Tom York came in to tell Pamela the plane was ready for takeoff. Rising to her feet, Pamela said to the overseer, “Tell Louquo to have the patient brought here, and that Tom will fly him to San Juan as soon as we get back.”
* * * *
It did take less time than Louquo had estimated for the canoemen to traverse the winding jungle stream from the lake. The snakebite victim arrived shortly after eight a.m. and was given a bed in the servants’ quarters. At nine Pamela contacted the house by radio. There was no phone service on the island, but there was a shortwave radio room in the house, and Tom York had instructed all the house servants in its operation.
Juan DiMarco was out on the veranda, peering east in the hope of spotting the returning plane when the call came. The weather was clear, with a limitless ceiling, he was happy to see, but the ocean was getting rough. The guests arriving by yacht would probably be late, he thought, because headway against such high seas would be difficult.
When Louquo came to tell the overseer that their employer was on the radio, he hurried to the radio room and said into the mike, “Juan here, Pam.”
Pamela’s voice came from the speaker quite clearly. “Any of the guests show yet, Juan?”
“No, and they’ll probably show late, because seas are running high. The snakebite victim has been here for nearly an hour, though. What’s the holdup?”
“The flight was late. How is he?”
“It’s a she, not a he. She looks to me like she’s dying.”
“Well, tell her we’re doing everything we can for her. There’s been a slight change of plans. I’m not going to be able to get back for a while, so I’ve made other arrangements. I want you to run the woman over to Mayagues in the speedboat. The public hospital there has been alerted that you’re coming. They don’t have any snakebite antitoxin, but I’ve arranged for some to be trucked there from San Juan.”
“Pam, there isn’t time for that. The victim’s dying.”
“Nonsense,” Pamela’s voice came from the speaker. “Mayagues isn’t more than eighty miles from there, and the speedboat can do fifty miles an hour. You can get her there faster than I could fly back for her.”
“Not today, I can’t. I told you the seas are running high. We would be lucky to make it in four hours.”
“Juan, there’s nothing else to be done, so don’t argue. We have to fly the plane to Nassau.”
“Why?”
“Because Piggy and Sue Barton are stranded there. Their yacht has engine trouble. They phoned a message to the San Juan airport because they knew Tom was meeting the seven-thirty a.m. flight.”
DiMarco said, “For God’s sake, Pam, this is more important than your friends’ inconvenience. Call them back and tell them to rent another yacht. If that’s the Bartons I think it is, they have nearly as much money as you.”
The voice coming from the speaker was sharp and definite. “Juan, Piggy and Sue’s convenience is a lot more important to me than that of an ignorant savage I have never even seen. I am not those people’s mother, you know, regardless of what they think.”
The overseer had a sudden idea. “Why can’t you charter a plane to send the serum and a doctor here?”
“I already thought of that. There’s nothing available small enough to land on our airstrip. The local police have helicopters, but they aren’t allowed to fly them into the jurisdiction of a foreign country. I’m not going to argue with you any more, Juan, because I don’t have time. You had better get moving. Over and out.”
DiMarco flipped the microphone switch from Receive to Transmit and said, “Wait a minute, Pam.”
There was no reply.
Irritably the overseer turned away from the mike. Louquo was standing in the doorway.
“You hear all that?” DiMarco asked the old man.
Louquo nodded impassively.
“Then you know the situation. Have one of the maids make some kind of bed in the boat and have the patient carried down to it. Make sure she’s wrapped warmly in blankets.”
“Si, señor,” the old man said.
* * * *
It was nearly two p.m. when the small jet returned from Nassau loaded with guests. They had already started partying on the plane, and everyone was in such a gay mood, Pamela completely forgot to inquire about the snakebite victim until she suddenly realized a couple of hours later that Juan DiMarco was missing. Then she hunted up Louquo to ask what had happened.
“Señor DiMarco took the girl in the boat right after you radioed,” the old man said.
“Girl?” Pamela said. “I thought it was a woman.”
“Well, yes, señora, but a young one. About eighteen.”
“Juan should be back by now,” Pamela said with a frown. “I didn’t mean for him to wait until the patient is fully recovered. Ask him to report to me as soon as he returns.”
The boat didn’t return until six p.m. By then all the guests had arrived and the party was in full swing. Juan DiMarco found Pamela on one of the upstairs balconies with a handsome, bronzed man she introduced as Sir Ambrose Harding.
The overseer’s clothing was drenched with salt water and he looked exhausted. After politely shaking hands with the baronet, he said to Pamela in a tired voice, “Louquo said you wanted to see me.”
“Yes. How did things go?”
“About as I expected. She was dead on arrival. The doctor figured she’d been dead about an hour, which means about three hours after we left.”
“Three hours? It took you four hours to make eighty miles?”
“I told you it would.” After a period of silence, DiMarco added, “At the request of the father I brought the body back. He went along in the boat. According to native belief the girl’s spirit would forever wander instead of entering the eternal jungle if she weren’t buried on home ground.”
“I see,” Pamela said. There was another period of silence before she finally said, “I’m sorry.”
“I knew you would be,” the overseer said.
Making an abrupt about-face, he went back inside.
“What was that all about?” the baronet asked.
“One of the island’s Indians was bitten by a snake. Juan took her by speedboat to Mayagues on the west coast of Puerto Rico, about eighty miles from here. Unfortunately he didn’t get there in time.”
“That’s too bad,” the baronet said.
Pamela grew conscious of someone standing in the arched doorway onto the balcony. Glancing that way, she saw it was Louquo.
Because she suspected he had been standing there listening to the whole conversation with the overseer, her tone was a trifle sharp. “Well?”
“When does the señora wish the buffet served?” the old man inquired in his most formal manner.
Glancing at her watch, Pamela said in a more pleasant tone, “Not for about an hour, Louquo. Give the guests a little more cocktail time.”
The weekend was not as great a success as Pamela had hoped. The guests seemed to enjoy themselves, but Pamela was disappointed in Ambrose Harding. While he obliquely implied that he was available for an affair if Pamela were interested, he made it quite clear that he had no desire to remarry which ruled him out completely so far as she was concerned. Despite her six husbands, there was a puritanical streak in Pamela that made it impossible for her to enter into casual affairs. As a matter of fact, the reason she had married so many times was that she was incapable of sleeping with any man out of wedlock.
* * * *
On Monday morning when Tom York flew the Baronet and his party back to San Juan, and the Bartons on to Nassau, Pamela did not go along. When the last yacht departed shortly afterward, she suddenly felt lonely. Hunting down Louquo, she told him to send someone to Paxhali’s village to tell the guide she wanted to take the speedboat a
cross the island after lunch.
Paxhali showed up a little after one p.m., and they took off along the winding jungle stream leading to the central lake about one-thirty. When the speedboat shot from the mouth of the freshwater outlet into the lagoon, only one old man in a canoe was fishing. Pamela waved to him as they went past, and he waved back.
The tide was just starting to come in when they arrived at the reef. Paxhali, as usual, pulled the bow of the boat up on the reef, then stood on guard near it while Pamela went to examine the tide pools.
Today there was an unusual wealth of sea life in the pools. Pamela became so fascinated that she was unaware of how much time had passed until water began to lap over her canvas shoes. Then, glancing around, she saw that only the higher portions of the reef were still above water. She was going to have to wade back to the boat.
At that moment she realized that although Paxhali still stood where she had left him, the speedboat was gone. Her gaze skimmed over the water in all directions, and she spotted the boat just as the pounding surf carried it crashing against the base of the cliff, smashing it to pieces.
How careless of Paxhali, she thought, irritated but hardly alarmed. There was no cause for alarm because the old man in the canoe was heading for the reef.
Paxhali stepped into the canoe while Pamela was still wading through knee-deep water in that direction. By the time she reached the high spot where the young Indian had been standing, the canoe had drifted off a dozen yards. Pamela stood looking at it expectantly, waiting for its return. Paxhali was seated in the boat’s center and had picked up a paddle. The old man in the stern had his paddle in the water and was moving it just enough to keep the canoe stationary.
After a few moments, Pamela said, “What are you waiting for? Tell him to bring the canoe over here, Paxhali.”
“He understands English, señora,” the young Indian said. “His name, Pia.”
Pamela said to the old man, “Pia, come here and get me.”
Pia stared at her unblinkingly, still moving his paddle just enough to keep the canoe in place.
“What’s the matter with him?” Pamela asked on a high note. “I thought you said he understood English.”
“I guess he close his ears,” Paxhali said. “He Wawaiya’s father.”
“Who?” she asked blankly.
“Wawaiya, my bride-to-be. You remember, the one bitten by la serpiente.”
Pamela gazed at him openmouthed.
“We would return for you, La Madre, but we have no time,” Paxhali said tonelessly. “Is something more important we must do. Is the funeral of Wawaiya today, and we must hurry there to make sure her akamboue, her spirit, goes to the eternal jungle.”
His paddle sliced into the water, turning the canoe toward shore. Then both blades were driving the canoe toward the outlet with powerful strokes.
“Paxhali!” Pamela screamed. “Come back! Pia!”
The canoe shot through the wide gap in the cliff and disappeared upstream.
Pamela screamed for help until the water was halfway up her thighs, but no one answered. Eventually she had to swim for shore because she had no other choice.
Her only chance was to make for the outlet, because at high tide the surf raged against vertical rock either side of it. She thought she was going to make it until she got within twenty yards, but then discovered the current of the freshwater stream was too strong to swim against. It kept pushing her back.
She continued to struggle against the current until she was too exhausted to struggle any longer, then despairingly let it carry her back toward the reef.
She had been lucky on the way in, but halfway back to the reef the sharks discovered her.
FRIENDLY WITNESS
Originally published in The Saint Magazine, July 1984.
Sergeant Gunner wanted the three old people to wait at the morgue’s front desk while he took Mrs. Worth to the viewing window.
“You’ll have to go over to Homicide with me later,” he said to the aged man and two aged women with the retirement home manager. “But all I need to make an identification is Mrs. Worth.”
The manager of the Riverview Senior Citizens Retirement Home said, “They want to see Olivia, Sergeant. They were her best friends.”
Sergeant Gunner didn’t particularly care how many people viewed the body of old Mrs. Olivia Pritchard, but he was uneasy about elderly viewers. Over the years, he had piloted enough witnesses to the viewing window at the morgue to know the traumatic effect the sight of a body full of bullet holes could have. He didn’t like the prospect of three visitors in their eighties keeling over from shock. But since they seemed determined to view the body, he couldn’t bar them. Leading all four along the corridor to the viewing window, he moved the lever that parted the curtains.
Beyond the glass, the withered body of an old woman lay on a morgue cart. She was naked and the blood had been washed from her, but four puckered purplish-black holes across the chest and stomach showed how she had died.
In a faint voice Mrs. Worth said, “It’s Olivia Pritchard all right.”
Sergeant Gunner glanced at the three old people. Apparently, his worry had been needless. None showed emotion. Although sad, their expressions were curiously lacking in grief. It occurred to the homicide officer that after you pass eighty, death probably doesn’t seem very tragic.
Anna Stenger, the oldest of the trio, was eighty-six. A retired schoolteacher, she was a straight-backed spinster with snapping black eyes and a birdlike manner of cocking her head to one side. Except for a face so wrinkled it resembled cracked parchment, she might have passed for sixty.
Mrs. Hester Lloyd, like the dead Mrs. Pritchard, was a widow. She was a pear-shaped little woman with a gentle smile and a nearsighted manner of peering over thick-lensed glasses. She was eighty-four.
Gerard Hawk, the youngest of the group, was eighty-one. Tall, stoop-shouldered, and beak-nosed, with curling white hair and a white handlebar mustache, he had clear blue eyes that were still strong enough not to require glasses. Mrs. Worth had told Gunner that he was a lifelong bachelor.
Closing the curtains, the homicide detective said, “Now, would you all please accompany me to Homicide?”
As Police Headquarter’s was only a half block from the Coroner’s Court Building, they walked. Sergeant Gunner expected that he and Mrs. Worth would have to cut their paces to accommodate the old people. Instead, they had to walk briskly to keep up.
As they fell a few steps behind, Mrs. Worth said, “They’re going to miss Olivia. The four were inseparable.”
When Sergeant Gunner only grunted, she said, “So many of our tenants are mentally slow—some even senile. Anna, Hester, and Mr. Hawk are still smart as whips, and so was Olivia Pritchard. They had nothing in common with most.”
“I know,” Gunner said. “When she came in to report seeing the Sloan Company bombing, there was nothing vague about her description of the suspect who tossed the bomb.”
“You think it was this Nick Spoda person?”
“The description fits. We’d have a better case if we had caught him in time for her to make a positive identification.” His expression turned glum. “I didn’t think she was in danger, because we kept from the media the fact that we had her as a witness. I had no idea it had leaked to Spoda. If she had phoned me when Spoda called on her the day before yesterday, I would have put her in protective custody.”
Mrs. Worth said, “I would have phoned you myself if I had known who the man was, but Olivia wasn’t in the habit of confiding in me. She told Anna and Hester and Mr. Hawk, but I knew nothing about it until after she was dead. It didn’t seem to occur to any of them that the police ought to be informed.”
The three old people waited in front of Police Headquarters for Gunner and Mrs. Worth to catch up, and the five cr
ossed the lobby together to take the elevator to the third floor. In the Homicide squad room, Sergeant Gunner briefed them on the situation.
“We figure this as a gang kill,” he said. “With Mrs. Pritchard scheduled to testify against Spoda when we eventually caught him, it’s pretty obvious she was gunned because she could identify him as the one who threw the bomb through the window of the Sloan Cleaning Company. But suspicion is not proof. Your testimony may make the difference between Spoda getting away with this raw deal and going to the gas chamber.”
The white-haired and white-mustached Hawk said, “How could he get away with it, Sergeant? If I was on a jury in a case where the only witness against a gangster was shot down in broad daylight, I would figure either the gangster himself did it or had it done. Hardly likely anyone else would be gunning for a harmless woman like Olivia.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a member of the Fallon gang got away with this raw a kill,” Gunner said. “Not even the first time for Spoda.”
Mrs. Worth said, “The Fallon gang?”
“A bunch of labor racketeers, headed by a crooked lawyer named Mark Fallon. Spoda is Fallon’s top gun.”
He had Nick Spoda brought in then. The old people showed no more emotion at the sight of the gunman suspected of murdering their friend than they had when they viewed Mrs. Pritchard’s body. Gerard Hawk examined him with the clinical detachment of a biologist looking at a specimen under a microscope. Anna Stenger cocked her head to one side and stared at him with teacher-like disapproval. Hester Lloyd peered over her glasses at the swarthy gunman sorrowfully, as though she pitied him more, for his sins, than she censored him.
Nick Spoda sneered. “What’s this, Sergeant? An old folks’ convention?”
Ignoring him, Gunner said to Mrs. Worth, “Is this the man who came to see Mrs. Pritchard?”
“Yes,” she said.
Still looking at the gunman while speaking to the retirement home manager, Gunner said, “But you weren’t present when they talked?”
The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK® Page 51
