The Crimes of Jordan Wise (16 page)

She'd given me a lot to be thankful for since that night in her apartment in San Francisco. Four years of greater passion and stimulation than I'd ever known. St. Thomas and the sea and sailing and Bone's friendship. But I hadn't given her all she'd wanted. She had never been content living here. Or content with me. From the first, I was a means to an end, a source of satisfaction for her cravings—an integral part of a package deal. If she'd ever felt love for me, even a little, it had been for that reason and that reason alone. That was why she'd stayed with me as long as she had.

Verriker had been a dalliance, a way to relieve the restless boredom. The New York clothing manufacturer had been a ready-to-wear excuse. When I refused to satisfy the most important of her hungers, a shot at the New York fashion world, she ran off with the first man who could offer it to her. She'd been gone a long time before she actually left.

What it boiled down to was that I couldn't have held on to her because I'd never really had her in the first place. That was what hurt the most. Even at the moments of our deepest connection, in and out of bed, she'd never really been mine in the way that I'd been hers. I don't mean love—I mean the extension and cornmingling of self, the absorption of one persona into the other that creates a bonded third. Or, hell, maybe I do mean love. Maybe that's another thing love is, the only definition that's not strictly personal.

If I hated anybody during that time, it was myself for not understanding sooner. Love is blind—the platitude makers got that one right. Blind and stupid and short-sighted. I accepted that, and accepted that I was a fool for believing otherwise. That was why, when the hurt went away, the rest of the emotion went with it.

Did I stay in the villa? Yes. I would have moved out right away, except that the lease ran until December; I'd been paying the rent in six-month increments to take advantage of a discount offered by the owners. Giving it up immediately would have meant breaking the lease and taking a heavy financial hit, because one condition of the discount was that the biannual payments were nonrefundable. I'd been so careful with money up to then, I couldn't bring myself to throw away thousands of dollars for no good reason.

Aside from a short period of adjustment, I had no trouble learning to be alone again. I slept at the villa most nights, but I spent very little time there otherwise. Days, except when there was a storm, I was at Sub Base harbor or Frenchtown or the native quarter, or out on
Windrunner.
In port I worked on the yawl's upkeep or just sat on deck reading and listening to music. Sometimes Bone would join me; sometimes I would join him on
Conch Out.
I ate all my meals alone or with him on one boat or the other, or in Harry's Dockside Cafe or one of the native eateries. Now and then I would drive over to Red Hook to see Dick Marsten, or up to the top of Crown Mountain for a sunset watch, or out to Coki Bay or Sapphire Bay for a swim and some snorkeling among the coral reefs. Once at Sapphire I helped a native kid with a speargun drag a big moray eel in from the reefs offshore—an ugly creature with a body like a bar of white iron and foxlike jaws, that even dead scared hell out of a couple of female tourists.

St. Thomas crawled with unattached and willing women; it would have been easy enough to pick one up for a one-night stand. But I had no interest in playing that kind of game. No interest in female companionship, no interest in sex. My libido had reverted to what it was before I met Annalise. Maybe that would change eventually, I thought, and maybe it wouldn't. It didn't seem to matter much either way.

What mattered was doing as I pleased twenty-four hours a day, every day, with no encumbrances. I didn't have to attend any more parties, play any more handball, dance in any more nightclubs or eat in any more expensive restaurants or take any more lengthy trips that didn't involve sailing. I let my hair get long and shaggy and I grew a beard to go with my mustache. I saw none of the people who no longer cared to see me. The only one of that crowd who ever came around, once, was Jack Scanlon. I didn't encourage him and he never came again.

After a while I came to realize that I not only preferred this way of life to the one I'd had with Annalise, but that it was actually a relief to be alone again. You can change your financial status, your environment, your perspective, but you can't change your basic nature. After three years or thirty, you're still the same person. Jordan Wise had led a quiet, contemplative, mosdy celibate, loner's existence in San Francisco; Richard Laidlaw, without Annalise, gravitated to the same on St. Thomas. She had been only half right when she accused me of evolving back into my former self. I'd never really been anything else.

I thought about her less and less. And when I did, it was only to wonder, with detached curiosity, whether she was still with the manufacturer, whether her intro into the fashion industry had paid off, whether she had any regrets, whether she ever thought of me. I didn't wish her ill and I didn't wish her well—I didn't care one way or the other.

Out of sight, out of heart, out of mind.

Gone.

Curiosity and the fact that the day was clear and the seas calm led me to explore it. I hunted up a gap in the reef that surrounds almost every cay, large or small, eased in as close as I dared under power, and then weighed anchor and put the dinghy over and rowed in the rest of the way. There was nothing on the cay other than a few twisted screw palms, scatters of broken coral and shells, some tiny, almost translucent crabs, and a noisy colony of nesting terns and frigate birds. It was a beautiful place, quiet except for the birds and the murmur of the sea, lonely unless you were a loner yourself. There were tidepools and a little lagoon among the reefs on the leeward side, the water so clear you could see the dark red starfish on the bottom sand and the multicolored fish darting in and out among the lace and brain coral. I stripped down and had a swim in the lagoon. Later, in the tidepools, I cought a brace of yellow-and-black-mottled crayfish and pried loose a couple of dozen mussels.

Fine, lazy afternoon, so much enjoyed that I returned twice over the next few months for more of the same. On the third trip, I decided the spit-kit needed a name and christened it Laidlaw Cay. When I told Bone about it, he laughed and said, "Next thing, you gonna want to move out there and build a house."

"Nope. I was thinking of burying my loot on it like one of the old buccaneers."

"Not you, mon. No pirate blood in you."

That made me laugh. That's what you think, my friend, I thought.

That's what you think!

All the prospects looked good. Life looked good. Uncomplicated. Comfortable.

Then, without warning, the bottom fell out again.

He was about my age, late thirties, short but muscular, and hard-looking in an indolent way. Thick biceps bulged the sleeves of the blue pullover he wore. Fair hair, blue eyes, a sideways bend in his nose that indicated it once had been broken and the break hadn't healed properly. Pale skin that marked him as a snowbird, the local name for northern tourists who flock to the Caribbean in the winter months. He seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite place him.

"What's that you're eating?" he said.

"Fish chowder."

"Looks greasy. How's it taste?"

"It tastes fine," I said. "Even better without cigar smoke."

He tapped ash on the floor. "I don't like fish," he said. "That's all you get down here, fish and more fish."

"Try one of the downtown restaurants."

"They serve meat in this place? Any kind of red meat?"

"Look, I really don't want company—"

"Maybe I'll just have a beer."

"Have it at another table."

"I like this one."

He sat watching me, smoking, while I spooned up the chowder. I could feel his eyes on my face, like bugs crawling; they were making me uncomfortable. I pushed the bowl away and started to get up.

"Hold on there," he said. "Let's talk a little."

"I don't think so. I've got work to do—"

"The work can wait. My name's Cutter, Fred Cutter."

"Good for you."

"And you're Richard Laidlaw."

" . . . You know me?"

"I know a lot of things about you."

"What do you want? Are you selling something?"

"Might say that."

"Well, whatever it is, I'm not interested. I don't need anything."

"You need what I'm selling. You just don't know it yet."

"All right, what is it you think I need?"

"Silence," Cutter said.

"What?"

"Richard Laidlaw's a good name," he said, "but I like Jordan Wise better."

I could feel the muscles pull as my back stiffened. I went cold all over. "You must have me mixed up with somebody else."

"I don't think so. Not anymore." The lopsided smile was broader.

My control had slipped for only a second or two, but that was long enough for him to see it. "I thought I recognized you when we bumped into each other yesterday morning. I wasn't a hundred percent sure, with the beard and the long hair. Now . . . I'm sure."

Outside my bank on Dronningens Gade, that was where I'd seen him before. We'd almost collided on the sidewalk when I walked out.

I said, "I've never heard of anybody named Jordan Wise."

"You're not from San Francisco, either, I suppose?"

"That's right, I'm not."

"I used to live in Frisco myself," Cutter said. "Worked for an insurance company in the same building as Amthor Associates. I saw you a few times in the elevators, the lobby, remembered you when the story broke in the papers. Everybody figured you disappeared into Mexico, but no, you came down here instead. Real clever, the way you pulled off the whole deal."

Crazy coincidence. The
y
factor. Three years, all the traveling in the Caribbean, to New York, Paris, Monte Carlo, London, and recognition happens right here in Charlotte Amalie.

"I've never even been to San Francisco," I said. "I'm from Chicago."

"Uh-huh. Retired tool-and-die manufacturer, made a killing in the stock market, sold your business and showed up here three years ago. Out of the same blue Jordan Wise disappeared into."

"If you know all that about me . . ."

"I know that's your cover story. I made it my business to find out."

"You want me to prove I'm Richard Laidlaw? My passport says so. So does my driver's license."

"Sure they do," Cutter said. "The way you had the embezzlement and the disappearance planned out so smooth, you had to've arranged for some pretty good false ID."