Murder at a Vineyard Mansion (15 page)

Passions ran high among the Bradfords, but since Sarah apparently knew nothing of her daughter's love affair with Harold, her general hatred of men seemed an unlikely motive for his murder. Ethan, on the other hand, still seemed a possible suspect, since he did know and disapproved of Harold's liaison with his window-smashing sister.

It was far from impossible that out of love for Cheryl he had coshed Harold to save her from one of the island's most notorious womanizers. People have killed for less reason.

I drove down to the Edgartown Police Station on Pease's Point Way and was told by Kit Goulart, who was tending the desk, that the Chief was in but that he was buried in both routine paperwork and the additional paperwork having to do with the still unsolved murders on Chappaquiddick.

“No problem,” I said. “He loves me like a son and will be hurt if I don't drop in to say hello.”

“And I'll be fired if you barge in on him, and I'll whack you with my nightstick if you get me fired, so stand right there while I tell him you're here.”

Kit and her husband, Joe, both stood over six feet tall and weighed in at 250 or more. You wouldn't want Kit whacking you with her nightstick, if indeed she actually had one. I hadn't seen a nightstick for years, but I wisely took no chances.

“Tell him I've been nosing around in police business,” I said as she picked up a phone. “That should get a rise out of him.”

“I can imagine,” said Kit. She spoke into the phone then put it down and waved toward the Chief's closed office door. “Your father awaits you.”

The Chief's desk was piled with paper. As I shut his door behind me he voiced an oft-heard complaint. “Ever since we got computers I've had more paper to deal with. I thought computers were supposed to make paper obsolete.”

“You'll be interested to learn that I am now a computer owner myself,” I said. “So far I've barely learned how to turn it on and off, but Zee and the kids can make it dance and play games.”

“Kids can make them do that without even reading a book,” he said. “My grandchildren can probably learn how to build atomic bombs if they want to. Say, maybe I should hire them to come down here and computerize this mess on my desk.”

“Nepotism is not unknown in Edgartown,” I said, “so why not? They can make a couple bucks and you can go fishing.”

He put his hands behind his neck and yawned. “Kit tells me that you've been snooping. No surprise there. What have you learned that I don't already know?”

“Probably nothing, but I'll tell all if you'll do the same.”

“Well, I won't, but if you know something I should know you'd better cough it up so I won't be obliged to throw you in jail for some reason or other.”

“Being in jail is a pretty good deal these days,” I said. “Duane Miller turns out the best meals on the island and I can crawl out a window after supper, spend the night with Zee, and be back in time for breakfast.”

“The window has bars on it now, I'm told. Did you hear about the counterfeit bills they found on Mickey Gomes when they collected him in Oak Bluffs?”

“I didn't think Mickey was bright enough to be a counterfeiter.”

“And you'd be right. Turns out he got them from a fellow inmate. The story is that while he was outside the walls, Mickey bought some of those prepaid telephone cards for his cellmates and one of them paid him off with queer bills.”

“Tsk. So it's true about there being no honor among thieves.”

“And guess where the guy got the bills: he made them himself on the jail's computer. No wonder us poor cops are the laughingstock of half the island. If I wasn't wearing the uniform I'd be laughing myself.”

“I take it that this means that when you toss me in jail I won't have a computer to play with in my idle hours.”

“You got it. No escape window and no computer. Hard times have come to the County of Dukes County Jail.”

“Has any inmate sued yet?”

“No, but it's bound to come. Inhumane treatment, police brutality, and all that. They'll probably win their case, too, what with the times being what they are. Now, what do you want? You never come smiling around unless you want something.”

“Like I said, I had an info trade in mind. Just to show I'm playing an honest game I'll start by telling you what I know. Then you can do the same.”

“I'm promising nothing but I want everything.”

“And that's what you'll get,” I lied, and told him almost everything I'd heard or seen in my investigation. Among other things, I didn't burden him with the knowledge that Cheryl Bradford was a window breaker.

“So she and Hobbes were lovers, eh? She didn't tell us that when we interviewed her.”

“Was her mother there with her?”

“Yes. So what?”

I told him what Cheryl had told me about hiding the relationship from Sarah. I said, “If you talk with Cheryl privately she'll probably tell you the truth.”

He had been a cop a long time and had seen and heard a lot. Like most cops he had considerable sympathy for most people in trouble and an understanding of their fears and weaknesses.

“I'll ask her to come and see me. We can have a private talk. You don't think she killed him?”

I shrugged. “No, but I've been fooled before.”

“What about Hobbes's other women? What about their husbands and boyfriends?”

“The only men I've talked to are John Lupien and Ethan Bradford. I haven't scratched them off my list, but I can't link Lupien to Harold Hobbes and I can't link Ethan to Ollie.”

“The ME says Mattes and Hobbes were killed with similar weapons by similar assailants. A club or maybe a piece of pipe swung left to right by somebody about middle height. How tall are Lupien and Bradford, would you guess?”

“Both about six feet, I'd say.”

“Too tall, according to the ME. We're looking for somebody built lower to the ground. Another thing: Ollie had a fractured skull but he may have still been alive before he got pitched off the cliff. He was only hit once.”

“How about Harold?”

“Oh, Harold was very dead before the killer was through with him. Mashed his skull pretty good. Blood all over the place. Harold was a pretty big man, but he was hit first from behind and was probably unconscious when he got pounded some more. What do you make of that?”

“What you make of it, I imagine. The killer either wasn't as mad at Ollie as he was at Harold, or he kept pounding Harold because there wasn't any cliff to toss him off of.”

“What do you think of the theory that the killer didn't mean to kill Ollie and tried to make his death look like an accident?”

“I can see that, but whoever killed Harold didn't try to make it look like an accident.”

The Chief nodded, then opened a drawer in his desk and brought out an ancient briar. He stuck it in his mouth and chewed on the stem. I eyed the pipe enviously. If I'm ever diagnosed as having an incurable disease I'm going to stoke up again.

“No,” said the Chief, “Harold was no accident. The killer wanted him dead. Probably wanted to get it over fast, too, so he could get gone before Maud came home. Which raises another question.”

“How he knew Maud would be away from home?”

“Yes. Of course he might not have known. He might have been willing to kill Maud, too, if she'd been at the house. It's possible that Harold got himself killed just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe Ollie got killed for the same reason.”

“The idea of these two guys being killed almost by accident is a little hard for me to swallow,” I said. “You come up with the murder weapon?”

“No. If you find a bloody club or a bloody piece of two- or three-inch lead pipe I want you to tell me right away.”

“You'll be the first to know. You get anything useful out of Maud Mayhew? Harold's enemy list or his hate mail or anything like that?”

“She didn't have any illusions about him even though he was her son. But she was no help when it came to naming anyone who hated him enough to beat him to death. Whoever did it was either a very professional killer or a very angry amateur. There wasn't much left of Harold's skull.”

“A professional hit, you think?”

He shook his head. “He wasn't in debt, he wasn't a gambler, he didn't do drugs. We can't come up with any reason a hit man would whack him. I think it was a private matter and that the killer is right here on the island. We're out asking questions and talking to people who might know something, but so far nothing.”

And when the police finished talking to everyone, they would start from the beginning and talk to them all again, looking for a break, for a detail someone had neglected to give them before, for a line on someone who had motive and opportunity and a willingness to beat Harold Hobbes's skull into pieces.

They might never find the killer, but murder cases are never closed until someone is convicted of the crime. As far as I knew, the Jack the Ripper case was still open, and this case wouldn't close either, until the killer was nailed, whether or not the Chief and I lived to see it ended in court.

I sat there in the Chief's office, thinking about everything I'd been told, wondering how much of it, if any, consisted of lies and how much of truth, how much meant something and how much meant nothing.

I was looking at a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. It was a picture of Martha's Vineyard covered by a spiderweb. Little people, dead and alive, were tangled in the web and linked by its strands one to another. Here and there a missing piece prevented me from seeing a connection. I could see two bodies and a number of living women and men whose names or faces I recognized. In the center of the web was a spider linked unmistakably to the two bodies, but whose human face was on a missing piece.

I searched my memory for those missing pieces, but I couldn't find them.

“This was supposed to be a trade,” I said. “I tell you what I know and you tell me what you know.”

“In your dreams,” said the Chief. “All right, here's something for you: Harold Hobbes had a vasectomy not long before he died. What do you make of that?”

I tried to find a use for that information but failed.

“You have a pained expression,” said the Chief. “Tell you what: you leave this murder business to us professionals and you concentrate on catching the Silencer. That way you'll be out of my hair, and, who knows, maybe we'll both get lucky.”

“Oh, no, you don't,” I said, getting up and heading for the door. “The Silencer is your problem, not mine. If I find out who he is and turn him in, I'll have everybody in the Chamber Music Society and the community chorus on my neck because they like what he's doing. No, you chase him if you must, but leave me out of it. I'm on his side.”

“Sure, you are,” said the Chief, chomping on his pipe stem. “But will you still feel that way when he decides he doesn't like Beethoven either and melts your
Missa Solemnis
?”

Melt my
Missa Solemnis
?! Maybe the Silencer really was a danger to Western civilization. Maybe I really should stop him while he still had good taste in music.

First, though, I wanted to talk again with Maud Mayhew.

I got several chapters of my car book read as I waited in the ferry line to Chappaquiddick and willed another pox upon the Fish and Wildlife people. That week the book was
Prehistoric and Roman Britain,
which had a lot of good pictures.

Maud Mayhew's pickup was parked in front of her house. The place had a vacant feel about it, as though no one had lived there for a while, and I wondered if Maud had gone away.

But she had not. When she answered my knock, though, I saw in her lightless eyes that the vitality that usually animated her was missing, and I realized that it was the lack of this life force that gave the farm its abandoned air. Maud's body was there but her son's death had made it an almost empty shell.

“Come in,” she said in an emotionless voice, and she turned and led me into the house. Although the rooms were clean and neat there was no sign of human life in them, no feeling of habitation other than by ghosts.

I wondered if Harold's death was going to kill his mother, if his murderer would be hers as well; or if, as women have done through the ages when their men and children die, she would rally and go on living, tougher and stronger than most men would be if bereft of wife and children.

She waved me to a chair and said, “Would you like some tea?”

“If you're having some.”

She nodded and went to the kitchen. While she was gone I looked around the room. There was no dust on the floor and furniture, but I felt like there was. I could feel white sheets covering chairs and sofas.

Maud came back and poured tea into two cups. She sat and looked at me, saying nothing. It had been a week since Harold's murder.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I'm tired.”

“Are you getting any sleep?”

She shrugged.

“Your doctor can probably give you something that will help you sleep.”

“I don't like pills. Never did.”

“Do you have a friend who might come and stay with you for a while?”

Another shrug. “I'd be bad company.”

“I want to ask you some questions. I'll come back later if you're too tired.”

“I'll be just as tired later, so ask them. They won't make any difference anyhow.” Her voice was small and dull.

“All right. Was your second husband related to Alice Hobbes?”

A small nod. “Ben was her brother.”

“Were you all friends before you married Ben? You and Ben and Alice?”

She nodded again. “Oh, yes. There were several of us who did things together. Riding, tennis, golf, bridge, sailing, softball. Parties. We palled around a lot.”

“You must have been newly divorced about that time.”

Her smile was crooked and fleeting. “Free and making the most of it. My first husband was a bore.”

“Were the Bradfords and Piersons part of the crowd?”

“Miles Bradford and Sarah Pierson were part of the crowd until they got married and started having children. After that, Sarah dropped out of the circle.”

“But not Miles?”

“No,” she said, “not Miles. Miles liked to party and he was good at it.”

“He had a bad heart.”

“It didn't slow him down.”

“It killed him.”

Her voice changed tone, losing something of its listlessness. “Yes.”

“In Alice Hobbes's bed, I'm told. That must have had an effect on the social swirl.”

Her tired eyes studied me. “It ended it. Alice married Pete Mattes. Pete had been after her for years, but he wasn't one of us, and she fended him off until Miles died and she found out she was pregnant. Then she married Pete in a hurry. It was a smart move. They were happy and Pete treated her baby like his own.”

I had finally arrived at my true interest. “And you married Ben Hobbes.”

She sipped her tea. “Yes.”

“And Harold was born a few months later. Less than nine, I think.”

“I see that you've been looking at the marriage and birth records.”

“No, I thought I should talk to you first.”

The wrinkled hand that held her teacup was steady as stone. “Go on, then. Talk. Nothing makes any difference now.”

“It might,” I said. “I think that Ben was already wooing you when you discovered that you, like Alice Hobbes, was carrying one of Miles Bradford's children. You accepted Ben's latest proposal, got married, and gave a legal name to Harold.”

She drank more tea. “That's about it. Harold had a name and I had another husband I didn't want. I lived with him, though, until he finally drank himself to death. He was a weakling like a lot of men.”

“Did he know Harold wasn't his son?”

“He should have suspected. Every woman in our crowd must have known, but men can be blind. Sarah Bradford hasn't spoken to me since, but Ben never mentioned the possibility. When he died I told Harold the truth. I didn't want him thinking that his father was nothing but a sentimental drunk.”

I had been seeing through a glass darkly, but now I knew in part. “How did he take the news?” I asked.

“He grew up to be a drunk and a weakling himself. When I married again he began to hurt me with his tongue. When we got divorced, it got worse. What put you onto this ancient history?”

“I saw an old photo of Miles Bradford. It reminded me of someone but it took a while for me to realize that Harold was that person. They were both tall, good-looking men.”

She put the cup in its saucer on the low table between us. “And both of them could be charming and both were womanizers. Like father, like son. But what difference does it make now? My son is dead.”

“It might have something to do with his murder and with Ollie Mattes's death. It's another link between the two men. They were half brothers. Did Ollie know that?”

“I've never told anyone but Harold who his real father was.”

“Maybe Harold told Ollie.”

“I doubt it. Ollie Mattes was a leech. He'd have come to me looking for money if he'd known he was related to my son.”

“I think you're probably right,” I said, remembering what Helga Mattes had told me: that Ollie didn't know Harold and that he had prevailed upon his wife, Helga, to use her cousin's influence to get him the job as watchman at the Pierson house.

She saw something in my face. “Do you think that's significant?”

“I'm not sure.” I put my cup beside hers and stood. “I don't think it's good for you to be staying here in the house by yourself. Why don't you get outside? I imagine your garden needs weeding and your animals will need some attention.”

She rose. “I'm not suicidal.”

“I'm not opposed to rational suicide,” I said, “but I don't like to see a useful life end. You own a farm that needs tending and you're not tending it.”

She sniffed. “Ten-cent psychology, J.W.”

“It's the only brand I handle. For you it's free.” I went toward the door. “I'll let you know if I learn anything useful.”

She followed me out onto the porch. It was a pleasantly warm day with thin white clouds moving slowly across a pale blue sky.

“It's a good day for gardening,” I said, and walked to the Land Cruiser.

She said nothing.

As I pulled away she was still standing in front of the door.

I drove down to the east end of Norton's Point Beach. There was a chain across the entrance to the ORV track we took when the beach was open. A sign advised me that piping plovers were fledging and that vehicles were prohibited.

Not all vehicles, apparently, for down the beach I could see one that probably belonged to the plover police.

During the year before the beach was first closed, a single plover chick had been found run over by an ORV driven, it was guessed but never proved, by some plover-indifferent fisherman. This was enough evidence for the Fish and Wildlife people to close the beach on the grounds that ORVs were dangerous to plovers. The first year it was closed, another plover chick had been run over by an ORV, this time one definitely driven by a plover protector. The beach stayed closed. The net benefit for plovers: zero.

The plover police vehicle was coming toward me so I waited until it arrived. The driver was a young woman with sun-bleached hair and a good tan. I wondered but didn't ask if she'd squished any plover chicks lately. Instead I smiled my imitation Burt Lancaster smile, told her I was investigating the Chappy murders, and asked if she had noticed any of several vehicles using the beach just before it had closed. I described the vehicles.

“Well, I know that blue Cherokee that Harold Hobbes drove,” she said, “but I don't remember the others. A lot of SUVs use this beach.”

“Not for most of the summer these days,” I said. “Did Harold go back and forth often?”

“Almost every day just before we closed the beach. It was terrible when he got killed. Do they know who did it?”

“Not yet. If you'd noticed these other ORVs it might have narrowed things down a little.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I'm a biologist, not a police officer. What have those vehicles got to do with anything?”

“The killer either lives on Chappy or got over there somehow, which means he either drove there on this beach or took the On Time. My guess is that he used the beach so no one would know he came and went. I'd hoped you might have seen his SUV.”

She was in a devil's advocate mood. “Maybe he had his own boat.”

“He could have gotten to Ron Pierson's house by boat, but he'd have had a long walk to get to Maud Mayhew's farm and back again.”

“Maybe there were two killers.”

“Are you left-handed?”

“No. Why?”

“Because that rules you out as a suspect. Whoever killed Ollie Mattes and Harold Hobbes was a southpaw about your height. The odds are long that there weren't two killers with that same description.”

“Why'd he do it? Does anybody know?”

“The killer does.”

It was a warm day, but the young woman shivered. Just to be ornery I lost my smile and studied her and said, “Are you sure you're not left-handed?”

She was very sure.