Off Season (20 page)

“Look,” I said. “I don't care about what went on between you. But I need to know some things. How long were you two seeing each other?”

Her voice was small and tight. “Since midsummer. I don't want to talk about this.”

“You'll be talking about it to somebody. To me or to the police or maybe to both of us. Chug wasn't a very dominating guy out in the real world, but I take it that at least some of the time he liked to play that game with his women. Or was he the one on his hands and knees?”

“No.” She put both hands to her throat and curled her fingers as if grasping a dog collar that was still around her neck. “He wasn't the one.”

There are houses in Boston where very wealthy and powerful men pay a lot of money for the privilege of dressing in panties and bras or diapers or nothing at all and being spanked until they cry by women wearing leather clothes and spike heels. They pay to be handcuffed, and tied in strange ways. They pay to be whipped and abused, and to whimper and bleat and become babies again. And the next day, they go back to being wealthy and powerful men who walk the
corridors of political power and whose faces appear regularly on the financial and social pages of the
Globe
and
Herald.

And there are also houses where Brahmin women and women of lesser castes can find people who will play similar games with them. And of course, since there is a lot of money to be made in such business, there is a very professional group of people, male and female, who make a good living catering to their customers' desires. There seems no limit to the varieties of human sexual activity, as many Boston police officers can tell you from either professional or personal experience.

“He wasn't cruel,” said Heather. “But he liked to have me . . . do things I'd never done before. I didn't mind, really. And it pleased him. I never knew about such things . . .” She seemed suddenly glad to talk. “He liked to call me Asta. That was a dog in some movie. He put my food and wine in dishes and fastened my hands behind my back with handcuffs and made me eat and drink there on the floor, with my face down in the dishes. He held the leash. We had sex that way too, sometimes. The doggy way. There's nothing wrong with that.” This last came with a quick defensive energy, and she looked right at me as if in anger.

“Did he take pictures?”

“Yes.”

That meant the police probably had them, and I wondered why they'd taken so long to come knocking at her door. It didn't make any sense that they hadn't come. I began to get an idea.

“Did you ever look at the pictures?”

A small blush. “Yes.”

“Did he ever show you other pictures? Of other women?”

She tossed her head. “Yes. So what? I never really looked at them.”

“I hope that you did. Did you?” ~

“No.” She lifted her chin. “I told you they didn't interest me. He had them in albums. I didn't really look at them.”

“Did you recognize anyone? If you did, I want you to tell me who it was.”

“You're nastier than I thought you were.” She was getting her gumption back.

“Could be. Look, you're not the first woman Chug ever had out at his place. You were just the latest in line, and if rumor is correct, he was planning to replace you with Helene Norton . . .”

“That's a lie!” But her face said she didn't believe it was, and her voice no longer had the rage in it that I'd heard when I'd first told her of Helene and Chug. I wondered if she'd had a talk with Helene, and if their friendship had survived.

I shrugged. “Maybe so, maybe not. The point is that all of his earlier women are potential suspects. So if you know any names, give them to me.”

“I didn't really look at them . . .” She touched the papers on her desk, then touched her hair. “Well, I did think I recognized one face . . . I'm not sure . . .”

I thought she was sure. “Who?”

“A woman named Kittery. Christine Kittery. She teaches at the high school, I think. Her husband did some business with me once. Real estate. She came in
with him to co-sign some papers. I think I saw her in some pictures.”

“Doing the same sort of thing that you did later?”

“Yes. Look, we didn't do that all of the time. That wasn't the only thing we did . . .” She looked at me with fiery eyes, and leaned forward. “You're working for me, and I expect you to keep this confidential. My private life is no one's business, and I want it kept private. Do you understand?”

I was glad to see that she was replacing her fear with anger. “I don't care about your personal life one way or another,” I said, “and I don't plan on telling anyone about it. Do you know what happened to the photographs?”

“No.” The anger that had stiffened her spine seemed to abruptly disappear, and she sagged back into her chair.

“In that case, somebody else besides me knows about you and Chug, because the photographs aren't in Chug's house anymore. I looked around pretty carefully, and there were no photographs.”

“Oh, God, the police have them!” She fumbled open a drawer of her desk and brought out a box of Kleenex. She took a tissue and blew her nose, then stared at the desktop. “I knew they must have them. I knew it right away, as soon as I heard about Chug being dead. I mean, they couldn't have missed them. Chug kept them right there in his closet. He never even locked the door.” Tears began to form in her eyes. “Oh, God, why did I let this happen to me?”

“I don't think the police have the pictures,” I said. “I think that if they had them, they'd have come to talk with you before this. Something else happened to the pictures. I think that whoever killed Chug has them.”

She stared at me with her watery eyes. “The killer has them? The killer?”

“Or maybe Chug hid them away somewhere. Maybe he gave them to somebody to keep for him. But I think that the most likely thing is that the killer took them away after the murder.”

Heather dabbed at her eyes. “But why? Why would he do that?” Then she frowned at me. “Blackmail? Is he going to blackmail me with the pictures?”

“Maybe. When we find the killer, we'll know. Has anybody tried to blackmail you, Heather?”

“No.” She wiped at her face with clean tissues. “I'm a mess. I must look awful.” She wiped some more. “So the police don't have them . . .”

“That's how it looks to me. If anyone talks to you about having the pictures, I want you to play along and then call me right away. It would be better if you called the police, but I don't imagine you want to do that, do you?”

“No.”

“You might be smarter to play straight with them.”

Her eyes grew strange and wild. “No. I don't want them to know about this.”

“They'll probably find out anyway.”

Her anger was there again. “Not if you don't tell them!”

“I won't, but there are other people who might. The cops aren't fools. Don't make the mistake of thinking they are.”

“Who would tell them? Who?”

Fear makes us stupid sometimes. It can transform a bright person into a fool. I counted on my fingers as I spoke.

“The killer might send the albums to the cops. An anonymous contribution to the investigation to give
them a suspect. Or whoever you talk to about your love life may get nervous and go to the cops so she can't be accused of withholding evidence. And then there's whoever
she
talks to . . .”

Heather's face was stiff. “You're a wicked person to say such things.”

“I'm just telling you how things are. I still think you should give some thought to going to the cops yourself.”

“Well, I'm not going to! This is my life, damn you!”

In her place, I wondered what I would do. I was glad I wasn't in her place.

“All right,” I said. “Have it your way. Now, were there any men in the pictures you looked at? Or were there only women?”

She seemed almost shocked at the question. “Women. There were only women. Why, Chug didn't . . .”

“Did Chug borrow any money from you?”

“What? Yes. I gave him some. A little . . .”

“How much?”

“I don't know . . .”

“How much?”

“Two or three hundred dollars. Why do you want to know?”

“After he showed you your pictures or before?”

“What are you asking me? Oh, all right. It was afterward, but the one thing never had anything to do with the other. He never threatened to show them to anybody. He never did that. It was just that he was a little short of money. You have a really filthy mind, do you know that? Don't you ever just think the way normal people think? Maybe you should go to a doctor.”

“Maybe.” There was a door in the side wall of the
office. I pointed to it. “Is that a bathroom? Okay, why don't you go in there and get yourself fixed up? I'll wait.”

She opened her mouth as if to say something, then shut it again. She took a purse out of the same drawer where she'd found the Kleenex, and went into the bathroom.

I sat and wished that Heather had looked at Chug's albums more carefully and could tell me whose pictures were there. I wondered if she was lying to me about not having recognized anyone but Christine Kittery. I wondered if she really had seen Christine Kittery's picture at all. I wondered how many women had their photos in the albums and whether Chug's killer just had a fancy for such pictures, or had taken them for some other reason. Blackmail was a possibility, of course, but not the only one. If one of Chug's women was the killer, she might have taken the albums so she could destroy them. Or maybe one of the women had a husband or a boyfriend who, learning of Chug's sexual adventures, did in Chug and took the pictures to protect the woman's reputation. Or to provide entertainment for himself and his friends. Or to become a blackmailer in his own turn.

There were a lot of possibilities. The longer I worked on this case, the longer my list of suspects became. It wasn't supposed to work that way. An investigation was supposed to narrow the list. Could it be that I had been right to quit the cops when I had?

Heather came out looking pretty good. Her eyes were a little red, but aside from that, the damage had been controlled. She looked at me and made a vague gesture with one hand. “I'm sorry I said those things about you. I know you're just trying to do your job.”

I got up and let her look at me look her over. I nodded. “You look okay. I'm going now. I'll let you know if I learn anything. If the cops come or you have to talk to somebody, talk to Percy Goodman first. Keep a level head and a closed mouth with everybody else and you may come out of this without any scars.”

“I've already got scars.”

“I mean the kind that other people can see.”

“I know. You won't . . .?”

“No,” I said. “I won't tell anybody.”

She took a deep breath and exhaled it. “Thank you. I . . . What kind of a person am I?”

I didn't know what sort of expression was on my face. “A fairly ordinary one, I think. Brighter than most, probably. Not the kind you should worry about. I've got to go.” I gestured at her desk. “You've got work to do.”

“You'll stay in touch?”

“Yes.”

I went out into the cold afternoon air. Snowy Circuit Avenue was decorated with red and green and silver adornments, and people were strolling the sidewalks and looking into windows, their faces red and happy. The street itself was slowly turning to slush. From Circuit Avenue I took a right and drove through the narrow streets of the campground, past the Victorian gingerbread houses, including my favorite, the particularly cute pink one whose picture graces so many postcards. When I fetched the main drag again, I drove to the blue-painted headquarters of the state police.

There was a cruiser in the driveway with a chunky young officer about to get into it. He told me that Dom Agganis was not in but that he liked to grab a cup of coffee about this time up at the Black Dog.

Both the Black Dog bakery and the Black Dog restaurant are in Vineyard Haven, near the ferry docks, which makes them popular with people waiting for their boats. They are also near the infamous five corners road intersection. Along with other traffic, almost all of the Vineyard Haven ferry traffic and the traffic going to and from the A & P parking lot passes through the five corners intersection, but Vineyard Haven has no interest in improving it, although its summer-long traffic jam could be eliminated pretty easily by the installation of a traffic circle. In midwinter, on a snowy weekday, things weren't too bad, and I even found a parking place by the A & P.

Both Black Dogs serve up excellent food at good prices, and are favorite island eating places. The bakery also makes a pretty good buck selling hats and sweatshirts with black dogs on them. Rumor has it that the black dog hat is the most coveted one in the whole U.S.A. Could be. In the restaurant, you can sit by a window and look out at the ferry boats coming and going, and the only possible complaint you might have is that, Vineyard Haven being a dry town, you can't get a beer to wash down your food. Whenever Vineyard Haveners are invited to vote on whether to go wet or stay dry, they stay dry, their reasoning being that as long as Edgartown and Oak Bluffs are the only wet towns on the island, that's where most of the rowdies will hang out and most of the fights will happen. Five corners apparently provides Vineyard Haven with all of the excitement it wants.

I found Corporal Dominic Agganis sitting in a window seat having coffee and staring out at the harbor. Vineyard Haven harbor has a fine collection of schooners, and a lot of them swing on their moorings
all winter long. I sat down across from him and asked, “Are you fevered with the sunset? Are you fretful with the bay? Is the wander-thirst upon you? Is your soul in Cathay? If so, I want to remind you that this is the middle of the day and you're still on duty even though you're hiding away in here trying to escape your responsibilities while you indulge in romantic fantasies.”