Vineyard Blues Read online

  “A sore point,” said Zee. “Don’t get J.W. too wound up on that issue.”

  Too late. I was quick to be annoyed. “Dad-blasted environmentalists keep the beach closed all summer these days. No ORV’s allowed, the theory being that the beach is being ruined and the plovers and terns are going to be killed by people driving by. Bunch of hogwash! The ocean wears the beach away, like always, natural predators kill the birds, like always, and now everybody has to go to Chappy by this ferry, so in the middle of the summer the waiting lines reach halfway back through town and we have to hire extra cops just to tend traffic!”

  “He gets testy about this subject,” explained Zee in her best wifely voice.

  “Damned right!” I said.

  “You can tell he feels very virtuous,” said Zee. “He thinks most environmentalists are idiots.”

  “Not most,” I said, “some. The sanctimonious ones, especially.”

  “The ones who get between him and what he likes to do,” said Zee, smiling back at Corrie. “He’s not very good at having other people tell him how to behave.”

  True. The ferry took three more cars and the line moved ahead. I put my hand on Zee’s thigh.

  “I’m getting to be one of those guys who always talks about the old days,” I said, looking at Corrie in the rearview mirror. “You know the type. Why, when I was a boy everything was better than it is now.”

  “I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” said Corrie, “but as far as I’m concerned, you can have the good old days. I remember them pretty well, and I don’t think I want them coming back again. Besides, in another few years these will be the good old days.”

  “By then I’ll probably remember this as a golden age,” I said.

  We laughed. What nuts people are. Me in particular.

  The On Time pulled in and we drove aboard. To our right, Edgartown harbor opened to the west and south; to our left was the lighthouse, the outer harbor, and the channel leading out to Nantucket Sound. There were moored boats both east and west of Chappy, and the falling tide was running strong. A southwest wind rippled the water, and the blue summer sky arched overhead like the inside of a Chinese bowl. We pulled away from the dock and crabbed across to the other side.

  Years before, according to accounts I’d read, a fire truck on its way to fight a blaze on Chappy had tried to disembark from the ferry with such urgency that it had succeeded in spinning the boat right out from under it and standing itself on its rear end right in the ferry slip. We, being of more cautious bent, got off without incident and headed for Wasque Point on the far southeast corner of the island.

  Wasque, like all coastal points, comes and goes according to the whims of the sea gods and goddesses. It gets bigger one year and smaller the next. Over the decades it has grown or shrunk as much as a quarter of a mile. A century or so before I was born, according to old charts, it was much farther out to sea than it is now, but the bluffs inland from the present point show that at some time it was a lot smaller. Whatever its size and shape, it is one of the best bluefishing spots on the East Coast, thanks to the Wasque rip that snakes out from the point, tossing bait around and attracting the voracious blues.

  We fetched the point in time to catch the west tide, pulled up out of the reach of the slapping waves, and got the rods off the roof rack. There were already a half-dozen trucks ahead of us, and there were fish lying under them. Paul Schultz, who roamed the beaches for the Trustees of Reservations and always knew where the fish were but didn’t always have time to stop and catch them, was driving out as we drove in. He waved and we waved back.

  “You guys stay up here,” I said to Joshua and Diana. “Watch out for cars, and don’t get behind anybody who’s making a cast. You don’t want to catch a hook on somebody’s backswing. Josh, you keep an eye on your little sister. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.” I walked down to the surf, where Zee and Corrie were already fishing, and made my cast. The redheaded Roberts arced long and high and hit the roiling water with a satisfying splash. I took a couple of turns on the reel, glanced back to make sure that my offspring were doing what I’d told them to do, at least for the moment, and turned back to the sea.

  The Roberts bounced and wobbled toward shore, offering an apparently attractive sight to any bluefish that might be around. I have caught more blues with it than with any other lure. However, there were apparently no fish close by at the moment, so my first cast was to no avail.

  Down the beach there were a couple of bent rods, proving that there was life in the sea in spite of my failure to catch any of it. I hauled in and made another cast, and as I did Zee’s rod bent and she set her hook. She looked at me and grinned.

  “Land him,” I said, feeling happy.

  “I will,” she replied and did. By then the fish had moved a bit closer to us, and both Corrie and I were on and working our fish toward shore. We got back to the truck at about the same time with our fish—nice seven- and eight-pounders.

  “Like old times,” grinned Corrie, “but I must be getting old. This guy almost wore me out!”

  “Your fishing muscles are out of shape,” I said. “You spend all your time with your guitar and none with a rod.”

  “Pa,” said Josh, touching my arm, “I want to fish.”

  “Like father, like son,” said Corrie approvingly.

  I got Josh’s little rod off the roof rack. He wasn’t able to cast far enough to catch anything today, but you’re never too young to try.

  “Don’t forget to throw the bail,” I said. “You don’t want to snap your lure off.”

  “I remember,” said Josh in his solemn little voice. He took the rod and went down to the surf near his mother. She gave him a smile. If he ever learned to fish as well as she could, he’d be able to hold his own in any company.

  Diana, alone now, grabbed one of my fingers. “Play with me.”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” said Corrie, “I’ll get back to fishing. Maybe I can get a couple more of these fellows and take them back to the boys and girls in the house. I don’t think they’re much in the way of cooks, but they got an oven and I can show them how to bake a fish.”

  So then there were three of us fishing and two of us up on the beach playing a game I didn’t quite understand, and it was a fine day.

  When we headed back for home along East Beach, we had as many fish as we needed and a few more. I planned to smoke some of mine and sell the extras at the market to help pay for gas. Who knows, we might even make expenses for the trip.

  “You have to come for supper tonight, Corrie,” said Zee. “The boys at the house can do their own cooking.”

  “More likely they’ll get some of the girls to do it for them,” said Corrie with a laugh.

  “No doubt,” said Zee with a sigh.

  “Well, if we can eat early, I’ll be glad to come,” said Corrie, “but I got to be at the coffeehouse by nine, and if I come to your place, you got to come to the show afterward.”

  “That’s a deal,” said Zee. “Win-win for us.”

  “For me, too,” said Corrie. “Things do work out at times.”

  We sold the extra fish and dropped Corrie off with the three he’d caught. I handed him a fillet knife, since I doubted that there would be one in the house.

  “I’ll use this on these fish and put them in the fridge, then I got to put in some practice,” said Corrie, leaning over the driver’s-side window and looking in at us. “Old fingers ain’t as limber as they used to be. Got to keep ’em loose.”

  “I’ll pick you up at five.”

  “What a dump,” said Zee as we drove away. “There ought to be a law against renting out places like that. They should make Ben Krane live in one of these slums he owns!”

  “There is a law,” I said. “It’s just that there aren’t enough cops to enforce it. If they tried to keep track of every illegally occupied house in Edgartown, they wouldn’t have time to do anything else. Besides, where would the college kids live if they didn’t l
ive in one of Ben’s outhouses?”

  “I know, I know. But it’s disgusting.”

  Someone, maybe God, agreed with that assessment, because in early spring someone had torched one of Ben’s houses and hadn’t been caught yet. The year before, the same thing had happened to Ben’s Oak Bluffs office. I didn’t have any more idea than the cops did about who had burned the house, but as for the Oak Bluffs job, I attributed that to some in-town fire starter.

  Oak Bluffs, one of the island’s three biggest towns, which doesn’t mean much in terms of population since only about twelve thousand people live on the whole island in the winter, is rightly famous for its Victorian gingerbread houses and its long-standing tradition of racial diversity, particularly as a summer resort for well-to-do Afro-Americans. As perhaps is unknown to its tourists and summer population, but is well known to year-round islanders, OB is also renowned for its hot-headed political factions. Typical small-town squabbles are squared or even cubed in Oak Bluffs, where no political decision is non-controversial and petty violence and vitriol are the norm: insults are exchanged in the newspapers and during town business meetings, cars of political figures are keyed and have their tires slashed and their windows broken, and occasionally someone gets a bloody nose.

  Ben Krane, being at once a lawyer, a realtor, and the owner of some of the most disgraceful summer rentals on the island, naturally had his share of enemies, and in my view some OB citizen had torched his office for public or private reasons. In any case, Ben had not rebuilt in Oak Bluffs, but had reestablished his office in Edgartown, where tempers might run as high but actions were much more restrained. They don’t burn people out in Edgartown, they chill them out.

  Like the office fire, the blaze that later had leveled Ben’s big old rotten rental house was very overtly a case of arson.

  From Zee’s point of view, the fire was just fine since no one had gotten hurt and Ben now had one less slum to rent out at exorbitant prices to summer kids. She wouldn’t have minded if all such buildings burned down. It was a widely agreed-upon assessment. Ben Krane, rich and getting richer, was not a beloved figure with the local health board, the police, the neighbors of his decaying buildings, or the kids who rented his places, who were getting ripped off and knew it but didn’t know what to do about it except trash the places when they left and leave them in even worse shape than they found them when they moved in. Ben publicly howled at their ingratitude and often refused to return the kids’ security deposits, but never fixed anything up more than he absolutely had to before renting the place out again the next summer for even more money. And he didn’t mind being a public outcast, either. He had money, and because he had money he had women and he didn’t have to hang on to any of them longer than he wanted because there were always more.

  It drove Zee wild and made her uncharacteristically sullen. “Why don’t those women ever wise up?” she’d ask me when the news of Ben’s latest ex-bedmate reached the streets.

  “They’re desperate,” I’d explain. “They know I’m taken and it drives them to do mad things. They deserve sympathy, not impatience.”

  “I’m the one who deserves sympathy. I’m the one who lives with you!”

  We got home in time to square away kids and gear, and to fillet our keeper bluefish and get them soaking in brine in preparation for smoking, before Warren Quick arrived with his load of lumber for my addition. He was driving his old truck with the logo on the door reading QUICK ERECTION COMPANY—WE GET IT UP FAST AND IT STAYS UP! Warren was a straight-arrow, West Coast guy who had apparently brought some California humor with him when he’d moved to the Vineyard and gotten his building business going in West Tisbury. I was surprised to see Susanna, his wife, riding in the cab with him.

  He backed around the house to my lumber pile, climbed out, and the two of us began to unload. Susanna, babe on her hip and holding her eldest by the hand, went into the house, presumably to trade mom talk with Zee. Warren was quiet as usual. Unlike a lot of Californians, he never had much to say.

  Before we got all of the lumber stacked, Zee came out the back door and waved me toward her. She had a frown on her face. I went to her.

  “Come in,” she said. “I want you to listen to Susanna. She’s got a problem and she needs help.”

  “Serious?”

  She flicked her eyes at Warren. “Serious enough. Somebody’s writing her nasty letters.”

  I had quit the Boston PD because I was tired of trying to solve the dilemmas of the world and just wanted to be left alone. But woe is everywhere, of course, so I left Warren to finish the stacking and followed Zee into the house.

  — 3 —

  Susanna Quick was about thirty years old. She had an oval face with big blue eyes, light brown hair, a just-right nose, and full lips. Her hair was thick and her body was petite and nicely shaped. Warren’s and her kids were just a tad younger than ours, and took after their mother in looks and coloring. The eldest, Abigail, who looked like Susanna, was going to give her parents a lot of grief in not too many more years; boys were going to be after her like hounds on a fox.

  Susanna and Warren had arrived on the Vineyard with enough money to set up a business. He was good with his hands and tools and she was good in the office, and the Quick Erection Company was doing okay in spite of or maybe even because of its outlandish West Coast name. On building-happy Martha’s Vineyard, there’s plenty of business for construction outfits that can do their jobs right, and the Quicks sold not only lumber but other building materials too, and thus got business from the do-it-yourselfers like me.

  I didn’t know them well, having only met them as a customer, but they had always seemed to be happy together. When their kids arrived, Susanna just put a playpen in the office and kept on working. I admired her for that, being of similar inclination with regard to Josh and Diana; I liked having them around me.

  Nurse Zee, who had met Susanna at the hospital, where all young Vineyard parents appear sooner or later for medical advice or assistance, had taken to her immediately, in part because they shared the drama of having young children about whom they had a lot to learn, and in part because Susanna was cheerful and full of life.

  She didn’t look so cheerful now.

  “I’ll take the kids outside so the two of you can talk without any little ears around,” said Zee. She picked up the baby and reached for Abigail’s hand.

  “Let’s go watch Warren unload lumber,” said Zee to Josh and Diana, who were inside because everyone else was.

  Zee and the four children went out. I looked at Susanna, who was sitting on the couch behind the coffee table that held the vise that held the lock that I practiced opening with the picks I’d gotten in an up-island yard sale. As far as I knew, I was the only apprentice lock picker in the neighborhood.

  “Warren doesn’t know about this,” she said. “He wouldn’t understand. He’s so . . . pure.”

  “Understand what?” I sat down across from her. Susanna twirled her thumbs.

  “Zee says that you used to be a policeman.”

  “Yes. In Boston.”

  “She says I can trust you.” Her blue eyes were deep and somber.

  “I’m glad she thinks so.”

  Silence sat in the room while Susanna studied me. Then she made her decision.

  “I’ve been getting phone calls. A man. He knows things I didn’t think anyone knew. At least anyone here.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “I’m not sure. Until yesterday he just made calls. He never said he wanted anything, he just told me what he knew. What he knows.”

  Everybody has secrets, so it was no surprise that Susanna had hers. I had mine, certainly. I hoped no one knew about some of them.

  “What happened yesterday?”

  She opened her purse and took out an envelope. “I got this.” She handed the envelope to me. Since there were probably dozens of fingerprints on it already, I took it. Inside was a folded piece of paper with a photograph printed on it. The pi
cture was of a bondage scene featuring a bound and gagged woman wearing a mask, a cap with a feather, a cape, and a scanty green costume that looked vaguely as if it belonged in a Robin Hood movie. She was young and beautiful and was staring wide-eyed at a cloaked and hooded masked man dressed all in black. I thought I recognized the woman’s eyes.

  I handed the picture back to her. Compared with some of the stuff I’d seen, it was pretty mild.

  “It’s a printout from the Internet,” said Susanna.

  “There’s a lot of that sort of thing available, they tell me. In this one I was a superhero named Oriona. You know, it’s a feminization of Orion the Hunter? She always hunted down the bad guys so she could capture them, but naturally she got captured instead and the villains got to humiliate and abuse her to their hearts’ content. I made several Oriona films when I was eighteen or nineteen.”

  She looked at me as if trying to determine how I felt about such things.

  “There’s a market for it,” I said.

  She nodded. “Yes, although I didn’t think much about the audience at the time. Don’t get the wrong idea. The job paid pretty well, and nobody made me do it. I did it because I was young and was trying to get into the movies. I made myself into a blonde and called myself Eva L’Amour. It was actually fun most of the time, and I met some people I still like.” She paused, and then went on. “Later, I did other stuff. Rougher stuff. Movies, stills, whatever. By the time I realized that I was never going to be a movie star, I’d made a lot of it. Then I met Warren.

  “He was with a construction outfit that took on a job right next to where I was working that week. We ran into each other and got to talking. He wanted to start his own business, and I was ready to leave the gags and chains to somebody else. I never told him what I’d been doing, because he was so nice. We even go to church, you know. Every Sunday.”

  “Ah.”

  “So we got married in California and moved here, to Martha’s Vineyard, where nobody knew me. His folks had died and left him some money and I’d squirreled away a nest egg of my own, so we were able to start up the business. Now this has happened.”