Death on a Vineyard Beach (8 page)

Marcus laughed, then gestured toward the veranda railing. “What are you looking at?”

Decker hesitated, looking at Zee and me.

“It's all right,” said Marcus. “As you know, Mr. Jackson saved my life. You can speak freely.”

Decker nodded reluctantly. “There's a man and a woman down at the pond, the other side of the blueberry bushes and cranberry bog. The guy's got a floppy summer hat that makes his face hard to see, even with the binoculars. They have backpacks, and we've seen them take out books, water bottles, and sandwiches. They have field glasses and a camera with a telephoto lens like this one, mounted on a tripod. They act like they're looking at the birds in the pond and along its shore. They jot notes on clipboards and look at the books they get out of their packs.”

“Birders,” said Angela.

“You know, Grandma,” said Vinnie, “I've been thinking of getting myself one of them bird books. There are a lot of birds around here, and I don't know one from another.”

“You should do that, Vincent,” said Angela. “It would give you a great deal of pleasure.”

“I don't know that they're birders,” said Decker. “They look up this way now and then, instead of at the birds on the pond. What are they doing now, Vinnie?”

Vinnie lifted his binoculars again and looked down the slope. “The woman just wrote something on the paper on her clipboard, and now she's looking through her field glasses at something I can't see.

“And now she's sort of turning, and now she's turned her glasses right up here toward the house. Jees, it looks like she's studying me just like I'm studying her. Weird.”

“Excuse me for a minute,” said Decker, turning away and lifting his telescope. “You better get a shot of her face,” he said to Vinnie. “You get a good look at the guy yet?”

“Not yet. That hat flops down and he's wearing shades. Hey! Look. He just took his hat off, and he's wiping his brow. I'll get him now.” He put down the binoculars and went to the camera.

“Well, well,” said Decker, looking through his telescope while Vinnie snapped shots with the camera.

“I don't know how much detail we'll get at this distance,” said Vinnie.

“No matter,” said Decker, “I know who the guy is.”

“Who?” asked Marcus.

“Joe Begay,” said Decker. “That Navajo guy that's been nosing around. I should have known it would be him.”

“Those damned Indians!” Marcus paled under his tan, and drew a small box from his pocket. He took out a pill and put it under his tongue. Angie gave him a worried look.

I was pretty shocked myself. “Can I take a look?” I asked, and without waiting for a reply I picked up Vinnie's binoculars and looked down the long slope. It was Joe Begay, sure enough, but now a middle-aged Joe Begay instead of the young man I had known. The woman beside him was younger, and as bronzed as he was. While I watched, the couple packed away their gear and moved toward the beach parking lot.

Some small movement about halfway down the hillside caught my eye. I looked that way and saw birds fly out of
a bush and soar away. I looked some more, but saw nothing else. When I looked at the pond again, Joe Begay and the woman had walked out of sight.

I lowered the glasses. My past had become my present. More than twenty years had passed since Joe Begay and I had been blown up together in Vietnam. Now, after I'd almost forgotten him, he was back in my life. First at my wedding, and now here. I looked at Luciano Marcus and saw hatred in his face.

  
7
  

I turned and found Zee giving me an odd stare. I put the binoculars down, and walked back to her.

Luciano Marcus seemed to be recovering his emotional balance. He gestured at the camera. “Vincent, take this stuff away, but don't go too far. You'll be taking our guests home later in the evening.”

“Yes, boss.” Vinnie scowled, picked up the camera, telescope, and binoculars, and went away.

“Thomas, you stay and eat with us.” Marcus turned to Zee and me. “Thomas is part of the family. Another son to me.”

Angela's mouth tightened as he spoke.

“It would be my pleasure,” said Decker in his oddly formal fashion.

“Our own children come for visits, but they don't live here,” said Angela, moving away. “I just happen to have some pictures of the younger grandchildren, in the living room. Excuse me while I get them.”

“We just happen to have about several albums of pictures of the younger grandchildren,” said Luciano. “Our youngest and his family were here last week. When the kids come, Angie and me get to spoil the little ones while their parents escape to the beaches by themselves. Of course, when the babies act up, we shove them right back at their
parents and escape ourselves. It's the great advantage of being grandparents.”

“Oh, we do not,” said Angela, reappearing. “Don't listen to him. He's a total softy when it comes to the babies. He lets them get away with anything. Now let me show you these pictures. I just got them back from the developers. Did you ever see anything cuter?”

We looked at the pictures and agreed that we'd never seen anything cuter, then we all went and sat beside the pool. In the gathering night we sat and sipped a second round of drinks provided by Priscilla.

“Tell me about Joe Begay,” said Zee in an innocent voice.

Decker glanced at Marcus, who took a sip of his gin and tonic before replying.

“Mrs. Jackson, have you heard the saying that if you save someone's life you must care for him afterward?”

“I think that's some sort of oriental wisdom,” smiled Zee.

He smiled back at her. When Zee smiles at men, they almost always smile back. “Well, if it's true, then you and your husband are now responsible for my life.”

Zee laughed. “We're pretty busy just taking care of ourselves.”

“Of course you are. Still, my life is yours in the sense that I now exist because of you. That being the case, I should have no secrets from you.” A smaller, slightly ironic smile played across his face. “I'm not going to say that I will confide everything to you, but certainly I can tell you about Joe Begay. In fact, I want to do that.”

I glanced at Angela Marcus, and saw again the worried look that I'd seen earlier.

Marcus took another sip of his drink, seemingly to gather his thoughts. Then he spoke. “They say that Joe Begay is a Navajo Indian from out West some place. Anyway, now he's married to a Wampanoag woman who lives here in Gay Head. His wife is the daughter of a woman named Linda Vanderbeck. Linda Vanderbeck is one of those Indians who thinks that my cranberry bog belongs to the
Wampanoags and not to me. Something about some illegal land sale a long time ago. Or maybe it was a treaty of some kind. My lawyers can tell you more about it than I can.

“Anyway, this Linda Vanderbeck goes around making trouble for me any way she can, trying to get that cranberry bog, which, I can tell you right now, she's never going to get. And now that this Joe Begay is in town, she's got him helping her out.” He looked at Decker, then back at Zee and me. “We see him down there at the pond, don't we, Thomas? And all around the edges of my property here. And they say that he's down at the Historical Society in Edgartown, looking at records, or up here looking at records, or maybe even in Boston or Washington looking at records. All he does is snoop!”

“He hasn't broken any laws, yet,” said Decker. “But a couple of times he's tried to get up here to the house. Both times, we stopped him at the gate.”

“You mean, he tried to sneak up here?” asked Zee.

“Yes!” exclaimed Marcus.

“Now, Luciano,” said Angela in a soothing voice. “You know that's not quite true. He phoned first both times.”

“And I told him no both times, but then he came to the gate anyway, and climbed over and came on up the driveway, just like we'd invited him!”

Angela nodded. “But when Thomas met him and told him to leave, he did.”

“Only after an argument!”

“Not much of one,” said Decker. “I asked him to leave, and he left.”

“But he came back!”

“And left again.”

Marcus's face was red. He took a deep breath. “I know I get excited, but it makes me mad. All this stuff about my land. Who do these Wampanoags think they are, trying to take a man's land away from him?”

“Linda Vanderbeck says somebody took theirs away from them,” said Angela.

“Well, it wasn't me,” said her husband. He looked at me. “You know, when I think of what happened up in
Boston, I wonder if it had anything to do with this cranberry business.”

Thomas Decker didn't look surprised at this notion, but Angela did. She opened her mouth, then shut it again.

I put my glass on the table. “That wasn't Joe Begay up in Boston. I just saw Joe Begay through Vinnie's glasses. Begay is a big guy, and a grown-up. The kid up in Boston was only about five six or so.”

Decker raised a brow. “The kid could have been a hired gun.”

I thought about that. Were Wampanoag passions running so high that one of them would hire a killer to remove an obstacle standing between the tribe and the contested cranberry bog? I had no idea. On the other hand, since history began, and no doubt before that, people have regularly been killed over trifles—a casual word, a pair of shoes, a few pennies, an imagined slight. Or sometimes just for fun. 'Twas ever thus.

“I don't know much about hired guns,” I said. “The shooter up in Boston looked like one of those kids I read about in the
Globe:
hooded sweatshirt, baggy pants, floppy sneakers. The only difference was that he used a sawed-off Remington 12-gauge instead of a Nine, which seems to be the weapon of choice among teenage hoodlums these days.”

“What's a Nine?” asked Zee, looking at me. “I meant to ask you about that up in Boston.”

“You haven't been keeping up on the latest street slang,” I said. “A Nine is a nine-millimeter pistol. If you read your
Globe
carefully every morning, you'd know these things.”

“Some of us have to go to work in the morning, sweets. We don't have time to read the
Globe
from end to end. We only have time to do the crossword puzzles and read the sports page.”

Priscilla appeared and informed us that dinner was served, and we went inside.

The dining room had a cathedral ceiling and a table that could be extended to seat at least a dozen people. Tonight, however, the table was sized for five, and adorned with an
impressive amount of silverware, dishes, and wineglasses. We used all of them as we downed a many-coursed Mediterranean meal with a separate wine per course. Our host and hostess made small talk, and Zee and I, who normally concentrate on eating when face-to-face with fine food, did our best to reply in kind. When the coffee and dessert, a flan in the Spanish mode, were behind us, Marcus pushed back his chair.

“I allow myself one or two cigars a year. I smoked Cuban before Castro, but now I have them made in Florida. Tonight I'll have one, and I invite you to join me. Gentlemen, and you ladies, too, if the smell of cigars doesn't offend you, let us retire to the library.”

“I think I will pass on that offer,” said Angela. “Mrs. Jackson, please feel free to join the gentlemen.”

“My name is Zeolinda,” said Zee. “Most people call me Zee. While the men have their cigars, perhaps you and I can have more coffee on the veranda.”

“Excellent. You're Zee and I'm Angela. Gentlemen, please join us later.”

Decker and I followed Marcus.

I had given up pipe and cigarettes long ago, and had never been a cigar smoker, but that night I accepted one as I settled into a leather chair and looked at the room. There was an oriental carpet on the floor, a desk, and there were other comfortable leather-covered chairs such as mine, and good reading lights. The walls were lined with shelves of leather-bound books, and, unlike other libraries I have seen, this one looked as if it really was used.