Twenty-Seven Bones elp-3

by Jonathan Nasaw

“Do you have any of them around?”

  “All of them-Tex never let me throw a magazine away.”

  “Could you get them for me?”

  “Of course.” But she didn’t move.

  “Mrs. Wanger…?”

  She looked up from the coffee table; their eyes met for the first time since she’d asked to see his ID. “Agent Pender, this isn’t really about the missing persons report I filed, is it?”

  Gently, Pender told himself. Easy does it. “No,” he said. “No, it’s not.”

  “Is Tex in some sort of trouble?”

  “You might say that.” It sounded coy even to Pender. Jesus, he thought, I am so fucking out of practice.

  “How bad?”

  He set his glass down. “The worst.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “His body was identified through a fingerprint match last night.”

  No reply. Thanks to the Botox, her face remained a mask, but Pender could sense something crumpling behind that rigid armature. “Mrs. Wanger, your husband has been murdered,” he continued urgently, hoping to forestall the inevitable meltdown. “That’s why it’s so important that we learn everything we can about his trip-so we can catch whoever did it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Pender nodded. “I’m so sorry.”

  After a long silence, marred only by the hum of the air-conditioning and the distant roar of a leaf blower, the new widow pushed herself up from the sofa. “I’ll get you those magazines you wanted,” she said dully.

  “Appreciate it,” said Pender.

  4

  There were certain advantages to being an Apgard on St. Luke, where Lewis’s father, and his father before him, and his father before him, had run a government that distributed more per capita federal aid than any state or territory except the U.S. Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia.

  The plan was for Lewis and Dr. Vogler to meet for a fifty-minute hour every weekday this week, then three times a week until further notice. But because Lewis was an Apgard, and didn’t want to be seen entering the psychiatrist’s office, Vogler had agreed that their sessions would take place at the Great House. For a house call premium, of course.

  They began at the stroke of noon, facing each other in twin red leather armchairs in Lewis’s study, which was still furnished as it had been in his grandfather’s day. “What I’m hoping to accomplish in our first session,” the psychiatrist began, “is to get an appreciation of your perception of why we’re here, why you’re entering into therapy, and what you hope to get out of it.”

  Lewis, who could charm the birds from the trees when he set his mind to it, flashed the shrink a shy, skewed grin. “I’m afraid the better half insisted on it.”

  Vogler, a plump bespectacled man who favored bow ties and seersucker sport jackets, nodded understandingly. “Tell me about yourself.”

  Lewis began, as any Apgard would, with his pedigree. “My great-grandfather was the last Danish governor of St. Luke, my grandfather and father were the first two American governors. I was born in 1968. Scorpio, not that I believe in that shit. I’m an only child. My mother died two days after my birth. Something called eclampsia-you ever heard of it?”

  “I received my MD from Johns Hopkins,” said Vogler, providing a little pedigree of his own.

  “I guess that means yes. Anyway, my earliest memory is being hauled around by my wet nurse.”

  “Wet nurse,” Vogler echoed, blinking furiously behind his thick lenses-wet nurse stories were catnip to psychiatrists.

  “Her name was Queen Charlotte. When I wasn’t sucking her titis, I was riding her big old round hip like a little white monkey. Which is what she used to call me-her little white monkey. She used to take me everywhere-to market, to the washhouse, to church on Sunday morning. I cried like a baby-well, I was a baby-when the Guv canned her.”

  “The Guv?”

  “That’s what I called my father. That’s what everybody called my father. And his father before him. Anyway, the Guv declared unilaterally that my titi days were over, and I was put in the charge of his maiden sister Agneta.

  “Given a choice, I’d have preferred a wicked stepmother. Auntie Aggie was of the opinion that children should be seen and not heard, and from what I could tell, she wasn’t all that crazy about seeing them, either. Or maybe she really liked children in general and it was only me she couldn’t stand. For whatever reason, she was a royal pain in the bumsie, from the day she moved into the Governor’s Mansion to the day she was raped and murdered.”

  “Raped and murdered,” muttered Vogler, scribbling intently in his notebook.

  “During Hurricane Eloise. You want to hear about it?”

  “If you’d like to tell me about it.”

  “I probably should-it was my fault.”

  “Definitely, then.”

  “Okay, well, I remember the rain and the wind, for sure, the bruised look of the clouds, that astonishing blue sky and the way my ears popped when the eye passed over us. Which happened twice-from what I understand, after stalling over St. Luke, the storm circled the island in a clockwise spiral and hit us a second time. I also remember how surprised I was and how strange it seemed when I looked out the window of my room on the third floor of the Governor’s Mansion and saw that Sugar Town had disappeared, swallowed up by the rising water.

  “We lost phones and power the first day. On the second day we lost our water and ran out of batteries for the transistor radio, and by nightfall everybody had fled to higher ground except for Aggie, myself, Mr. Featherston, my father’s houseman, and his wife Bougainvillea, who was our cook. The Guv was in Washington, on government business, but he called just before the phones went down and told us to hold the fort.

  “So hold the fort we did, but with Sugar Town gone and Dansker Hill half underwater by the third morning, looting had already begun. Then the looters freed the surviving prisoners from the holding cells in the basement of the police station, and all hell broke loose. The prisoners who’d survived, we later learned, had done so only by killing, stacking, and standing on the bodies of the ones that hadn’t, which meant that nature had Darwinned out all but the meanest of the mean and the toughest of the tough. And of course having been left by the authorities to drown in their cells hadn’t done anything to improve their dispositions.

  “From that point on, anarchy reigned in the streets of Frederikshavn-those that were still above water, that is. Although I suppose it reigned in the drowned streets as well. The loyal Mr. Featherston, whom I remember only as a bald brown head with a woolly gray fringe, locked the spiked wrought-iron gates of the Mansion and sat outside under the dripping portico with a big old horse pistol across his lap. I suppose he was thinking that the mere sight of the antique Colt would serve as a deterrent. Instead, somebody shot him dead from outside the gates.

  “Auntie Aggie dragged me into the huge mahogany wardrobe of her room, next to mine on the third floor, when the looters broke in a few minutes later. I still remember the smell-stale cedar potpourri mingled with Aggie’s sour powdery eau-de-old-maid-and the darkness, and the terrible sound of Bougie, who’d been screaming downstairs, being cut off in midshriek by a shotgun blast.

  “After that there were footsteps and shouting, doors banging open and shut, heavy furniture being dragged around. I heard the worst language I’d ever heard in my life and so, I suspect, did my auntie, who clapped her hands over my ears. I wriggled away and put my eye to the crack between the wardrobe doors just as the bedroom door came crashing inward and two men burst into the room. One of them began rummaging through Aggie’s bureau; the other lowered his double-barreled shotgun and pointed it directly at the wardrobe-directly at me. It was an ancient side-by-side; I remember looking down those two black barrels. I pushed open the wardrobe doors and stepped out, hands in the air.

  “ ‘Eh, eh, well me gad,’ said the man with the shotgun. ‘Look heah, mon, we done ketch us a scuppy.’

  “ ‘Me ain’ no
scuppy,’ I told him. ‘Me a titi-bitah!’ ”

  Lewis had dropped into the dialect that was a first language to him. Me ain’t no was pronounced as one word, meeyaino, the u sound in scuppy was halfway between uh and oo, a scuppy was a bony saltwater fish, an utter waste of bait, and titi biter was the local name for the freshwater mullet, Agonostomus monticola, which according to local legend lurked in streams in order to bite unsuspecting maidens on the breast when they went bathing.

  “I remember the two men glancing at each other in surprise to hear a little white boy talking pure Luke-and full mout’ing them, at that.”

  “Full mowting?”

  “Sassing. That’s probably what saved my life. Instead of killing me on the spot, they laughed. Then the one with the shotgun waved it in the direction of the wardrobe, and whispered, ‘Anybody else in there?’ so softly I had to read his lips.”

  As he paused for a much-needed sip of water, Lewis glanced at the psychiatrist, still scribbling furiously in his notebook. Vogler looked up. “What happened next?”

  “Good question. What I told the Guv and the police was that the men just yanked me and my auntie out of the wardrobe.”

  “I gather that’s not what really happened?”

  “No. What really happened was that I nodded and stepped aside, out of the line of fire.”

  5

  Mm-mmmmm mm-mmm, mm-mmmmm mm-mmm…

  Holly found herself humming the theme from Gone With the Wind as the Apgard Great House, alabaster white, winged and colonnaded, appeared at the end of a half-mile-long, ruler-straight driveway with a whitewashed five-rail fence on either side to separate the hybrid Senepol cattle in the fields on one side from the woolless sheep on the other.

  But the Great House was not Holly’s immediate destination. Just before she reached it, she turned left and followed a rutted dirt drive lined with handsome bay rums until she reached the eighteenth-century stone house that had once served as the overseer’s quarters for the Apgard sugar plantation.

  The overseer’s house was one and a half stories high, built in the Danish manner with thick stone walls mortared with crushed seashell and molasses, and deep windows with dark green shutters. The half story was represented by the original Danish kitchen under the main floor, now a hollow, stone-walled ruin recessed into the landing of the outside front staircase, accessible through a low stone archway.

  Holly parked Daisy in the driveway. Bennie, a wrinkled brown man wearing his customary sarung, came out to meet her and carried her fold-up massage table into the house.

  As always, she set up the table in the living room, which was decorated with artifacts and souvenirs the Epps had brought with them from Indonesia. Ornately carved bureaus and tables, rattan chairs, batik wall hangings, bamboo screens, woven straw mats on the floor. Masks and spears, brass gongs and gamelan chimes. An Indonesian wedding headdress flattened behind glass. Two-dimensional shadow puppets in rough wooden frames, so lifelike they looked as if they had been frozen in mid-dance.

  Holly did the woman’s massage first. Emily wasn’t in bad shape, but her back was always sore from the strain of supporting that enormous, gravity-challenged bosom (whenever she worked on women like Emily, Holly thanked her genes and lucky stars for her own, somewhat more modest endowment), and from the way she groaned when Holly deep-massaged the quads and hammies of her stubby thighs, Holly could tell she’d been overexerting recently. “No rest for the wicked,” Emily explained, when Holly mentioned it.

  Compared to Emily, Phil Epp had a difficult body to massage. Long, tense muscles, very little body fat, very little pectoral sag for a man in his sixties or seventies, however old he was. One of the hairier apes, too: arms, legs, chest, belly, back, covered with curly black hair, gone white at the chest and loins, that seemed to repel the massage oil. And although Holly had massaged him at least once a month for the past year, his muscles were as tight as if they’d never been rubbed before.

  “Have you been overexerting, too?” Holly asked him, as she worked his spinal muscles with the balls of her thumbs.

  He grunted with pleasure. “Just a little treasure hunting.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Getting closer.” He turned his head to glance at her. “You ever have any interest in that sort of activity?”

  “Treasure I could use-hunting I don’t know about.”

  “Maybe we’ll take you along sometime-but only if you promise not to tell anybody-I mean, not a word to anybody, not even about this conversation.”

  “Hey, a masseuse is like a doctor or a lawyer: what I hear on this table stays on this table.”

  Holly’s next appointment was only a few hundred yards away, at the Great House. As she took her massage table out of the bus, Holly pictured horse-drawn carriages clippety-clopping up to the wide marble steps, being met by liveried servants, and discharging Danish beauties in decollete silk ball gowns, accompanied by planters in white suits and wide-brimmed Panamas.

  Lewis Apgard trotted down the steps to meet her halfway. He was wearing white bermudas and a blousy white shirt open at the throat. His golden blond hair was cut short and neat, parted on the side; the turquoise stud in his left ear matched the color of his eyes.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Holly. Glad you could make it. I decided to give up booze-I’m detoxing like a madman.” He took her fold-up massage table from her, carried it the rest of the way up the steps, through one set of French doors, past a tastefully appointed formal drawing room furnished with museum-quality Danish West Indian pieces carved from mahogany, purple heart, and other endangered rain forest trees, and out a second set of French doors to the patio. The Olympic-sized pool was as turquoise as Apgard’s eyes and earring. Holly, who’d worked up a pretty good sweat on the Epps, asked him if she could take a dip before they started.

  “Sure thing,” said Apgard. “My wife is playing golf out at Blue Valley, and it’s the servants’ day off, so we have the place to ourselves all afternoon.”

  Holly’s uh-oh alarm went off again. “You make it sound as if we were having an affair,” she said-lightly, she hoped-and forced a laugh.

  “Is an affair so out of the question?”

  “So out of the question,” Holly replied.

  “Too bad,” said Apgard. “Let me know if you change your mind-we could just write off the rent.”

  When pigs fly, thought Holly. When kosher pigs fly.

  6

  The bad taste from the interview with Mrs. Wanger stayed with Pender for hours. He’d gotten the information he needed, all right-they’d found a circled ad in the back of the July Soldier of Fortune with a St. Luke post office box for a return address. Mrs. Wanger had also produced phone bills for July and August, with several calls to a number with a St. Luke area code. But all he’d given her in return were the usual lame assurances and equally lame advice-call somebody, you shouldn’t be alone. The least he could have done was stay with her until that somebody arrived.

  Instead he split-plane to catch. Whoopie ti-yi-yo…your misfortune and none of my own.

  The second leg of Pender’s journey took him from Miami to Puerto Rico. One look at the ancient prop-jet waiting on the auxiliary runway at the San Juan airport, and Pender decided to change his seat assignment from a window to an aisle. Enjoyable as it might have been to see the Caribbean from the air, he didn’t want to have to watch it rushing up to meet him if they had to ditch in midocean, as seemed not at all unlikely.

  But the weather was clear, the flight was smooth, and the only problem he encountered was a dearth of Jim Beam on the drink cart. Pender was forced to purchase a miniature bottle of Jack Daniel’s (not bad, but it didn’t stand up to ice like Jimbo) from a stewardess with long brown legs he wanted to shinny up like a monkey.

  The island first appeared as a lone dot in a wide azure sea. Soon Pender was able to make out the dark tangle of rain forest crowning the north-central hump of the island, the flat patchwork of canebrake and pasture in the middle of t
he island, and the low mangrove swamps to the east. As the plane dipped its left wing into a bank that was far too steep for Pender’s liking, he looked back and caught a glimpse of the neat half-round bight of Frederikshavn Harbor and the red-tiled roofs of Dansker Hill.

  The airport was located in the northeast corner of the island. Although there were only a dozen passengers on the little prop-jet, at least three times that many people crowded the corral at the edge of the tarmac to meet the plane. Julian Coffee, impeccably dressed as always in a spotless white guayabara shirt and twill trousers, was at the back of the crowd, but it parted magically to let him through.

  “Good afternoon, Edgar. Welcome to St. Luke. Did you enjoy your flight?”

  “Yeah-and I loved the landing.” He turned to look back at the truncated runway. “Short, you’re in the drink; long, you’re in the trees.”

  “The St. Luke airport is not currently for the faint of heart,” agreed Coffee, leading Pender into the terminal, which was basically a cavernous lean-to. “But according to rumor, all that mahogany will be coming down one of these days-then they’ll level that near hill, extend both runways for the big jetliners, and we’ll be in a position to duke it out with the Virgin Islands for the tourist trade.” He sounded pleased by the prospect.

  Coffee’s car, a cream-colored vintage Mercedes-Benz, heavily upholstered and polished to a buttery sheen, was parked at the curb, in the red zone. The airport road looped back to the Circle Road, the island’s only major artery. Pender yelped and braced himself against the red leather dashboard as Coffee began driving down the left-hand lane of the two-lane highway.

  “We drive British style on St. Luke,” Coffee explained coolly. “No one’s quite sure why: we haven’t been owned by the British since the Napoleonic Wars.”

  “But the wheel’s on the left,” Pender noted, as they slowed down behind an ancient pickup truck. “How do you pull out to pass?”

  “It helps to have a passenger. If not, you hit the horn. If you hear somebody else hitting a horn, you don’t go. Not that anybody’s in all that much of a hurry.”