Twenty-Seven Bones elp-3

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “Over here.”

  Pender followed the voice, ducked under a low-hanging branch, saw Julian standing behind Layla, who was crouched beside a blanket where two bodies lay, one atop the other. Pender circled the crime scene at a distance, saw the machete in the male’s left hand, the female’s outstretched brown arm, the wrist stump, the severed hand. He kept circling, saw the revolver in the girl’s left hand. Too good to be true? “Please tell me this hasn’t been posed,” he called to Layla.

  She was kneeling, with her head almost on the blanket, peering upward at the bullet wounds in the male’s lower right rib cage. “Trajectory looks about right,” she said. “Won’t know for sure ’til we get him on the slab.” Her accent was her mother’s-the pronunciation was pretty close to standard English, but the tune was definitely Caribbean. “Blanket under the wrist is soaked, ground under the blanket is soaked, and you can see the spray pattern across the blanket and onto the dirt, so this is where it happened. If there’s GSR on her hand, I’d be willin’ to-Oh Lord, here she comes.”

  She being the rain, arriving not with a tentative pitter-patter, but a whoomp, as if the sky gods had overturned a giant bucket. Layla quickly pulled off her nylon windbreaker and covered as much of the bodies as she could, while Pender and Coffee raced to the van. Julian stayed behind to man the phone; Pender donned a hooded yellow SLPD slicker and raced back through the rain with his arms full.

  For the second time in four days, Pender helped Layla set up a crime scene tent. “We have to stop meeting like this,” he called, over the roar of the driving rain. When they were done, he offered to look for footprints in the woods before it was too late.

  She gave him a disposable Kodak in a yellow cardboard case and a pocketful of numbered plastic evidence markers. As he ducked out of the tent and into the storm, Pender heard sirens dopplering up the dundo road, barely audible over the sound of the rain.

  4

  Phil had slept poorly. Despite Emily’s reassurances, he couldn’t shake the idea that his younger wife might be phasing him out, grooming his replacement. The girl last night, for instance-by all rights her last breath should have been his, shouldn’t it?

  He ran through the chronology again. There was the German woman last Three Kings Day-she’d been his. Then there was the debacle with Tex Wanger in August. He was to have been Emily’s, but the big man turned out to have had a violent and unseemly will to live. He had somehow managed to yank his bloody stump free of the restraints, battered at Phil with it, twisted his head away from Emily’s avid mouth, and died before they could restrain him again, his last breath wasted, dissipated into the still air of the cross chamber.

  So Arena had represented Emily’s rain check, and Hokey Apgard, whom they hadn’t bothered to take to the cave, since her body was intended to be found, had breathed her last into Bennie’s mouth in the back of the van. So yes, the whore’s final breath should definitely have been Phil’s.

  Equally troubling, for the first time in years Phil had been unable to arouse himself physically, before, during, or after the sacrifice. And to add insult to injury, he’d been reduced to sitting in the corner of the room chafing his flaccid old dick while his wife fucked the screaming bejesus out of the younger, handsomer Apgard, who’d stolen the dying breath that should have been his.

  But Phil knew where the blame for his own impotence really lay. Something he’d feared for years was finally coming to pass: ten months without a dying breath, an infusion of eheha, and he was already starting to feel his age. If he didn’t replenish himself soon, he knew, he’d turn into an old man. An impotent old man-and for Phil, life after sex would hardly be worth living.

  But when he broached the subject to Emily later-unlike him, she’d slept like a log late into the morning-she’d simply refused to see things his way. After all the trouble they’d gone to the night before to provide the police with a dead Machete Man, another sacrifice was out of the question just yet, she told him. They’d have to let the stir die down-then they could start working tourists or down-islanders, people who wouldn’t be missed, and find a chamber other than the Oubliette in which to dispose of the bodies.

  Or even better, she said, they could come up with a new way of releasing their sacrifices’ ehehas-something that would look natural and not be associated with the Machete Man. Bennie already had more than enough hands to get him safely across the bridge to the other world, said Emily, so why not turn their attentions to lone hikers in the forest who could be made to look as if they’d fallen from the cliffs, or lone bathers who would appear to have drowned?

  Emily chucked Phil under the chin, told him to be patient, that he was her loving man and no other could ever take his place, then raised her loupe to her eye again and went back to examining the tiny brown shallowly cupped bone fragment she believed to be part of the cranium of a five-hundred-year-old Carib neonate.

  5

  Stay busy. The important thing was to stay busy. After Vogler left, Lewis made his first appearance at Apgard Realty since Hokey’s death. He’d seen Doris at the funeral yesterday, but it seemed to Lewis there was something different about her today. A gleam in the eye, perhaps; one less button fastened on her blouse. It occurred to Lewis that he was a single man again-and Doe was such a distant cousin that marriage wouldn’t have been out of the question. All the gals would be setting their caps for him, he reminded himself-he’d have to be careful, watch out for snares. All in all, though, he expected to be dwelling in nookie heaven for the foreseeable future.

  But thinking about the future only brought on the dread again. Even though the Epps and Bennie appeared to know what they were doing, Lewis had read enough true crime stories to know how even an infinitesimal clue could give a killer away. A strand of hair, saliva, a shoe print…

  Shoe print? No problem there, chappie, thought Lewis, glancing out the window. Johnny had been right: Tropical Storm Sylvia, which had begun while he was still closeted with Vogler, continued to piss buckets. Here in town, great silver sheets of rain were hitting the cobblestones so hard an ankle-high mist hovered over the cobbles of Tivoli Street.

  Still Lewis couldn’t entirely dispel the feeling of dread that had been haunting him all morning. And Vogler’s comment about Delusional Disorder being contagious hadn’t helped any, especially because it fit with what little he really knew about the Epps.

  The delusion had obviously taken hold of Emily first-perhaps she’d been traumatized by the scene at the chieftain’s deathbed-but Phil surely shared it now. And for Bennie, if Lewis had understood Vogler correctly, this dying breath business wasn’t a delusion. More like a matter of religious belief. Which no doubt made him the most dangerous of the three.

  But Lewis wasn’t really worried about “catching” the delusion, contagious or otherwise. He’d felt nothing the first time, and there wasn’t going to be a second.

  To ensure that, however, he’d need to get some blasting supplies. And since it wouldn’t do to apply for a permit, he’d have to visit the black market. Which on St. Luke meant one person: Bungalow Bill. Bungalow Fucking Bill. Cheese-an’-bread, thought Lewis: I hope he’s sober.

  6

  As much of a horror as the weekend had been in other ways, financially it had been a blessing for Holly-two busy nights at Busy Hands, lots of extras and lots of tips. So when her first client Monday morning-the hemiplegic Helen Chapman, up on the ridge-laid an extra twenty on her, Holly decided to visit Vincent at the Sunset Bar and parlay the Jackson and a neck rub into an eighth of rain forest chronic.

  Vincent was wearing his customary tight yellow tank top, which contrasted dramatically with his brown skin. He tossed Holly a bar towel to dry her rain-drenched hair. He had drawn the pull-down bamboo screens that surrounded the circular bar, leaving only a narrow opening for a doorway. It was cozy inside, if humid, and the rain on the round tin roof sounded so much like a steel drum band that she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it break into “Yellow Bird” or “Jamaic
a Farewell.”

  Holly came around the bar, worked on Vincent’s neck for a few minutes, then started working on his arms. The distal surface of Vincent’s right arm was striped horizontally with short, irregular raised scars from shoulder to wrist. Scar tissue was tricky-you wanted to loosen the adhesions, but gently, gently, without forcing anything. Holly traced her fingertips along the cicatrices. She felt she knew him well enough by now to ask how he’d come by them.

  “Knife fightin’,” he replied. “Never could handle lefties.”

  Holly worked for twenty minutes, then took a seat on a barstool while Vincent opened the safe under the bar and took out a weighed, bagged eighth of an ounce of chronic-actually 3.5 grams, an eighth of a dealer’s ounce-then froze with his hand still under the bar.

  “Good afternoon, Vincent, Miss Gold,” boomed a mahogany-skinned fat man wearing a dripping raincoat, as he turned sideways to fit through the narrow opening in the bamboo shutters.

  “Good afternoon, Detective Hamilton,” said Holly and Vincent in unison. It had taken Holly a few months to understand the importance the islanders placed on the formal greeting; there were shopkeepers who to this day still gave her the stank-eye because she had inadvertently offended them.

  Vincent brought his hand up empty from under the bar. Hamilton was one of his best clients, but in his profession one could never be too discreet. “And what can I do for you on this sorry day?”

  “Not a sorry day at all, mon,” said Hamilton, taking off his poncho and draping it over an empty barstool. “It’s a day of jubilation, or ain’ ya hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “De Machete Mon, me son-he done chop off de las’ han’ he gahn ta chop on dis’ eart’.”

  “You got him!” cried Holly.

  “His las’ victim got ’im. Whore from Montserrat, name’ Angela. Shot he aftah he chop she han’. Gyirl foun’ dem in de lime grove, boat togeddah, boat dead.”

  “Dis calls for a celebration-on de house.” Vincent reached for the bottle of St. Luke Reserve under the bar, set up three shot glasses, filled the first two, glanced questioningly at Holly. She shook her head. Hamilton winked a bloodshot eye at her and told her she was going to need that drink when she found out who the Machete Man was.

  “Who?”

  “Your neighbor-St. Vincent mon.”

  “Ruford Shea?” Holly was rocked, all right, though not enough to blow ten years of sobriety (at least as far as alcohol was concerned). “I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe it.” Hamilton knocked back his drink.

  “But Ruford wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Dot’s because flies ain’ got no han’ ta chop.” Hamilton chortled at his own joke, then turned one-drink serious. “Take it from de seniormos’ detective on St. Luke,” he told her. “De Machete Mon and Ruford Shea be one and de same, and dey boat be deadahs now.”

  7

  His real name was Bob Piersson. Like Lewis, he was the scion of one of the original Twelve Danish Families. They’d started calling him Bungalow Bill, for the bloodthirsty young tiger hunter in the song on the Beatles’ white album, when he returned from ’Nam in ’71 with the well-known thousand-yard stare.

  His blond beard was grizzled now, as was the long hair he wore tied back with a Confederate flag headband, and the thousand-yard stare had degraded into a complex of PTSD tics and twitches, but he still wore camouflage at every opportunity, and his alcohol-fueled rage binges, though more widely spaced, were still the stuff of island legend.

  His business, which he ran out of a house converted from an old sugar mill, tower and all (all that remained of the original Piersson family holdings) was partly legitimate. He was a licensed firearms dealer, and most every cop on the island had bought his or her off-duty and throw-down pieces from Bungalow Bill. But most of his profit came from a brisk trade in black market things-that-go-boom. Import and export: they didn’t call it Smuggler’s Cove for nothing.

  Lewis parked the Rover in the driveway, unfurled his umbrella, crossed the dirt yard, and rapped on the dark red door set in the side of the stone mill tower.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Lewis Apgard.”

  “Hold your hearses.”

  Lewis heard locks being unlocked, bolts unbolted, chains unchained. The door opened. Bungalow Bill, dressed in tan Desert Storm camo, stepped back, waved Lewis in, locked, bolted, and chained the doors behind them. “Good afternoon, Apgard. Sorry to hear about Hokey.”

  Sober, thank God. “Good afternoon, Mr. Piersson. Missed you at the funeral.”

  “I don’t do funerals. Let the dead bury the dead, that’s my motto.”

  Not a very practical approach, thought Lewis-we’d be up to our bumsies in corpses. He furled his umbrella, trying not to drip water on his loafers, and leaned it against the back of the door. There was no furniture, no merchandise on display-just a cement floor surrounded by curving stone walls. The mill tower had been capped by an octagonal skylight that gave a bluish cast to the conical room. The sky was gunmetal gray overhead; the rain rattled against the glass.

  “And what can I do you for this afternoon, Baby Guv? Need some protection? This Machete Man thing has been damn good for business-handguns have been flying out of here since Hokey died. No offense.”

  Chappie, the boom’s just about over, Lewis wanted to tell him. “None taken. And I still have that thirty-eight you sold me a few years ago. I believe I’m going to need something a little bigger for the job I have in mind. Dynamite, I suppose.” Lewis explained about the cave, but minimized its extent and fudged the location.

  “Ever worked with dynamite before?” asked Bungalow Bill.

  “Negative.”

  “Then you ain’ want to start now.” Piersson’s speech pattern was part white West Indian and part patois, with a heavy overlay of stateside southern, both black and white-the lingua franca for the grunts in the ’Nam. “It ain’ as easy as it looks in the Roadrunner cartoons, buoy: red stick, sizzling fuse, ka-boom. You need electric blasting caps, crimpers, det cord. Lots and lots of det cord, ’cuz that there umbrella won’t do you no good when it’s raining limestone boulders. And forget timers-if the shit don’t blow right away, the last thing you want to be doing is humpin’ down the mother-humpin’ hole after it to find out why not.”

  “What do you suggest, then?”

  “I suggest you hire a pro.”

  “Out of the question-I don’t want anybody knowing the cave was there in the first place.”

  “Well if you can’t do it the right way, and you don’t want to do it the wrong way, all that’s left is the Army way. We blew a shitload of tunnels in ’Nam. And it juuust so happens…Wait here.”

  Not that Lewis had any choice-Piersson took the key from the front door dead bolt with him, and locked the door on the opposite side of the tower behind him. When he returned he was carrying a small wooden crate bearing the label Armaturen Gesellschaft m.b.H., ARGES SplHG 90, qty 24, with the words DANGER: HIGH EXPLOSIVES stenciled in English, French, and German on the top and sides.

  “Couple of these ought to do the trick,” he told Lewis, as he pried the top off the crate with a small longshoreman’s hook. “NATO quality, lightweight plastic body, 190 grams of plasticized PETN-that’s a demolition load, twice the normal amount-fuse delay 3.5 to 4.5 seconds-don’t count on the 4.5-and an effective radius of ten meters-give it fifteen just to be on the safe side, and whatever you do, don’t stand in front of the hole.”

  “Sounds good to me. But what the fuck are we talking about?”

  “Hand grenades. Pineapples. Chuck and ducks. Pull the pin, toss it in, 3.5 to 4.5 seconds later, boom. No damn cave, no damn Cong.”

  “There are no Viet Cong on St. Luke,” Lewis pointed out.

  “You never know,” said Bungalow Bill.

  8

  The best way to approach a slam dunk crime scene is not to treat it as one. Take nothing for granted. But by late afternoon no clear signs of a third par
ty to the events in the lime grove had been found, and everything else seemed to be falling into place.

  Layla and Dr. Parmenter had examined Shea’s entrance wounds, verified the powder burns as consistent with a point-blank discharge, traced the trajectories of the bullets and found them consistent with an entry from below and slightly to the side.

  The recovered shells, two from inside Shea’s body and a spent, flattened through-and-through found on the blanket, had all been fired by the.22 pistol found in Angela Martin’s hand, the pistol in turn had been identified as Angela’s by the other Wharf Street whores, and thanks to the Saturday night special’s shoddy Korean manufacture, even the antique 1970s-vintage spectrophotometer in Layla’s lab had picked up traces of gunshot residue on Angela’s left hand.

  Nor could Pender fault Layla Coffee’s proposed scenario. To wit: lying atop Martin, Shea had reached across their bodies to pin her outstretched right arm with his right hand and chopped downward with the machete in his left hand, leaving her left hand free to fumble for, and fire, the gun in her purse. This clumsy positioning, with his body angled awkwardly to the left, would have accounted for the first bullet exiting just below the rib cage; when he turned to his right, the next two shots would have been angled lower and hit the hipbone from the inside.

  But even so, by close of business Monday, Pender remained unconvinced, or at least uneasy. “Twenty-five years hunting serial killers,” he told Julian privately, in the chief’s office, “and I’ve never yet seen a perp and a vic kill each other at the same time. And I interviewed Shea Sunday morning, after the Bendt murder-he seemed kosher to me.”

  “Did he have an alibi?” asked Julian, somewhat testily, it seemed to Pender.

  “No, but according to Holly Gold, Shea was the first one to reach the Crapaud when she blew her whistle. If he were the killer, wouldn’t he have been more likely to stay away entirely?”