Plum Island

made a few hundred or you lost a few hundred, you had dinner, saw a show, slept in a nice room. A good date weekend. A lot of the locals, however, didn't like the proximity to sin. Some wives didn't like the boys going over with the grocery money. But, like anything else, it was a matter of degree.

So, Fredric Tobin, cool and dandy viniculturist, a man who seemed in control, was a gambler. But if you, thought about it, was there a bigger gamble than the grape crop every year? The fact was, grapes were still experimental here, and so far, so good. No blight, no diseases, no frosts or heat spells. But one day, Hurricane Annabelle or Zeke was going to blow a billion grapes into the Long Island Sound, sort of like the biggest tub of Kool-Aid ever.

And then there were Tom and Judy, who gambled with little pathogenic bugs. Then they gambled with something else and lost. Fredric gambled with the crop and won, then gambled with cards and roulette and he, too, lost.

I said to Ms. Whitestone, 'Do you know if the Gordons ever went with Mr. Tobin to Foxwoods?'

'I don't think so. But I wouldn't know. It's been about a year since Fredric and I parted.'

'Right. But you're still friends. You still talk.'

'I guess we're friends. He doesn't like it when his ex-lovers are angry with him. He wants to keep them all as friends. This is interesting at parties. He loves to be in a room with a dozen women that he's had sex with.'

Who doesn't? I asked her, 'And you don't think Mr. Tobin and Mrs. Gordon were involved?'

'I don't know for sure. I don't think so. He wasn't a wife chaser.'

'How gallant.'

'No, he was chicken. Husbands and boyfriends frightened him. He must have had a bad experience once.' She sort of chuckled in her breathy way. She added, 'In any case, he'd rather have Tom Gordon as a friend than Judy Gordon as a lover.'

'Why is that?'

'I don't know. I never understood Fredric's attachment to Tom Gordon.'

'I thought it was the other way around.'

'That's what most people thought. It was Fredric who sought Tom out.'

'Why?'

'I don't know. At first, I thought it was a way of getting to Judy, but then I came to learn that Fredric doesn't do wives. Then I figured it had to do with the Gordons' attractiveness and their jobs. Fredric is a collector of people. He fancies himself the leading social personage of the North Fork. Maybe he is. He's not the richest man, but the winery gives him some status. You understand?'

I nodded. Sometimes you dig for days and weeks and come up with nothing. Sometimes you hit gold. But sometimes it's fool's gold. I mean, this was fascinating, but was it relevant to the double homicide? Also, was this an exaggeration? A little revenge on Ms. Whitestone's part? This would not be the first ex-lover who sent me sniffing up the wrong tree in order to make life miserable for the party of the second part. So I asked her point- blank, 'Do you think Fredric Tobin could have killed the Gordons?'

She looked at me as if I'd lost my mind, then said, 'Fredric? He's not capable of violence of any sort.'

'How do you know?'

She smiled and replied, 'God knows, I gave him enough reason to take a swing at me.' She added, 'He just wasn't physical. He was in total control of his temper and his emotions. And why would he want to kill Tom and Judy Gordon?'

'I don't know. I don't even know why they were killed. Do you?'

She didn't reply for a second, then said, 'Maybe drugs.'

'Why do you think that?'

'Well… Fredric was concerned about them. They did coke.'

'He told you that?'

'Yes.'

Interesting. Especially since Fredric never mentioned it to me, and since there wasn't a grain of truth in it. I know what a cokehead looks and acts like, and the Gordons weren't cokeheads. So why would Tobin pin that on them? I asked her, 'When did he tell you this?'

'Not long ago. A few months ago. He said they came to him and wanted to know if he wanted to score some good stuff. They dealt to support their habit.'

'You believe that?'

She shrugged. 'Could be.'

'Okay… back to Mr. Tobin's relationship with the Gordons. You think he was the one who sought them out and cultivated the relationship.'

'It seemed that way. I know in the nine months I was with him, he'd been on the phone with them a lot, and he rarely had a party without inviting them.'

I thought about this. Certainly this didn't square with what Mr. Tobin had told me. I asked Ms. Whitestone, 'What then was Mr. Tobm's attraction to the Gordons?'

'I don't know. Though I do know that he made it seem to everyone that it was the other way around. Funny thing is that the Gordons seemed to go along with it, as if they were honored to be in Fredric's company. Yet, when it was just the four of us a few times, you could see they considered themselves his equals. You understand?'

'Yes. But why were they playacting?'

Again, she shrugged. 'Who knows?' She looked at me a moment, then said, 'It was almost as if the Gordons were blackmailing Fredric. Like they had something on him. In public, he was the big cheese. In private, Tom and Judy were pretty familiar with him.'

Blackmail. I let that percolate for a good half minute.

Emma Whitestone said, 'I'm only guessing. Speculating. I'm not being vindictive or anything. I had a good time with Fredric, and I liked him, but I wasn't hurt when he broke it off.'

'Okay.' I looked at her, and we made eye contact. I asked her, 'Have you spoken to Fredric since the murder?'

'Yes, yesterday morning. He called.'

'What did he say?'

'Nothing more than anyone else was saying. Standard stuff.'

We went into some detail about that phone conversation, and indeed, it seemed standard and pro forma.

I asked her, 'Has he spoken to you today?'

'No.'

'I visited him this morning.'

'Did you? Why?'

'I don't know.'

'You don't know why you're here, either.'

'Right.' I didn't want to explain that I was out of potential witnesses after Plum Island and the Murphys and that I was off the job and had to interview people that the county PD would not think to interview. I wasn't exactly scraping the bottom of the barrel, but I was sort of working the edge of the crowd. I asked her, 'Do you know any of the Gordons' friends?'

'I didn't really travel in the same circles except for when we were with Fredric. And then it was his friends.'

'Wasn't Chief Maxwell a friend of theirs?'

'I think so. I could never understand that relationship any more than I could understand the Gordons' relationship with Fredric.'

'I seem to be having trouble finding friends of the Gordons.'

'From what I can gather, all their friends are Plum Island people. That's not so unusual. I told you-they're a tight-knit group.' She added, 'You'd be better off looking there than around here.'

'Probably.'

She asked me, 'What did you think of Fredric?'

'A delightful man. I enjoyed his company.' Which was true. But now that I knew he'd popped Ms. Whitestone