Twenty-Seven Bones (19 page)

Nowadays you practically had to be a Hokansson or an Apgard to be buried in the old Lutheran churchyard. The Hokansson plot was prime real estate, nicely situated under a flaming red Never-Be-Thirsty tree, so named because you could squirt drinkable water from the unopened buds. They buried Hokey next to where her parents had been laid to rest—twice, once after their murder and a second time after Hurricane Hugo exhumed several of the twentieth-century occupants in ’95.

The interment itself was restricted to family. By the time the minister finished dust-to-dusting Hokey, Lewis was the soberest he’d been since waking up that morning, which was the soberest he’d been since fleeing the overseer’s house in horror the night before, which was too sober entirely. He couldn’t wait to get to that flask in the glove compartment of the Bentley. Should have put it in his pocket instead—after all, who the hell was going to say anything, grieving widower at his wife’s funeral?

It had shaken him, having the Epps pop up unexpectedly like that, and it hadn’t helped his nerves any when Phil took his hand in the receiving line as the crowd filed out of the church, pulled him close, and whispered into his ear that they needed to talk—ASAP.

But the FBI man, Pender, was watching Lewis from the back pew. “Thank you, I’ll miss her, too,” he’d said loudly, then used the Guv’s technique for moving people along a receiving line—shake their right hand with your right, usher them along with a gentle but firm pressure of your left hand on their elbow or upper arm.

But he couldn’t get it out of his head all during the interment service. Talk? With those ghouls? What did they have to talk about now? He’d fulfilled his end of the bargain—surely the best thing for all of them would be to break off any further contact as quickly and completely as possible, he told himself, as he tossed his ceremonial scoop of earth on the heavy, sealed casket.
Ka-chunk.

The Great House stood silent and empty—Lewis had let it be known there would be no reception. Let the Twelve Danish Families and the Hokansson cousins and the Ladies Who Golf feed their own faces and drink their own booze—Lewis was condolenced out.

What he really wanted to do was get drunk and laid, but he’d reached that point where rum only seemed to sharpen his senses. He kept seeing things he really didn’t want to: the bones in the coffee can; Hokey in the morgue; Bendt’s hand palm up in the ivy, blood-spattered fingers curled.

Of course, getting laid wasn’t a real strong possibility either, Lewis realized as he shucked off his black suit and tossed it in the direction of the hamper. He wasn’t even all that horny—or if he was, it was a strange kind of horny. It wasn’t so much sex he desired as desire itself. He tried unsuccessfully to masturbate in the shower, conjuring up every woman he had ever fucked, or seen fucking, and always coming back to the dick-shriveling thought of Hokey in the shower. Oh how we danced on the night we were wed, oh how we fucked on the night that she died.

After his shower, and a nap that left him more tired than he’d been before he lay down, Lewis changed into shorts, rubber sandals, and a T-shirt and went down to the kitchen to make a sandwich. There was carved ham in the meat bin, sliced Swiss in the cheese bin, and half a loaf of Sally’s homemade bread in the bread box. And in the freezer were two full bottles of white Reserve, one of which had the words
MR LEWIS
scrawled on the label—apparently his snooty cook wasn’t comfortable sharing a bottle with her boss. Of course with Hokey gone he could fire her now, but he didn’t want to lose Johnny, her husband, as well.

Lewis took his sandwich and his rum out back to the pool. Daylight was fading rapidly—and in the tropics, rapid means rapid. Within half an hour the sky was black straight up, midnight blue around the rim, splashed with fat round stars. He turned on the pool lights—it looked inviting but he wasn’t supposed to get his bandage wet. He kicked off his sandals and sat at the shallow end, dangling his bare feet in the warm water, watching the ripples spreading outward. His mind started flashing on the words
fait accompli.
Fait a-fucking-compli. Rest of your life ahead of you, me son.

Then a rustle in the oleander bushes. “Hsst. Over here.” Bennie, from next door, crouched in the shrubbery so he couldn’t be seen from the house. “They wanna see you. They say why you no come over.”

“Tell them I think we should stay away from each other for a while. No calls, no visits, until things blow over.”

“You tell ’em.”

“I don’t think you quite have the picture here, Bennie.” Lewis climbed out of the pool, looked around for a towel to dry his feet. “How can I
tell
them if—”

Bennie gone, mon.

Struck out on the Epps: the alibi held up. Uniforms had begun canvassing the island with Frieda Schaller’s picture, which would be in the next day’s paper, but Julian admitted privately to Pender that for the locals, trying to pick one tourist out of the descending horde from a holiday cruise ship was like trying to identify a single longhorn a year after the stampede.

They more or less struck out on Fraulein Schaller’s credit card, too. The German police had already pulled her records: there was only one charge on St. Luke: a twenty-five-dollar dinner at Captain Wick’s. “A popular tourist spot—there’s a live sea turtle chained to a cement wading pool in the courtyard,” said Julian.

The restaurant was located about halfway between Frederikshavn and the Core, on the Circle Road. Pender volunteered to stop off on his way home, interview the staff, show Schaller’s picture around.

The first thing he noticed when he pulled into Captain Wick’s nearly deserted parking lot was that it was on the side of the building, not out front. There was no valet service and the lot itself couldn’t be seen from inside the restaurant, which made it an ideal place to pick somebody up without being seen.

Pender could picture the contact between the killer and the vic: Can I give you a lift back to your ship, Fraulein? It can be dangerous around here at night. And the taxis are so unreliable.

His mind continued to spin off the scenario as he walked around to the entrance. Had the vic also been trolling? For companionship? Sex? Romance?

Swinging half doors led to an open-air courtyard. The outdoor tables were all unoccupied. The giant sea turtle had one of those just-shoot-me looks. So did the maitre d’, when Pender made the obligatory joke about not ordering the turtle soup, and his forced laugh was a terrible thing to hear. But he didn’t recognize Frieda Schaller, and neither did anyone else on staff. At least no one who was working Sunday; the turtle wasn’t talking.

Like Apgard, Pender made himself a sandwich for dinner; like Apgard, he ate it al fresco, on the patio. The rain tree at sunset was exquisite, but after a few minutes Pender found himself jonesing for a football game. He wondered how the ’Skins were doing, and if Spurrier was still playing musical quarterbacks. First week of October, the leaves would be just starting to turn, back home. He felt as if he’d been away for months.

Which he might be yet, for all the progress they were making on the investigation. For a while there, he’d really thought he was on to something. That look in Apgard’s eyes when he saw the Epps at the funeral—Pender couldn’t stop thinking about it. But they all had airtight alibis. Or did they? Apgard had an alibi for his wife’s murder, but not for Bendt’s. The Epps had an alibi for Bendt, but not for Mrs. Apgard.

And such good alibis they were. That in itself was somewhat suspicious. In his thirty years as an investigator, one thing Pender had learned was how rare a good alibi was, especially at night. Hell, he himself didn’t have an alibi for either night.

At the meeting this afternoon they had all spoken of the killer as a he, singular, but the more Pender thought about it, the better he liked the idea of a conspiracy. Overlapping alibis. The Epps and Apgard. They scratched his itch, he scratched theirs.

Of course at this point it was only a hypothesis, but definitely worth checking out, especially in the absence of any other, more likely, hypotheses. Tomorrow then, Pender promised himself, he would interview the Epps and their mysterious Indonesian companion. Apgard, too. Check his alibi for Bendt, theirs for Mrs. Apgard.

And if they didn’t have alibis, or if he got the chill during the conversation (always trust the chill, was one of Pender’s mottos), maybe he’d put some pressure on. The opposite of an affective interview—he’d see if he could make them squirm, react, do or say something incriminating. Old cop trick: invent some imaginary evidence, a fingerprint, a shoe print, see how they reacted. Conspiracies were often easier to crack than single perp crimes, because you could turn the conspirators against each other.

Darkness fell. The mosquitos arrived with a vengeance. Pender went back inside, cracked the seal on a bottle of Jim Beam. The knee-high refrigerator hadn’t succeeded in making ice yet, so Pender didn’t bother with a glass.

The first slug tasted so good Pender sucked in a great whoosh of air afterward just to taste the fumes. The second went down easier still, and the third had him feeling convivial. He pulled his wide-brimmed Panama down low on his brow, buttoned his shirt collar, rolled his shirtsleeves down, pulled out his shirttails to cover his kidney holster, then smeared insect repellent on every inch of skin that was still uncovered except his eyes. He left the A-frame by the front door, and strolled down the starlight-shadowed lane.

Marley Gold was in the open-sided kitchen, sitting on a stool washing the supper dishes with his feet, by the yellow light of a single bug-bulb hanging in a wire basket from the tin roof.

“Good evenin’, Mr. Pender.”

He had two mosquito coils burning; Pender took off his hat and waved the smoke away. “Evening, Marley. I see they put you to work.”

“Everybody gots chores, sir.” The boy might have been a trifle offended.

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Pender quickly.

“Are you really an FBI agent?”

“I was. For twenty-seven years.”

“I got a book from the school library,
Your FBI in Peace and War.
Did you ever meet Mr. J. Edgar Hoover?”

It had been a long, long time since Pender had heard The Director referred to in such awed tones—must have been an old book. “Just once. He came by the Academy to look over the recruits. I was as bald then as I am now. He told me always wear a hat, son.”

Marley dipped a dinner plate into the suds sink, holding it between his big and second toes, swiped it clean with a dishrag held in his other foot, dunked it into the rinse sink, then slid it onto the stack. He pivoted around on his coccyx to face Pender. “Did you ever have a shootout?”

“Constantly. Rare was the day I got to finish breakfast without a gunfight breaking out.”

“Don’ mek naar wit’ me now.” Whenever Marley used a St. Luke word, the whole sentence came out in dialect. “You still got your gun?”

“My SIG Sauer is in the FBI Museum.” Pender might have answered differently if he hadn’t had a few drinks in him—he almost never boasted, sober. But it was only the plain truth, he thought; he was vaguely aware of wanting the boy’s approval. “Chief Coffee loaned me a nice little semiautomatic, though.”

“Can I see it?”

Pender reached behind his back, unsnapped the two-stage holster Hamilton had loaned him, removed the gun, shook out the clip and racked the slide to make sure the chamber was empty. Marley dried his feet on a dish towel, took the gun between his feet, pressed the textured grip between his soles, then pivoted in the other direction and slipped the long, flexible middle toe of his right foot around the trigger. He dropped it; Pender picked it up and placed it between his feet again.

“That little clicker there—that’s the safety,” said Pender. “You want it so the red dot is showing—yeah, that’s right. Don’t worry if you can’t pull the trigger, it’s got kind of a heavy—”

Marley managed to pull the trigger on his second try. Obviously the boy’s toes were strong as well as flexible.

“Good job,” said Pender, reaching around him and taking the gun back. “If it was loaded, though, the recoil would have knocked you ass over teakettle off that stool—you’d have to remember to brace your back against something.”

“I want to shoot it for real.”

Boys will be boys, thought Pender, reholstering. When he was ten, he was always bugging his father to let him fire the Luger the old Marine sergeant brought back from the war. “Not in the dark.”

“Tomorrow? After school?”

“Maybe. We’ll have to see how things go.”

“If you promise, I’ll tell you a secret,” said Marley.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Promise first.”

“How can I promise if I haven’t heard the secret?”

“I’ll give you a hint—it’s about Dawson.”

The mystery woman. The lady of the lagoon. Who’d been in and out of his thoughts, in various stages of dress and undress, from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. “Okay, you’re on,” said Pender. “But it better be good.”

The moon was dim, but the starlight was so bright that the bay rums cast shadows across the path from the Great House to the overseer’s. Lewis gave the black hole of the Danish kitchen a wide berth when he passed the landing.

Emily answered the door. Her blouse was cut low, her bosom pushed up high. She closed the door quickly behind him. “A reporter? You killed a reporter?”

“Is there a problem with that?”

“Yes, there’s a problem.” She led him into the living room, handed him a copy of that morning’s
San Juan Star. St. Luke Sentinel
reporter murdered…serial killer…Machete Man…as many as four previous murders…

“That’s what we wanted, isn’t it?” said Lewis. He could hear someone typing furiously in one of the bedrooms.

“No, it’s not what we wanted. A reporter dies, every newspaper in the country gets interested. Once the wire services pick it up, the heat’s really going to be on. There’ll be Feds all over the place.”

“Feds! Pah! There’s already one nosing around. That big bald fellow in the church this afternoon—he moved into one of the A-frames at the Core yesterday. Dumb as a sack of coconuts—he doesn’t suspect a thing.”

“Well, they won’t all be. We have to give them a Machete Man, the sooner the better.”

We? Have to nip that one in the buuuuud. “How are you going to do that?”

She told him—they were back to
we.

“No,” he said firmly. “No more.”

“No more what?” They were standing two feet apart—casual but friendly conversation, according to the proxemics chart. She moved closer, broke the casual plane. She pressed up against him. She was wearing an underwire poosh-em-up, he realized—her huge titis were slopping over like pillows served up on a tray.

“No more killings.”

“What’s the matter, didn’t you enjoy the experience?”

“Of course not.” But he was starting to get aroused, remembering how it had felt the other night to be lying in wait, holding the power of life and death, wielding it. And the plan did make sense, in a twisted way. Give the police a dead victim and a dead suspect at the same time—
thhhwooop:
they’d be on it like a gecko on a fly, no questions asked. Not many, anyway.

Emily pressed closer, trapping his semi-erection against his thigh. “When a man and his dick disagree,” she told him, “I always believe the dick. And next time it will be even better—we’ve decided to give you the honors.”

“What honors?”

“That’s right, you don’t know yet, do you?” She stepped back. He found himself missing the contact. “Have a seat, Lew—there’s something I want to show you.”