Vineyard Chill (12 page)

“I may do that.” Clay's eyes flowed around the house and farm yard.

I showed him where I sometimes hung the key, behind a shutter on a kitchen window, and we went inside.

“Nice,” he said, after I showed him around.

“Don't tell anyone where you are and don't show yourself in the usual places,” I said. “Buy gas and groceries up-island, where they don't know you. If you need anything, give me a call, but don't use the phone to call any of your friends out west because their lines may not be secure or they may have caller ID. You have a cell phone, so use that if you need to.

“I'll come by tomorrow morning and take you for a ride.”

“Where are we going?”

“To Aquinnah to talk with a friend who may be able to help us find out what's going on.”

His blue eyes were bright. “You have interesting friends.”

I felt a smile on my face. “You're evidence of that.”

I rarely tell anyone everything, so that evening I told Zee about my encounter with Jack and Mickey and how I'd warned Clay about them, but I didn't tell her about the rest of my day because if Jack and Mickey came by before she learned otherwise via gossip, she could tell them that Clay was living in Eleanor's apartment and was working for Ted. If the gossip about his departure reached her before Jack and Mickey did, she could pass that bit of disinformation along instead. I asked her to tell Jack and Mickey what she knew and to have the children do the same, so there would be no reason for Blume and Monroe to feel any need for threats or violence.

She looked up at me with her great, dark eyes. “Do you think there's any danger of that?”

“I don't think there is but I want you to be careful.”

She glanced across the room at the gun cabinet, where we kept our weapons locked up tight. I guessed she might be thinking about the deadly little .380 Beretta 84F she'd used when she first learned to shoot. It was easier to conceal than the big .45 she now shot in competition.

The trophies stored in the closet of our guest bedroom spoke to her skill but not to her paradoxical dislike and disapproval of firearms in general. I, on the other hand, lacked her magical abilities with a pistol but had no theoretical objections to the existence of guns or their use in hunting or self-defense as long as the hunting was for meat and the self-defense could stand the test of reason. I don't like trophy hunting, and in practice, I rarely feel so endangered as to go armed, unlike a few islanders I know, who feel quite naked without a pistol on their person and are, therefore, always dressed.

I thought that Mickey Monroe was such a pistol packer, although I hadn't actually seen what he carried in his coat pocket. But if Jack Blume was another one, he hid his weapons more successfully and was, if my first impressions were correct, less inclined to use brute force as anything but a last resort. Even his threats had been indirect. Maybe he'd studied to be a psychiatrist before abandoning that career for one of crime.

Now, as we sat before our fire after the children were in bed, I put my arm across Zee's shoulder. As an ER nurse she had no illusions about violence in the world and had devoted her life to tending to its victims. Her gentle heart was accompanied by a cool head that forbade her to ignore truth, so I had no doubt that she would now accept the reality of Blume and Monroe and I trusted her to act appropriately. If she decided to carry the Beretta, that was fine; if she didn't, that was fine, too. But I hoped she didn't feel that she had to.

Zee leaned against me and repeated something she'd said before: “I'm glad you're not an adventurer.”

It wasn't the first time that tension roused passion in us. “You're all the adventure I can handle,” I said, feeling a familiar electrical charge pass between us.

I could sense her siren smile. “Oh? Can you handle me?”

I pulled her toward me and cupped her breast in my hand. “Sometimes I seem to have you under control. But maybe you're just pretending.”

She put her hand over mine. “Sometimes I am,” she said. “But not always.”

Her fragrance filled my nostrils and my free hand drifted to the buttons of her blouse. As my hand entered her clothing, I heard her breathing change. When my own breathing seemed so loud that it filled the room, we got up and went into the bedroom. Blume and Monroe faded into a mist.

They were back in my consciousness again the next morning, though, along with Nadine Gibson, whose officially unidentified body had been found, according to the morning news on the radio. The reporter of this news, however, took note of the corpse's strawberry hair and reminded his audience of Nadine's disappearance just a year before.

The poet thought that April was the cruelest month, but March seemed to wear the crown this year.

“Be careful,” said Zee, as she prepared to depart for work after we'd seen the kids off on the bus for school.

“You, too.”

I watched her drive away in her little red Jeep, known lately as Miss Scarlet because we'd been playing Clue with the kids. My old Land Cruiser was the wrong color to be given any of the names in the game, although I thought its rust might qualify it to be Colonel Mustard. When Miss Scarlet was gone, I called Joe Begay to learn if he was home. He was and I told him I wanted to talk with him and that I'd be right up. Then I drove to John Skye's farm, where I found Clay in the library reading a copy of the
Code Duello.

“After you mentioned them, I thought I should catch up on the latest rules,” he said, “but this book was published more than a hundred years ago. Duels seem to be out of fashion these days.”

I believed the French still had them occasionally, remembering reading a story or seeing a photograph of an outraged pastry chef and somebody else having at each other with sharpened épées. Drawn blood was usually enough to settle passions and balance the demands of honor sufficiently for the participants to embrace and go off together to share a few glasses of wine.

“In America the killing rules have always been a little shaky,” I said. “Back in the days of the Wild West, people popped away at each other with smooth-bore pistols now and then, but mostly they preferred to shoot their enemies from ambush or catch them unarmed before they blazed away. Nowadays that's how the gangs and angry lovers do it in the wild Eastern cities. Better by far to shoot somebody in the back or from a moving car. Fair fights are too dangerous.”

“Disputed honor seems to have been important in the old days,” said Clay, putting his book down on a reading table, “and I guess it still is, if you take dissing as the modern equivalent.”

I thought that it was and that the idea of honor has probably caused more grief than most notions. “If you'd like to come along, I'm visiting a friend of mine. He may be able to find out what's going on out west.”

“No more ignorant armies clashing by night?” Clay shrugged into his coat. “That would be nice. Who's your friend?”

I told him as we drove toward Aquinnah. How Joe Begay had been my sergeant in a long-ago war and how we'd been blown up by a mortar along with the rest of our patrol but had survived and met again years later right here on the Vineyard, where he had married and now lived with a Wampanoag woman he'd met in Santa Fe. How since our war days, he'd worked for some unnamed agency in Washington and still occasionally disappeared in that direction for a few days, although he was officially retired.

Clay listened and then said, “You trust him.” It wasn't a question.

“He saved my life in Nam.”

“Does he subscribe to that old Oriental notion that if you save a man's life you have to take care of him from then on?”

“It hasn't been mentioned, but he's helped me out several times in the past.”

“What does he do in Washington?”

It was a question I'd considered more than once but had not voiced. “I've never asked. Maybe that's why we're still friends. I met a woman once who'd seen him in Europe at some bigwig international political function, and I know he was overseas another time as part of a trade mission when some bad guys got killed. He knows a lot of people and he's got a lot of contacts with a lot of agencies.”

“That's a lot of lots.”

“I'm going to ask him to use some of those contacts to find out what's going on with your friends Mark and Lewis and whether the Feds are on their case.”

“If the DEA is interested in them, it may be interested in me, too,” said Clay. “Even though I was mostly just a pilot, I was part of the gang.”

I'd thought about that. “We can ask Joe to look into that possibility, too, but only if you okay it. We'll talk with him together and you can decide whether you want your name mentioned if he noses around. It'll be hard to get the answers we need if we don't tell him about Jack and Mickey looking for you.”

We came to West Tisbury and took South Road past the field of dancing statues and the general store. In the summertime the farmers market would be spread out in the yard of the old Ag Hall, but now the yard was empty and brown. West Tisbury is farm country, defined by fields and meadows, quite unlike Menemsha and the coastal down-island villages, where beaches, fishing, and yachting establish the ambiance. A lot of artists live there, and like the citizens of many other parts of the island, they socialize among themselves. In that respect the Vineyard is akin to large cities: a place made up of small neighborhoods quite separate from one another and from the whole, where people know one another and may live out their lives feeling little need to expand their horizons. I sometimes thought of the island's towns as little mouse nests shoved together in a box, the mice eyeing one another carefully and rarely entering a neighboring territory.

When we got to Beetlebung Corner, we took a left past the Chilmark Store, home of some of the best sandwiches on the island. If you blink as you drive through Chilmark Center, you'll miss seeing it, which means, alas, you'll also miss Chilmark Chocolates, makers of deluxe candies that have destroyed many a diet. Summer people who are customers never lose weight in spite of their intentions to go home slim and fit and tan in the fall.

In time we fetched Aquinnah, once known as Gay Head, which is famous for its colorful clay cliffs and, to fishermen, for its excellent bass fishing. On the other hand, it's infamous to me because of the No Parking and even No Pausing signs that line its roads and make it hard for would-be fishermen to wet their lines on Lobsterville Beach, and also for its pay toilets, which require elderly tour-bus passengers to come up with fifty cents each to relieve their bladders and which are, like all pay toilets, an abomination in the eyes of God. I consider Aquinnah to be an unfriendly town and I bad-mouth it regularly. A pox upon its No Parking signs and its pay toilets, I say.

However, I do like to fish there and manage to do that without contributing to Aquinnah's money-grasping hands by parking for free at the homes of friends, of whom Joe Begay is one. Joe and Toni and their children live in a house just north of the cliffs. A path leads from the house to the beach where, back in January 1884, frozen bodies from the
City of Columbus,
wrecked on Devil's Bridge, washed ashore hour after hour in spite of the heroic efforts of the Wampanoag lifeguards, who rowed out in the storm and managed to save twenty-nine people from the stricken ship. Even now, in March, you wouldn't last long in the cold waters surrounding the Vineyard.

In Aquinnah I took a right onto Lighthouse Road, then a left into the sandy Begay driveway and pulled to a stop in front of the house. Joe's car was there but Toni's was not, probably because she was up at her shop on top of the cliffs, getting a jump start on organizing things for the summer trade. Toni sold American tribal arts and crafts, scorning the term “Native American” as being even more nonsensical than “Indian,” since the latter was based on a simple geographical error while the former was a conscious effort to name a whole continent and its many cultures of people after a tardy Italian explorer. She sold no Taiwan-or Chinese-made bows and arrows, but stuck strictly to genuine American tribal rugs, pottery, carvings, jewelry, and knickknacks.

As we got out of the car, Joe Begay stepped out onto his porch. He was a tall man with most of his weight above his belt. He had a broad chest, wide shoulders, and a face that looked like the one on the old nickels. His wife claimed that when they'd first met in Santa Fe, where she was on a buying trip, she'd been instantly smitten because he looked more like an Indian than anyone she'd ever seen.

We shook hands and I introduced him to Clay. Each of them took in the other with what seemed to be a casual glance. “Come in,” Joe said to me. “I'm inviting you even though you're impolite. Out on the rez you stay parked in your car for a while so whoever's inside can size you up before deciding how to deal with you.”

“Is that the Navajo rez or the Hopi rez?” I asked, since Joe was about half one tribe and half the other.

“Either,” said Joe as we went inside. “Be a good tradition for these parts, too, but around here people are in too much of a hurry. Sit down. I've got coffee going. Too early for beer.” He looked at Clay. “For me, at least. How about you?”

“Coffee's fine.”

Joe waved us into chairs at the kitchen table and brought coffee and the makings. “Been a while since you came out here to Indian country,” he said to me. “There are no fish around, so it must be something else.”

“It's something else. I'm looking through a glass darkly and I want to see face-to-face.”

Begay smiled. “I think Paul was saying that would happen only after death. Is that what you have in mind?”

“No, I just want some light and I'm hoping you can shed some for me.”

“Some off-island light, I presume. If it was local light, you'd know more than I do about how to shed it.”

“It's off-island light that I need.” I glanced at Clay, who was looking into his coffee cup. “Here's the situation,” I said, and I told him about my encounter with Jack Blume and Mickey Monroe. When I was done, I added, “I want to know who sent them and what they want with Clay. If we get that information, we may know what to do about them.”