Off Season (11 page)

Beverly was between songs when the extension phone in the shed rang. I turned down the tape player.

“Guess what,” said Manny Fonseca, excitement in his voice.

“What?”

“They just found a body up at Chug Lovell's place.”

You can be surprised and not surprised at the same time. I paused before asking. “Who was it?”

“Chug Lovell himself! Got an arrow right in the chest. Imagine that!”

I read the details in the
Martha's Vineyard Times
on Thursday, and in the
Vineyard Gazette
on Friday. Their stories gave pretty much the same information. Lawrence Lovell, age thirty-eight, had been found dead in the living room of his house on the Edgartown-West Tisbury road. An anonymous telephone call had informed the police of the body. Lovell's death was apparently the result of a wound caused by a hunting arrow that had entered and lodged in his chest. Near the body were a bow and similar hunting arrows, such as are used for large game, like deer. Because of the nature of the death, the state police had assumed responsibility for its investigation. The authorities were awaiting the medical examiner's report.

I noted that the
Gazette,
whose style sheet obliges its writers to use titles of address when referring to people, had not strayed from its policy but had consistently identified Chug as
Mister
Lovell. The
Gazette,
which devotes itself only to matters concerning the Vineyard, and is one of America's great newspapers, is probably the only entity that ever referred to Chug as
Mister.

For what it was worth, I also noted that Chug's body had been found on the last day of the black powder hunting season.

I wondered if Chug had any relatives to mourn him. None had been mentioned in the
Gazette
or the
Times.
I thought back to the last time I'd seen Chug, and remembered seeing a bow in the next room. And now Chug was dead of unnatural causes. Maybe from one of the arrows that presumably went with the bow
I'd seen. Life was an odd proposition. As the jazz man said, “One never knows, do one?”

When the Friday mail had arrived, I had been making kale soup and listening to Linda Ronstadt sing so heartbreakingly about how a woman could never trust a man that I had found myself wanting her to know that she could trust
me.
I could be true to Zee and Linda at the same time.

Why not? Linda obviously needed a man who was straight and true. A perfect description of me. Zee also needed that kind of guy. Me, again! I could be perfectly faithful to them both. And maybe to some other women as well. Emmy Lou Harris came immediately to mind. I could be true to Emmy Lou, too. I could be true to all of them at once. With one arm tied behind my back.

Or would being true to all of them just prove Linda's point: that men were no-good two-timers who were nothing but grief? I thought I might ask Zee's opinion. I would begin by explaining how difficult it was to be traditionally true when, as a rare example of a truly manly man, there were so many women in need of me. I would put forward the notion that maybe for special men like me a new definition of being true should be developed, one that let us be true to a lot of girls at once. I was sure she'd understand.

I had lifted the lid of the pot and inhaled the fragrance of the soup. Kale soup is a soup that is a meal. You boil a shinbone in water, then add a pound of cubed and braised stew beef and simmer that for an hour or two. Then you take out the bone and add onion soup mix (one of the really great packaged foods), chopped kale and a couple of chopped onions. You simmer everything until it's tender and then add some sliced linguica and cubed potatoes. When that
stuff is tender, you add kidney beans and chili powder and maybe some pesto, and whatever leftover cooked veggies or soup you have around. A bit of salt and pepper and
violá
! Anything you don't eat right away, you freeze for future reference. With kale soup in the freezer, you can withstand an atomic attack.

I decided to not ask Zee's opinion about a new definition of being true.

By four o'clock, everything was in the pot, and I had gone up my long sandy driveway to the mailbox on the highway. The
Gazette
and a number of green and red folders advertising Christmas sales made up most of the mail. The sun was very low and the air was chilly. I was glad to have the fire in my new stove waiting for me when I got back.

Christmas was coming, and the local merchants were again promoting the idea of a Vineyard Holiday. The streets of the island's villages were strung with lights and Christmas trees, and the stores, some of which had closed after Labor Day and then reopened for the holiday, were displaying miniature houses, toys, bright winter garb and other attractions to lure a tourist's wallet from his pocket. For several days there had been a suggestion of snow in the air, and people were feeling festive. I read my mail in front of the fire and sipped a Sam Adams out of a brass mug I'd found in a yard sale last summer.

I like the rituals of Christmas. It's my favorite pagan holiday. Every culture is glad when the long nights start to get shorter and the promise of a renewal of life is made once more, and every culture therefore has a happy midwinter celebration of some sort. Ours is Christmas, borrowed and modified by the Christians from those who preceded them. Since one set of renewal rites and symbols is as good as another, I play my tapes of carols, decorate a tree in my
living room and mail a package of presents to my sister and her family out near Santa Fe. I am even sometimes enticed into church by the promise of a good choir. It seemed an unfortunate time for Chug Lovell to have been shot by his own arrow, but then death takes no holidays.

I hadn't known Chug well enough to be more than slightly moved by his departure and relieved to learn that he had no close family. He had indeed shared his venison and a couple of laughs with me, but aside from that, I had seen little of him and was, probably like most people, more interested in the curious way he had died than in his death itself. To be shot by a hunting arrow in your own living room is an unusual way to go, to say the least, and I, again like most people, I imagined, was quick to wonder who done it, and why. Not that it made any difference to Chug, who was just as dead one way or another.

I was warmed by my fire and soothed by my beer. Old folk songs and seasonal myths turned in my brain. Had someone taken Chug for a swan? Had someone decided to make him a symbol of the old year and sacrificed him so some new god could start the cold world turning once again toward the light of life?

Chug was no role model or idol of the people, but who had disliked him enough to shoot him? And why use a bow and arrow? If bows and arrows were as efficient as guns, Robin Hood would still be in business, and Manny Fonseca's ancestors would have sent the Pilgrims packing.

All in all, I was glad it was a problem for the state police and not for me. Homicide was not in the spirit of the season.

I phoned Zee and invited her to a supper of kale soup.

“Tomorrow night. I'll bring the jack cheese and wine,” said goodly Zee, who was knowledgeable in the ways of kale soup and knew that a bit of grated jack cheese was the proper topping for your hot bowl.

“Not tonight?”

“My last day on the evening shift. Tomorrow morning I'm sleeping in, and by evening I'll be ready to boogie.”

“You could drop by here after work tonight and practice your boogie just so you'll be sure to have it right tomorrow.”

“I need some
sleep,
my testosteronic friend.”

“Testosteronic? Is that a real word?”

“It is now. Thanks for the invitation. I'll see you in twenty-four or so.”

I lifted the lid of the soup pot and inhaled. Ah! I cut some thick slices from a loaf of yesterday's homemade white bread, broke open another Sam Adams, grated a bit of cheddar and had a kale soup supper. Delish. Zee had a real treat in store.

The next afternoon, I was downtown looking for a
Globe
after selling the day's scallop catch. The scallops were getting harder to find, and there were only a few boats still out there after them. Dave Mello and I had gone out early and done a lot of cold, hard work for our limits, and after we were in Dave, who was seventy-something, had told me he was going to take a Christmas break so he could spend some time with his grandchildren, who were coming from off island. I was cold enough to agree that he had a good idea and that I'd take a vacation, too.

“You don't have to quit on account of me,” said Dave. “Hell, you do all the muscle work as it is right now. You want to go out alone, just go ahead and do it. I'll probably start again after New Year's.”

“I'm not quitting on account of you,” I said. “I'm quitting on account of it's miserable out there on the water and I want a Christmas vacation.”

“Makes sense to me,” nodded Dave.

So to celebrate, I looked for a
Globe
to read in front of my fire while I waited for Zee to arrive. I found a last tattered copy of the paper at the Midway Market, and was climbing back into the old Land Cruiser when someone touched my arm. I turned and found myself looking down at Heather Manwaring. She was wearing her lawyer clothes: a tweed coat over a wool suit, a white blouse, medium-heeled shoes. Her long yellow hair was neatly combed and held in some sort of knot by pins I couldn't see. She looked very professional, but a little pale around the gills.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. “I've been calling you all day, but you've been out.”

“I've been scalloping.”

“Are you going home now?”

“Yes.”

“Can I follow you, so we can talk?”

“Sure. Are you all right?”

“No. Yes. My car's over there. I'll follow you.”

I hadn't seen Heather since that day when I'd discovered her in Chug Lovell's canoe. She'd been boozing and as giggly as a schoolgirl then, but she didn't look giggly today. She followed me out of town and down through the winter trees to my house. Inside, we stripped off our outer coats and I poured two vodkas, a straight one for me, one with orange juice for her. She drank hers right down while I stoked up the fire. I got her another.

She put down about half of that one. “I want you to do some work for me,” she said.

I felt a frown on my face. “I just quit working. I'm on vacation for the holiday season.”

“Good. Then you'll have some free time. I want you to find out who killed Chug Lovell.”

She'd gotten right to the point. No messing around with preliminaries for Heather. I hedged. “You're a lawyer. You know that the authorities are pretty good at their work.”

She leaned forward. “If the police find out about me and Chug, they're going to come asking me questions. They're going to think that I might have killed him.”

She tossed down the rest of her second drink.

“Did you?” I asked.

She held out her glass.

“Maybe I wanted to sometimes, but no, I didn't. One more?”

I finished my own drink and made each of us another one.

I pointed at the couch and she sat there while I sat across from her in the easy chair I had gotten from the Edgartown dump before the environmentalists seized control of it and made it harder to get into than Outer Mongolia.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because you know this island. You know everybody. You can talk to people and they won't get suspicious. If I hire a private detective from off island, people won't talk to him. Or they'll lie to my detective just like they'll lie to the police. At least some of them will.”

“The police expect people to lie to them,” I said. “People lie when they feel in danger or when they want to protect someone. Sometimes they lie just because they don't like having people ask them damn fool questions. It's normal. The police take that into account when they do investigations.”

“I know all that. But pretty soon they may be trying to ask me questions. I'll be a suspect.”

“Then they won't be surprised if you lie too.”

“Do you think I'd lie?”

“I don't know. It doesn't make any difference because I'm not judging you.”

She leaned forward. “I want someone working for me. And not just to prove that I didn't do it!” She made a fist with the hand that wasn't holding the drink and brought it down on the arm of the couch. “I want you to find out who did it! I don't want that person to get away!”

I looked at her wild eyes and her flushed face. “I probably wouldn't find anything the police wouldn't find,” I said.

“If you don't find anything, well, that's the way it will be. But I want you to look! Everywhere!”

I remembered how happy and silly she'd been in Chug's canoe. There was none of that to be found in her now. I felt a flicker of pity for her.

Her voice was sharp. “You were a policeman yourself. You know how to ask questions.”

I had liked being a Boston cop at first, but my wife had not liked being a cop's wife. Her constant worry had exhausted her, and after seeing me through a recovery from that shooting that had left a bullet near my spine, she had left me for a quieter life. Not too much later I had decided that I would let other people solve the world's problems from then on. I had taken my disability money and moved to the Vineyard, where felonies and I would not meet.

But no island is an island. And even the Eden of Martha's Vineyard was a garden where the weed of crime bore its bitter fruit.

“There's something you should consider before you start this ball rolling,” I said.

“What?”

“I may find out something you don't want to know
or don't want the police to know. Have you thought of that?”

She looked at me with her fierce eyes. “Just find out who did it!” She opened her purse and put some money on the coffee table in front of her. “There. Is that enough?”