Sweet Paradise

by Gene Desrochers

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  They hopped into the boat. My stomach was already doing cartwheels in anticipation of the ocean voyage.

  “Guys, I get seasick. I need something.”

  Harold lifted the cushions of a seat and fished out a Canada Dry Ginger Ale. I sipped the lukewarm soda as we motored out of the marina toward Hassel Island.

  An alpha-male in blue steered. Harold had seated himself on the bow, arms hugging his knees. The wind whipped through his stringy locks. Junior paced around in front of me, wringing his hands and muttering, “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”

  I wanted to say something to alleviate his guilt. “Junior, it wasn’t your fault.”

  He spun, planting both hands on the cushion next to me. “Not my fault! I’m the one she talked to most.”

  “But you weren’t here.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. I’ve wanted to be gone for a long time. But I should have stayed. She needed me.”

  “Why’d you want to be gone?”

  “It’s complicated. My dad put me up in boarding school, so I figured I’d prove that I was okay with it. Like, hey man, I got this handled. I’m a man. Plus ... ”

  He pushed up and started pacing again. Although he was moving he had that same frozen look in his eyes I’d seen when Kendal was shot.

  The boat jounced over a wave. Ginger ale sloshed on my hand. I sucked it off and took another sip. My stomach started to churn. Behind us, the clutch of houses and low buildings that made up Charlotte Amalie shrank. A white cruise ship dominated the right side of the harbor. I tried to make out my office building, but the docks and other buildings concealed it from view. Bluebeard’s Castle stood above to the east and below it, The West Indian Manner nestled behind two tall coconut trees and the avocado tree. I knew the termites were devouring it, but from here, the tree looked whole, at peace.

  “I know what you mean,” I said without turning around. “I went off with the same intention. Fathers seem to do that, but maybe that’s how it works. Fathers shove their offspring out of the nest. You fly or fall.”

  “Falling. Done a fair amount of that,” he said.

  I didn’t know what else to say to Junior. It all seemed so stupid. Harold in the bow, his dirty-blond locks whipping in the wind, looking too cool in his Oakleys. The kid had more family than I did, as well as more opportunities. Boarding school sounded pretty good to me. I envied Junior. It’s why I’d left New Orleans where we’d started living with my mom’s cousin after my father went on disability. To disappear. To stop being seen. To stop being a part of the dysfunction. All Junior wanted was to be included. To be let in on the business. In the end, we both had different solutions for the same problem.

  Harold groaned as he stepped down from the edge back into the cockpit area.

  “Yo, man, this is fucked up. Can’t believe we’re going to see where mama bought it.” He looked at me. One of his eyes was black.

  “Creepy, right? I sometimes burst a blood vessel under extreme stress. I think this qualifies, dude.”

  “Who’s showing us what here?”

  “We know people, like this guy.” He nodded at the blue-shirt wearing pilot. “Former cop. Eddie, say ‘hey’ to Boise.”

  Eddie grunted acknowledgement without turning around.

  “Eddie,” I said to the back of his head. “Okay, what’s Eddie’s story,” I asked.

  “Friend of mama’s. He heard and called his buddies on the force to get us some photos and an unobstructed look at the crime scene. Eddie’s the man, right, Eddie?” Harold slapped the thick man on the shoulder. Eddie gave a slightly more cordial grunt. “Detective named ... what’s it again, Eddie?”

  This time, Eddie spoke with a thick West Indian accent. “Leber.”

  Chapter 10

  Leber. Did this guy ever take off his sunglasses? The Bacon family had pull. Detective Leber wore another billiard-ball colored button-down. Eddie and he nodded at each other in some cop greeting. Leber must have made the journey over in the police boat moored at the dock.

  We stood on the beach in front of some stone and brick ruins I’d hiked through once on a cub scout trip. Hassel Island was home to a few hundred folks who were mostly hippie types that liked to be more isolated than the bustling tourist trap of St. Thomas allowed. A ferry serviced the island. In elementary school one of the girls, who cut her hair short and smelled like sage, lived over here. I’d had a crush on her for a minute in fourth grade.

  “Eddie, this better be good. I already spent the morning doing my rowing workout in this harbor, now you got me out here again. I don’t like motorized vessels. Too noisy.” Leber shifted his attention to Junior and me. “We really should stop meeting at murder scenes.”

  “Wait, you’re saying my grandma was murdered?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Someone killed her.”

  “How do you know that?” Junior demanded.

  “You certainly are more rambunctious today than when last we met,” Leber said scratching his arm. “Look, I’m doing a favor for Eddie. That’s it. I’m not here to be interrogated. We’ll save that for the suspects when I locate them. All of you, including you.” He pointed at me. “Have a date at the station for questioning tomorrow.”

  Harold nodded plaintively. “Yeah, yeah, we’ll be there.”

  “Don’t gimme no sass, boy. Y’all done gone and involved yourselves with two people who’re dead, and we are gonna want answers.”

  “Two?” Harold asked.

  Junior stepped forward. “Can we stick with this outing. We’ll be there tomorrow, Detective Leber. Promise.” Leber glanced at Eddie, who again gave a nod. This seemed to relax the detective.

  A patch of sand on the beach. The waves surged in and out. A hint of chop on a fairly calm day. My stomach settled more and more the longer we stood on solid ground. I bent, getting closer to the sand, then looked sideways at Leber.

  “Evidence?” I asked as I stood and made a mental note of our proximity to the main island.

  Leber shrugged. “She drowned. She had some signs of small fish nibbling at her extremities.” He looked at Harold and continued speaking. “She was in fairly recognizable shape. Drowning, if that’s all it is, leaves the body in fairly good condition.” He squinted at his phone. “The report says something about bruising on the backs of her thighs, like a board hit her there, but not too hard. She’d bruise easily at her advanced age.”

  “Do the police have any idea where she’d have drifted into here from?” I asked. “She died somewhere out there, right?”

  Leber nodded. “They think she must have been in the water at least two days before washing up here.”

  “Hey man, if you offed someone, wouldn’t you weigh the body down or something?” Harold asked.

  “Let’s get back on the boat,” I said.

  “What for?” Junior asked.

  “There’s no evidence here, is there, Detective?”

  This time Leber shook his head, a gleam in his eye. “You’re a little brighter than most of the P.I.’s around here, I’ll give you that.” He turned to Eddie. “What’s his name again?”

  Eddie spoke in a tone so low, even I wanted to date him. “Mr. Montague.”

  We returned to High Hopes. Leber stood off to the side, his arms crossed over his bulging chest. Junior fell into his soft stillness. He’d witnessed a murder in my office and now we had confirmation that his grandmother was also a murder victim. My thoughts returned to one of my father’s tried-and-true remarks that things, usually bad things, happened in threes. If you included Roger’s death almost three years ago, this was my third, but I had a feeling that didn’t qualify.

  “What are you doing?” Harold asked once we were back on the boat still moored to the small concrete pier.

  Leber’s skepticism oozed over me as I hunched over, examining the inside edges of the area aroun
d the steering wheel, fisherman’s chair, and the entrance to the below-deck cabin. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary except for a little nick in the otherwise immaculate white fiberglass over wood finish. After snapping a photo of the small gouge, I straightened up.

  “Where’s your partner?” I asked. “What’s his name? Bales?”

  “Barnes, but you already knew that,” Leber said. He still hadn’t taken off those oval sunglasses. Mr. Cool.

  “Are your eyes sensitive to light?”

  “You want to look deep into my baby blues?” he asked.

  “Nope, but I do like to see the eyes, otherwise how do I know who I’m dealing with?” I shot back.

  Leber waved his hand in a let’s-get-on-with-it circle, so I did.

  “How tall was your mother?” I asked Harold.

  He looked at Junior and shrugged. “I dunno, what you say, Junior, five-two.”

  Junior assented to the estimate.

  “And how tall are you, Harold?”

  “Five-eight and one-quarter.”

  “Would you stand over here?”

  He moved against the railing of the boat. Taking hold of both his shoulders I positioned him directly in front of the mark I’d found.

  “Please lean back so the backs of your legs are touching the edge of the railing.”

  “Hey man, you’re not gonna push me in, are you?” When he said this, everyone’s eyes lit except Harold’s. “What? Wha’d I say, man?”

  “Where’s it touching the back of your legs?”

  “Hmmm. I dunno. Maybe just below the knee here.”

  “What kind of shoes was she wearing when you examined her?” I asked Leber.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have reception?”

  He checked his phone, then climbed out onto the dock and strolled to the shore. I pointed at the nick in the rim of the boat, then laid back and put my sneakered foot on the edge and banged my heel against it.

  “This could have been made by a shoe kicking down with the heel as she was shoved over the side.” I stood and leaned over to look at the starboard hull. There were no marks there. It was very, very speculative on my part. A mark. Not much.

  My stomach had begun to churn again, so I got out of the boat and sat on the dock, giving myself a good view of the spot where Francine was found. Junior settled next to me, squinting up at the sun, his forehead redder than ever.

  Junior said, “She wasn’t wearing shoes, but she had on stockings when they found her. Sounds like she would have worn some kind dressy shoes with heels.”

  Picking up a pebble, I chucked it into the green water. “Women in their eighties, they like shoes like that. Let’s go look at her closet and find out who had access to this boat.”

  Leber returned, clicking off his phone. “You sound like you think you’re in charge of this investigation. This is a police matter.”

  “You find out anything about her shoes?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “No, you didn’t find out anything or no, you’re not sharing?”

  He turned his face toward the sun. “Beautiful sunset tonight. It’s best y’all go grieve your loss and be ready to answer some questions tomorrow.”

  I put my arm on Junior’s shoulder like a friendly neighbor. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think these po-lice were more interested in snagging a collar than in figuring out who killed your grandma. Would you like to take a piss on the deck?”

  He peered around at Eddie, who had positioned himself back in front of the steering wheel in a possessory manner. Eddie tilted his head. He had brown skin and a football-thick neck. His blue shirt flapped in the breeze.

  Leber said, “It isn’t like that. We want to figure this out and all help is appreciated. Much appreciated. But, we need to be kept in the loop. You share everything with us.”

  At that Eddie turned and fired up the engines. Leber disembarked.

  “How do I get in touch with you, partner?” I asked. “I only have your office number. What about your cell?”

  He wrote his cell on the back of a business card and handed it over. I noted its thickness. Even the government had better business cards than me. We motored into the channel and around the point. Leber remained on the pier, watching us cruise away.

  Harold and Junior surrounded me, after looking at each other with a blend of fear and exhaustion.

  Junior said, “So you think grandma was killed on this boat?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a theory, but a shaky one at best.”

  A wave of nausea swept over me. The rest of the trip I hung over the water, puking my guts out.

  Chapter 11

  The next day, I solicited a copy of the coroner’s report from Leber via Eddie via Harold. I entered Leber’s cell into my phone and dropped the card on my bedside table for safe-keeping before heading to the Bacon’s.

  “How do you know Eddie?” I asked Harold from a chair on the archery range. Using his old bow, Harold was taking shots from the one-hundred-yard block.

  “Eddie and I went to Antilles together. We had classes all through middle school and high school after he transferred over from Charlotte Amalie.”

  “Not too many kids from Charlotte Amalie High School get to Antilles. I mean public school kids usually can’t afford a place like that, right?”

  “Man, his mama went and won the V.I. Lottery. And wouldn’t you know it, that woman was smart with those winnings. She didn’t act like those usual lottery winners and splurge on cars and televisions and a big house with fat payments. She stuck to the program and fixed up the same ratty house she lived in that her parents owned and then focused on her kid. Oh yeah, and she bought a rental property. Eddie went on and studied criminology and became a detective, too. Good dude that Eddie. Doesn’t talk much though, except when he gets in an emotional mood and knows you real well.”

  His phone dinged. “All right, the report’s in my inbox.”

  “Can he get the report on Kendal, too?”

  “Kendal?”

  “Yeah, the guy who was arrowed in my office.”

  “You know, man, I’m not about using up favors on dudes I don’t even consort with. Why do I care about Kendal again?”

  “Cause your mother told Junior to go speak to Kendal. I think his murder’s connected.”

  He gave me a sideways stare, shot another arrow then typed something into his phone. He kept mowing down targets while I waited patiently and considered the difference between darts and archery. On one target was a photo of the governor’s grinning face at some pep rally or other. Harold put one right between the man’s smiling eyes.

  After a time, I sighed. “So, can we print out the report?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Lemme finish this set. Hold your horses.”

  He took ten more shots, then we returned to the house. Shortly, he retraced his steps clutching a printed copy of Francine’s autopsy report.

  I held the pages aloft. “That’s fast, even in more advanced jurisdictions.”

  “It’s no accident. Eddie and the coroner have history. He got us pushed up. He says Kendal got sent to Puerto Rico, so no way to expedite there.” He shrugged.

  No surprises in the coroner’s report. She drowned. Salt water into the lungs and all that technical jargon about asphyxiation and doses. “Homicide” was checked under “Manner of Death.”

  “What’s it say about the cut on her forearm? I noticed it when we ID’ed the body.”

  I leafed through the report. “Nothing much, some kind of superficial wound.”

  “Superficial? It was pretty deep.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t mean the wound was minor. It means it wasn’t why she died. Who uses your boat? Anyone besides you and your siblings?”

  He snickered. “Hillary? Man, Hillary wouldn’t go out in that tub. A cruise ship or a yacht’s her game. Occasion
ally, Herbie’ll take a run with me. He’s not much for taking it out on his own, but he’s capable.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “You use the boat?”

  “’Course. I go to some remote surf spots. You sound like the cops. They were here for hours, questioning all of us and digging through our shit. Then we had to go down to the station for more questioning and fingerprinting. You believe that shit?”

  “Harold, your mother is dead and an associate of hers is dead. The family are always strong suspects. They are gonna be all over you and this house for weeks.”

  “Come on. Hillary and my brother are jerkoffs, but offing mama? No way.”

  I gave him a blank stare, then said, “Family. They love you the most, and they hate you the most.”

  He stared at me a moment before lining up another target. “I suppose. Whatevers.” He shifted back to answering my questions about the boat. “Eddie and I do some fishing. Couple months ago, we caught us a nice king fish and some pompano. Good eating.”

  “Sounds like you use it a lot. When was the last time before today?”

  His eyes squinted down to slits. “I’m guessing little over a month ago. I’ve just been out Karat Bay and Hull surfing lately. Waves been nice, so no need to go excursing about.”

  “It says in here she was killed on or about October first. Could be off by as much as thirty hours in either direction, but based on the feeding around her nostrils and ears, it looks like it happened in the late afternoon. Where were you on that day?”

  He tapped his pocket. “As you can see, I’m not big on preserving brain cells. Probably right here smoking weed or cigarettes and shooting arrows, or just smoking weed. What day’d you say?”

  “October first.”

  “Naw man, what day, like day of the week?”

  “Thursday,” I said.

  “Thursday, that’s tough. Not a day I typically have a set routine for, but usually around late afternoon I’d be relaxing out here smoking. Don’t think I even left the house again that day after surfing till about eleven.”