“Well…technically not my loss,” Olivia said. “But it’s very very sad.”
Dr. Nolan looked at me, “For the record, can you identify this man?”
“Yes?” It felt wrong. Someone who liked him should be identifying him.
Olivia was quickly losing her cool, eyes dashing between Nico’s body and the door. She pulled me out of the room and down the poorly lit hall to the exit. It was the middle of the week, so the streets were still fairly empty; a few locals making their way to their hospitality jobs, and a couple of tourists window shopping while others dipped in and out of bars.
She bummed a cigarette from a hungover couple walking down the street. After five years of abstinence, she still lit up like a pro.
We’d smoked our first cigarettes together at the age of 13, hiding behind the cork trees in the tree sanctuary. For me, it was the one and only cigarette. Thanks, but no thanks. For Olivia, it had been a hard-to-break habit now rearing its ugly head.
Olivia also held her copy of the wedding binder tightly under her arm, pages dog-eared and worn. We’d been working from an enormous version of a planner for a year now, with all the documents you’d expect; schedules, contracts, individual bridesmaid responsibilities and the standard wedding nitpicking.
I always had mine close by, now in a commemorative red wedding tote, of course. Within the overstuffed, constantly updated planner was the equivalent of an 8th-grade slam book.
It had been designed to give us pictures and basic info on all the guests and their dietary restrictions, but had devolved to a nasty book of secrets and judgments, and I now knew far more than I wanted to about anyone. It was worth hiding.
I gave everyone in my book a nickname, or I’d never have remembered. Princeton Colleen. Little Joe. Walter’s uncle who become known as Commando Gordon. Photographer Migs had tested me on the names just that morning and I’d aced it.
Olivia’s voice was gravelly. “I need to find Walter. Is that cool? I’m sorry to leave you here, but… I’ve just never seen him like this. His friend’s dead – I mean, what can I do? That was horrible. But just please keep this between you and I… and Lloyd, god help us.”
“Olivia, we need to tell people. People need to make arrangement to get back home,”
“No one’s going home. That’s why we have to wait to tell anyone. I need to figure this out.”
“What?” I assumed the event would be called off.
“Not until we know what happened. I mean… obviously Nico would want the wedding to go on…” She was counting on her hand, quickly calculating. “I’m thinking that maybe you can handle this morgue stuff for a bit? I’m far too emotional, obviously, and have to calm Walter down. I’ve got seventy-two hours before the wedding to make things cool.”
“Olivia…”
She frantically rattled off all the reasons why the wedding was impossible to cancel. In addition to the fact that Nico wouldn’t be around to foot the bill in the future, there were the schedules of the rich and powerful to consider, and the impossibility of ever getting her parents in the same room again.
She took a long final wet drag of her cigarette and said, “So you see, this wedding is going to happen. Not a question in my mind. I have to tell Walter before he… I have to find Walter.” In a state of confusion, she slowly walked away, working out step one in her quest to find broken-hearted Walter. Eventually looking back at my shell-shocked expression, she added, “I love you, Lexie.”
She threw the cigarette and her binder carelessly on the ground, taking a momentary break, stretching her perfectly sculptured arms defiantly above her head. She quickly picked up her beloved binder and was off.
Where are you about to do, Olivia?
I missed the old, dark, hilarious, struggling writer version of her. I loved her success, her confidence, and humor, but running a business like hers, I guess you’d have to change.
Five years ago, she and Bridesmaid Amanda had opened Femme Fit-all. They ran a showroom, not really a gym, where clients would meet model-attractive trainers who would make house calls, showing clients how to work out in their homes with whatever they had: candlesticks, half-gallon jugs of milk, the seven volumes of Harry Potter. They’d learned early on that recommending jump ropes and hula-hoops in NYC apartments was a recipe for disaster.
Clients could have trainers “update” with them in their homes as often as they needed. The most popular package was the gift of the 4-session quarterly visit. 75% of the unfit, slightly-bloated New Yorkers only used it once, if ever.
All gyms counted on the post New Year’s resolution drop off, but Olivia had almost zero overhead, and the laziest of all gym rats would all soon disappear into the un-muscled masses. All gyms work on the model that only a fraction of people with memberships show up and exercise, but Olivia and Amanda didn’t even go through the pretense of having locations.
We were still as close as ever, but slowly but surely over the last five years, since she’d partnered with Amanda, things were just a little different, just a little less lovely. Sometimes it was like old times, and sometimes it was like I never knew her at all.
Back in the morgue, Dr. Nolan worked with the nurse in silence. I sat uncomfortably on one of the wobbly chairs in the room, trying to conjure up some sympathy. Truth be told, I went through my mental filing cabinet of memories of Nico and could not think of one where he was truly kind to me. When I’d tried to sit down at one of their poker games last summer, he had shooed me away, saying, “Just for the big boys, little girl. Tall little girl.”
My thoughts were interrupted by the nurse, softly asking me, “Are you next of kin?”
“Me?” I exclaimed, as if it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. As if someone could tell, as he lay dead on a table, that he thought he was far too important to go near me with a ten-foot pole. “No.”
“Do you know who that would be, and how we can contact her?”
“Max,” I said, as I watched the doctor. “I don’t know how to find her.” I didn’t even know her last name.
Please don’t make me call Max.
Nico’s estranged wife, Max (short for what, no one knew), would most definitely not be attending. She was inhumanly beautiful with sleek long red hair and granite eyes, and a nastiness to rival that of her husband’s.
Max was of British aristocracy, which was one step above socialite, I had recently learned. I was told that Princess Di had been her eightieth cousin, thirty-six times removed, or something ridiculous like that, which made her about three-thousandth in line for the throne.
Late into the few evenings that we were at the same parties, Max would corner me, drunk and sad, confiding the same things every time; how much she missed Europe, how much she hated Nico, and how her and motherhood were a match made in hell.
Every so often, she was charming and sometimes even thankful for hearing her out without any pretense of judgment. Men would pass us, drool over the unthinkable beauty, then give me a quick once over, returning their focus to Max as they kept on walking. She never acknowledged they existed.
Max and Nico finally had enough of each other and split last May, with a heinous divorce currently in progress. Neither would leave their Gramercy Park townhouse, perhaps because of the possibility of losing custody of their six-yearold terror of a son. My guess was the atmosphere stayed as pleasant as their sunny dispositions.
He had money. She not-so-secretly had none, but she had beauty, youth, and indisputable jet-set bona fide aristocrat status.
“Anita, ves esto?” Dr. Nolan looked shaken, as the nurse joined him on the other side of the table. His latex-clad hand was frozen on Nico’s well-formed triceps and he moved the examination light over his arm.
Oh no. This can’t be good.
He rolled a surgical instrument trolley over and grabbed small forceps. The nurse joined him by his side.
“Do you see this?” he asked her. There was a small but very inflamed spot, which looked like a ba
d spider bite. With forceps, the doctor removed what looked like a tip of pencil lead. “Well, well,” the good doctor said. “Look at that. How does a needle break like that?” He paused. He was going to say something big. “I don’t think that this was a heart attack. Right into the brachial vein. Assassin style.”
Assassin? Did he really say, “assassin?”
He became excited and curious, like a mad scientist, and decided to go to the police. Maybe he’d finally get to do an autopsy after all.
Chapter 4: Bocas, PD
You could walk the length of Bocas Town in ten minutes, so the police department was close. The streets were lined with clean but rickety three-story buildings; hostels and low budget hotels, markets, and restaurants. Only a few looked like homes.
Most people who worked on the island lived on the mainland and traveled by ferry or speedboat. There was also a community of Americans working here, those who had come down for vacation and never left.
Land was cheap and so was everything else on the island; 60 cents max on a water taxi, $12 for a gourmet meal, and the waterfront property cost a fraction of the price of neighboring Costa Rica. With modest savings and a job at a hotel or a water sports company, you could live like a king, or at least maintain a fine middle-class lifestyle.
Dr. Nolan had put the tip of the needle in a ziplock baggie. We had spent thirty minutes in his musty office, with an administrator trying to get the island’s police detectives on the phone.
“Let’s just walk over there. But seriously, fifty percent chance they’re even there. Just as possible that they’re off surfing. It’s pretty standard,” he said, rummaging through his small volume of English and Spanish medical books, finally finding what he was looking for.
No one looked twice as the doctor walked familiarly through the station; just a few waves and nods. We entered an office with two casually dressed officers.
“Lexie, this is our crack team of island detectives, Alajandro LaGuardia and Juan McDonough. Not answering your phone today? This is a serious emergency,” the doc scolded.
“If you don’t dial in on 104, it’s not really an emergency. Everyone knows that,” La Guardia said, with minimal accent.
Dr. Nolan kicked his chair. “Then why give me a private number?”
“Simple. If it’s not really an emergency, you’ll go away.” They both laughed.
The doc tossed the baggie on their cluttered desk. “I figured it would be easier to bring this than to wait three days for you to get back to me.”
McDonough picked it up and examined it through the baggie. “What do you have there?”
“One of the guys from the big wedding is dead. I don’t think it was of natural causes. I think this guy has been killed,” the doc gravely said.
He dramatically stated this, as if it was the first time he may have uttered the words. He came off more like a bad medical soap opera than concerned doctor. LaGuardia almost looked as if he was going to giggle, which struck me as strange.
“Always a bit of the drama with you. I’ll see when we can get a helicopter from Panama City to pick him up,” La Guardia said, reaching for the desk phone.
“Just listen to me for a few minutes and check this out before you call. Come down to the hospital for five minutes,” Doc pleaded.
They put on their flip-flops and led the way. “Okay dude, but I think we’ve worked enough in the solving of murders department. The Landis case was all us, not Panama City. That was all us.”
The Doc just said, trailing after them like a mascot, “This is something you are going to want to see. If I’m right, I’ve never seen this in my ten years here.”
In his most pensive state, it was hard to take him seriously. Ten years on the job? He couldn’t have been more than 30 at best. But then again, the cops looked like they might have been even younger.
The three of them crowded around Nico’s inanimate form. Dr. Nolan held up the baggie with the needle tip. “Look at that wound. I’m near positive that he was killed with this needle. I read about this when I moved down here. This kind of lesion around the needle entry means it was, well, you know, essentially a poison dart.”
Poison dart? Impossible.
The doctor opened an old book on the table next to Nico’s feet, turning the musty pages until he found what he was looking for. McDonough looked the page over studiously and commented, “Red frog poison? I’ve never seen it here. But everyone knows….”
Who’d want to kill Nico? Besides everyone.
We only taught everyone at this wedding about red frog poison. That narrows it down.
LaGuardia said, “You know as well as I do that we have to get the body to Panama City tonight. We don’t have the facilities. He’s going to start stinking up your place really soon. And, who’s footing that bill to get him there?”
I dug into my tote pulling out Lloyd’s roll of cash.
“Get the body back, fine, but we have this needle tip.” Dr. Nolan held up the baggy and shook it in LaGuardia’s face. “We have the facilities. Can’t you take it up to the research station? Please?”
La Guardia looked at the small wound with increasing curiosity, pulling his longish black hair into a ponytail. “Hmm. That would be something. When was the last death like this on record?”
“The records aren’t great. I can’t find a report of it,” Dr. Nolan said, looking through the book.
“It’s foggy, but I’m a little curious, to tell you the truth,” McDonough stated.
Doc continued, “Could you just ask this one little favor? I’m just dying to know. Not literally.”
Around the coast and up the island was the Bocas Research Station, a field location of the Smithsonian Research Institute, systematically examining “interactions between diet and toxicity in dart poison frogs.”
McDonough was excited to tell us that he had a good friend up there, who might look at it for them. He was getting excited, smiling like a little boy. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
He went on to explain that he might have missed his scientific calling of herpetology and spent a good deal of time with the traveling researchers up the west coast.
La Guardia sighed and sat down in an examination chair, lighting up. “Hey, McDonough. Do you think we should close the airport?”
No one seemed to be bothered by indoor smoking.
Casually, McDonough answered, “Yeah, why not? Until we know what we have.”
They seem to get a kick out of this. It’s as if they did it just for laughs on a fairly regular basis, pleasantly speaking with the guys from air traffic control.
“This is very exciting,” Dr. Nolan said. He was trying to be low key, but he was desperate to be part of this investigative clique.
I think he had wanted to be one of the cool kids his whole life. Now maybe he was a part of something big.
McDonough was on hold for a long time while we all waited, silently watching and listening. The conversation was in Spanish, so I had to wait with bated breath, listening to any word that I could understand.
He finally said, “They’ll look at it. We should know by tomorrow.”
LaGuardia seemed satisfied. “Okay, airport closed. Keep it closed until tomorrow if we see we need to investigate.”
I meekly said, “Is there still a chance it was a heart attack? Or just a regular drowning?”
The police looked at Nolan, who bit the inside of his cheek, thinking. “I mean,” he said like a twelve-year-old, “it’s possible. But, I don’t know, call it a hunch. I think we know exactly what it is.”
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, to escape for a moment. I was terrified. Not at the fact that there might be a killer in our midst, but at the thought having to face telling the close to unraveling bride.
Chapter 5: Salty Tears
LaGuardia drove me home in a police boat, which I thought was actually very cool and important. I offered to take myself home in a water taxi, but he thought that I might be shaken and ups
et by Nico’s death, and gallantly wanted to make sure that I got home safely.
No one had seemed to want to say “murder” out loud until the research facility could analyze what they had, most likely by tomorrow. I had a feeling they weren’t being 100% kosher on not contacting Panama City yet. He casually asked me about Nico, what he was like, and if there was anyone in the wedding party who had any feelings of ill will for the deceased.
What could I say? I’d met him a dozen unpleasant times and that’s all I know.
Before I got off the boat, he offered me a beer and he sat down next to me, commenting, “We’ll let you know about the toxicology results when we hear back tomorrow. I don’t think I really believe it, but if you see anything strange, let us know, tall girl.”
If I saw something? What would I see? What would I be looking for?
I watched the boat pull away from the dock and head south, quickly out of sight and earshot.
The resort was empty, thankfully, with the rest of my guests obviously still living it up with Lloyd at the Pickled Parrot. Of the four bridesmaids, I’d definitely won out on the digs, laying my hat at Mariposa del Mar on the main island of Isla Colon.
Six luxury bungalows had been built over the clear shallow water near a mangrove. The rooms were connected by a long walkway, which continued on to a reception area and a mellow, elegant restaurant, now empty. The website described the resort as “constructed using the traditional methods of the archipelago: each handcrafted cabin is built upon stilts over the water and covered by a palm leaf roof – an unforgettable habitat congruent with the native communities of the region.”
Not too shabby.
Walking past the bored bartender, it felt rude not to get a drink, so I ordered Soberana beer. I joked with the bartender at how funny it was that a beer had the word “sober” in it. The irony was lost on her.
Drowning Lessons Page 3
