Off Season (19 page)

I finished my coffee and got up. “When you get your kittens, just bring them by my place. There's a good deal of snow in my driveway . . .”

“Don't worry. I've got four-wheel drive.”

Everybody on Martha's Vineyard has a vehicle with four-wheel drive. I went out and climbed into mine.

Downtown, everybody was working to get rid of the snow. Merchants were shoveling sidewalks and the highway department was busy with a scoop loader and dump trucks, hauling snow down to the harbor and dumping it. The snow made Main Street look even more Christmasy than before, and the window shoppers looked quite Dickensish as they dodged snow shovelers and peered into windows, their breaths making clouds in the air.

I drove down to the Reading Room, and put the glasses on the
Mattie
and the
Shirley J.
Their cabins
and decks were covered with snow, but there was no ice to be seen, and the boats swung easily from their stakes between the Reading Room and the yacht club. Still, I dug my dinghy out from under the snow that covered it, rowed out to the boats and cleaned off the snow. On the off chance that we might get a real freeze, I didn't want two ice-covered boats on my hands.

About the only other boats in the harbor were fishing boats—scallopers, conchers and draggers. A fisherman's life, like a farmer's life, is a tough and chancy one in the best of times, and a very tough one during the winter. Not many people were up to it. Scalloping all winter in the Edgartown ponds was hard enough. I didn't want anything to do with going outside into the deep water. I thought about Joey Percell as I rowed ashore. Then I drove to the police station on Pease Point Way.

I found the chief holed up in his office. He had a little Christmas tree sitting on a file cabinet.

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

“Well, it was until just a second ago,” he said. “What brings you out of the snowy woods?”

“The eternal search for truth.”

“Are we talking about the late Chug Lovell? If so, I don't know any more than I knew last time.”

“But I do,” I said.

“I'm not involved in the case. The state police are handling it. Nobody tells me anything.” He leaned forward. “What do you know?”

I told him.

When I was done, he looked at me. “How do you know about this sex stuff?”

“How do
you
know about this sex stuff?”

“I'm an officer of the law.”

“Yeah, but I'm a civilian. There are more of us than there are of you. I've got contacts out there among the normal humans.”

“Listen to me,” said the chief. “If you've been breaking and entering or interfering with a murder investigation or anything like that, your ass is in a sling. You understand?”

“What? Me break and enter? I'm shocked that you'd even think such a thing.”

“Sure you are. So you think there was kinky sex going on. What do you make of it?”

“I don't know. Personally, I don't care what kind of sex goes on if it goes on between grownups who both agree . . .”

“I believe they're called consenting adults,” said the chief.

“Okay. Consenting adults. Whatever.”

“But what if they don't both agree?”

“That's something else.”

“That could be a motive. A lover who didn't like being loved that way. You know the joke: sadomasochism is okay as long as the sadist and the masochist agree about who's doing what to who. But if they don't agree . . .”

“Yeah, unhappy lovers kill each other every day.”

“So who was Chug's lover?”

My client. Perhaps among others. I shrugged. “A good question. Well, now that I've been so helpful to you, maybe you can be helpful to me.”

The chief narrowed his eyes, leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “I'm a cop. Cops are always helpful.”

“Sure.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know who Joey Percell works for and why he came down here to tell Nash Cortez to lay off the animal rights gang and then flattened him to underline the message. You're a cop, so you might have some contacts over in America who keep an eye on people like Joey. What are the chances of you asking them some questions about him and his boss's business interests?”

The chief smiled his thin smile. “As a matter of fact, I already did that. When a guy like Percell comes to my town to punch somebody out, I like to know why. So I called some people I know in Providence. What's your interest in Joey Percell? I mean, aside from the fact that he might decide to come back down here and break you into little pieces for interfering when he was delivering his message to Nash.”

“The animal rights people and Nash Cortez and Chug Lovell were all interested in what happens to Carl Norton's land. Joey gets tied in because he slugged Nash. Joey's boss is tied in because he told Joey to slug Nash. I wonder if maybe Chug got killed for some reason tied in with Joey slugging Nash.”

“it's almost Christmas. The season to be jolly. Why don't you go home and sit in front of your fire with Zee and string popcorn and leave the police work to the police?”

“I'd sure like to know who Joey works for and why he cared enough to send the very best to keep Nash from jawing with a bunch of animal rights people way down here on the Vineyard.” I arched a brow. “I'll bet Quinn could find out, now that I think of it.”

“Who's Quinn?”

“You may have met him. A reporter from the
Globe.
Down here a while back on that drug bust that went sour. Friend of mine from when I worked on the Boston P.D. I take him bluefishing once a year or so.”

The chief frowned. “Oh, yeah. I remember that bastard. Dumb cops, smart drug ring story. Some reporter!”

“Quinn is good, all right. You know, I think I will give him a call. He'd probably like another cops and robbers story, and this one has all the ingredients: small-town murder, Providence mob enforcer, cops who won't talk to each other. Quinn will love it.” I put my hands on the arms of my chair. “Well, thanks, chief.”

“Wait a minute,” said the chief. “We don't need any hotshot big-city reporters nosing around where they don't belong.” He pointed at my chair. “Sit.” He leaned forward. “This is off the record. Nothing anybody can take to court yet . . .”

“Yet?”

“Yet. There are some people working on a case in Rhode Island and Connecticut, but so far that's all they're doing, working. Some reporter gets his nose into it, everything could fall apart. You understand?”

“Yeah. Are you telling me that this case they're working on has something to do with Joey Percell coming down here and dinging Nash Cortez?”

“I'm telling you that there's an important case being investigated up in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and that's all I'm telling you.” He sat back, dug his pipe out of his pocket and stuck it, empty, into his mouth. He looked at me.

I thought awhile. “Are you telling me that Joey's boss has interests in Connecticut that are tied to the
animal rights people here on Martha's Vineyard, and that that tie is important enough for him to send his enforcer down here to quiet Nash down?”

“I'm not telling you any such thing,” said the chief, sucking on his pipe.

I thought some more, putting names I knew into different configurations. Phyllis Manwaring emerged from the animal rights group. “Are you telling me that the Providence mob has an interest in Vince Manwaring's political campaign? And that they don't want any embarrassing stories coming out about the candidate's wife fighting with island hunters? And that Joey came down here to make sure there wouldn't be any?”

“I've never said one word to make you think that,” said the chief, getting out his tobacco and stuffing it into his pipe.

I ran things through my mind for a while. “Okay,” I said, finally, “but how did Chug fit into all this? He went off island every now and then. Was he tied to the mob? Did he make his money doing business with the wise guys? Did he cross somebody up there, maybe, and get himself killed?”

“My little bird never said anything about Chug Lovell.”

“Well, if you talk to your bird again, will you ask him?”

The chief sucked his pipe. It was his policy not to smoke at his office. If he wanted to puff, he went outside to do it. “I might, but we both know he wasn't killed by a hit man. Some amateur did it.”

True. “Did you find any long-lost relatives? Any family?”

“If he had any, we haven't found them yet. I used to hear that he was from down south someplace.”

“The tobacco heir rumor. But if he had tobacco money coming in, there should have been paper in his place to show it. Check stubs, receipts, some such thing.”

“The way I hear it, all they found in that line was a bankbook and some checks for an off-island bank. Chug had a couple thousand in savings and another thou or so in his checking account. Not much, for a tobacco heir.”

“Don't be condescending, chief. That's more money than I have. So he didn't do business with island banks, eh? I wonder why.”

“He was a private sort of a guy. didn't tell people much of anything about himself. At least I don't know much about him, and I'm the police chief. Maybe he figured that bank people gossip just as much as other people, and that he didn't want the locals talking about him and his money.”

“Maybe he was trying to hide his money from his ex-wife, or something.”

The chief peered over his pipe. “He has an ex-wife?”

“No, no. I just made that up. Or maybe he did have one. I don't know.” I got up. “I'm not even making sense to myself. Time to go home.”

The chief nodded agreeably. “Past time, some might say.” He got up. “I'll walk out with you. I feel the need to stoke up this briar.”

“You just want to make sure I actually leave.”

“That too.”

A light wind had come up, and there were snowflakes in the air, blown from the trees. The air was still nippy, and the snow crunched under my feet as I walked to the Land Cruiser. It was lunchtime, and I wondered if food would improve the blood
circulation in my brain. Things were a little sluggish up there right now, for sure.

I went down to the coffee shop on Dock Street and had two portuguese mcmuffins, coffee and pie. Delish, high-cholesterol American food. Just what the doctor ordered. When I got out on the street again, I was ready to face the world with a smile.

I drove along the beach road to Oak Bluffs, past the empty, snow-covered beaches where not too long before I would have passed an unending line of parked cars and hundreds of summer people lying on the yellow sands or splashing in the blue water of the Sound, the mothers, sitting with their backs to the road, watching their small children playing in the water, and the teenagers wishing that they could be at South Beach instead, so they could play in some real surf and flirt with each other out of their parents' sight.

And in not too long, the beach would be that way again. But not now. Now it was white and lonely and coldly beautiful, and the frigid gray Sound was no place for swimmers.

I passed the statue of the Confederate soldier, the northernmost such statue in the country, I've been told, and drove up Circuit Avenue until I found a parking place not too far from Heather Manwaring's law office.

I went in and confronted Heather's answer to Effie Perine. Effie said she'd see if Ms. Manwaring would see me, went into an inner office and came out again and said that I could go in. I went into Heather's office and closed the door behind me.

It wasn't the world's champion office, but it was good enough. Very businesslike. A desk, file cabinets, bookcases with law books and other thick, well-bound
tomes, a couch against one wall fronted by a coffee table and two stuffed chairs, two plain wooden chairs in front of the desk, a couple of standing lights and a large, slightly beat-up oriental carpet under everything.

Heather got up as I came in and pushed some papers off to one side of the desk. She was wearing a silk blouse with a sort of ruffle at the neck, and a gray skirt. I wondered if she was wearing those uncomfortable shoes that professional women seem to think they have to wear when they're doing business, or whether, hidden by the desk, she'd kicked them off and was wearing either no shoes at all or the running shoes a lot of women wear to and from the office, or maybe even slippers. I hoped it was slippers, but I doubted it. Heather didn't seem to me to be the slippers-in-the-office type. Too stiff. Too proper. Too much like her parents.

“J.W. How nice to see you.” She smiled, but there was a question behind the smile.

I poked a thumb at the door. “Does much sound get through there?”

She looked at the door, then back at me. “No. Anything you say will be strictly between the two of us. Why? Have you learned something?”

I sat down in one of the wooden chairs.

“Do you want some coffee? I'll have Harriet bring some in . . .”

“No thanks.”

She sat down and posed her hands together on the desk. “Well then . . .”

I looked at her yellow hair. It was pinned in a neat bun, but it was the right color and looked long enough. I got the strand of hair I'd found at Chug's house out of my pocket and laid it on her desk. “I
think this is yours,” I said. I told her where I'd found it, and told her about the handcuff key and the dishes on the floor, in one of which was still the smell of white wine.

As I talked she first blushed, then turned visibly pale. Her eyes grew blank and strange, and she took her lower lip between her teeth. Her hands tightened against each other, but she didn't look away.

“How long were you two lovers?” I asked.

She stared at me without saying anything.

“How long?”

She put a hand to her throat.