Twenty-Seven Bones (12 page)

Talk about your heart leaping to your throat: Emily couldn’t have swallowed a poppy seed when she and Bennie returned from shopping Thursday afternoon to find a police car parked under the bay rum in the driveway.

Nothing to do but face it out. Emily whispered to Bennie to go around the back way and get his machete, then mounted the front steps, whispering a short Niassian prayer, which translated as
Watch over my house, watch over my pigs,
as she turned left at the landing. The front door was open—she saw Phil standing just inside the vestibule, talking to a fat black man in a cheap suit.

“Here she is now,” said Phil. “Detective Hamilton, this is my wife, Dr. Emily Epp. Em, this is Detective Hamilton. He wanted to know if we heard or saw anything unusual last night.”

“Not a thing. Did something happen at the Great House? There have been police cars coming and going all afternoon.”

“Meeyain’ at liberty to say, Missus Doctah.”

Just then Emily caught sight of Bennie tiptoeing across the living room, in the direction of his bedroom. She waved him over. “Here’s our houseman, Bennie. Bennie, did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary last night?”

Only Emily could have caught the twinkle in his eye when he said, “No, Ina Emily.”

“Thank you, Bennie. Is there anything else, Detective Hamilton? I don’t mean to be rude, but I still have so many things to do to get ready for tomorrow. We’re going to San Juan for the annual meeting of the Association of Anthropologists and Archaeologists of the Americas this weekend. If we have your permission to leave the island, that is,” she added.

“How long do you plan to be gone?”

“We’ll be back Sunday evening at the latest.”

“Meeyain’ see no problem, Missus Doctah.”

“Meeyain’ know me ass from me elbow, Missus Doctah,” chortled Emily a few minutes later. “Did he look stoned to you?”

“They all look stoned to me,” replied Phil. “But we seem to be in the clear for the time being.”

“What were you doing when he showed up.”

“Typing. I was so flustered I left the manuscript out on the table. All I could think of, the whole time I was talking to him, was please don’t let him ask to look around.”

“I told you it wasn’t wise to put things down on paper.”

“Punctiliously speaking, Zep, you
asked
me if it was wise. I said it was important. I still think it is.”

“Just let’s not push our luck. That’s all I’m saying here: let’s not push our luck.”

“I agree,” said Phil—this was how most of their arguments ended.

Phil’s bedroom was spartanly furnished. Single bed, rolltop desk, folding chair, card table for typing. He picked up the typescript to see how far he’d gotten, reread the last page, crumpled it in disgust, then quickly retrieved it from the wastebasket and tore it into strips. Once again, he’d reached the heart of the matter and found it indescribable. It was fun to write about the sex, challenging to trace the development of the ritual through the years—wrong turns, punctured lungs, the
ehehas
that escaped them, Bennie’s brilliant suggestion that they dispatch the subjects by severing their right hands—but the correct words with which to convey the
feel
of the ritual remained elusive.

Phil retrieved the crumpled paper from the wastebasket, reread it before tearing it into strips, then tore the strips into confetti. Have to buy a shredder, he reminded himself as he inserted another piece of paper into the trusty old Remington, and started typing again.

Rip, crumple, retrieve, confetti-ize.

By Thursday afternoon the resources of the St. Luke PD were stretched to the breaking point. All available personnel were out beating the cane stubble, sifting the dirt from the tower floor, dusting and vacuuming the Apgard vehicles for trace evidence, fingerprinting every door and sill and piece of furniture in the Great House and taking swabs of the bloodstains on the patio for identification (they proved to be Lewis’s, as promised), going through Hokey’s personal effects, interviewing her family and friends, or scouring the island for potential witnesses.

When Pender and Julian returned to police headquarters after confirming Apgard’s alibi at Missionary Hospital, they were informed by the desk sergeant that a Miss Gold of Estate Tamarind had filed a missing persons report on a Mr. Andrew Arena, also of Estate Tamarind. It turned out Julian knew him, which somehow did not surprise Pender.

“He’s the bartender at the King Christian. He’s not a flake, either—he’s held down the same job for at least, oh, five years or so. And lived in the same place—little village at the edge of the forest. Hippies, down-islanders—not quite plush digs, but a step up from Sugar Town. Interestingly enough, Lewis Apgard is the landlord. And come to think of it, if I’m not mistaken, our missing Robert Brack lived up there for a few months as well.”

“Sounds like it’s worth checking out,” said Pender, for whom the prospect of sitting in the basement of police headquarters going through the department’s files of habitual criminals and previous homicides was not at all attractive. “Why don’t you let me take this one?”

“That might not be a bad idea. The Core has a habit of depopulating rapidly whenever someone in uniform shows up.”

“Then I’m your man,” said Pender, glancing down at his hula shirt—black, with neon green dragons.

“If you’re sure you don’t mind.”

“Are you shitting me? This old fire horse has done heard the bell, Chief Coffee.”

“You’re on, then,” said Coffee, rummaging through his desk drawers until he found a tarnished badge, which he slid across the desk to Pender.

“What’s this for?”

“Liability. Raise your right hand. Do you swear to uphold the laws of this island and obey the commands of Chief Julian Coffee as if they issued from the mouth of the Almighty himself?”

“I suppose.”

“Congratulations, you’re now an auxiliary member of the St. Luke Police Department. No pay, no benefits, just the honor of the thing.”

Pender polished the front of the badge on the thigh of his plaid slacks as if it were an apple, and glanced at it before slipping it into his shirt pocket. “Hey, my first day on the force, and I already made detective.”

“That’s
my
old badge. Try not to disgrace it. You want a gun?”

“Naah. I could use a set of wheels, though.”

“Let me see what’s available,” said Julian. He picked up the phone, buzzed someone. “What’s in the lot…? That’s it…? What about…? All right.” He replaced the receiver, grinned knowingly at Pender.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing.”

Twenty minutes later, Pender was grinning too as he left police headquarters, his enormous butt balanced precariously atop a tiny white Vespa motorbike that kept threatening to turn itself into a suppository every time it hit a bump, of which there were plenty on the cobbled streets of Dansker Hill.

It took Pender a few minutes to master the Vespa. He came close to spilling it at the bottom of Tivoli Street, when he turned into the wrong lane of the Circle Road, having momentarily forgotten about driving on the left, and had to make a desperate correction to avoid a truck full of naked-looking sheep.

No harm, no foul, though. Once he got the hang of it and was tootling down the cracked two-lane whitetop at an exhilarating twenty, twenty-five miles an hour, with a too-small white helmet jammed down snugly over his ears, the wind in his face, and the blue Caribbean winking through the gaps in the palm trees to his right, the song that kept going through his mind, God bless him, was Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild.”

Eight miles east of Frederikshavn, a wooden signpost marked the turnoff for Estate Tamarind. A tarred driveway ran for a mile, straight as a ruler, through flat brown fields of cane stumps. A wooden gate swung back on sagging hinges marked the entrance to the Core. Beyond the gate, two rows of august tamarinds, forty feet high, with rounded crowns of feathery leaves, shaded the dirt lane.

Quonset huts and cabins on stilts dotted the broad hillside rising to the right. Straight ahead more cabins lined either side of the lane. At the end of the rows of cabins, two tall, narrow A-frames faced each other across the lane. Beyond them, parked in a dirt clearing under a towering red flamboyant tree, was a collection of old cars, vans, and pickups that would have been classified as a junkyard in the States. Pender left the Vespa there, with the helmet hanging from the handlebars, and walked up the hill.

The first person he came upon was the armless boy from yesterday afternoon, sitting on the plank steps behind one of the cabins, the lower end of which was raised on stilts to level the floor. The boy was barefoot, holding a pencil between the big and second toes of his right foot, writing in a loose-leaf notebook he held down with his left foot.

“Excuse me,” said Pender. They hadn’t met yesterday. Thoroughly embarrassed after his dressing-down, Pender had stammered an apology and fled the field before soccer practice was dismissed. “Do you know which house Holly Gold lives in?”

Marley looked up from his homework. Huge bald white man in a black-and-green dragon shirt. He slipped the pencil into the loose-leaf and closed it with his foot. “Yes, sir.”

Pender waited…waited…. “Okay, which one is it?”

“Said I knew, didn’t say I’d tell.”

“I’m with the police—Miss Gold filed a missing persons report.”

“Tell me another one, mister—you ain’ no police.” Marley knew every cop on the island, from Chief Coffee, his friend Marcus’s grandfather, on down.

“I am, really.” Pender showed him the badge.

“I’ll fetch her,” said Marley. Balancing on his left foot, he opened the cabin door with his right, depressing the thumb latch with his big toe.

A moment later, the woman who’d given Pender what for yesterday appeared in the doorway in a Japanese robe that came down to midthigh—shapely midthigh, Pender couldn’t help but notice. Her dark curly hair was flattened on one side; she appeared to have been awakened from a nap. “You,” she said accusingly.

“Me,” he said apologetically. “I’m Ed Pender—I’m helping the local police investigate that missing persons report you filed on Mr. Arena. I was hoping to have a look at his house, talk to a few people, see if there are any indications as to what might have happened to him.”

Oops, thought Holly, wondering just how big a can of worms she’d opened with her little missing persons report. If Andy did come back, he wouldn’t be pleased to learn his A-frame had been searched. “Do you have a warrant to search his house?” she asked Pender.

“Don’t need one,” he replied. “Mr. Arena isn’t a suspect, he isn’t being charged with a crime, and just to set your mind at ease, any contraband I might happen to come across in the course of a warrantless search could not be used as evidence against him in a court of law, if that’s what’s bothering you.” Not strictly true, but Pender was no narc—he hadn’t made a dope bust since he was a sheriff’s deputy in Cortland County, and wasn’t about to start now.

“Of course not,” said Holly. “Wait here, let me get dressed, I’ll walk you down there.”

“I’ll take him,” Marley offered.

“Really? Finished all that homework already?”

“No, but—”

“No but me no no buts, young man,” declaimed Holly.

Marley looked over at Pender, as if for support.

“Yeah,” said Pender. “What she said.”

Shortly after Pender left police headquarters on his Vespa, Lewis Apgard arrived in a squad car to formally identify his wife’s body. His own vehicles were still being examined, though they hadn’t been officially impounded. Chief Coffee led him across the cobbled courtyard to the morgue in the basement of the courthouse, where Hokey lay in a refrigerated drawer, covered by a sheet.

Lewis felt a blast of cold air when Dr. Parmenter, an obstetrician who doubled as coroner—womb to tomb, he liked to say—opened the door and rolled her out on a slab. Coffee lowered the sheet as far as Hokey’s neck. Lewis glanced briefly at her face; her long rabbity nose looked even more pinched than usual. He nodded. Coffee started to pull the sheet back up. Lewis stopped him.

“Could I have a couple minutes with my wife, please? We never did have a chance to say good-bye.”

Layla had already taken her smears and gone over the body for trace and transfer evidence, so Coffee had no problem with that. He and Parmenter went across the hall to the coroner’s office to go over a few details about the autopsy scheduled for later that evening, leaving Lewis alone with Hokey.

He looked around to be sure there were no hidden cameras, then pulled the sheet down to her waist. It was sort of the ultimate peep, but he got no pleasure out of it.

At least she still had her full-body, no-line tan, Lewis told himself, and would for eternity now. Hokey would have been glad of that: she’d been terribly vain about her tan, all but suicidally so in this age of melanoma.

Poor Hokey—so much had happened in the last twenty-four hours that it was just beginning to sink in for Lewis that what had been only a vague plan the previous morning was now a fait accompli.

“I miss you,” he whispered. “And all over a few fucking trees. You stupid, stupid—” He was about to call her the C-word. He caught himself—he hadn’t come here for that. “Sorry,” he said, bending to kiss her.

He couldn’t do it, though—he could feel the cold coming off her in waves when his lips were only an inch away. He touched her blue lips with his forefinger instead, then pulled the sheet back up over her head and smoothed out the wrinkles with his palm.