A Deadly Vineyard Holiday (7 page)

I decided I was on both sides of the issue. “Look,” I said. “Here's what we'll do. I'll go up and see if Burt Phillips is there. If he is, we'll have to think some more, but if he's gone, you two can go to the movies. How's that?”

“That's good,” said Debby, for whom any step in the direction she wanted to go was okay.

“What do you say?” I asked Karen. “If he's gone, there's no reason for you two not to go up to the flicks, is there?”

She looked at her charge. “What if you're recognized, Cricket? What then? You'll have to go back to the compound.”

Debby shrugged. “That could happen anytime, anyplace. But with my hair this way, and these glasses, why should it? Nobody will be looking for me there at the movies. Come on, Karen!”

I stood up. “You two rinse the dishes and stack them in the sink. I'll wash them when I get back.”

I walked up the driveway, ducked into the woods, and from behind a tree looked at Burt Phillips's car. It was right where it had been before. I walked farther through the woods and looked again. The back tire was still flat.

I crossed the road to the car. I tapped on the driver-side window.

Nothing.

I went around to the other side, got out my picks, and went to work on the door. When I got it open, I looked inside. Nobody home. Everything looked the same as it had when last I'd been there. Burt had not come back to his car.

I locked the door again and walked back down my driveway.

“The car is there, but Burt isn't,” I said to my make-believe cousins. “I don't see any reason why the two of you shouldn't go. Give the twins a call, and tell them you'll pick them up at their place.”

“Oh, good!” Debby J. clapped her hands and looked at Karen. “Please, Karen! Be a good sister!”

“I'm not your sister,” said Karen, “I'm your bodyguard.”

Debby J. came over and very ceremoniously gave her a hug and a kiss. “You're a sister to me, Karen, dear. A nice, sweet big sister who wants her little sister, Deborah, to have a fun night at the movies, just like all the other girls are doing.”

“I think you have a future in politics yourself,” said Karen, giving in. “All right, all right, let's call the twins.”

“Yes!” Debby pumped a fist into the air and headed for the phone.

After Debby made her call and headed for the bathroom to ready herself for her big night out, Karen phoned Walt Pomerlieu to tell him of the evening's plans. Walt was back on the job.

“He's not too happy,” she said when she hung up. “But he says it's okay. He has two sons about Cricket's age, you know, so he knows how kids that age feel about things. If I know Walt, he'll have somebody or -bodies there at the theater, just in case. But Cricket doesn't
need to know that. He's going to call again late tonight to make sure Cricket's bedded down for the night.”

“You should practice calling her Debby,” I said, and gave directions to John Skye's farm. After Debby emerged from the bathroom, Karen went in. When she came out, the two of them left in Karen's nondescript car. I wondered if I should build a second bathroom. If Zee and I ever had any daughters, I'd need at least one more, that was for sure.

Through the early-evening air I could hear sirens from the direction of Edgartown. It was a common sound during the summer, and usually had to do with yet another moped or bicycle accident, or with a heart attack victim. Much of a police officer's work has nothing to do with crime.

I listened as the sirens came along the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road, then I went inside to get at the dishes. The sirens stopped somewhere not far to the north, and I thought that probably Karen and Debby had met the cruiser and ambulance coming out as they headed into town before taking West Tisbury Road to the farm.

As I washed the dishes, I thought about Burt Phillips. It seemed strange that he'd neither managed to get help nor even come back to his car. Burt hadn't seemed like the type to wait around in the woods or down at the Felix Neck buildings when he could be sipping whiskey in his car and listening to the radio and maybe, just maybe, getting an exclusive picture of the president's daughter that would earn him some good bucks.

When I had the dishes stacked in the drainer, I went out and climbed into the Land Cruiser. At the end of the driveway, I turned right and drove by Burt's still silent car, then took another right onto the long sandy road that leads to Felix Neck.

I didn't get far. There were police cruisers a couple of hundred yards in from the highway, and a uniformed Edgartown cop was waving me down. The cop was Janie Lewis. I got out.

“What's going on, Janie?”

“Some bird-watcher walked over there to get a better look at that osprey nest and found a body,” said Janie, gesturing with her thumb. She was trying to be cool, but was obviously pretty excited. “Looks like a homicide!”

That explained the sirens.

“Homicide?” Homicides occur on Martha's Vineyard, but they're not common.

“Yeah! Guy got his neck broken. He's out there in the woods with a broken neck. Can you imagine that?”

“Who is it?”

“Nobody's told me. Male. Forty, maybe fifty. That's all I know.”

I had a sudden certainty. “There's a chance I might know the guy,” I said. “Can I go back there?”

Janie hesitated. She wasn't sure. I saw Tony D'Agostine come through the trees and pointed him out to Janie. She waved him over.

“J.W. here says he may know the guy.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Tony. “Come on back and take a look.”

We walked back through the woods until we came to the body. I looked down at Burt Phillips. His head was at an odd angle, and his eyes were wide open. I told Tony who he was and that the car out on the road belonged to him.

“Okay,” said Tony. “That squares with the ID we found on him. How do you know him? He's not a local guy.”

I decided I'd walk carefully through these waters. “I met him up at his car,” I said. “He had a flat and
decided to come down here to phone for somebody to fix it.”

Tony looked down at the body. “How come he didn't go down to your place? That's a lot closer.”

“I offered, but he said he'd come here.”

“Looks like he made the wrong choice,” said Tony. “We'll want a statement from you. What are you doing down here, anyway?”

“His car's still out there. When I was driving by just now I saw it and wondered what had become of him, so I thought I'd come down and maybe catch up with him. I never figured anything like this.” I looked around. “How do you read what happened here?”

“Beats me,” said Tony. “Our detectives are waiting for the medical examiner, and the state cops are on their way. Right now we're just keeping the site clean for them. You say this guy came down this way to make a phone call?”

“That's what he said.”

Tony shook his head. “He didn't break his neck falling down. He had help. What did he do for a living? You know?”

“I think he worked for a newspaper, or something like that.”

“Reporter?”

“I don't know. I only talked with him for a minute.”

I looked again at poor Burt. No more stakeouts for him. No more cold pizza and cold coffee, no more bourbon by the pint, no more pictures snapped with his telephoto lens, no more bylines in the
National Planet.
No more Burt. I felt a little sick.

“I'll come down to the station and leave a statement,” I said, and walked away, trying to think.

At home again, I phoned Walt Pomerlieu. I seemed to
be talking to Pomerlieu a lot these days. He came on the line, and I told him the latest news about Burt Phillips and what I'd told Tony D'Agostine. Then I said, “I don't know if the Edgartown police know about cousin Debby staying here with us, so I didn't mention that angle. But I've got to give them a statement about what I know, and when I do I may have to tell them. It would make things simpler for me if you told them first.”

“The chief knows,” said Pomerlieu. “I don't know which of his people he told. I'll get out to that scene myself right now. I have to presume there's a tie-in between this killing and your houseguest.”

“Well,” I said, “for what it's worth, I got the impression that Burt didn't even know what Felix Neck was, so I don't think he went down there to meet somebody. I'd guess that whoever he met was somebody he didn't expect to meet. Maybe somebody he knew or maybe somebody else who didn't want to be seen and ID'd.”

“Like who?”

“That's the question. Burt was a guy who wrote stories and took pictures for the
National Planet,
and probably some other no-brain sheets like that. I'd guess he'd been at it quite a while. So maybe it was somebody he'd run into before on one of his surveillance jobs. He worked in sleazeland, and some of the people who live there aren't sweet customers.”

“We'll have to look into his background. Right now, I've got to go.” He rang off, and the phone buzzed like a bee.

The sky was darkening. I thought of Debby J. and Karen up in Oak Bluffs, and was glad they were there, enjoying themselves. They'd know of the murder soon enough.

I went up onto the balcony and looked northwest toward the site of Burt's last breath. The oak forest
swayed in the late-evening wind, but its sighs told me no secrets of life and death.

I could just see the pole that held the osprey's nest that had attracted the attention of the birder who had found Burt's body. It wasn't much more than a quarter of a mile from my house, as the crow flies.

I went down and got some spools of dark thread. I walked a hundred feet up the driveway, tied one end of the thread to a tree, about three feet off the ground, then circumnavigated the house, about fifty yards out, tying the thread to trees and scrub oak until I was back at the driveway again. Maybe a deer would break the thread, but not much else than a human would. Smaller creatures would pass under it. I'd check the parameter in the morning.

Then, in the very last of the daylight, I walked north-west through my woods until I came more or less to the end of my property. There was no fence there, but I knew I was about to cross over onto Felix Neck land. Not far away was the Christmas tree I'd scouted last year and would cut in December.

Through the trees ahead and to my left I could see lights, where the police were still at the scene of Burt Phillips's death. To my right, outlined against the sky, was the pole holding the osprey's nest. I looked at my watch. It had taken me about ten minutes to reach this spot, and I was familiar with my woods. Someone who didn't know them would need more time to make the trip. I wondered how much.

I turned and walked back to the house through the gathering darkness. I felt jumpy, and thought I heard strange noises under the trees. Ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. They made me shiver.

Karen and Debby got home a little after ten, nattering at each other just like real sisters. When they came through the door, my hands were working on picking a new lock, having mastered the old one, and I was playing the Three Tenors' first tape, which is a doozy, and which normally makes me think that if I could be Pavarotti singing “Nessun Dorma” just once, I could die content, knowing that I had done a great thing. But tonight my mind was full of Burt Phillips, and not even the combined tenors could push him aside.

“No,” Karen was saying. “We're supposed to spend the night right here.”

“But I don't see why we can't stay there,” said Debby. “They invited us. Their parents said it was okay. It would be fun! Why can't we?”

Karen took a deep breath. “Because we can't.” She looked at me for help.

“What's going on?” I asked.

Karen opened her mouth, but Debby spoke first, her words coming fast as bullets. “Jill and Jen have invited us to spend the night at their house, and their folks said it would be okay. It'll be fun, and I want to go. Say it's okay!”

“Well . . . ,” I said.

“It's not okay,” said Karen. “I can't take the chance.”

“Well . . . ,” I said.

“I'm going to call Mom,” said Debby. “If she says it's okay, it's okay, isn't it?”

“Well . . . ,” I said.

“I'm going to call her right now,” said Debby, and she went to the phone.

I looked at Karen's frowning face. “How were things in Oak Bluffs?”

Things in O.B. had been fine. No one in the ticket line had guessed that the girl with the big glasses was the daughter of the president of the United States, and the movie had been a summer comedy with some good laughs. Afterward, they'd all had ice cream up on Circuit Avenue.

For Debby, it had been a blast, and even nay-saying Karen had had a good time. Except for this notion of overnighting with the twins at the Skyes' house. John and Mattie Skye had said it would be fine, but Karen had never imagined that Debby would get so stuck on the idea.

“And tomorrow,” Debby was saying into the phone, “Jeff is taking all of us clamming. We're going to have a clambake on Sunday! Maybe you can come!”

I felt my eyes widen. The president having clams at our house? The parking logistics alone made that unlikely. During his first trip to the island I had once caught a glimpse of the caravan taking the great man to play golf at Farm Neck, and I doubted if we could fit all of the necessary cars into our yard. There had been at least a dozen vehicles in that parade: a police car in front, another in back, and, in between, cars full of, I supposed, Secret Service agents, a car full of media types, complete with TV and movie gear, the big armored brown Suburban that presumably bore the golfer himself, more cars full of agents or other personnel,
an ambulance, and a couple more cars containing other people of some kind or other. I didn't have room to park such a convoy.