“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.
I knew when we reached it there would not be a soul anywhere in sight on Black Point Beach, just the great surf of the Atlantic Ocean, constantly throwing up waves to meet the shore.
I started to talk as we drove down the winding road.
“You know that I went to law school in Charlottesville, at the University of Virginia, right? I loved it there and I loved everything about the law school experience, which is quite unusual, as you’ve heard. It’s a great school and it’s also one of the most beautiful places in the country. From my first semester I knew that I wanted to go into public service, and I knew that I wanted to be a prosecutor they were a natural overlap and Paul Battaglia had the reputation for running the best District Attorney’s office anywhere.
“So I was off on the right foot academically, from the start. School was interesting, the friends I made there were fantastic it was a long time since I’d been in classes with and I was playing as hard as I was working.
“One Saturday afternoon my friends Jordan and Susan‘ whom Mike knew well’ invited me out to the house they rented to go horseback riding… a big mistake for a Jewish girl from Westchester whose only experience on a horse had been at the Bronx Zoo. We were only doing a trail ride, but my horse got spooked by a snake and threw me. I went straight to the University Hospital Emergency Room with my left hand kind of dangling three fingers badly fractured.”
We had reached the end of the dirt path and I parked the car so Mike and I could get out and walk over the dunes.
He followed my lead as I kicked off my shoes and left them in the car.
“Enter Adam Nyman the resident on duty in the Emergency Room. He splinted my fingers, convinced me that law students male variety were pedantic and boring, and took me to dinner. I fell madly in love and we spent every free moment together from that weekend on. Fill in the details I’m sure you can.”
“Was he a Vineyarder?” Mike asked.
“No, but he’d been coming here with his family all his life.” We stood at the top of the sandy walkway up to our knees in the tall, reedy grass and stopped to look at the incredible sweep of ocean and sky, with not a human in sight.
“This is what Adam lived for to sail on that water from the first light of day till the sun set beyond the Gay-
