A Case of Vineyard Poison Read online

  On the beach, the bright umbrellas were up, and in the water beyond the sand the surf sailors were riding their multicolored sailboards back and forth across the gentle southwest wind. In the air, kaleidoscopic kites were flying. Although I could not see them, I knew the young mothers had their beach chairs facing the water so they could watch their children playing on the edge of the water. Their babies’ cribs were beneath their umbrellas, their beachbags were stuffed with towels and toys, food and drink, sunscreen and lotions, diapers and books. Their husbands were flying the kites or reading or letting themselves be covered with sand by their children.

  My Sam Adams was so good that I had another one, accompanied by some bluefish pate, cheese, and crackers. Life was not bad. The sky was pale blue, and in the woods around the house the birds were talking. More birds were at the feeders I had hanging here and there. I wondered if they’d still come after Zee moved in and brought her cats, Oliver Underfoot and Velcro. I gave that some thought and decided that I could probably rig the feeders so Oliver and Velcro couldn’t get at them. Of course the birds would have to watch out for themselves, cats being cats, but that was okay since both were God’s little creatures. I wondered once again whether there were birds in cat heaven or cats in bird heaven. Once again, I really couldn’t guess.

  At eleven-thirty I phoned the Vineyard Haven National Bank and asked to speak with Hazel Fine.

  Hazel’s voice sounded musical as always.

  “Let me take you to lunch,” I said.

  “Well, thank you, but I imagine that Mary has already fixed something at home.”

  “She can come, too.”

  “Why don’t you join us instead?”

  “I want to ask you some bank questions. Nothing serious, but if you eat my food, I won’t feel guilty. If I eat yours . . .”

  “I don’t imagine you’ll feel very guilty about that either, J.W. You’re not the guilty type. Come by the house at twelve-thirty.”

  “I’ll bring white wine.”

  “You and Mary can drink it. I’ll have to go back to work.”

  “I think Mary and I can manage that.”

  She laughed. “I’ll give Mary a ring so she’ll be forewarned. See you in an hour.”

  Hazel Fine and Mary Coffin lived together in Vineyard Haven, a short walk from the bank and an even shorter one from the library. They were attractive women, both fortyish, who had been together for years. They were fond of early and baroque music, and were members of an island choral and orchestral group that I had hired to play at our wedding. Hazel had an excellent voice, and Mary played recorders, the oboe, and other wind instruments. They were also good cooks, so I made sure I arrived on time.

  Mary was wearing a light green housedress and Hazel was in banker lady’s clothes—blue suit and white blouse, low-heeled shoes, and some gold at her throat and wrist. I told them they both looked smashing, which was true as well as being politically correct.

  Lunch was vichyssoise and thin ham and cucumber sandwiches. My bottle of vino verde was just right with it. Mary and I poured glasses for ourselves and iced water for Hazel, and we dug into the soup and sandwiches.

  “Now what is this bank business you want to know about?” asked Hazel, touching her lips with a napkin.

  I told her about Zee’s hundred thousand dollars.

  She smiled and shook her head. “We’re installing a new computer system, and there are still some bugs in it. Our ATM’s have their share of those bugs. I imagine that it was probably just a printing error in the machine.”

  “But Zee got the same information from another machine the next day. Could the same mistake occur in two different machines?”

  “I wish I knew more about computers, but I imagine two machines can make the same mistake, just like two people can.”

  “I can make enough mistakes for two people all by myself,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Hazel. “I’ll look up Zeolinda’s account myself, and check the balance.”

  “She called the bank this morning and the hundred thou was gone.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. All right, I’ll double-check the balance and also check all transactions on her account for the last month. If there was an error during that time, we should catch it.”

  “If you find the hundred thousand and it doesn’t belong to anybody, will you just slide it over into my account? I’ll split it with you later.”

  “There are very few hundred thousands that don’t belong to somebody, J.W.” Hazel glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to get back. I’ll call the bride-to-be at the hospital when I’ve checked her account.”

  She went out, and Mary and I finished the wine and sandwiches.

  “Well,” said Mary, “in a month you’ll be a married man. How do you feel about that?”

  “Fine. Anxious. Worried.”

  “Worried about what?”

  “Worried that she’ll change her mind. If she does, I’ll have to start courting her all over again, and I may not be able to con her into this another time.”

  “I don’t think you conned her, J.W.” She smiled. “Relax. The wedding will be a great success and you’ll live happily ever after. It’s good when people find a partner to live with. I don’t think we were meant to live alone.”

  “I’ve done more of it than I want to. How’s the music shaping up?”

  “It’s well shaped.”

  We cleared the table and took the dishes into the kitchen. Then I found my hat—a baseball cap advertising CV 60, the USS Saratoga—and gave Mary a kiss on the cheek. “If Hazel can’t get through to Zee at the hospital, have her give me a ring at home. I’ll relay the message.”

  On my not-too-good truck radio, I got the classical music station in Chatham, and listened to the end of something by Bach on the way home. Bach often bores me, but this time he was okay. It’s too bad he had so many children and so much work to do. If he’d had more time, maybe he could have spent it on each piece of music and would have written fewer that sound so much alike. When the station was through with Bach, they played a Beethoven piano concerto performed by David Greenstein, the latest winner of the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, and Zee’s current musical passion. Better than Bach. Ludwig Van is the world’s heavyweight music champion, and David Greenstein could really pound the ivories. He was still at it when I got home.

  There, having had enough classical music, I switched to the C and W station that comes out of Rhode Island, and listened to Reba and Tanya and Garth and the other guys and gals sing their songs about love betrayed or gained. I like classical and C and W music, but you can have most of the other stuff, especially the current noise that kids listen to. Too hard on my ears, and too juvenile. C and W music may not be profound, but at least it’s written for grown-ups.

  I was fixing up a giant salad for supper when the phone rang. I thought maybe it would be Hazel, but it wasn’t. It was Quinn.

  “Coming down this weekend,” said Quinn. “You got room?”

  “I’ve got room.”

  “Bringing a guest.”

  “She’s welcome.”

  “Not she, he.”

  “He’s welcome. How long you staying?”

  “Week?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “How are the fish running?”

  “So many they’re standing on their tails so they’ll all fit in the ocean.”

  “Dynamite! See you Friday night. We’re bringing the pizzas and beer. Tell that sweetheart of yours to cheer up because a real man is on his way!”

  “I’ll try to keep her calm.”

  Quinn hung up.

  Quinn was a reporter for the Globe. I had met him when I was a cop for the Boston P.D. and we had hit it off. After I’d taken the bullet that still nestled next to my spine, and had retired to the Vineyard in search of a more peaceful career, Quinn and I had kept in touch, the touch being mostly in the form of my going up to Boston once a year to catch the Sox in Fenway a
nd have a few beers at the Commonwealth Brewery, makers of America’s best bitter, and Quinn’s coming to the island to have a go at the wily bluefish. Next to nailing a good story, Quinn liked nothing better than nailing the blues.

  It would be good to see Quinn, and I looked forward to having him down a couple weeks before the wedding. He would loosen things up in case they got tight. Quinn didn’t let things get tight. He disapproved of tight, except for occasionally being that way by dint of booze.

  I wondered who his friend was. Since his divorce, Quinn had taken up with a number of women, but had never remarried. Once or twice, he had brought women down to the island with him, and I had put them up in my spare bedroom, which is normally only occupied by my father’s hand-carved decoys. There were twin beds in there, so this time Quinn and his friend would also have that room. Someday, maybe, it would be a child’s room. But not yet.

  A half hour after Quinn had called, the phone rang again. I was making some pesto bread to go with the salad, and having a Sam Adams. This time it was Hazel Fine.

  “I called the hospital, but Zeolinda was busy with someone who had just come into the emergency room.”

  “She’ll be here for supper, if you want to talk with her personally.”

  “Oh no. You can pass the word, such as it is. Tell her that I checked her account from April till now, and there’s no sign of any hundred thousand dollars or any other error. I think we can blame it on a couple of faulty ATM machines. A computer glitch of some kind.”

  “A hundred-thousand-dollar glitch is a pretty good glitch.”

  “Yes it is. As I told you, we’re installing a new computer system here at the bank. Until now, we’ve had a servicer over on the mainland doing all of our computer work, but that got too expensive, so we’ve decided to do all of our processing in-house. We’ve had problems transferring the accounts from there to here, and this balance error is apparently just another one of them. It probably happened late last week, and didn’t get corrected until this morning.”

  “I thought you bankers didn’t make mistakes.”

  “You thought that, eh? Say, I have a deal in real estate—a bridge in New York—that might interest you.”

  We laughed. I’m so bad at handling my own money that I’m probably qualified to open a savings and loan of my own.

  When Zee came in, tired after a long day of putting people back together after sundry mishaps, I sent her right to the shower. After she came out, feeling better, I gave her a martini and took her up to the balcony. There, I plied her with hors d’oeuvres and more martinis while I gave her Hazel’s message and told her of Quinn.

  She liked Quinn. “It’ll be good to see him again. Who’s his friend?”

  “I didn’t catch his name.”

  The-news of the coming of Quinn and his companion was the second thing that happened that week. The third thing happened on Wednesday. It was a very bad thing.

  — 3 —

  Martha’s Vineyard draws young people like honey draws bees. They swarm down from the mainland every spring and take up jobs that pay peanuts for the sake of spending a summer in the island sun. They promise to work faithfully until Labor Day, but quit in mid-August, as their employers know they will, so they can have a couple of weeks of uninterrupted fun before returning to college. If they break even over the summer, they are happy. They are usually happy anyway, since it’s hard to be unhappy when you’re twenty years old and sun, sex, surf, and beer are in such plentiful supply.

  Only young people from abroad, the Irish and the like, keep working into the fall, since the money they make on the island, however meager, is more than they can make at home.

  These summer citizens live in shacks in the woods, or group illegally in large houses in violation of town ordinances which are ignored by their slumlords. The slumlords can make a pretty penny from their summer guests, and care little at all about the condition of their buildings or their occupants, or about the opinions of their neighbors.

  Just after I pulled out of my driveway late Wednesday afternoon and headed for Edgartown, I met one of the youthful summer persons coming along the other side of the road on a wobbly moped. Bound home after a day’s work, I guessed. She had long brown hair and would have been quite pretty if the expression on her face had not been so strained. Was she thinking bad thoughts about her boss or boyfriend, or just trying to stay on top of her restless moped? I thought she should try to look less severe, so her frown lines wouldn’t become habitual, and recalled my father warning me that if I kept sucking my thumb I’d grow up looking like Eleanor Roosevelt.

  I had spent the afternoon refiberglassing the bottom of my dinghy. I had worn a hole in its bottom by dragging it over the sand when I launched or retrieved it from Collins Beach, where I kept it log-chained to the bulkhead during the summer. It was now in the back of the Land Cruiser, and I was returning it to the log chain which prevented Edgartown’s gentlemen summer sailors from stealing it so they could get back out to their yachts late at night after the launch service had ended. I drove down Cooke Street, fetched the Reading Room dock, and made the dinghy fast. Inside the Reading Room, the men were having cocktails. Only men had cocktails at the Reading Room, I’d been told, except for a couple of hours on Sunday nights, when wives and ladies-in-waiting were allowed to share the booze.

  I had not been invited to the cocktail hour, so I parked the Land Cruiser on the beach, and walked down South Water Street, past the giant Pagoda Tree and various inns and hotels, to Main Street. There I took a right and popped in at the Wharf pub, where at that time I could get a glass of Commonwealth Brewery Ale, America’s finest beer. The pub was full of young people and noise, but the beer made the stop worthwhile, so I had not one but two before returning to the street.

  There I met the chief of the Edgartown police, looking fairly composed for a man whose Vineyard summer had already started. The chief was watching one of his summer rent-a-cops trying to handle the mix of cars and pedestrians at the four corners, where Water Street and Main Street intersect. The rent-a-cop was not doing too badly, and the chief saw no need to interfere, even though the walkers were, as usual, crossing the street without looking or slowing down. Happily for the rent-a-cop, the drivers were both slow and alert, so no bumps or bruises had yet occurred, and the rent-a-cop was able to keep both vehicles and people on the move.

  The chief and I walked away from the intersection and down to the parking lot in front of the yacht club. Out in the harbor, a few yachts were swinging at their moorings. There would be a lot more later. On a stake between the yacht club and the Reading Room my cat-boat, the Shirley J., pointed her nose into the falling southwest wind.

  “Did you see that crowd?” said the chief. “It looks like the Fourth of July and here it is only June. More cars and people every year!”

  “That’s what you said last year.”

  “I think this may be my last year. I can’t take this anymore. I think I’ll retire and rent a place up in Nova Scotia for the summer. They say that up there it’s like it used to be here twenty years ago.”

  “That’s what you said last year.”

  “I’ll come back down here after Labor Day. It’s not so bad then.”

  “That’s what you said last year.”

  “I know I said it last year, but this time I really mean it. The other day when I came out of the station, this woman stops her car and asks me, ‘Is this the right road?’ That’s all. Just, ‘Is this the right road?’ Not ‘Is this the right road to Katama?’ or ‘Is this the right road to the airport?’ Just, ‘Is this the right road?’ Ye gods, what kind of a question is that? Then, about an hour later I was up in front of the A & P and damned if a guy doesn’t stop his car and ask me the very same thing. That’s when I knew it was time to go up to Nova Scotia.”

  “What did you tell those people?”

  “I did the right thing. I smiled and said yes, it was. And they drove off.”

  “Clever. And some people thin
k you’re simple-minded.”

  “Speaking of simple minds, are you still planning to marry Zee now that she’s just a poor working girl without a hundred thousand in her account?”

  “How’d you find out about that?”

  “I ran into your betrothed and she told me about her rapid rise to riches and her equally rapid return to normalcy. Too bad. You two could have afforded a humdinger of a honeymoon. Where you going, by the way?”

  “I thought we might go to your house. Annie could cook for us and you could open the champagne and run errands. What do you think?”

  “It’s all right with me if you move in. I expect to be in Nova Scotia.”

  “In that case, I’ll have to change my plans. We’ll need somebody to serve us breakfast in bed, and shine our shoes, and stuff like that.”

  “Actually, this island is a good place to have a honeymoon. A lot of people spend an awful lot of money to do it. Annie and I did it ourselves. Of course that was because we were too poor to leave.”

  “It’s not too bad being so poor that you have to live on Martha’s Vineyard. I can imagine being poor in a lot of worse places.”

  “You don’t know what poor is. You’ve got government money pouring in every month.”

  Not pouring, really, but at least dribbling. A bit from the Boston ED. for carrying the bullet next to my spine, and some benefits from the USA as compensation for some Vietnamese shrapnel, bits of which still oozed out of my legs now and then. Any hopes I might have had of making a career as a male model had been done in, thanks to the scars bestowed upon me by people trying to kill me. I had collected some more scars since coming down to the Vineyard for good, but I didn’t get any money for those.

  “Your favorite reporter is arriving this weekend,” I said. “Quinn. He’s bringing a friend.”

  “Quinn!” The chief spat out the name. Some time before, Quinn had covered a drug bust on the island and had produced a story that was unflattering to the DEA and the various police agencies which had let the big guys get away while rounding up the small fry.