Murder at Teatime (20 page)

“Way to go, Chuckie baby,” hooted Wes. He was standing up like a bettor cheering on his horse at the track.

Bang bang went the gavel. “Please sit down, Mr. Gilley,” said the First Selectman. “Mr. Donahue has the floor.”

Wes complied, casting a mocking smile at the young woman.

“Second,” continued Chuck, “I’d like to point out to the young lady and to the other members of the Coalition to Save Gilley Island that the Chartwell Corporation is not planning to build a factory.” He paused. “Or an oil refinery.” He paused again. “Or a nuclear power plant.” His voice had risen with each statement. “What they are planning to do is invest seventy-eight million dollars in what will be the finest resort on the coast of New England. I doubt very much that they’d be willing to invest that kind of money in the destruction of the environment. The Chartwell Corporation is just as interested—probably even more interested—in preserving the natural beauty of our coast as the Coalition to Save Gilley Island.”

Turning his broad back on the microphone, he stalked back to his seat amid a thunder of applause.

Next came Wes Gilley, who rolled up the aisle yawing like a lobster boat in a heavy sea. He was dressed as usual in a navy watch cap and a faded red sweat shirt, his white belly hanging over his belt like rising dough over the lip of a bowl. As he passed, Charlotte could smell his odor: a not unpleasant mixture of beer, brine, and freshly cut wood. At the front, he gripped the microphone with one hand and hitched up his pants with the other. Then he stood silently for a minute, balancing himself with the aid of the microphone stand.

“Name, address, and occupation, Wes,” prompted the First Selectman.

“John Wesley Gilley the third, Gilley Road, Gilley Island,” he replied in a nasal growl. “Lobsterman. The way I figure it is this: there was this person who was ballin’ up the works. You know who that was.” He pointed at the First Selectman. Then he pointed at his chest. “
I
know who that was. So we don’t have to go namin’ names. Excuse me, Chuck,” he said with a nod to Thornhill’s son-in-law, “but that’s the truth of it. Now, due to certain circumstances, the person we’re talkin’ about is out of the picture. So what’s the problem? Let’s get on with it.”

It wasn’t a very coherent speech, but Wes wasn’t exactly in a condition for clear thinking.

He turned to walk back to his seat and then changed his mind. “Forgot something,” he mumbled, taking the microphone again.

Tracey stood at the side of the hall. Charlotte noticed his expression change from relieved as Wes terminated his speech, to worried as he resumed it. She suspected he’d had to throw Wes out of more than one public meeting.

“I’d like to tell Miss Richbitch that she don’t have no more right to preserve Gilley Island than I have to
piss
in her backyard,” he said. He looked around him with a proud grin, swaying from side to side.

Bang bang went the gavel. “You’re way out of order, Wes,” said the First Selectman.

“Don’t I know it,” he replied, still grinning. “If I was in order, I’d have a hell of a time holdin’ this much beer.”

The audience chuckled.

“That’s enough, Wes,” said the First Selectman. “Now sit down and shut up.”

Wes smiled broadly, hitched up his pants, and staggered back to his seat with a distinct cant to leeward.

The testimony continued for another hour, but it was tame by comparison with that of Chuck and Wes. Most of the speakers touted the development’s benefits. But there were a few who spoke against it, including a high-school history teacher who called it welfare for the rich, and an Audubon Club spokesman who claimed, in a variation of the payroll or pickerel theme, that it posed a threat to the island’s bird life. Charlotte was glad she had come. The people whose temperatures ran the hottest on the issue were clearly Chuck and Wes. If any of the island’s recent events could be linked to the development controversy, it would most likely be through either of them.

The next day, a Monday, dawned cool and crisp and electric, the kind of summer day that presages fall. After a late breakfast Charlotte and Tom set out to visit Wes. To reach his front door they had to make their way across a yard littered with broken lobster traps, rusting fifty-gallon oil drums, old tires, castoff auto parts, even a broken toilet. The door, which was posted with an orange
BEWARE OF THE DOG
sign, was answered by a slovenly but cheerful-looking woman, whose thin, light brown hair was pulled tightly away from her face in a ponytail. She had the prematurely old appearance of women who have given birth too young and too many times.

“Hello,” said Charlotte, “My name is Charlotte Graham and this is Tom Plummer. We’d like to have a word with your husband, if he’s not busy.”

“The girls told me you might be comin’ over,” she said in a thick accent. She turned toward the interior of the house. “Tammy, Kim,” she shouted.

The younger girl appeared in the doorway behind her mother, carrying a little boy who was chewing on a crayon. In his other hand, he was holding a drawing that had been scribbled in red crayon on a brown paper bag.

“Yippee, you came,” Kim said, seeing Charlotte. Handing her brother over to her mother, she threw her arms around Charlotte’s waist and clung to her side. “I didn’t think you would. Honest, I didn’t.”

“Kim Gilley, show your fetchin’ up,” scolded her mother.

From inside came the yipping of a small dog. Tammy appeared at the door, carrying the huge radio in one hand and cradling a Chihuahua, which must have been the ferocious dog to which the sign referred, under her other arm.

“You girls take the lady and gentleman out to your father,” ordered their mother.

They found Wes sitting on a bench at the rear of a ramshackle bait shed, painting lobster buoys in stripes of red, white, and black. The already-painted buoys lay spread out around him, drying in the sun.

“Papa, look who’s here,” said Kim excitedly, running ahead. “It’s Charlotte, the movie star I was tellin’ you about. And this is her friend, Tom.” She turned to face him. “Right?” she said, with a disarming smile.

“Right,” said Tom, charmed.

Wes continued painting. Charlotte noticed that the hand that gripped the paintbrush was scarred and calloused from the burn of the pot warps.

Collecting a group of the lobster traps, Kim arranged them in a semicircle around her father, as if she were arranging a tea party for her dolls. After showing Charlotte and Tom to their seats, she took one of her own, while her sister sat down on the bench next to her father.

Wes looked up. “Get,” he said to the girls.

He was met with a chorus of whines. “We was the ones that asked Charlotte,” protested Kim. “She come to see us, too.”

“Don’t make no damn’s odds who asked her,” he replied. “Now, go sandpaper the anchor,” he bellowed, raising his paintbrush threateningly and baring his teeth in an expression of mock ferocity.

The girls retreated reluctantly to a grassy plot at the foot of the wharf to watch the proceedings from a permissible distance, sitting like the patrons of a movie theatre on a castoff automobile seat.

After settling in on his makeshift seat, Tom inquired about the lobster catch. If he thought he was going to get a short reply, he was wrong. When it came to the state of the lobster industry, the taciturn toiler of the sea was apt to become as loquacious as a New York cabbie. No matter how good or bad the market, the lobsterman could be depended upon to find something to complain about, the perennial favorites being the size of the catch, the price of bait, and their exploitation by out-of-state interests. Like the farmer, the lobsterman wore his poverty like a badge of honor. Hearing Wes refer to his traps as “poverty boxes,” Charlotte was reminded of Tom’s story about Diogenes the Cynic, the Greek philosopher who, upon seeing the nobles of Athens in their finery, snorted, “Affectation,” and, upon seeing the poor in their rags a few minutes later, snorted, “More affectation.” She suspected Wes’s littered yard was as much an affectation as Chuck’s expensive automobile.

Taking advantage of a pause in the conversation, Charlotte asked Wes what he thought of the meeting.

“All right,” he said tersely.

She waited.

He looked up at her and smiled broadly. “I guess I really gave that rich bitch a rakin’ over.” Chortling to himself, he reached down to dip his brush into a can of paint.

“I assume that the person you referred to in your speech, the person who was balling up the works, was Frank Thornhill,” she continued. “You didn’t like him much, did you?”

He stopped painting and looked out over the water with the far-off look in his pale blue eyes that came from a lifetime of gazing out to sea. “Can’t say that I did,” he replied, leaning over the edge of the wharf to spit a brown stream of tobacco juice into the water.

“Why’s that?”

He nodded in the direction of the Gilley Road. “See them cement pillars over yonder? He put ’em up. To mark the boundary.”

Charlotte turned to look at the cement pillars that flanked the road midway between the Saunders and Gilley properties. They were about six feet high and shaped like the Washington Monument. On the walk over she and Tom had wondered who had put them there and why.

“The island was settled by my great-great-great-grand-father. He had two sons, and he divided the land between ’em. The line was sighted through a knothole in an apple tree. The tree is long gone, but the Gilleys have always held that the line followed that stone fence over yonder.”

Charlotte and Tom turned to look at the stone fence, which intersected the road about fifty yards from the monuments in the direction of the Saunders’ place.

“I owned all the land to this side of the fence—or thought I did—and the old man owned all the land to the other side. He bought the Ledge House property and the Saunders property from my cousin; it was all one piece back then. Anyways, I was out cuttin’ cordwood one day,” he continued, nodding toward the pillars, “and who comes drivin’ up but Howard Tracey. He serves me a summons—for cuttin’ wood on the old man’s land.”

“The land you thought belonged to you,” said Tom.

“Damn straight I thought it was my land. Still do. Well,” he went on, “the old man gets himself some big Herb of a lawyer, and we go to court about it. He dredges up some old maps to prove that the tree was fifty yards this side of the fence, though how anyone could know where that tree was beats me. I lose. Fifteen acres, including the most beautiful little stand of white pine you ever seen—it’s as quiet as a church in there.” He turned around to look at the pillars. “Some day I’m goin’ to get me some dynamite and blow ’em all to hell. I shoulda done it before the old geezer croaked.”

Charlotte wondered if the pillars would have been next on the list of vandalized property. “Do you have any idea who might have killed him?”

“It weren’t me, if that’s what you’re thinkin’. What’s it to you, anyways?” he said, turning suspicious. “Why’re you snoopin’ around?”

“Chief Tracey asked us to help him out with the investigation,” said Charlotte, “You’re under no obligation to talk with us if you don’t want to.”

“I already talked to Howard and to that royal boy.”

“Royal boy” was Maine parlance for a State policeman, Kitty had said. The State police wore hats modeled on those of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “I know,” said Charlotte. “But I’d appreciate it if you could go over it again for Mr. Plummer and me.”

“Well,” he said. “I guess if Howard says it’s all right, it’s all right. It coulda been anybody. The old bastard weren’t very popular around here.”

“Why was that?”

“Oh, he was the hoity-toity type. He insisted that everybody call him doctor, like he was a medical man or something.”

“Mr. Gilley, did you see anyone other than Mrs. Harris at Ledge House while you were waiting at the door?”

“Only that fat joker, the book dealer. He was out back on the veranda. He was settin’ on a lounge chair just outside them French doors.”

“Were you waiting at the door the entire time that Mrs. Harris was upstairs getting your change?”

“No. I went out to look at my truck. Thought she might be leakin’ oil—my oil pressure was low.”

“How long were you gone?”

“Only a couple of minutes.”

If Wes was telling the truth, it would explain why John hadn’t seen him when he came out of the house, she thought. “Did you see anyone else?”

“Ayuh. I seen Chuckie comin’ out of the library. He’d been arguin’ with the old man. Goin’ at it tooth and nail by the sounds of it. Then, two, maybe three minutes later I seen that guy Lewis comin’ through the parlor.”

“Through the parlor. You mean from the back of the house?”

“Ayuh.”

“Where were you when you saw Chuck and Lewis?”

“Kneeling down behind my truck.”

“From that position, you were able to see into the house? To see Chuck coming out of the library, and John coming through the parlor?”

“Ayuh.”

Looking into his far-off blue eyes, Charlotte knew distant, dusky parlors would present no challenge to his eyesight. “Do you know what Chuck and Thornhill were arguing about?”

“Nope. But I can guess.”

“The development?”

“Ayuh,” he replied, spitting another stream of tobacco juice over the side. “Chuckie wanted the old man to sell out to Chartwell. The people from Chartwell say they won’t go ahead with the development without the old man’s land. They say it wouldn’t be worth their while.”

“But that’s old news,” said Charlotte. “They’ve been arguing about that for a long time. There must have been something else.”

“There was,” said Wes, massaging the wad of tobacco under his lip with his tongue, like a cow chewing its cud.

“Well?”

“I suppose it don’t matter none if I tell you,” he said with a shrug. “Bound to come out eventually, anyways.” He paused. “Chuckie was pissed about the will. The old man said he’d rather leave his property to the State park than leave it to Marion and see it turned into a resort development.”

Then the words, “You’d better leave it to me, you understand?”
had
referred to the will, thought Charlotte. “But Thornhill didn’t change his will—the house and grounds were left to Marion,” she said.