Sweet Paradise

by Gene Desrochers

  “No,” I said, afraid what road this led down. Patience Daniel-san, I thought. Show patience with drunk lizard or all you catch is tail.

  “It’s a bill introduced by Representative John Conyers in the House of Representatives to sturdy, er, study reparations for slavery and discrimination in our colonizers.”

  “Colonizers? You mean the U.S.?”

  He slapped the bar. “Yes, goddamn it, the U.S.!” A couple in the booth behind Pickering, who were hunched together whispering in each other’s ears, turned and glowered at us.

  “It’s a bar,” I said, “not a library.”

  It was late and after only a beer and a half, my buzz was strong. This side of Pickering could be fun. As if to accentuate his irreverent attitude, he loosened his black tie and unbuttoned the top of his stiff shirt. The man looked like a Mormon on his mission to spread the gospel.

  My second pint was suddenly on its last sip. My boozing was gaining steam. Seeing Pickering was getting low on gas, I ordered another round. I, feeling a mite peckish, ordered extra-spicy chicken wings for two to be brought over. Pickering probably needed food in his gut soon or I’d be cleaning up a mess. Some people couldn’t handle the business of drinking. Pickering appeared to be one of them.

  “There was a lot, lot in that computer of Kendal’s. Thank heavens for the ravishing Ms. Kendal. Don’t you think she’s ravishing?”

  “Walter, let’s stick to the content of Kendal’s computer.”

  Pickering resumed. “So, Conyers does this every year. Stubborn as a Taurus, and you know what?” I waited. “Nothing! Nothing happens. They won’t even vote on the damn thing. It wallows. The bill doesn’t even ask for reparations, it just asks to study reparations. Would you pasty white guys merely check it out and see if there’s any merit? That’s all he’s asking. You believe that? All those old, supposedly reformed and open-minded congressmen afraid to even study it.”

  My worry that I’d have to convince Pickering to eat some of the wings dissipated when I placed them between us, and we jointly set upon them like wildcats. The blue-cheese dressing was exceptional, as was the spiciness of the wings. I went to get another ramekin as Pickering mindlessly double-dipped in the first one. A small glob of white dressing clung to his chin for over two minutes. A photo to prove the guy wasn’t always immaculate would have been nice, but I resisted the urge.

  “Did Kendal have something to do with H.R. Forty?”

  Pickering sniggered. “No. Boise, Boise, Boise! He and the Bacon woman were old family friends, according to Savannah. Kendal had some affinity for reparations. Like a hobby. He was a student of the topic. Must have gone to her with numbers and tragedies.” He waved a dismissive hand at me. “You got to know what I mean.”

  A bit of spice caught in my throat, and I swallowed hard. My eyes watered. Pickering crunched on a bit of ice from the water I’d brought back as a mandatory beverage with spicy wings.

  “He convinced her to make reparations to the descendants of the Bacon Family’s slaves. They calculated a fair amount and located the people. They found around twenty-eight who live here, a couple in Barbados where their original plantation operated, and the rest scattered around.” He ripped into another wing, exclaiming, “Spicy!”

  Chapter 21

  There it was. Pickering refused to entrust Kendal’s computer to me, but in true investigative fashion, he’d pieced together the story. It was Kendal who’d convinced Francine to do the right thing and hand over the bulk of her fortune to descendents of former slaves, plus form a permanent fund to help anyone else who came forward later through an endowment. The family was abandoned at sea. Strong motive for offing their matriarch.

  Problem was, killing Francine didn’t fix the reparation issue. In fact, you could argue that the heirs should do anything and everything to keep her breathing. This would give them more time to convince her to change her bequests. Her demise actually benefited the Bacon Group most immediately.

  “So, what does that leave for the Bacon family?” I asked.

  Pickering laughed again. A giggly drunk. “I gave the trust instrument to a lawyer, who says they get to live in the house till they pass. Something called a life estate. The children each get $1.5 million in a trust with Kendal, Miguela Salas, and someone named Camilla as trustees.”

  “Well, that’s not too shabby ... the money I mean, not what happened to Kendal.”

  He squinted at me like a father assessing his daughter’s new hipster boyfriend. “You daft? If you’d expected to each get twenty to thirty mill and wound up with one-point-five, you’d think that was shabby.”

  True. To me, one-point-five million was a dream. To the Bacons, a nightmare.

  “What about Junior? Does he get anything? Wasn’t he the favorite?”

  “The grandson stands with a trust fund of ten million.”

  Nineteen-years-old with ten million in the bank. Most would be lucky to see one or two million earned over the course of a lifetime.

  Pickering excused himself to use the bathroom. When he returned, I could smell that he’d thrown up. His eyes were milky. So much for spicy chicken wings saving the day.

  “You okay?”

  He shoved aside the last Cutty Sark, only half-drunk, and downed a mouthful of water.

  I pressed on although Pickering appeared ready to be poured into bed. “The kid gets the most. Guess he really was her favorite. What about the people in the Bacon Group?”

  “What about them?”

  “Have they been notified they stand to inherit a small fortune?”

  Pickering’s eyes blinked shut, then popped open again. He looked at me, absent recognition, then his eyes swam back into focus.

  “Yes, they know. It was part of the story Kendal was working on. He interviewed members of the group for genuine reactions. I think he got a kick out of seeing the joy he expected it would bring struggling people who’d never had much.”

  “Who else knew?”

  “The family was made aware not too long ago, except the grandson. What’s his name again?”

  “Junior. Well, Herbert, Jr., but everyone calls him Junior.”

  “She wanted him to have his degree before he became a trust fund baby. Until he’s thirty, he only gets $40K per year.”

  “What happens at thirty?”

  “Junior’s allowance goes to $100K, then he has full access at forty. According to the notes, that’s when she thought he would have the maturity to responsibly handle the money. Also, it’ll force him to work and be self-sufficient in the meantime.”

  That’s a long time to have a carrot dangled, but Francine was probably right, forty would be late enough to give him an appreciation, but sometimes knowing that money’s waiting out there keeps a person from doing anything else with their life.

  Chapter 22

  The Bacon family dynamic nagged at me like a hungry mosquito. Up until now, my amateurish deductions had kept me dialed in on them as part of this murder. But my mentor’s voice nagged that something wasn’t right. Henry would have agreed that the family had secrets and that they had had a less-than-loving response to Francine’s demise. But one thing I’d observed in myself and others who suffered the loss of someone close, it was damned hard to judge behavior in a room full of grief. People sometimes laughed at funerals or remained stoic to everyone on the outside while cheering on the inside. They clung to habits and behaviors that might seem heartless, but got them through each second until they were ready to process.

  I’d spent hours riddled with guilt over my anger since I’d found out about Evelyn’s infidelity the same night she was killed. Try dealing with hate and love and death in one melting pot of guilt and grief. Try getting the call that your wife’s died of a collapsed lung from a hit-and-run driver, when you’ve spent the whole night stewing about her staying over at another man’s house. Instead of worrying about her safety, I imagined the worst, most g
raphic sexual events as I drowned my sorrow in a bottle of not-so-cheap scotch.

  I couldn’t know what Hillary, Herbie, Harold, or Junior felt internally from the brief moments when I infiltrated their home. What I did have was the endless and confident loop of every base behavior immemorial—primal motive.

  Henry liked to say, “When you lose track of the tiger’s teeth, go back to why. Teeth are for eating, find the food.” It always seemed like a weird metaphor, but the gist was pure and simple: motive solves cause. Cause narrows your suspect pool.

  None of the family had a rational motive from a long-term perspective. That doesn’t mean they didn’t or couldn’t have done it. It did mean if they did, their reasoning was flawed or they killed from an emotional place, which was entirely possible if they discovered her intentions to abdicate, tried to convince her to change her mind, and upon failing ended Francine’s life in a mad rage. The obvious place for a family member to kill her would have been in the house with lots of privacy, but everything looked copacetic there. It seemed the person who knew every inch of the home, Wilma, had no inkling of anything untoward happening on the premises.

  A non-disclosure document to Kendal that Pickering had shared with me, indicated Francine purposefully kept her children and Junior out of her business. This explained the bickering I’d witnessed when Junior asked about getting involved and Herbie put him off. Herbie had no access, but he didn’t want the rest to know that was because his mother had kept her first-born out of the family business and nothing he could do would change her mind. The man had three business degrees, but they didn’t matter. He would never measure up, because it wasn’t about measuring up.

  This feeling of inadequacy on Herbie’s part would certainly satisfy motive. Being ignored by the one person whose approval he craved could drive anyone to engage in reckless, even lethal behavior. After all, once you cleared all of the hoops and still get nowhere, you might just want to see the whole thing burn, if only to see what would happen next.

  From what I’d gleaned from the notes on Kendal’s computer, Francine’s motives were more altruistic. Consciously, Francine seemed to be trying to protect them all from the whole messy sugar business and to give them a life independent of the Bacon family’s sordid history. Subconsciously, perhaps she really was not satisfied with any of her children and knew they could not cut it in the sugar world.

  My phone buzzed.

  Pickering barked at me, “Get over here to Kendal’s now. Savannah came home to find the place ransacked.”

  Even in the shade of a coconut palm outside the house, the relentless heat pressed on my shoulders like a weight. A flock of sparrows exploded from beneath a festive bougainvillea bush. Bees circled and crawled between the magenta petals.

  Kendal had a standard two-story job of cinderblock construction doused in white with gray trim. Thick tempered glass blocks wiggled between the cinderblocks to allow a diffuse light into the house. It wasn’t the house I pictured Adirondack Kendal living in, but when I tried to imagine anything else, my mind drew a blank. Maybe a condo out by Aunt Glor in Bolongo Bay? Probably the wife picked this, which was more in line with a sophisticate like Pickering. The wife had the cash or one of them had family dollars. No newspaper guy in a small backwater could afford this pad on his salary.

  “Boise, this is Savannah.”

  “Hi, yes, we met at the paper’s memorial,” I said, extending my hand. “How’re you holding up?”

  She shrugged.

  Pickering eyed the yard and street with suspicion. “Does anyone know you came here?”

  “The cabbie,” I said.

  After one more furtive glance around, Pickering beckoned me inside slamming the door and throwing the deadbolt in one fluid motion.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Pickering looked at Savannah. “Is it okay I tell him?” She nodded and he continued. “Boise, this stays between us. Right now, I don’t want Dana on this. I’m trying to send her back to Tortola, but she’s being difficult.”

  “You didn’t hire her for her tact.”

  He held up a video tape. I hadn’t seen one in some time and it caught me by surprise. The bulky black plastic, the reality of our isolation here in St. Thomas, and the low-technology all struck me at once as very out of place; a time-warp.

  “You should watch it,” Savannah said in a whisper.

  Kendal’s basement had a bulky old television on a press-wood entertainment center that looked left over from a college student’s dorm room. A dusty Emerson VCR with a blinking green display sat on the bottom shelf.

  “I’ve thought about throwing this bulky electronic junk away so many times,” Savannah commented before shoving in the tape.

  The screen blinked to life, a blue field, then some static. From off camera Kendal’s voice hummed through the speakers.

  “I can only get it to record in black and white,” he said in an irritated tone.

  “Fine, fine,” said an older woman’s voice, then Francine Bacon filled the frame. She sat in a cushioned chair. She wore no make-up, but the poor lighting was kind. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Francine Bacon stated that she’d been working for years in secret to bring the sugar industry down to earth. It needed clearing up. Morals and ethics had long ago perished because of those connected to it who needed to maintain profit margins. She named the players and government officials from places all over the world, but mostly the local Caribbean officials who helped to perpetuate the growing and processing of cheap sugar through what she termed the twenty-first century slave labor. She was forming “a sort of non-profit” to beat the bastards at their own game by any means necessary. She made clear that Kendal and the other two trustees were in charge of carrying out the annihilation of this white, crystal industry by any means necessary. The kids and Junior, and any others who made a claim to the family fortune, would be cut out completely if they contested the trust or undermined the singular purpose of the non-profit. She admonished the trustees to remain steadfast in their primary objective. Whatever was left after sugar was brought to its knees was to be then used to continue an assault on any other industries that enslaved people in unfair and unsanitary conditions.

  “So, where’s this leave us?” I asked.

  “I’m personally paying you to figure that out, remember? I’m struggling with my feelings about this.” Pickering made a fluttering gesture at Savannah. “Kendal got on my nerves, but he was a damn fine reporter with a nose for news. Two reporters gave me notice yesterday. One is a senior guy nearing retirement with tons of contacts. I’d convinced him to stay on the last two years, because we already have too many greenies on staff and even free-lancing. Every blogger thinks he’s a reporter these days. The experienced ones have more contacts and sources. They know where to sniff. The youngsters aren’t ... ” He snapped his fingers as he searched for the right word.

  Savannah tapped his other hand in a motherly manner that made me wonder how long these two had been carrying on. “Dogged,” she said.

  His eyes lit up, and he leaned into her. She held him off with a stiff arm. He cleared his throat and pulled back, an embarrassed look flashing across his face.

  “Yes, dogged! They aren’t dogged. Anyhow, the second quitter is a woman right out of the journalism program at a northeastern school at the second tier. Tufts, I think. No huge loss, but it’s hard to recruit talent to leave a place like Boston or New York and come to this god-forsaken rock.”

  “And you’re saying they split for fear of their safety? You can’t convince them to stay?”

  “Convince them? Great idea, then when something happens to them, not only will their families sue the paper, they’ll sue me personally for telling them to stay on.” He pursed his lips like he was dealing with an insolent child. “This leaves me shy three reporters on staff and scrambling for people to give me enough content. So, although I’d like to stay on
this with you, as they say on Broadway, ‘the show must go on,’ and I need to get with my headhunter on this asap.”

  With that, Pickering rummaged in a cabinet and came out holding a pile of papers, Kendal’s laptop, a zip drive, and a bag.

  “I haven’t even been through all of it.” He settled the pile in my arms. “Good luck.”

  Savannah ejected the videotape and placed it atop my pile. “Walter says we need to trust someone who is not emotionally involved. Guess you’re as good as anyone.”

  I looked at Pickering, a smile beginning to crack my lips. “I’m as good as anyone?”

  He gave me his professorial stare. “I’ll have you know, I don’t trust easily and we’ve only been acquainted a few months.”

  “Half-a-year,” I corrected.

  “What I said.”

  “Okay, so by your non-trusting standards, I’ve breached the wall quickly?”

  “Very,” Savannah said, leaning into Pickering’s side and giving him a playful bump with her hip. “I’m still not sure he trusts me.”

  Pickering rubbed her shoulder. “I trust you with some things.”

  She playfully shoved him away, and he allowed a small smile. It vanished as soon as he turned back to me.

  “This is all hush-hush,” he said, pointing back and forth at himself and Savannah.

  “Course,” I said, “top secret, except one thing.” I explained that some details would need to be shared with Leber the next time I saw the curious detective. We hashed out which details were appropriate for disclosure and which should be kept under wraps. Savannah got antsy and went to bed, saying she trusted us to make these life and death decisions so long as no one else tried to break into her home for any more of Kendal’s secret mission notes.

  A cab shuttled me back to The Manner as Pickering didn’t want to leave Savannah alone in the recently ransacked house. He had arranged for a security company to come out the next day and install an alarm system.