Third Strike (11 page)

“We're going to have to go over the whole thing again,” he said. “Okay?”

“How did Larry die?”

“I'm the one who's going to ask the questions,” he said, not unkindly. “If you don't mind.”

“I mean,” I said, “was he murdered, or what?”

He narrowed his eyes at me for a minute, then nodded. “One shot in the back of the head. Small caliber. No exit wound.”

“Executed,” I said.

He shrugged. “Shot dead, for sure. Now you talk to me.”

So I told Dom Agganis what I'd just told Olive Otero twice, and he took notes in a notebook that looked identical to the one Olive used. When I finished, he made me go over it again, asking his own questions, a few of which were ones that Olive hadn't asked. He kept circling back to the story that Larry had told me about the boat with its lights off unloading wooden crates in Menemsha Pond and the men with Uzis Larry thought he'd seen.

All I could do was repeat what Larry had told to me. I told Agganis that I didn't think Larry was entirely trustworthy, that he was unstable and paranoid and depressed, had been for years, and normally I would have assumed that he'd imagined, or exaggerated or distorted, all or parts of his story.

But now he had been murdered, and that lent his story a lot of instant credibility.

While I was talking to Dom Agganis, J.W. appeared. “How long you going to keep him?” he said to Agganis, jerking his head at me.

“A while. I don't know.”

“What about me?”

“We don't need you anymore right now.” He smiled. “Why don't you go get a shower.”

J.W. nodded. “I'm going to head back, then,” he said to me. “I've got places to go, people to see. You'll be at our house for dinner.”

He made it a statement, not a question or an invitation.

I looked at Agganis, and he nodded.

“Great,” I said to J.W. “I suspect by then a martini would come in handy.”

“Be gentle with him,” J.W. said to Agganis. Then he turned and trudged up the hill to where his Land Cruiser was parked.

By the time I'd finished talking with Agganis, I had given him about five versions of the previous twenty-four hours of my life.

Finally, he said, “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“We're not done,” he said. “But okay for now.”

“You're not done?”

“No. You'll need to be available.”

“Available. How long?”

He shrugged. “Until we get a handle on this case.”

“I plan to go back to America tomorrow,” I said. “I've got a law practice to run.”

“I'll write you an excuse,” he said. “Unless something miraculous happens, you won't be leaving the island tomorrow, even if you did manage to find a ride back to the mainland.”

I looked at him. “You making a suspect out of me?”

He shook his head. “You know how it works, Mr. Coyne.”

“Yeah, yeah. Everybody's a suspect.”

“I assume you have an interest in this case,” he said.

“Of course I do.”

“Then don't argue with me.”

I
don't often find dead bodies in pigpens, and I was glad when Dom Agganis and Olive Otero were through with me.

When I got to Larry Bucyck's house, I used his hand pump and a bucket to wash the worst of the mud off, glad that I was wearing summer shorts so that most of the muck was on my skin and easily removed. Still, I smelled like something other than a rose as I drove home.

There, before I collected a towel and headed for the outdoor shower, I found a note from Zee informing me that she and the kids had gone to the beach with a friend and her children, who were about the ages of Joshua and Diana. Smart Zee, lying on the beach while I was wading in a pigsty.

While I showered and got into cleaner clothes, I thought about poor Larry Bucyck, and then I thought about myself.

When I was a kid I'd heard of people seeing red, but I'd always thought it was just a manner of speaking, a way of saying you were angry. Then, one day when I was grown, when fear and fury and pain possessed me in some confrontation, that red film had fallen in front of my eyes and turned the whole world scarlet, and I had to be pulled off a man before I killed him. Afterward, I'd been so frightened by the experience that I'd promised never to become angry again.

But once or twice since then, in spite of my vow, the red curtain had fallen and I'd gone mad. The beast within me had broken free, and only luck had prevented me from committing homicide. When I thought about it, it seemed to me that the madness was caused by intense rage, that the rage was caused by fear, and that the fear was caused by pain or some other assault on what I held most dear. In this case, it had been Steve's roughhousing of Bonzo, followed by the pain of Steve's kick. It didn't seem to take much.

I wondered who Larry Bucyck had frightened so badly? Was his killer some monster who got off on killing? Or was his murder what the cops sometimes think of as a rational killing, one that is logical, given the morality of crime? A killing to prevent someone from talking, to protect a secret, to eliminate a rival, or to protect a loved one, or a territory, or a friend.

Dostoyevsky thought that there was little difference between murderers and the rest of us. In my case, I thought there was none at all. I didn't like it.

Clean and shiny on the outside, at least, I went out to the truck and felt the midday sun pour down on me. It made me feel better, if not good. Nature is never spent.

I drove to the hospital and went into the Emergency Room. Zee was at the beach, but nurse Terry Grace gave me the information I needed.

“Your man is back there resting,” she said, “with a cast on his leg. He took quite a tumble.”

“I'd like to see him.”

“He's sedated,” Terry said, “so let me take a peek and see how he's doing. His wife is on her way, and after she gets here we'll probably send him home. Ankles are pretty complicated, and he broke a couple of bones. They say he was dancing on a table and fell off. Well, he won't be doing any more dancing for a while, but I guess he'll be all right.”

“I'll wait,” I said, and sat down in a chair.

I was looking at the cartoons in a months-old
New Yorker
when Terry stuck her head around the corner of the waiting room and said, “You can see him now, J.W., but he may still float in and out of fuzziness.”

“Anybody with him?”

“No. But like I said, his wife is on her way.”

I followed her back to a bed surrounded by white curtains.

Steve's eyes widened when Terry said, “You've got a visitor.”

She went away, and I looked at the new cast on his leg, then put out a hand and touched it. I had the impression that he'd have pulled it back out of my reach if he'd been able to, but of course he wasn't. “What is it that you didn't want Bonzo to tell me?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“I'm sorry we got tangled up back there.”

“Not as sorry as I am.”

“Your wife is on her way,” I said. “They say you'll be okay.”

“Good,” he said. “I want out of here. I don't like hospitals. People die in them all the time.”

I gave the old saw a small smile. “What is it you didn't want Bonzo to tell me, Steve? It wasn't nothing. It was something.”

“I told you. It was nothing.”

Stubborn Steve.

“If I don't get it from you,” I said, “I'll be annoyed, but I'll get it from someone else.”

But he was obstinate. “I tell you, it was nothing. There wasn't anything he might tell. I was drunk. It was the beer talking.”

“You weren't drunk then and you're not drunk now.” His good ankle was under a sheet. I touched it lightly and he jerked his leg back.

“Lemme alone!”

I leaned over him. “You can tell me now or tell the police later. A man is dead. Maybe you know something about that. The cops will come and ask you questions, and then they'll ask some more, and then they'll start backtracking you. They'll find out things you never thought anybody could find out. You don't want the cops on your case, believe me.”

“Leave me alone, damn it.”

Although they'd given him some kind of painkiller, the memory of his hurt was fresh, and his stubbornness diminished before it.

“Last chance,” I said. “I'm losing my patience. You don't want that to happen. As I just said, if I don't get it from you now, I'll get it from somebody else, and you'll get the cops.”

“All right, all right,” he said. “No cops. I don't need no more cops in my life.”

Nobody does. I leaned over him. “What did Bonzo see? What does he know?”

He wiped a hand across his lips. “You keep this to yourself, damn it.”

“I'll decide that.” I looked at him with narrow eyes. Tough guy.

“I got a wife and kids,” he whined. “I don't want nothing happening to them.”

“I'll keep that in mind. You keep in mind that you already have a broken ankle and won't be working for a while, strike or no strike. You can try for two, if you want.”

“Christ,” he whined, “they'll do more than break my leg if they feel like it!”

“Who?”

“I don't know! I don't know! I can't tell you what I don't know.”

“Tell me what you do know. What Bonzo knows.”

It came out hard and slow. “He seen me talking with Harry.”

“So what? Who's Harry?”

“Harry Doyle. Works for Bob Mortison.”

“So?”

“So Mortison owns the
Neptune.
”

“So?”

“Mortison is hauling more cars and passengers back and forth to Woods Hole than almost anybody else. He's got the
Neptune
and he owns a couple of them barges, too. How's it gonna look to the guys in the union if I'm hanging around with a strike buster like Harry? They'll break my other goddamned leg!”

“Why were you talking to Harry?”

There was fear in his face. His eyes flicked toward the curtains I'd come through, and his voice got small. “I knew Harry over in New Bedford when we was kids, before he came here and started working for Mortison. He and me ran a little on the wild side and did some rough jobs over there before I wised up and got married and got into the union.”

He paused for a moment and shut his eyes. When he looked at me again, I saw pain in them. “Harry came looking for me last week, found me down on the docks, and wanted me to do a job with him. Said he knew the strike was costing me money, but he had some for me if I gave him a hand. I asked him what the job was, and he got cozy. I asked him if it's legit work, and he said it wouldn't be any skin off my nose. Then I look up and there's this idiot Bonzo staring right at me, and he's with Ed Alvarez. The dummy's got a pizza box in his hands. It's noon, see, and they've got lunch from Giordano's. Gonna eat out in the sunshine, I guess. Bonzo gives us that dizzy look of his and says, ‘Hi, you guys. Whatcha talking about?' We tell them to fuck off, and they do, but it's too late. They seen us talking.”

“So what?” I was getting my lines memorized.

“So this. Once when we was kids in New Bedford, Harry and me got hired to do some damage to some boats. Nothing big, and we never got caught, but I don't do that stuff anymore, and I got to thinking that Harry had something like that in mind, so I told him thanks but no thanks, I didn't want his job. Then, when the
Trident
blows up, I figure I was right.”

“You think that Harry Doyle blew up the
Trident
?”

He yawned but tried to keep focused. “I don't know for sure, and I can't prove nothing, but I wouldn't be surprised. The thing is, Alvarez knew who Harry works for and what kind of guys him and his boss are, and he found me later and said he didn't think it was a good idea for me to hang around with Harry because Bob Mortison would love it if the strike never got settled, and if anything bad happened, I might be nailed for it. Moralistic prick. I told him to go fuck himself, but he said he was gonna keep an eye on Harry to make sure that I didn't get mixed up with him and that there wasn't going to be any dirty work that would make the union look bad.”

The painkillers seemed to be working on him. His eyes were getting heavy, and his voice was woolly.

I shook his shoulder as his consciousness slid away. “Are you saying that Harry Doyle might have been with Alvarez when the
Trident
blew up, and that Bob Mortison might have been behind it?”

But Steve only mumbled something and sank deeper into his bed. I'd get no more from him, and I couldn't be sure that I'd gotten anything at all except suspicions.

As I left, a woman about Steve's age was coming toward the bed. She had a worried face. Terry Grace was with her.

“I think he's asleep,” I said to Terry, and walked on to the front desk, where I borrowed their phone book. There were several Doyles listed, but only one Harold. There was also one Mortison, Robert.

If I was a spy, I don't think I'd hide out with an alias and become an expert on secret codes and sneak around taking pictures and trying to get people to tell me secrets. I'd get a room with a refrigerator full of beer, a telephone, and a computer. I'd get a subscription to the
New York Times
or maybe the
Boston Globe
and do all my intelligence collecting from my easy chair.

But I'm not a spy, so I wrote down the phone numbers and addresses, offered thanks for the use of the phone book, and went out to my truck.

Doyle lived in Vineyard Haven, and Mortison lived in Edgartown. Vineyard Haven was closest, so I drove to Doyle's place, which turned out to be a second-story apartment in a building on one of the little dirt roads out near the Misty Meadows golf course. The first floor of the building was apparently a storage area for somebody who did heating and air conditioning, or so it seemed to me when I peeked through a cobwebby window beside a padlocked double door. Nobody was there to tell me about the renter upstairs.

I went upstairs and knocked, then peeked through a smudgy door window. Nobody was there, either. Harry Doyle was probably at work. I wiggled the doorknob. Locked.

Zero for one.

I got back in the truck and drove to Edgartown.

Bob Mortison lived higher off the hog than did Harry Doyle. Not surprising, since he owned a fishing boat and barges. His house was one of the big ones down on Slough Cove Road in Katama, across the way from the farm and not too far from Slough Cove itself, where my father used to take me oystering on Thanksgiving when I was a kid and we went down to spend a chilly holiday in our old fishing camp. Mortison's house wasn't one of the mansions that were being built all over the Vineyard, but it was big enough.

There was a two-car garage beside the house and a forest green Mercedes sedan parked in front of it. I parked on the far side of the car and walked to the house along a brick walk lined with flowers. The lawn was neatly mowed and trimmed. The door knocker was a brass dolphin. I used him or her to rap on the door.

After a bit, a woman opened the door and smiled at me. “Yes?” Behind her, somewhere, soap opera voices were speaking of lovers who couldn't be trusted.

She was fifty or so and was softening around the edges. A week at a decent spa would melt off those extra inches, probably. She was wearing comfortable summer clothes—loose pastel purple knee-length shorts and a pastel blue blouse decorated with a pastel pink flower growing on a pastel green stem with pastel green leaves. Very Lilly Pulitzer.

“My name is Jackson,” I said, returning the woman's smile. “Are you Mrs. Mortison?”

“Yes, I am.” She seemed to have one ear dedicated to me and the other to her television drama.

Over her shoulder I could see a living room featuring overstuffed furniture, small tables with doilies on them, and a fireplace whose mantel was adorned with framed photographs of healthy people who looked a lot alike. The most prominent of these pictures featured a broad-faced man standing at the stern of a large fishing boat with the name
Neptune
scrolled across the transom. Her husband, Captain Robert Mortison, I presumed. Almost as large was a photo of the same man with his arm around the shoulders of a younger man with similar features. The men were grinning, and in the background was a palm tree bending over a jungle shack of some sort. Dad and son on a Caribbean holiday?