn't need any protection from you.”

“She's a fool who knows nothing about men, including you! Get out!”

“I want to see her.” I was a foot taller than she was, and threw my voice over her head into the house. “Cheryl! It's J. W. Jackson! I want to ask you a question!”

“I'm calling the police!” Sarah stepped back and tried to slam the door, but I stopped it with my foot. She pushed on the door and I saw her daughter come into the room behind her. Her mother spun to follow my gaze. “Go back to your room!” she snapped.

“Just one question,” I said to Cheryl, and she took a deep breath and came across the room. Her mother released the door and ran like a deer into the house.

“What is it?” said Cheryl. “What do you want to know?”

In a quiet voice, I said, “Just one thing: Did your mother insist that you break off your relationship with Harold Hobbes when she found out about it?”

She looked bewildered, then gave a quick glance behind her and stepped out onto the porch, closing the door behind her. “No,” she whispered. “Of course she didn't. She didn't know about us. And I don't want her to know! Please don't tell her! If she knew, she'd be livid. You saw just now how angry she can be. You'd better go. I think she really is calling the police.”

“If they show up, I'd appreciate it if you tell them that I'm not stalking you.”

“I will. But you'd better go.”

I agreed with her and left.

At home I called Quinn again and this time he answered. “You should get yourself an answering machine,” he said. “I called you twice and nobody was home.”

“That's why I don't have one,” I said. “I don't want to get endless messages from you. All I want to know is whether you found out anything about Ethan Bradford and Connell Aerospace.”

“The Fourth Estate has a long reach,” said Quinn. “I talked with a couple of the people I met when I did that earlier story. Seems like a prototype weapon Connell was developing went missing and hasn't been seen since. Bradford had been working on it. He was the prime suspect but they couldn't prove he was involved in its disappearance so they couldn't charge him. But they could fire him and they did.”

“What was the weapon?”

“They were very coy about the details, but apparently it was some sort of portable electronic device. Something small enough for one man to carry around. Shoots microwaves of some kind. The military is big on microwave weapons these days, apparently. I can probably find out more about it if it's important. What's going on?”

“Did the theft set the program back enough to cost the company a lot of money?”

“I wondered the same thing. I guess it wasn't the only model they had, and apparently it was still in an experimental stage and didn't really work well. What worried Connell was that whoever stole it might sell it to another country or to another company that might bring it out first. If that happened, Connell could lose millions in military contracts. Are you going to tell me what this is all about, or not?”

“Not. At least not now. I'll pay you in bluefish if you ever stop muckraking long enough to come down and go fishing.”

“I know Zee would like that,” said Quinn. “She could stand some sophisticated company for a change.”

“I think you've got sophism and sophistication mixed up,” I said, “but come down anyway.”

I hung up before he could get in a last one-liner.