Twenty-Seven Bones elp-3

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “Cheese-an’-bread,” Lewis muttered aloud. He grabbed the table for support and lowered himself carefully into the broad-bottomed, spindle-legged kitchen chair. “Bloody cheese and bloody bread.”

  Because he had-he had seen that man, back in August, while crouched behind an oleander bush, peering into the living room of the overseer’s house. At the time, he’d been disappointed-there’d been nothing of any interest going on. Everybody was fully dressed. Bennie, Phil Epp, even Emily, who often went around topless.

  And the fourth person Lewis had seen in the overseer’s house that night, the man who according to Fran Bendt had been brutally murdered not long afterward, had also been fully dressed, from his well-worn cowboy boots to his big, white, ten-gallon hat. There was no question in Lewis’s mind that this same man was looking up at him from the newspaper.

  As soon as he had his legs under him again, Lewis found the bottle of St. Luke Reserve Sally, the cook, liked to keep in the freezer. He poured himself a shot, tossed it back, reread the story under the photograph, poured and tossed another, reread the story again. By the third shot he had convinced himself that one or both of his tenants in the overseer’s house had to be the killer or killers. The fourth shot was for inspiration, as he hatched a plan born as much of white rum as reason. Contact the Epps, let them know that he knew, offer them a substantial sum to help him with the Hokey problem.

  But did he really want to get mixed up with people like that? Lewis asked himself. Well, yeah, came the answer. You’re looking for somebody to kill your wife, that sort of rules out the Eagle Scouts.

  The fifth shot was for courage.

  8

  Husband-and-wife teams of anthropologists are not uncommon. What was unusual about the Epps was that Phil was primarily a cultural anthropologist, while Emily was a physical anthropologist specializing in osteology-dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, she liked to say.

  After leaving Indonesia, Emily had studied very dry bones indeed-precontact ancestral remains of Northern California Original Peoples, eight hundred to two thousand years old, brownish fragments to complete skeletons, that had been disturbed by construction projects.

  She was good at it, too. Give Emily a pubic symphysis, and she could age and sex an individual with the best of them, while Phil had earned acclaim with a study of the population of a prehistoric village in Santa Clara, extrapolated from Emily’s osteological data.

  They both sucked at the politics associated with the job, however. In California you could hardly stick a trowel in the ground anymore without some clam digger Indians screaming about somebody disrespecting their ancestors, the Epps used to tell anybody who’d listen.

  Understandably, this attitude had not endeared them to the Most Likely Descendants. So when Emily’s father died and left her a tidy sum, they decided upon the move to St. Luke, where the Carib population had been wiped out to the last descendant four hundred years earlier.

  This evening, though, the Epps weren’t thinking about Indians, Californian or Caribbean. Instead, another home movie was being screened and cataloged.

  Different Niassian village, but the broad plaza with its great stone paving tiles looks much the same, as do the narrow, ski-jump-roofed houses flanking it. Wedding of a wealthy man’s daughter. Dressed in her golden marriage raiment, which will be returned to her village after the wedding, she is being borne around the plaza on a wooden throne mounted on poles, weeping copiously to mourn her symbolic lineage death. After the wedding she will be “dead” to her birth clan and it to her.

  “I cried at our wedding,” said Emily, seated next to her husband on a low rattan armchair, making notes while he operated the projector.

  “I wanted to,” replied Phil. Emily gave him a sharp, under-the-eyebrows glare. “Just-kidding-it-was-the-happiest-day-of-my-life,” he added quickly.

  “That’s better,” she admonished, then reached around the projector, which was on a low rattan table between them, and patted his shoulder affectionately, to show him she was only clowning.

  They were both startled by the knock on their front door-they weren’t expecting any late visitors. Phil switched off the projector and turned on the light. Emily, who was wearing only a comfortable wraparound cotton skirt, hurried into the bedroom and donned a smocklike batik overblouse while Phil answered the door.

  Twenty minutes later Lewis Apgard, Emily, and Phil were seated side by side by side in matching rattan chairs in the living room. They had just finished watching the last reel of the Niassian wedding. Phil switched off the projector. The room went dark, and the overseer’s house grew so quiet Lewis could hear the wind rustling through the slender leaves of the bay rum trees his great-great-grandfather had planted during slavery days. He patted the butt of the.38 revolver in the inside pocket of his linen sport jacket for reassurance, then withdrew his hand as Emily switched on the light.

  “Where was that again?” he asked.

  “Pulau Nias, Indonesia,” said Emily. “An island west of Sumatra.”

  “Fascinating stuff.”

  “Yes, isn’t it? Now what can we do for you, Mr. Apgard?”

  “You can call me Lewis, for one.”

  “What can we do for you, Lewis? Not that we’re not always pleased to see our landlord, but it is getting rather late.”

  Courage, Lewis told himself. Apgard courage. He wished he’d brought a flask with him. Earlier, when he was drunker, and the notion entirely hypothetical, it had seemed so easy. Go over there, tell them what you know, tell them what you want. “I’ll get to the point, then-did either of you see the paper this morning?”

  “The Sentinel?” asked Phil.

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  Lewis took the clipping out of his pocket and handed it to Emily. Her fingers brushed his, lingering just a little too long. He had the feeling, not for the first time, that she was coming on to him. If her husband hadn’t been present, he might have tested the hypothesis. “Recognize anybody?” he asked her.

  “Not that I recall. How about you, honey?” She passed the clipping to Phil, who muttered something in a language Lewis didn’t recognize, then shook his head and returned the clipping to his wife.

  “Well that’s odd,” said Lewis. “Because about six weeks ago, I was looking through that window there”-Lewis pointed to one of two windows flanking the four-by-six pull-up movie screen-“and I saw that man, in this room, sitting in one of these chairs, with one of you seated on either side of him, showing him a map or something. What do you have to say about that?”

  “Too long,” said Emily.

  “What’s too long?”

  “Too long,” she repeated, even more loudly. “Too long, too long, too long.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” asked Lewis, just before his world exploded into pain and glorious white fireworks.

  “Tolong: it’s Indonesian for help,” Emily said quietly, as Lewis slumped forward in his chair, blood beginning to well from a jagged wound at the back of his scalp. “Terima kasih (thank you), Ama Bene.”

  “Kembali (you’re welcome), Ina Emily,” replied the little man from Nias, slipping his nontraditional, short-handled, high-impact rubber sap back into the waist of his traditional gilt-threaded Niassian sarung.

  Lewis regained consciousness a few minutes later. His head was throbbing, he was tied to his chair with a continuous coil of nylon clothesline, and when he looked up he saw the black hole at the end of the barrel of a gun staring back at him. His own.38, in Phil Epp’s hand. He tried to pull his head back, but Bennie was behind him, pressing a towel against his bleeding scalp.

  “My wife knows where I am,” he said softly.

  “Then you’ve signed her death warrant, too,” said Phil.

  “Yes,” said Lewis. “That’s it-that’s it exactly.”

  “That’s what, exactly?”

  “That’s what I’m doing here-that’s what I came for.”

  The Epps adjourned to their bedroom whil
e Bennie tended to Apgard’s head injury. They were both shaken by their landlord’s revelations. Nor was Apgard’s having seen them with Tex the worst of their problems-it was what he’d told them afterward, about the two bodies washed up under the cliffs, that had them close to panic.

  Phil recognized immediately what had happened. The moment the bedroom door closed behind them, he told Emily about hearing the splash when they dumped Arena’s body into the Oubliette.

  It was probably something they should have foreseen, he said in a whisper. They’d been careless. In their relief at having solved the disposal problem that had plagued serial killers since time immemorial, they’d forgotten their basic geology. Underground rivers-that’s what had carved out the caverns in the first place, after the Pleistocene era. And even underground rivers have outlets and run eventually to the sea, don’t they? Or at least they do on a tiny island like St. Luke.

  Obviously the rising water from the most recent hurricane had somehow floated the bodies up and out to sea, which meant their most important line of defense had been breached. The surest way to escape detection, they’d learned over the years, was to ensure that the deed itself went undetected.

  Too late now. Neither the Jenkuns girl’s disappearance nor her reappearance had sparked the kind of intense investigation that had probably begun as soon as the police discovered that they had a serial killer on their island. Now anybody without an alibi could be considered a suspect-the cops might be showing up at the door of the overseer’s house anytime.

  So although they had of course been somewhat offended by Apgard’s initial offer-they weren’t contract killers, for the love of God-on another level, a counteroffer wasn’t entirely out of the question. “Tit for tat, quid pro quo, strangers on a train and all that,” Emily whispered to her husband.

  “Or maybe we should just kill them both, seal the cave, and get the hell off the island.”

  “That’s certainly another possibility,” said Emily. “But we’re the nearest neighbors-there are bound to be questions if they both disappear simultaneously. And you have to admit we’ve been awfully blessed so far. Perhaps Apgard showing up like this is lalu’a tonua.” Lalu’a tonua-the hand of destiny, in Niassian.

  “You think so?” said Phil.

  “I feel it,” replied Emily. “In here.” She took Phil’s big, bony, hairy-knuckled hand and pressed it against her pudgy lower belly, above her womb.

  And although some might have seen it as contradictory for trained scientists like the Epps to be swayed by so unscientific an argument, for a scientist, a true scientist, data always trumps theory. If something is true, it’s true, whether you can explain it or not. Emily’s womb had never been wrong before: that was good enough for both of them.

  But even with accurate data, there was still room left for interpretation. Don’t make the counteroffer, Phil suggested-just accept Apgard’s initial offer, and wait until after the deed was done to let him know what it was really going to cost him.

  Because when it came to murder, Lewis Apgard was about to learn, you paid the piper what he asked, and you danced to his tune until he said you were done.

  Chapter Four

  1

  Second morning on the island; a pounding at Pender’s door.

  “Good mornin’, Edgar! Are you awake?”

  Eight o’clock, according to the watch on the nightstand, next to the motionless gecko. “If I ain’t, I’m dreaming about you. That can’t be a good sign.”

  Julian pushed the door open. He was already in uniform-pressed khaki pants, pressed khaki short-sleeved shirt with navy blue tabs at the shoulders; no rank, no insignia. He handed Pender a mug of steaming coffee under the mosquito net. “Time to get cracking, me son. I just got off the phone with the Machete Man-we may have another victim on our hands.”

  “He called you?”

  “No, I called him, what do you think?”

  Pender took a life-giving sip of hot coffee. “Get me up to speed.”

  “A call came in twenty minutes ago. Man’s voice, muffled. ‘It took you so long to find the others, this time I’m going to give you a hint. The old mill tower.’ Hangs up before I can ask him which one.”

  “Your home number-it’s listed?”

  “Always has been.”

  “And you didn’t recognize the voice?”

  “He spoke in a whisper, used a phony British accent.”

  “That tells us something then,” said Pender.

  “What?”

  “That he’s not British. Do I have time to take a shower?”

  “Make it a quick one-bodies don’t keep well in these latitudes.”

  In the bad old days, when King Cane ruled St. Luke, every plantation had its own grinding mill, Julian explained to Pender as they drove east along the southern arc of the Circle Road. Some were powered by wind, some by steam, some by oxen, some by slaves-and every last one of them had been rendered gradually obsolete after emancipation and the development of the sugar beet made growing cane economically unfeasible.

  There were only a few producing cane fields left on the island, said Julian-you can’t make decent rum from beets. But there were still at least a dozen old mill towers standing, or falling, in various states of repair, all across the island. “I have my people checking out each of them, but the most likely spot for a body drop is the tower on Sugar Loaf Hill. It’s isolated but well-known and easy to drive to-I reserved that one for us.”

  “Lucky us,” said Pender.

  Sugar Loaf Hill was a rounded lump standing alone in the middle of a burned-out autumnal canebrake. The tower was conical, crumbling, thirty feet in diameter at the bottom, ten at the jagged top. Great round stones were tumbled about at the base, along with broken fingers of mortar, dry worm castings, sandwich wrappers, broken bottles, empty pop and beer cans, used condoms. Julian parked the Mercedes at the bottom of the little hill. Pender followed him up the slope and around the ruins to the arched doorway. A date was chiseled into the lintel stone in triangular strokes: 1792.

  Julian squatted just outside the archway; Pender peered over his shoulder into the dimness. Inside, no grinding wheel, no mill works. Just a round dirt floor speckled with grayish white bird shit, and a naked corpse lying on its side in the center of the room, with its back to the doorway and its head resting on its outstretched right arm, which had been severed at the wrist. The end of the stump was covered with swarming blackflies. Their buzzing was the loudest sound in the ruins, with Pender’s heavy breathing a close second.

  “Caucasian,” said Julian-the corpse’s skin was tanned all over, but the hair was whitish blond in the light pouring through the broken top of the tower.

  “Female,” said Pender-there was no mistaking the cellolike curve of a woman’s back, the narrow waist, the flaring hip, the heart-shaped ass.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Julian. “Don’t muck up my crime scene.”

  As Julian hurried back down to his car to use the police band radio-no cell service on St. Luke as yet-Pender stepped carefully into the tower and circled wide around the body, keeping to the perimeter of the conical stone walls so as not to disturb any transfer evidence left by the killer. There were no visible footprints except for his own, which meant the killer might have swept his way out of the tower-but you never knew what a good criminalist could pick up.

  “Hello there,” murmured Pender as he approached the corpse from the other direction. “Tell me a little about yourself.”

  But she didn’t have much to say, other than that she was, or had been, a Caucasian female, between twenty-five and forty years of age, tall, slender, with long, blond hair that matched her pubic hair. Full body tan, no bikini line, no stretch marks. No marks anywhere, except for a few old tomboy scars on her knees-and of course the missing hand.

  The ground beneath the severed wrist was dry, which meant this was a body drop and not a murder scene. Pender squatted down, took off his hat and waved it to shoo the flies away so he could
get a better look at the wound, but they ignored him. Her other arm, her left arm, was drawn up at her side, bent at the elbow, the fingers splayed out stiffly as if she were modeling her diamond-studded gold wedding band. (Robbery not a motive, Pender noted.) Close to full rigor, somewhere between ten and twelve hours postmortem, at a rough guess.

  “Edgar?”

  Pender looked up, startled. Julian was standing in the arched doorway with his daughter Layla, a handsome young woman with light brown skin, bright green eyes, and wavy brown hair.

  “And whom do we have here?” asked Layla.

  “You tell me.” Pender stood up, backing away from the body as the other two walked in his footsteps around the perimeter of the chamber.

  Layla drew her breath in sharply. “Daddy, is that…?”

  “Oh shit,” said Julian, and for a moment there, as he started to raise his arm, then put it down hastily, it looked to Pender as if he’d forgotten that Layla was a grown woman, and a trained criminalist to boot, and was trying reflexively to shield his little girl from a terrible sight.

  2

  “Shortly after my seventh birthday the Guv sent me away to boarding school in the states.” Lewis and Dr. Vogler were in Lewis’s study for their third appointment. Vogler had offered to postpone it when he learned of Lewis’s head injury, but Lewis said no, he’d just as soon get it over with. And of course it kept his mind off…things he didn’t want it on.

  They’d begun the session out by the pool, with Lewis’s Miami Dolphins cap covering his bandaged crown, but a morning shower blowing in from the west had passed briefly over the island. By the time the sun returned to dry things out, they had already moved inside.