Pressure Drop (24 page)

“What sort of bad egg?”

“I'm not sure I ever knew.”

Matthias examined von Trautschke's face. It too disintegrated into dots. “He was Happy Standish's grandfather, then.”

“You do function better with visual aids,” said Hew.

“Have you got any more?”

“More what?”

“Articles or pictures about the Standishes.”

“Possibly,” said Hew. “Probably. I've got loads of scrapbooks around somewhere. But I'd have to dig them out. What exactly are you looking for?”

“Hiram Standish's obituary, for one thing.”

“I told you. He died in that blue hole of yours.”

“When?”

Hew thought. “Before I had to sell the Lyford Cay house. I was still in Nassau. So it must have been the early fifties. They didn't stay on Two-Head Cay very long after that.”

“Who didn't?”

“Inge. Happy. The household.”

“Where did they go?”

“Moved to the States. There really wasn't much here for a woman like Inge. A beauty, of course, and rather accomplished at this and that—a crack shot if I recall. They were always going after boar, right here in the interior. Plenty of it in those days.”

Matthias put down his glass. “Have I got this right? The Standishes left Lyford Cay after the war and moved to Two-Head Cay. In the early fifties, Hiram drowned in the blue hole. Then you sold your place in Nassau and came here. You went to Two-Head Cay and saw Happy, already afraid of the water, which fits with his father being dead by that time. Then they moved to the States. Is that it?”

“My, my,” said Hew. “You have been listening.” He reached under the table and put his hand on Matthias's knee.

“Knock it off, Hew,” Matthias said.

“Aren't I wicked?” said Hew, trilling again. But he removed his hand.

Matthias thought of some of the men he'd known on the Isle of Pines and said: “No.”

“No?” said Hew, sounding disappointed.

Matthias studied the picture of the three doctors. “I don't understand why the owners of half of Bay Street would move out here.”

“No one did,” said Hew. “Though the Standishes didn't own so much by then. In fact, there were rumors.”

“Rumors?”

“That they had made bad investments, were deeply in debt, the whole dreary tale. But there couldn't have been much to it. People who saw them after the war—in Connecticut or some such dreadful place—said they were richer than ever.”

Matthias closed the scrapbook and laid it on the table between them. “I'd like to see the others.”

“Others?”

“Scrapbooks.”

“Tonight?” All at once Hew sounded very tired. The skin sagged on the fine bones of his face.

“How about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow night. That will give me time to search. But I can't quite see what it is you're looking for.”

Matthias had no reply. He swallowed the rest of his Armagnac.

“They both drowned, or in Happy's case, nearly so,” said Hew. “Is that it?”

“Sort of,” Matthias said. “About a quarter of a mile apart.”

“But Happy's accident was at sea.”

“Right.”

“And the blue hole is on land.”

“Right.”

“Ergo?”

“I don't know,” Matthias said. “When was the last time you saw Happy?”

“As a boy. Perhaps that time on Two-Head Cay. I don't believe I saw him or Inge after that. Certainly not much after.”

“He didn't visit you when he came to the club?”

“What do you mean?”

“Last September. The day before the accident.”

“No. Why would he?”

“I don't know,” Matthias said. “What was Hiram Senior doing in the blue hole?”

“Swimming, I suppose.”

“Alone?”

“I have no idea. Why don't you ask Gene Albury?”

Inside Hew's house, Edith Piaf went to work on “La Vie en Rose.” Hew's eyes dampened. He got lost in the music. “Thanks for the booze,” Matthias said, rising.

For a moment, he thought Hew hadn't heard him. Then Hew said: “I'll miss your company.”

“It's not over yet. Eleven days left to file an appeal.”

Hew gave him a look that said: “On what grounds?”

That was the question. “Good night,” Matthias said. He climbed down the steps from Hew's terrace, found the path and walked toward home. Something rustled in the palms that grew between the path and the beach. A dog started barking, somewhere in the bushes, then another dog, and another. The moon had set and it would be an hour or so before the sun rose. Matthias couldn't see a thing; because of that, or what he'd drunk, he stumbled and almost fell. He reached down and felt something big and soft.

“Who it is?” said a deep voice. Nottage.

“For Christ's sake, Nottage, get up.”

“Sea on fire, boss, sea on fire.”

“Get up, Nottage. Don't sleep here. You can sleep on the deck.”

But Nottage wouldn't get up. He would just say, “Sea on fire, boss, sea on fire.” Matthias left him on the path and went to bed.

23

“Matt?”

Matthias felt a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“Wake up.”

Matthias didn't want to wake up; he wanted to stay where he was, in his sandy sheets, and the way he was, unconscious, but he opened his eyes anyway. Brock was looking down at him. “What is it?” Matthias asked.

“Better come with me.”

Matthias got up, pulled on shorts and a sweater and followed Brock outside. The wintry sun, low in the sky, shone with a white, glaring light that made his eyes water. His head ached too, and his mouth felt dry: overnight, his body had deconstructed the 1909 Armagnac, leveling it down to the status of the meanest hangover-inducer on the shelves.

Brock led him along the crushed-shell path to the beach. They walked north, with the Bluff rising on their left. The wind, stronger than the day before, blew in stereo: on one side hissing over the wave tops, on the other whining in the sea-grapes. The sand ended abruptly at an outcrop of dead coral, covered in slippery moss. They climbed over and continued along the coral, a spiky and uneven beach that ran all the way to the tip of the island. Matthias had seen Blufftown children playing barefoot on sharp coral beaches, but his own feet, callused though they were, hurt with every step, and he was about to go back for shoes when he saw a dark buzzard circling the top of the Bluff. Below, on the rocks by the edge of the sea, stood Moxie, looking down at something twisted and white. It could have been an object tossed up by the waves, but it wasn't. Matthias knew that even before he started running.

It was Hew.

He lay on his side, one arm thrown up in a way that made Matthias think of the Nijinsky photograph, as did his long hair, swept back off his face, and his clean white trousers: he might have been posing for an avant-garde fashion photographer, except that his legs were in an impossible position and half a dozen red land crabs were scuttling back and forth in the shadow of the Bluff, biding their time. All around lay shards of dark green glass, 1909 Armagnac glass, not yet dulled by the sea.

High tide
—
splash, low tide
—
smash
.

Matthias looked up. Hew's balustrade loomed directly above, thirty or forty feet overhead. From where he stood, Matthias could just make out the neck of an overturned bottle extending over the top like a toy cannon.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Brock.

Moxie said nothing. He wore only a threadbare Speedo; perhaps that explained the goose bumps on his skin and the ashy tint around his eyes and mouth.

“What time is it?” Matthias asked.

Brock checked his Rolex. “Eight-fifteen,” he said.

Matthias had probably left Hew's less than three hours ago. “Who found him?” he asked.

Brock turned to Moxie. Moxie said: “Boys on the beach.”

“What boys?”

“Fishing boys,” said Moxie. “Down to Blufftown.”

“Which boys?”

Moxie gazed over Matthias's shoulder. “Craig be one. And the short boy with that bad foot.”

“Larry?”

Moxie nodded. “Larry, he be the one that tell me.”

“When?”

“Morning time.”

“An hour ago?”

“Yeah. An hour.”

Matthias looked up again: at the cliff, the balustrade, the bottle, the buzzard in its holding pattern. “And he was just like this?”

“Like this,” Moxie said. “But the tide be out then.”

Now it was rising. Waves foamed up the coral beach and slipped back down, not far from Hew's outstretched hand. Matthias knelt and patted Hew's pockets. They were empty.

“What's that for?” Brock asked.

Matthias wasn't sure. “Anyone seen Nottage?” he said.

“Nottage?”

“He was on the Bluff last night.”

“Meaning?”

“Maybe he saw something. Or heard something.”

“Like what?”

“Falling.”

“Nottage?” said Brock. “He's bloody pickled twenty-four hours a day.”

A ball of nausea quickly coalesced in Matthias's stomach and almost came up.

“What's wrong?” Brock asked.

“What's wrong?” Matthias, still kneeling, gently raised Hew's head and revealed the crushed side. The eye on the crushed side was open; the other closed. “That's what's wrong.”

No one blanched. No one turned away. Moxie came from a world where curable birth defects like club feet went uncured; Brock had seen a diving partner taken by a great white off the Queensland coast; Matthias had encountered men with caved-in heads before, starting with a few of Cesarito's
compadres
on the Isle of Pines. The ball of nausea in his stomach dissipated. “We'd better call Conchtown,” he said. “For Constable Welles.”

“Why?” Brock asked.

“To examine the body.”

“Welles?” Brock said. “He can't even write his name.” Matthias glanced at Moxie. His eyes had gone blank. “Isn't it obvious what happened?” Brock asked.

They all looked up. “I guess so,” Matthias said.

“He was a funny old ponce,” Brock said, “but he was as big a lush as Nottage. He didn't have to get by with aftershave, that's all.”

Matthias stood up. “I'll call Welles anyway. You stay here, Brock. And Moxie, see if you can find Nottage.”

Moxie went off down the beach. Brock said: “What am I supposed to do here?”

“Keep the crabs off him.” They watched the crabs, no longer scuttling: they had advanced a foot or two and waited in pools in the rock, claws folded neatly before them; each pair of wide-apart eyes formed the short base of an isosceles triangle with Hew's body at the apex.

“Better hurry,” Brock said. The tips of the first waves lapped at Hew's bloodless fingers.

Matthias returned to the office. He called the one-room police station in Conchtown and counted thirty rings before hanging up. When he tried again he couldn't get a dial tone. Walking out, he saw that he had left red footprints on the office floor. He slid on a worn pair of boat shoes and went up the path to Hew's house.

Inside, everything looked the way it had a few hours before: the mildewing antiques, the shelves of paperbacks, the stacks of
Punch
, the Gauguin, all in their places. Matthias moved to the terrace. The tray of Ritz crackers still sat on the table between the chaise longues, but now a cockroach had joined the ants inside. One empty snifter stood beside the tray. The other, which he had not been able to see from below, was on the balustrade, not far from the overturned bottle. The second glass was one-third full. Matthias picked it up and sniffed. He smelled the smell of 1909 Armagnac. It had lost its magic.

Matthias glanced over the wall. Brock stood gazing out to sea, arms folded on his chest, Hew's body at his feet. The sea half-covered the graceful outstretched arm and was beginning to foam in the long white hair. In ten more minutes it would lift Hew off the rocks and carry him away. “You might as well bring him up here,” Matthias called down.

Brock lifted Hew on his shoulders in one easy motion and brought him up to the terrace. He started to lower him on one of the chaises, but Matthias said: “Just lay him on the floor.”

“On the floor?” Brock said. Matthias didn't reply. Brock laid Hew down on the white marble. A strand of seaweed had caught in his hair, curled like a limp garland.

Matthias sat on the balustrade, his back to the sea. Brock sat nearby, on the other side of the snifter and the overturned bottle. “How much did he have last night?” Brock asked.

“Enough.”

“Then you left and he had some more.”

“Looks like it.”

“Maybe he sat up here.”

“Maybe.”

“To watch the sun come up, say. With his feet on the other side.”

They swung around to look east. Brock's arm barely brushed the overturned bottle, but it was enough to start it rolling. He snatched at it, missed; the bottle rolled off the edge and pinwheeled down, landing with a little splash in the waves that now covered the spot where Hew had lain. A red crab shot out of the water and sidestepped quickly out of sight.

“Shit,” Brock said. “That was evidence.”

“Of what?”

“I don't know. Maybe it wasn't an accident. Maybe it was suicide.”

“Why would Hew commit suicide?” Matthias asked.

Brock shrugged. Overhead the buzzard had been joined by another, slightly smaller and blacker. They flew in tandem, banking into the stiff wind, beating their heavy wings, then banking again and gliding swiftly on the breeze, round and round.

“Ever been in the blue hole, Brock?”

“What blue hole?”

“Our blue hole.”

“The sink hole by the shuffleboard?”

“Yeah.”