“Well, of course, you’re on the top of my list, Karen, and I would have sent her here, but I actually never got to speak with her on Wednesday.”
Mike casually began to ask for more details.
“Do you remember what time she was here?” was how he started, and when he found out it was between two and three in the afternoon, he moved on to whether or not she was alone.
Jackie had joined in the conversation, too, and both were quick to respond that Isabella had been with a man. No, he didn’t seem at all familiar to them, and yes, they had both checked him out, simply because they assumed he might also be a movie star.
“He was a looker,” Jackie offered. Taller than Mike, also with dark hair, and probably in his forties.
“They had a medium order of clams with some fries, and both of them had bottled water.”
“Did you happen to hear anything about where they were coming from or what they were up to?” I knew from lots of experience here that the deep-fryers were against the windows, right over the picnic table. My father once came close to bringing the girls to tears, unintentionally, by sitting below that window and grousing that there were too many potatoes and too few clams in the chowder. So I tried to make it easier for them to admit an overheard by urging, “It’s really important, girls. It could really help us a lot.”
Karen was eager to be useful.
“It sounded to me like they were on their way to the ferry. He had to be somewhere else and she was going to stay on the island. I’m telling you, she was all over him. I’m pretty sure she was driving him to the ferry, or maybe it was the airport. But they were in a hurry and they ate pretty fast.”
“Thanks, Karen. I’m going to ask Wally to come up and take some more details from you, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Meanwhile,” Mike smiled at the sisters, ‘let’s have a large order of clams, some Bite fries, and two cups of chowder.“
While the order was cooking I walked Mike around the bend to show him the fishing dock and the remains of the ever-shrinking fleet of commercial boats that worked off the coastline. The Quitsa Strider and the Unicorn were both moored in the picturesque harbor, but no sign of their two island captains, brothers who are descendants of original Vineyard settlers, who still caught their swordfish by harpooning them rather than dragging a gill net at sea for days.
We came back, picked up our food, and sat at one of the tables, barely talking as we devoured our late lunch. Mike inhaled the soup and ate two-thirds of the clams before he came up for air.
“You’re right, Coop, this is great stuff.”
“We may have stumbled on an important bit of evidence. Was Isabella killed before her lover left the island… or just after? Thank goodness you wanted fried clams.“
“As Mae West would say, ”Goodness had nothing to do with it,“ Mike responded.
I reached for another clam belly as I asked Mike what he meant.
“I was all set to eat your friend Prime’s pizza for lunch. Then Wally told me about the autopsy report. Looks like Isabella got knocked off within an hour or so of her last meal…“
I gagged on the delicious morsel as Mike finished his sentence.
“Fried clams undigested, sitting in her stomach big, juicy ones, with a little batter on them. I knew I could count on you to tell me who served the best ones on the island.”
He grinned as he raised his soda can to click mine: “Here’s looking at you, Coop. Hope you’re not still hungry that fried food is lousy for your diet.”
I had promised Wally that I would pack and ship Isabella’s belongings to Los Angeles to save his deputies the trouble of going back to the house another day, so Mike and I returned there after lunch to finish that chore. He turned on the CD player, slipped one of my Smokey Robinson discs in place, and sat in the rocking chair next to the bed as I began to fold the clothes that were so casually strewn about.
“I’m tossing these half-used candles,” I said as I walked behind Mike to reach for the one next to the bed.
He picked up the movie script and thumbed through it as I worked.
“Why don’t you keep one of those silk pajama things for yourself, kid? Nobody would begrudge you that.”
“Thanks for the thought. Isabella sent me an identical set for my birthday this spring. The tags are still on it somehow it just doesn’t have ”me“ written all over it.” I stroked the silky fabric of the champagne-colored lingerie as I fitted it into the already crammed duffel bag, guessing from Isabella’s descriptions of her pudgy cousin that these gorgeous indulgences of La Lascar would find their next life in some charity’s thrift shop in Sherman Oaks.
When the three bags were zipped and locked, I called my caretaker’s answering machine, leaving a message for him to get a house cleaner in to get rid of the dust left by the investigators.
“C’mon, Mike. Let’s lock up and get on the road.”
“This would have been a pretty good movie,” he said, still carrying the screenplay, which he had obviously decided to take with him as his keepsake of the deceased.
“Lucrezia Borgia was an interesting broad for the fifteenth century. Politics, war, intrigue, religion, sex, poison – some things never change. Izzy was hot for this one – she’s got stars and exclamation points in red ink drawn all around her entrance and opening salvo. She’s even written in her own poetry in the margin or maybe one of her friends wrote it. You know a Dr. C? It’s got a few lines of poetry, then it says “Dr. C.”
I turned off the CD and the lights and set the alarm system.
In his most dramatic drag imitation, Mike swept out the door reading Isabella’s poem to me:
“What beckoning ghost, along the moonlight shade Invites my steps… tell, Is it, in Heaven, a crime to love too well?”
“Whoa, Chapman, maybe they didn’t teach you this stuff at Fordham and certainly not at the Police Academy, but any self-respecting English literature major from a woman’s college could tell you that Isabella didn’t write that. It’s a very famous poem by Alexander Pope,” and I shuddered to think how sadly appropriate the title was as I said it to Mike, “”Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.“
“Well, she must have liked it a lot to write it in here herself. Maybe Dr. C. is the shrink she was complaining to you about you know, maybe C is one of his initials.”
“Sounds more like Dr. C. is from the Psychic Friends Network. A ”crime“ to love too well? Is some guy one of her exes so jealous that he killed her because she was with another man? Or did she love someone too much? Was this psychiatric advice or just the coincidence of someone’s taste for classic English poetry? If poor Isabella had only known the rest of this verse, she might not have liked it quite so much.”
“Why?”
“Cause it’s about the untimely death of a beautiful young woman, who once had wealth and fame, and now all that remains is ”a heap of dust.“ That’s why. You better read through the rest of the script and see if anything else has been added to the margins.”
“And we’d better get a handle on Dr. C. Let me tell you British poetry, Motown lyrics, movie trivia with all the stuff you’re good at, I don’t know why Battaglia thinks you’re so useless. Let’s get going.”
I took a last look around at the house and then started the car out the driveway. As we headed down-island, I continued to point out all the sights to Mike – friends’ houses, working farms, and beach roads.
“How did you find this place, Alex? I mean, why did you start to come to the island?”
“Can you stand a love story? A short one. Sad ending.”
I think Mike was sorry the moment he asked. Most of my office friends had some idea of what had happened to me in law school, but I had never talked much about it. I doubt he had connected it to the Vineyard or he would not have raised it at that moment.
“I’m taking one last detour on the way to the airport,” I said, turning off State Road onto a dirt path that led through two miles of thick brush before reaching an area of wetlands and saltwater ponds. Beyond the dunes, guarded only by gulls and shorebirds, stretched miles of sandy white beach covering practically the entire south coast of the island.