Vineyard Shadows (13 page)

These distractions turned a half hour's work into an hour's work, but I didn't really mind because my children's lives interested me, and the slowed-up mussel collecting gave me more time to think about what I was going to do with Tom Rimini's problem. What was increasingly clear to me was that what everyone—Zee, Joe Begay, the Chief, and even Sonny Whelen—had suspected was true: I wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for my feelings about Carla. I didn't know exactly what those feelings added up to, but there was no doubt that they existed and that it was because of them that I wanted to extricate Rimini from the hole he'd dug for himself.

When we finished collecting our mess of mussels, we went for a walk on Little Beach. All the way down to the lighthouse and back, through June people on towels
and under umbrellas, lolling in the summer sun and looking out at the boats leaving and entering the harbor. Diana and Joshua collected some valuable shells that looked to me a lot like many other shells they'd collected in the past, and we all looked for additions to the family beach glass collection, which we kept in jars at home.

Then we went home so I could scrub the mussels clean and put them to soak in salt water overnight, then prepare supper.

When Zee got home, I poured Luksusowa for both of us while she changed into shorts and a tee-shirt, and the two of us went up to the balcony.

The last of the boats were coming in and the cars along the beach were heading home. The warm sun was slanting in from the west onto our backs.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I'll be better tomorrow,” she said.

“I'm sorry you aren't today.”

“It's okay. Today is just one day too soon, is all.”

I must have had question marks all over my face, because she immediately went on.

“When Toni and I talked yesterday, she told me about a custom they have out where Joe lived in Arizona. She said some of the people out there on the reservation have a tradition of mourning their dead for four days, then getting on with their own lives. This is the fourth day since I shot those men. I think I've been mourning the death of the person I thought I was before that happened. But even though that person is dead, I'm still alive and I've got to get on with it. Today was the last mourning day.”

I looked at her, loving her bruised face and her bruised soul and her courage.

“Good,” I said, wishing I was as brave.

The next morning we woke to the drone of rain on the roof. It was a steady, gray rain, the kind that's great for gardens but not welcomed by tourists who want to spend their Vineyard vacations on the beach.

“Don't go downtown today,” said Zee. “It'll be zoo time.”

Too true. On rainy days when nobody can go to the beach, the Vineyard's summer people, bound and determined to waste not a moment of their vacation time, all go into the village centers to window-shop and wander around in their raincoats or under umbrellas. The narrow streets of the towns, filled with cars and pedestrians even on sunny summer days, become parking lots when it rains, and natives try their best to stay home until the sun comes out again.

For breakfast, I poured juice for all, milk for the cubs, coffee for the big people, and baked the world's best bran muffins made from the dough we kept ready-mixed in the fridge. I served them with real butter, and I could feel my taste buds jumping up and down with joy.

“Not bad, Pierre,” said Zee, wiping her lips. The split one was getting better, I could see, but it was still there, as were the bruises. If there was a hell, I hoped that Pat “The Pilot” Logan was in it. Vindictive me.

“More, Pa?” Diana was a fan of all foods, which made us a lot better off than families with picky eaters.

I gave her another muffin and looked at Zee. “How are you feeling today?”

She smiled. “I may not be quite singin'in the rain, but I'm through wearing black. And now I've got to go to work.”

“A working wife is a pearl beyond price.”

“And don't you forget it.” She grabbed her topsider, kissed us all, and ducked out to her little Jeep.

I watched her disappear up our wet, sandy driveway, and willed her to be past grief as well as past mourning.

“Pa, can I have the last muffin?”

“No, Pa, I want it!”

“No fighting,” I said. “You've both had plenty.”

“But I'm still hungry.”

“Me, too, Pa.”

“Me, too,” I said. “So we'll split it three ways. Diana gets first choice because she's the littlest, then you get the next choice, Josh, and I go last because the guy who does the dividing always goes last so he'll make an honest cut.”

We ate the last muffin and I did the dishes while the rain droned on the roof. I love the sound of rain as long as I don't have to be out in it, and I approve of people who build skylights in their bedrooms just so they can hear the sound of the drops. The roof of our old house was so thin that no skylights were needed. In fact, it was often too thin, as attested to by my routine leak-stopping expeditions over the tar paper shingles.

“Pa, can we go out and play?”

“It's raining, Josh. You'll get wet and cold.”

“We'll wear our raincoats and hats, Pa.”

I could remember when playing in the rain had been a lot of fun.

“Okay, but come in when you get cold. I don't need any kids with pneumonia.”

I got them dressed and out they went. I watched their rain gear turn wet and shiny. They put out their tongues to catch the falling drops and kicked at puddles and ran around in circles. Happiness.

I wasn't running around in circles; I was at a standstill. All I could do for Tom Rimini was try to keep people from knowing where he was until I could get a line on Graham and try to work out some sort of deal with him. Did vice guys give witness protection to small-time gamblers? I didn't know, but I wanted to find out.

I got my first clue about Graham an hour later when the phone rang. It was Quinn, up at his
Globe
desk in Boston.

“I don't know if this guy is the right Graham,” he said, “but he's the only Graham anybody seems to know about. This one was a Justice guy, first name Willard, who used to work out of Boston. I don't know what he's doing right now, but a few years back he was with the DEA. Maybe he still is, or maybe he's with some other Justice office or division now. And maybe he's not the same Graham at all.”

“I'm looking for a Graham who's interested in gambling, not in drugs.”

“They go together sometimes, don't they?”

“Everything goes together sometimes. Ask around some more. See if you can find out what your Mr. Willard Graham is doing these days.”

“Unlike you,” said Quinn, “I have a job. I can't spend all my time running around chasing ghosts.”

“Did I tell you I'm thinking of giving up playing host to bums from Boston who come down here to sponge off me and get me to take them to spots where even they can catch bluefish?”

“They just pretend to come down for the fish. They
really come down so your poor wife can have the company of real men for a change. How is your better half, by the way?”

“Better every day.”

“Good. Tell her that whenever she comes to her senses and leaves you, I'll be waiting for her up here. She deserves some happiness after all she's been through with you. Meanwhile, I'll poke around Graham's trail a little more, but don't get your hopes up.”

He rang off and I called Detective Gordon R. Sullivan, of the Boston PD, and told him what Quinn had told me.

“Well, well,” said Sullivan. “Maybe I've been asking the wrong people. I thought Graham was in vice, working on gambling and loan-sharking and like that. I didn't talk with anybody in drug enforcement, but I will. Some of our guys work with the feds, so they might have met him if he's DEA. But if he is, why's he interested in your pal Rimini's gambling problems?”

“You're the detective,” I said. “You tell me.”

“I'll let you know what I find out. Unless doing that will compromise some operation, in which case you'll get nothing.”

“Fair enough. If I hear from you there's no operation; if I don't, there is. Right?”

“More or less.”

We hung up and I called Joe Begay. I was having a lucky streak; he was there. I told him what Quinn and Sullivan had told me.

“Willard Graham, eh? I haven't gotten to Willard, yet. I'm working on some other Grahams. Mostly a process of elimination. I need a Graham who's on the job around Boston, and I'm weeding out the ones who don't fit the description. I'll take a shortcut now, and home in on Willard, just in case he's the Graham we're after. I
wonder what the DEA finds interesting in a schoolteacher with a gambling habit.”

“Me, too.”

“I'll call back.”

I went out on the porch and watched my now muddy children racing around trying to get as wet as they could. They put their faces up into the rain, they jumped in puddles, they fell down and rolled on the wet grass. The rain fell. They laughed and screamed. Fun!

I went into their rooms and got out dry clothes for them, then poured myself a cup of tea and went back onto the porch. Fun was still happening. Diana got up from the middle of a puddle and came to the bottom of the steps. Her face was white and she was shivering, but she wasn't ready to come in. She and a million other kids were the same way about coming out of the water when their parents can see the goose bumps. So I'm shivering, so I'm freezing, so what?

“Come out, Pa! It's lots of fun!”

“Your teeth are chattering. Time to come in and take a warm shower.”

“No!” (Chatter, chatter, shiver, shiver.) “I'm not c-c-cold.”

I opened the door. “Come in anyway.”

She was shivering too hard to put on her crying face. I put out a hand and helped her up the steps and through the porch door. She was soaked. I undressed her there, dropping her sopping clothing onto the porch floor, then picked her up and looked for her brother. He was on his knees watching the rain hitting the water in the puddle his sister had just vacated. A future aquatic engineer.

I called to him: “I'm giving your sister a warm shower. You're next. Come onto the porch and take off all of your wet things.”

“Aw, P-P-P-Pa!”

I carried white and shivering Diana into the bathroom, stood her under a warm shower until her skin had some color and her teeth had stopped chattering, then dried and dressed her and gave her a cup of cocoa, and went out and helped freezing but reluctant Joshua to strip before he slouched into the bathroom and took his own shower.

By the time he had warmed up and gotten dressed, I had all of the wet clothes in the washing machine, had hung the soaked raincoats and hats where they could eventually drip dry, and had emptied the rain boots of their water and stood them upside down to drain.

Being islanders, we naturally had other sets of rain gear, in case we needed them. And as it turned out, we did. Joshua and Diana had just finished second cups of cocoa when Joe Begay called.

“An interesting bit of news,” he said. “A guy named Willard Graham used to work for the DEA up around Boston. But a couple of years back he got himself canned, along with some other feds. Some serious questions about missing money. There was a bust and the dealers said they'd had money that Graham and his crew never mentioned in their reports.”

“Maybe the dealers were lying to get back at them.”

“Could be, but the scuttlebutt is that in the last few years other dealers who got themselves busted by Graham's crew had said the same thing. Nobody could ever prove anything, but Graham's bosses finally decided that two and two didn't equal five. Anyway, the upshot is that Agent Willard Graham is now ex-agent Willard Graham. What do you think of that?”

“Did you get a description of Mr. Graham?”

“I did.” He gave it to me. “I can probably get a picture, if you want it.”

“I want it.”

“I'll have them fax it to you.”

“No, you won't. Remember me? The last man in America without a computer or a fax or an answering machine?”

He sighed. “Even us savage redskins have faxes these days. All right, I'll have it sent to me and you can get it here. Come up in a couple of hours.”

I went to a window and looked at the rain. Dreary. I wondered why an ex–DEA agent was pretending to be a cop and was hassling Tom Rimini over a gambling problem. One thing was pretty clear: Tom Rimini should be told that Willard Graham was not a cop any longer. I wished I'd gotten a description of Graham from either Tom or Carla, but I hadn't. I went back to the phone and called John Skye's house. No answer. I felt a flicker of worry.

I unlocked the gun cabinet and got out my old .38 S and W police special. I stuck the gun under my belt and pulled my shirt down over it. Then I called Helen Fonseca, Manny's wife, and asked if she'd look after Josh and Diana for a couple of hours.

“Sure, J.W. Bring them right down.”

In addition to being Zee's pistol instructor, Manny was the island's premier gunslinger and National Rifle Association member, but he and Helen were both total softies when it came to children, their own or anybody else's.

I collected my offspring, got them and myself into dry rain gear, and trotted us all through the drizzle to the Land Cruiser.

“Where we going, Pa?”

“To Mrs. Fonseca's house. You're going to stay there for a couple of hours while I do some work.”

“Why can't we go with you, Pa?”

“Just because. It's big-people work. No kids allowed.”

“Can we have ice cream, Pa?”