The officer in the cruiser behind me gave his siren a quick, rude squeal, just in case I wasn’t aware of the implications of his flashing blue light. I pulled to the side of the road, turned off the ignition, and went rummaging in the glove compartment for J.W.’s registration. I found road maps, expired shellfishing licenses, lollipops, flashlights, and one chewed-up bluefish plug minus its treble hooks, but damned if I could come up with any automobile registration.
Had I been speeding? I didn’t think J.W.’s Land Cruiser was even capable of speed-limit speeds. But I hadn’t been paying attention.
In my rearview mirror I saw the officer sitting in his cruiser behind me. I assumed he was running the old Toyota’s plates. I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. Maybe he was after J.W. for scallop hunting out of season, or sassing some radical environmentalist, or refusing to divulge his martini recipe. J.W.’s crimes were legion.
After a minute or two, the cop opened his door, got out, and approached me. He stopped just behind the car window. “License and registration, please,” he said, as expected.
“I’m not J. W. Jackson,” I said, “and this isn’t my car and I don’t know where the registration is. But I can explain. I wasn’t—?”
“Do you have your driver’s license, sir?”
“Sure.” I fumbled it out of my wallet and handed it to him.
He squinted at it and handed it back to me. “Mr. Coyne, I’d like you to follow me, sir.”
“Huh? What’s up?”
“There’s a state police officer who needs to talk to you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll pull out in front of you. Just stay behind me, please.”
I nodded. I knew he wouldn’t tell me anything, so there was no sense in asking. I was relieved that I’d apparently escaped a speeding ticket.
I followed the cruiser to the state police barracks on Temahigan Avenue in Oak Bluffs. J.W. and I had come here a couple of times in the past. I was ushered into a bare conference room equipped with a rectangular metal table, four metal chairs, two wire-mesh-covered windows high on the wall, and a tin ashtray brimming with old butts.
Pretty soon a chunky, thirtyish woman with a crabby look on her face came in. She wore a mannish outfit—pale blue summer-weight sport jacket, a white button-down shirt, khaki pants, and sturdy black shoes. A manila folder was tucked into her armpit.
She gave me a perfunctory smile. Her teeth were very white against her deeply tanned skin. “I’m Olive Otero,” she said. “State cops.”
“Brady Coyne,” I said. “Boston lawyer.”
“I know who you are, Mr. Coyne.”
“I know who you are, too, Miz Otero. J. W. Jackson has mentioned you.”
“I bet he has. You should watch the company you keep.” Olive Otero scowled. “Last time you were down here hanging around with Jackson, if I remember correctly, all kinds of unpleasant things started happening. You two seem to have a knack for stirring things up. If I had my wits about me, I’d ban you from the island and exile him. Between the two of you…” She waved her hand in the air. “So what is it this time, Mr. Coyne? Business or pleasure? You fishing for fish or something else? Fish, I hope.”
“Business. Sorry.”
“Staying with the Jacksons, are you?”
“Yes. You knew that. That’s how you knew you’d find me in J.W.’s Land Cruiser. So are you going to ask me a lot of questions you already know the answers to, or can we get to why you had me brought here?”
She gave me a quick, sour smile in which her eyes did not participate. “Certainly.” She opened the manila folder and slid out Christa’s picture. “You’re looking for this girl, right?”
“Come on, ma’am. You know that, too. Kit Goulart had this photo faxed to all the departments on the island.”
“I didn’t get this out of any fax machine.” She arched an eyebrow at me. “I got it off a dead body.”
I stared at her. “Who?”
“Anita Montgomery’s her name.”
I frowned. “I don’t think I know anybody named Anita Montgomery.”
“No, I expect not. She goes by the name of Princess Ishewa. Works at the Four Winds Trading Post?” She made it a question.
“Jesus.” I blew out a breath. “The fortune-teller. I saw her just yesterday. What happened?”
“I’m the cop, Mr. Coyne. Do you mind if I ask the questions?”
“Am I some kind of suspect?”
Olive Otero shook her head.
“Then you ought to be able to tell me what happened.”
She shrugged. “Car crash on the Edgartown–West Tisbury road out past the airport. Head-on with a good-sized oak tree. Happened a little after two this morning.”
“God,” I said. “That’s terrible. She was a young, vital woman. Interesting person. Very spiritual. She seemed to have a—a gift of some kind. I liked her. She wanted to tell me my fortune. She—” I stopped and looked at her. “Why are you talking to me about a car accident?”
“I didn’t say accident, Mr. Coyne. I said crash. It appears that Ms. Montgomery was run off the road.”
“Hit-and-run, huh? Some drunk, you think?”
“Not necessarily.”
I looked at her. “You think somebody did it on purpose?”
She nodded. “We think it’s very possible. Scrape marks on the driver’s side of her car. Tire tracks in the sand at the scene indicate somebody pulled over, stopped and got out, walked over to the crash. Since nobody called it in, we don’t figure it was some Good Samaritan. Okay, maybe it was an accident, some drunk, and he stopped to see what he could do, saw she was dead, then panicked and took off, which would make it a hit-and-run homicide. But the other possibility is, he stopped to check her out, make sure she was dead.” She hesitated. “Which she was. Broken neck. She was driving an old Ford Pinto. You don’t see many of them around anymore. She was wearing her seat belt, but in those old cars, there’s no shoulder strap.” She snapped her arm down and back as if she were slapping something rubber and it bounced back. “See?”
“Whiplash,” I said.
She nodded. “The ME figures she died instantly. Before the fire.”
“The car caught fire?”
“Cops who came on the scene managed to haul her out before it exploded.”
“But if you’re thinking someone did it on purpose,” I said, “wanted to kill her—”
“Why?” She gave me another one of her humorless smiles. “That’s the question. That’s what we’re trying to figure out.” Olive Otero tapped Christa’s picture. “She had this folded in her shirt pocket.”
“What do you make of that?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. It’s got your name and your friend Jackson’s phone number written on the back of it.”
“I gave her that picture yesterday when I saw her. Asked her to keep an eye out for the girl, just like I’ve been asking everybody. I’m trying to find her for her parents.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know about that. Did Ms. Montgomery give you any idea that she might go looking for her?”
“No. She said she’d never seen her. Is that what you think she was doing last night? Looking for Christa?”
She shrugged. “She’s got the picture in her pocket. Must’ve put it there for some reason, huh?”
I thought for a minute. “She put it in her pants pocket when I gave it to her. So she took it out. To show somebody, maybe, huh? Is that what you’re thinking?”
She spread her hands. “Could be. Could be she actually did show it to them. Somebody out toward Gay Head, Chilmark, Menemsha, maybe West Tisbury. Ms. Montgomery had a little place, opposite end of the island in East Chop, that she shared with her business partner. It appears she was heading back home when it happened. Point is, if you’ve got any idea where she might’ve been before this happened to her, it would be a big help.”
“What did her roommate say?”
Olive Otero smiled. This time her eyes crinkled a little, as if I’d finally said something amusing. “There are some things I’m not going to tell you, Mr. Coyne, okay?”
“Well, obviously the roommate didn’t tell you where the princess—Ms. Montgomery, I mean—where she was going, or you wouldn’t be asking me.” I shrugged. “To answer your question, I have no idea where she might’ve been. I don’t know where Christa is, and the princess told me she didn’t recognize her, didn’t know anything about her. I showed her the picture, asked her if she could use her, um, powers to tell me anything, and she—” I smacked my palm with my fist. “Jesus. She had some kind of vision. She saw bright lights, heard loud noises.”
“Like—”
“Like an explosion,” I said. “Like fire. Like a car crash.” I blew out a breath. “Princess Ishewa wasn’t seeing Christa Doyle’s fate. She was seeing her own.”
“Me,” said Olive Otero, “I don’t believe in that crap.”
“I didn’t think I did, either,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “it looks like—” At that moment a buzz came from her jacket pocket. She reached in and pulled out a cell phone. “Yeah, Otero,” she said, then listened for a minute. “You’re sure it’s him?…Well, shit…Right, he’s here with me now. We’re about done. I’ll fill you in.” She snapped the miniature telephone shut, dropped it back into her pocket, and stood up. “I gotta go. Probably want to talk to you some more. I can reach you at Jackson’s house, right?”
I nodded. “Except when I’m driving around in his car, and you seem to be able to locate me then, too.”
Olive Otero walked outside with me, and as I was climbing into the Land Cruiser, she put her hand on my arm and said, “You be careful, now, Mr. Coyne, okay?”
That was a kindly thought, and coming from Olive Otero, it was touching. But it wasn’t a particularly comforting thought. I didn’t like it when people felt they had to tell me to be careful, even if it was good advice.
I’d been with Officer Otero for about an hour. Still a couple hours before martini time at the Jacksons. I decided to continue with my plan to drive around the island, get the lay of the land. Besides, I needed some time to think, and driving alone had always been a good way for me to do that.
The thought that kept ricocheting around inside my brain, of course, was that if somebody had murdered Princess Ishewa because she was looking for Christa, it was my fault. If I hadn’t spotted the Kokopelli on that sign in Oak Bluffs, if I hadn’t decided to go into the shop, if I hadn’t done something totally out of character for me—visiting a fortune-teller—Princess Ishewa might still be alive.
I hoped to hell that it turned out to be some random, drunken hit-and-run. That was an awful thing to hope for, but for my peace of mind, it was preferable to Olive Otero’s other hypothesis.
As I drove, I tried to invent scenarios that would explain committing murder to preserve Christa Doyle’s privacy. But I couldn’t. It didn’t make any sense.
What I couldn’t quite get my head around was the princess carrying Christa’s picture in her shirt pocket. What was she doing with it? What vision had she seen when she looked at it?
Well, I didn’t know. Damn good questions, though.
Guilt would gnaw at me until Princess Ishewa’s death was explained. Possibly longer than that. I knew that about myself.
I was driving on the long east-west road on the south side of the island. It cut through pine-and-oak woods, giving an occasional glimpse of one of the ponds off to the left. Here and there long sandy driveways meandered through the trees, and I knew that they led to the estates of the Truly Rich Summer People, with their horse barns and swimming pools and tennis courts and skeet fields.
On the Vineyard there were the year-rounders like the Jacksons, mostly descendants of island fishermen and shipbuilders, folks whose families had owned property there long before it turned to gold, plus off-islanders who’d worked hard all their lives, bought their modest places back when they were affordable, and then retired on the island.
Then there were the Ordinary Summer People, hardworking folks who scraped together enough money to buy cottages and houses and who helped pay their mortgages by renting their places when they weren’t around.
There were also the Rich Summer People, who didn’t need to scrape for their money and didn’t need to rent out their places.
And then there were the Truly Rich Summer People, the filthy, disgustingly rich—the CEOs and Manhattan psychiatrists and State Street law partners and oil tycoons and high-tech moguls and movie stars and bestselling authors and old-money Boston Brahmins, the people who didn’t care—didn’t even notice—what things cost. They bought up multiacre tracts of land with ocean views and built their mansions and installed their security systems and erected their tall gates and commuted by yacht and entertained presidents and foreign heads of state.
J.W. was acquainted with some of the Truly Rich Summer People. A few were my clients. Even when they wore T-shirts and baggy shorts and rubber flip-flops and neglected to shave and rode around on old bicycles, you’d never mistake them for clam diggers or bartenders or schoolteachers.
I wasn’t jealous. Not even a little bit. I never knew a Truly Rich Person who was truly happy.
There were two uniformed men standing at the entrance to the airport, and a little farther on, where the road ran alongside the state forest, a couple of Edgartown cruisers were pulled to the side of the road. Two more uniformed officers were standing there talking to a cluster of young people.
I was getting the impression that Martha’s Vineyard was under siege.
Around a bend I came upon what I assumed was the scene of Princess Ishewa’s fatal crash. Still another police cruiser plus an unmarked gray sedan were parked there, and the area was fenced in with yellow police-scene tape. I slowed to a crawl and looked. A jagged white scar had been gouged into the trunk of a big oak just off the shoulder of the road, and I could see where deep furrows had been plowed into the sandy earth when the princess’s little Pinto slewed off the road and smashed into the tree.
I pulled onto the shoulder and stopped, but a uniformed officer stepped into the road and waved me along.
Well, okay. Fine with me. I was no gawker. I had lots of curiosity, but none of it was morbid.
As I continued my circuit of the island, the accident scene kept playing in my imagination—the princess, tooling down the empty night road in her old Pinto, yawning, maybe, eager to get home to her warm bed, then headlights appearing suddenly in her rearview mirror, the vehicle pulling alongside her, moving fast, apparently in a hurry to pass her, then suddenly swerving, slamming against the side of her car, angling her off the road, and the princess skidding, fighting the wheel, standing on the brakes, out of control now, and then the big oak tree looming square in her headlights…
I wondered what kind of visions the fortune-teller had in those last few seconds of her life.
I found I had lost whatever enthusiasm for sleuthing I’d started the day with. My search for Christa Doyle would have to wait till tomorrow. Princess Ishewa was dead. It weighed heavily on my heart.