A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard (25 page)

There was a lot of empty space in the file cabinets, but that wasn't too surprising, since all of the bills and other dated material, except for some older papers about ongoing environmental affairs, were less than three years old, clearly having been accumulated since Ingalls had built this house.

Early on, therefore, I was fairly certain that my search wasn't going to reveal anything having to do with his more distant past, but I looked at everything anyway, just in case. Finally I did find a travel folder advertising the charms of a Costa Rica resort area called Playa de Plata, a place I had never heard of. It was for deluxe vacations, quite beyond the reach of sunseekers in my economic class, and was, I guessed, a reflection of Ingalls's holiday interests before he had built his Vineyard house and given up foreign travel. The brochure was printed on costly paper, and was filled with beautiful photographs of beautiful people doing things in beautiful places. It promised the kinds of services and activities available to those sorts of people who were content with only the very best, and for whom expense was not an issue.

I put the folder right back where I'd found it, and locked the file doors. Then I remembered something and opened one of them again and took out the folder containing records of car and truck purchases and repairs, which I'd only glanced at before.

The key word was
purchases.
As far as I knew, Ingalls's own Vineyard vehicle had been a three-year-old Ford Bronco. I'd seen it in Joe Begay's yard, and the last time I'd looked, after Ingalls's death, it was garaged out in the barn behind this house. Ingalls had used a DEP pickup when he was on company business, as had been the case the day I'd found him on the beach.

But the folder contained not only a record of the purchase of the Bronco, bought new the year Ingalls built his
house and began vacationing on the island, but, at about the same time, the record of the purchase of an almost new 4x4 Chevy pickup, color gray, low mileage, and the record of the transfer of ownership to Jason Berube, Sr. Ditto for Connie's four-wheel-drive Subaru sedan.

Lawrence Ingalls had bought both vehicles.

I wondered why. Were they part of the deal that had made Moonbeam into Ingalls's groundskeeper and Connie into his housekeeper? If so, Moonbeam and Connie had struck a good bargain, because he also paid Moon-beam a particularly liberal salary to mow the lawns and trim the shrubs, especially for a man not known for high-quality work.

I rechecked the money paid to Connie for her house-keeping. It was a very correct salary, but in no way as generous as that paid to Moonbeam.

As my sister Margarite, who lived out by Santa Fe, might ask:
Qué pasa aqui?
Why would Ingalls pay a hardworking, dependable wife less than her lazy and untalented husband? Surely straight-arrow, ironed-shirt-and-shorts, always proper and in control Lawrence Ingalls hadn't thought that Moonbeam was worth that much more than Connie. What was with the big salary? And with the pickup and the Subaru?

Maybe Ingalls had just been a terrible male chauvinist who believed that man's work was always worth more than woman's work.

Or maybe I was doing Moonbeam an injustice. Maybe he was worth every cent, and more.

Maybe I was the Grand Duke of Russia.

I locked the cabinet doors and went out of the house.

“They like me,” said Zee. “Or, at least, that's what they say. They say I'm photogenic.”

“You're at least photogenic,” I said.

“Tonight's the party, and tomorrow Drew and his family and a bunch of us are flying to the island,” said Zee. “I can hardly wait! I haven't seen you and Josh for a long time!”

“Almost five days. Is this the party where you finally get to meet the stars?”

“Yes. Kevin Turner, at least. And maybe Kate Ballinger, too, and maybe Jack Slade, according to Emily. Jack is going to be the director. I guess it's a sort of get-together for the people who are going to the Vineyard. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. What have you been up to?”

She had been up to getting a snap course about the movie biz from Emily Mondry, who had been taking her around town, and with whom Zee had struck up a friendship. She was being told about such subjects as agents and actors; contracts and salary negotiations; the jobs of directors, cinematographers, producers, distributors, and writers; the meaning of all those credits that show up on the screen, and the importance attached to the size and placing of them: the logos of the studio and the distribution company, the names of actors, the executive producer (who, Emily had explained, could have his or her name up there for any one of lots of reasons, many of which had little or nothing to do with the actual production of the film), the production company, the producer, the associate producer, the director, the writer or writers
(some of whom may have done a lot and others of whom may have done little or almost nothing), the composer, arranger, and conductor of the music, the film editor, the director of photography, the camera operator, and a bunch of other people like assistant cameramen, gaffers, makeup people and hairdressers, and others of whom there were too many for Zee to keep track of.

“You'd be amazed,” said Zee, “at how complicated it all is. No wonder movies cost so much money and are usually so bad. It's a miracle any of them ever get made at all!”

“I'd probably be more amazed than most people,” I agreed. “But there's a lot of money to be made, if it all works out.”

“For some people, but not for others. The bean counters out here are very good about showing that even movies that make hundreds of millions of dollars actually lose money; that way, the real money people don't have to pay taxes or the suckers who agreed to work for a share of the profits!”

“Skullduggery in Tinseltown, eh? Is that un-American or just American?”

“Just business as usual, as Sir Winston said in his youth. The smart people take a percentage of the box office receipts, but you have to be pretty important to get that kind of contract. The best thing for most people is to get as much money as you can up front.”

“In that case, since you're smart, you should demand a piece of the box office receipts. If they won't give them to you, quit!”

She laughed. “I think you'd better reconsider your decision to become a Hollywood agent, sweets. Now I've got to go prepare myself for the big party. See you tomorrow afternoon at the airport! Be there! I love you! Good-bye!”

Good-bye, good-bye. Tomorrow was already bright and shiny even though the calendar and clocks said it was really still getting dark the evening before.

Joshua, tired from another August island day, was
sleeping the sleep of the just. Since he was finally beginning to snooze through the night instead of insisting on a 2:00
A.M
. meal, as he had done up till now, I was pretty sure I had my time to myself until sunup or so, when Josh would need my attention once again.

I used it to first brood upon what I did and didn't know about Lawrence Ingalls's life and death; then, giving up on that, did some reading from my living room book, which, at the moment, was the Bible, Revised Standard Edition. I was actually rereading it—sort of, because I was skipping the “begats” and some of the other genealogical records that were probably important but didn't interest me, and was concentrating on the interesting stuff: war, romance, and mindless sex and violence, of which there is a lot and which explains why even us heathens call it a Good Book.

In our house, there were books in every room, so we never had to go looking for something to read. We had bedroom books on the bedside tables on each side of the bed; bathroom books (usually poetry or books of aphorisms, since we were never in there long enough to read novels or even short stories); living room books; kitchen books, read only while cooking or eating; and porch books, kept back away from the screens so they wouldn't get wet during windy rainstorms. I had been thinking about making a waterproof book box for the balcony, but so far I hadn't gotten around to doing it, so when we were up there we tended not to read, which was probably just as well.

And we had car books, so we could read on the beach or while in a ferry line, or while waiting for a spouse to come out of a store. By having books everywhere, it was possible to get quite a lot of reading done even though we were busy doing other things. The secret was to be able to alternately read pieces of a lot of books and not lose track of what was happening in any of them. People who could read only one book at a time would not benefit from our system, but both Zee and I always had several books going
at once, with Dr. Spock always at hand in case of unexpected baby problems.

With all this reading going on, why wasn't I getting wiser or, barring wisdom, at least getting smarter? Was it a case of the more you study, the more you learn; and the more you learn, the more you can forget; and the more you can forget, the more you do forget; and the more you forget, the less you know?

Whatever it was, I was aware of my failure to grasp the truth of Lawrence Ingalls's murder, even as I read of the Lord telling our Joshua's namesake to appoint cities of refuge so that the manslayer who kills any person without intent or unwillingly might flee there, and they would be a refuge for him from the avenger of blood.

I didn't think that whoever had killed Ingalls had done it without intent or unwillingly.

The next morning, right after breakfast, Quinn called. “Listen,” he said. “Charles Ingalls—that's Lawrence Ingalls's old man—belongs to a club here in town. He has friends there. Aristocratic types just like himself, all of them getting old together. They drink, they eat, they get away from their wives, they sit in big leather chairs and read the stock market reports. They been doing it since they were young guys. Larry Ingalls was a member, too, but he wasn't the club type, I guess, because he never went there much. But the old man has always spent time there. After work, sometimes overnight, and like that.

“Now here's the part that might interest you. Everybody drinks and everybody talks and listens, and over the years stories circulate. Some of them get outside the walls, and one of them got to somebody I know. It seems that the old man was straight arrow at home, but when he went abroad, it wasn't just business, but it was business and bordellos. He liked Oriental meat, and when he took his boy over there to introduce him to the banking business, he introduced him to his other interests, too. Like father, like son. Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, now you know something you wanted to know, for Christ's sake. You know your boy Ingalls wasn't a saint like everybody thought he was. If he liked sex over there, he probably liked it over here. And if he liked it over here, he might have made somebody mad enough to shoot him!”

“We don't have any saints on Martha's Vineyard, Quinn. Even I know that. As for sex, everybody likes it here, just like they do up there where you live. Except down here, especially in the summertime, there's so much of it being handed out free that most people don't have to pay for it like you do. And that being the case, nobody down here, as far as I know, has ever gotten mad enough to shoot somebody over a woman. The worst it gets is maybe a bloody nose and then a wife switch. Keep looking.”

“You're really going to owe me before this is over, buddy.”

He rang off, and I thought of what he'd told me. It didn't seem like much, one way or another. The Ingalls men were not the first to taste forbidden fruits abroad, while sticking to proper cuisine at home, and I could see no particular significance in their foreign dalliances.

I loaded Joshua and his gear into the Land Cruiser and drove down to Edgartown Travel, which was being womaned by Petunia Slocum, who was some sort of distant relative of the famous single-handed circumnavigator and the only Petunia I had ever met outside of a flower bed. Petunia and I don't often meet on business, because I rarely travel anywhere, so now she looked at me with surprise from behind her desk.

“What can I do for you, J.W.?”

“Tell me about a place called Playa de Plata, in Costa Rica,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “You must have won the lottery, J.W. Isn't that a pretty swanky place?”

I sat down across from her. “I'm a pretty swanky guy. I just don't let it show. I'm not interested in the hotel and
swimming pool, I'm interested in the entertainments that are available. Both the official ones and the unofficial ones.”

She put on her blank face. “The unofficial ones?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm afraid I don't know what you mean,” she said in a careful voice.

“Sure you do,” I said. “I mean what sort of activities are available to those who want only the best and are able to pay for it? Who, maybe, want something that's not listed in the brochure.”

She sat back and looked inquiring but, neutral. “Like what?”

“Like sex.”

She stared at me, and I thought I saw distaste in her eyes. “I'm afraid you've come to the wrong agency, Mr. Jackson. I wouldn't know anything about that sort of thing.”

I had gone from J. W. to Mr. Jackson in not very long.

“Now, Petunia,” I said, “don't get all moralistic on me. I'm not using you to help me pursue any exotic vices, because I've personally already got all the woman I can handle right at home. What I'm trying to do is get a line on a man who used to walk the wild side in the Far East, then switched to Playa de Plata. The guy is dead and gone, but I want to know what he liked to do in the way of recreation. Anything you can tell me might help in a criminal investigation.”

She brightened immediately. “Why didn't you say so right off, J.W.? What criminal investigation? Are you working for the cops on this murder case? I thought you were just a civilian like the rest of us.”