Murder At A Vineyard Mansion

Chapter 1 I was coming out of the Dock Street Coffee Shop at the foot of Main Street when I saw Sergeant Tony D'Agostine of the Edgartown PD step out of his cruiser and head in my direction. He apparently needed a caffeine hit to keep him going for the rest of his shift."What's up on the mean streets?" I asked."Well," he said, "Mickey Gomes escaped from jail last night and hasn't come back."The county jail in Edgartown looks more like a nice big white house than a jail, and Mickey wasn't the first person to break out of it. None of the escapees ever stay escaped very long, though, because Martha's Vineyard is an island so there's only so far you can run and the police know most of the places you can hide."What do you mean he hasn't come back?" I asked."I mean that he's escaped several times in the last year, usually after supper. But he's always come back in time for breakfast. This time, though, a jailer noticed he was missing and our best guess is that when Mickey saw a bunch of cops wandering around the jail, he was afraid to come back so he went and hid.""What's he in for?""Statutory rape. He got it on with a fifteen-year-old girl a couple of years ago. This escape isn't anything to worry about. He's not dangerous and we know where he is.""Where's that?""Up in the woods by the girl's house. When he breaks out he spends the night with her. According to her parents, she's seven months pregnant with his child."I did some fast calculating. "Sired on one of his jailbreaks, I take it.""You take it right. She's seventeen now and he's twenty and they want to get hitched, but the honeymoon will have to wait until he does the extra time for breaking jail. He had bad luck getting nailed now because he only had a couple more weeks to serve. Mickey's not too bright, but then again he had no reason to think he'd get caught this time because he never got caught before.""How come nobody noticed him escaping until now?""I hear two stories. First, that the prisoners complained about not having any privacy, so the jail keepers stopped checking up on them too closely; second, that the sheriff's wife ordered the surveillance cameras turned off so no one would catch her making whoopee with her favorite inmate. Anyway, just before they locked the cells for the night Mickey would put a fake head -- I saw it and it's a pretty cheesy one if you ask me -- on his pillow and then go down the hall to the john. Only instead of turning right and going into the toilet, he'd turn left and go out the window of a storage room. Somebody'd slipped him a screwdriver and he'd just take the screen off the window and leave. The next morning he'd come back and put the screen back on. All the prisoners knew about it, but none of the jail keepers did. He only got found out this time because a jailer happened to wander down the hall last night and find the storage room screen gone.""And now all has been revealed.""Some of it, anyway. Once the jail keepers found out he had escaped, the prisoners told them how he's been doing it for months. They thought it was pretty funny. I can see that you do, too.""You'd better get yourself that coffee," I said. "You need to be wide-awake if you're going to bring in a hard case like Mickey Gomes.""No problem," said Tony. "He'll be getting hungry about now, since he's missed breakfast. I don't think he'll hide very long.""Keep me informed of the latest developments.""Sure." Tony went into the coffee shop and I climbed into my old Land Cruiser and drove home. I'd forgotten to ask Tony how the Silencer case was going, but I figured that if they'd solved it he'd have told me.Actually I thought there was a good chance that they'd never catch the Silencer because, in spite of his victims' outrage, looking for him probably got less police attention than any other case on the island. This was because the cops, like most of the other people on theCraig, Philip R. is the author of 'Murder At A Vineyard Mansion', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743246767 and ISBN 0743246764.