Drafts of a Suicide Note

by Wong, Mandy-Suzanne

  Granted, few of my badge-toting clients can afford Empyreal. All the more reason for them to strong-arm other clients into making “donations,” which the badges could attempt to use to supplement their incomes. Their primary market would’ve been one another, but stupidity could’ve made them try their luck outside the station, so I visited them all.

  Including the dimmest dim bulb of the bunch.

  By the time I reached Javon after several worthless interviews, I was in the mood to beat the idgit senseless. Cha, this nonsense was as nerve-wracking as it was ridiculous. Though I didn’t hand out details, the conclusion that I’d run into competition wouldn’t have required cognitive exertion. They’d find the fool, make him undercut my prices, eradicate my indispensability to Court Street. I’d be vulnerable, they’d spread the word, and this is Bermuda.

  Javon shoved back his chair so fast he collided with the wall. “It wasn’t me I swear to God on my kid’s life, Kenji.”

  One of the others must’ve pinged him with a warning.

  “What wasn’t you, Javon?”

  Stage-whisper: “The fine print, Kenji, I never—”

  “Wherein it says what exactly?”

  Javon’s rendition of the fine print was remarkably comprehensive. He’d probably been prepped. But when I let go of his hand, he asked which product was the problem. So it began. Already.

  “Did you hear me say there was a problem? I didn’t mention any problem. Maybe you need to lay off the drugs, Javon.”

  “No, Kenji, listen. There’s no problem. In fact I was just about to call you. I’m a little short right now—”

  I turned to go.

  “Kenji, you—slow down, bye, goddammit! You as bad as my wife, you know that? I’m trying to tell you I got information for you.”

  Javon trotted round his desk to beat me to the door; he locked the thing and started talking. Two of us and the doorknob in a muted huddle. Perfectly unsuspicious-looking.

  “Now, look. Can’t say how I found this out, but the file on Aetna Simmons? You know, walking off like that? Well, Commissioner Wallace got it. Yeah, that’s right. Saltus found out, went and asked him for it back ’cause he forgot to initial something or other, and Wallace said don’t worry, case is closed, it don’t matter. He wouldn’t give over the file, Kenji, not even to Saltus. So here’s what I’m saying. I’m not asking you to tell me nothing, I’m just saying. Whatever interest you got in this? It in’t worth it.”

  Thrown out with the trash, devoured by the K9 unit, turned into a coloring book by someone’s misplaced child, all that was conceivable. But the commissioner? Spending his own time on the death of a nobody?

  Wallace had declined to state his reasoning. I couldn’t approach Saltus, who didn’t know me from Emperor Akihito and needn’t be tempted to make inquiries. I couldn’t ask any of my other Court Street clients anything about Aetna now that our connection had become incendiary. But it was possible the instigator wasn’t at Court Street at all.

  The commissioner’s priority wasn’t to resolve the matter but to quash it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have turned Saltus away. Unless Wallace had some hidden skeletons, he must’ve repressed the file on behalf of someone else who did.

  Someone wanted Aetna to vanish for a second time. Banished to the void where undocumented ideas go, as if they’d never occurred to anyone.

  Javon knew no more about the file, but he did have more to say. “I didn’t know this till, like, yesterday when I found out by accident, but my godmomma’s daughter used to be married to the third son of Myrtle Trimm’s father’s second cousin. The guy’s a private constable working out of Somerset. Now, like I said, if I were you, I would back away from this thing altogether. But if you want, I can get you a meeting. He knows you by name, you know, connected with the Bull’s Head thing, so I told him you’re my second cousin-in-law.”

  Here my acolyte took a deep breath and tried a grin.

  “You’re writing a book,” he said. “Unsolved Mysteries in the Bermuda Triangle.”

  I was in a tight spot and a rotten mood, but Javon was showing some initiative. And I’d become aware that if things kept going the way they were going, I might someday need him almost as much as he needed me. So I let him have that one. I bumped his fist with mine. “Touché, my brethren. Do it.”

  It’s said that in Bermuda, the black-skinned Trimm, Ming, and Ingham families took their names from Trimingham, the white English settler who held their ancestors in bondage. He also fathered some of them. So poor Doreen had more relations than she realized. Sheer numbers could prevent their awareness of each other. Thus I had no right to expect Private Constable Neil Ingham to know any sensitive details about Myrtle Trimm’s tenant. That he’d send everything I thought I knew tumbling like a bullet train off an unfinished bridge I had no inkling whatsoever.

  After I left Javon to bask in his own usefulness, I figured I’d have about an hour and a half before Nabi arrived at our love nest. PC Ingham was about to go off-duty when Javon called him. We decided to meet for drinks at the Somerset Country Squire, about ten minutes from my place. Once I’d ridden there from Hamilton, Ingham would have just shy of an hour to tell me that he’d never heard of Aetna Simmons. Or so I thought.

  Nabi says visiting Somerset Village always gives her a bit of a pang. I suffered one myself at the Squire’s outdoor bar overlooking Mangrove Bay. She and I were born in time to watch this historic place begin its struggle with deterioration. The quaint building opposite the Squire, for example, became, with its pretty double-staircase, another gratuitous branch of HSBC. It used to be a cozy outlet for Bermuda’s great department store, which so happened to be called Trimingham’s. The clan’s white echelon founded the store in the 1840s. It became an institution only to fall victim to a scheme of HSBC’s which, while the twenty-first century was still getting its feet wet, drove Trimingham’s out of business. Nabi and Iesha used to walk to the Somerset outlet with their mother, spend a few moments each week browsing ladies’ clothes and souvenirs just for the sake of time together. Sometimes, when we couldn’t get a ride from school (CAM’s interns did their best to embroil themselves in something vital by three thirty), Erik and I went along. He liked the china painted with Bermudiana. Nabi and Iesha tried on hats and fascinators, striking saucy poses while I played at taking pictures.

  A couple of times it was just Nabi and me at Mangrove Bay. Under the resentful aegis of some aspiring investment guru, who probably wished we would drown, we constructed Sand-Acropolis and Sand-Versailles. Now the sea was like a marble that unraveled itself as it rolled over the sand, bleeding its solidity into the water until it seemed hard enough to walk on. Late-afternoon sunlight illumined the shallows all the way to the bottom, where hundreds of rotund clams burrowed into the beach. Sparkles tickled the edges of the empty punts anchored in velveteen seagrass.

  Tall trees make a cabana of the parking lot that fronts the bay. The lot belongs to a post office; you can check your mail right on the water. But it’s become a hangout for junkies and drunks. Recently Nabi’s parents gave up their PO box because her mom got tired of boozy propositions. A dozen doddering fools lounged there that very day. PC Ingham spared them not a glance when he rode up on his Vespa.

  This little man barely came up to my shoulders. He was spry, quick with a grin, downed a pint in three gulps. Educated and intelligent, made a fair show of attentiveness. But minutes in his company revealed that incessant reverberations of the man’s own voice left room inside his brain for no other input. That meant he’d be a pushover and with any luck a fount of information.

  That said, as soon as I set eyes on him, I should’ve known he was apt to throw me for a loop. For while Myrtle and Doreen were black as sin, this relation of theirs, Neil Ingham, was white.

  “Well, what’s history but a bloody mishmosh of discrepancies? Some people will have it exactly as you described: common ancest
or, bastards everywhere, black and white, carved up the old man’s surname. That’s what I believe, mind you. But other people would just as soon not be related to me if they can help it and that’s quite all right; me ex-wife tells me I’m awfully useless round the house and I always seem to kill the goldfish. I don’t think anyone’s researched the matter properly, or if they have they haven’t said a bloody thing to me, so for all I know Inghams and Trimms are as different as De Silvas and Da Costas. And by the way, do use my Christian name, won’t you? I’ve gone off and forgotten the PC up at the barracks.”

  Delightful little fellow. The pair of us got on swimmingly. Had the bloke not been a copper, as a drinking mate he would’ve been top hole. “You spent some time in England,” I observed.

  “Born in Bermuda, shipped to Eton at eleven, fighting my way back ever since, finally made it last year, and I have yet to recover from all that bloody English rain. I can still hear squelching noises coming out of my shoes.”

  I warmed him up to Aetna Simmons by asking his professional opinion.

  “Well, the poor girl’s dead. There’s evidence enough for that. But to be perfectly candid, finding her will require an act of God. And so far He’s not shown much of an interest.”

  The constable described a case, a few years old, which he’d followed from England. A man went to sea and his empty boat washed up. The man himself was nowhere to be found until weeks later, when divers found his body tangled in the underwater roots of mangrove trees.

  “Not police divers, mind you. Members of the community with boats and scuba equipment. The whole thing was very public, a lot of Bermuda got emotionally involved. All because the man had a family who wanted him back. They were persistent, they kept everyone working and hoping. This girl has no such advocate. Which means, I’m afraid, Davy Jones shall have his way with her.”

  “What’s the gossip in your family?”

  “You’ve spoken with Doreen, I assume? Good, it’s just that I’d prefer not to discuss anything she’d just as soon keep to herself. Because honestly of all the people in our jumbled-up family—which may or may not be a family, it all depends on whoever happens to be present at the time—Doreen’s the only one with whom I’d eagerly manage a chat and a cup of tea.

  “To be honest, no one really took much notice of Aetna Simmons. Doreen said it was just like her mother. Take a perfectly sane and decent lodger and run her into the grave. She put me in touch with her mum and some of her cousins in case I could be of service. Rather smug lot, the cousins, fond of spiteful gossip. There was a particularly nasty story—all in fun, of course, but not really in good taste—in which Myrtle harangued the poor thing till she decided to take poison, and when she was dead, Myrtle had her stuffed and propped up in a chair so she could continue to regale the woman’s corpse with religious sermons and resentful criticism. Every time Myrtle launched one of her discussions, the ghost of that poor lodger wrote another suicide note.” This story gave the little constable a brief teehee.

  But he went on, “People never were kind to Myrtle. She was a very angry woman, incorrigibly resentful, and people resented her right back, especially poor Doreen. It was she who told me about her mum’s religious mania. Just another thing about her that made childhood impossible.”

  “And your own impressions?”

  “Well, I never met Myrtle in person.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No, she didn’t care to speak with me, only with the other fellow. Saltus, I believe it was. She said she felt more at ease among policemen of darker skin tone. And really I quite understand; one can’t deny the racist history of one’s profession. Plus there’s no such thing as a Trimm-Ming-Ingham-Trimingham potluck or Christmas-carol singalong. For one thing, we’d need to borrow the National Stadium. I met Doreen in England. We happened to sit next to one another at a conference on criminal psychology at the University of Kent. The session was rather exciting, so in the discursive enthusiasm for which I am well known I couldn’t help but engage her in discussion of the topic. She’s awfully nice, Doreen, isn’t she? We hit it off at once, then discovered that not only were the both of us from Bermuda, but we were also likely to be relatives!”

  I bought another round (“Awfully good of you, mate”) and Ingham bubbled on. Much of what he said I can’t recall; it was as though he’d dropped a pebble in the sea, causing a ripple that grew with time and distance into a tsunami, engulfing the narrow sandbar where I stood.

  Two words. Criminal psychology.

  I started making plans. The smartest thing would be a long vacation far away. But there was Nabi, and I’d have to move my inventory. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal pharma. My stomach filled with acid, I’d slept with the woman, gods help me—my cell phones had passwords, but a smart cop might know how—might know everything—it was all I could do not to sink my head into my hands.

  And then Neil said: “…which of course is why her mum resented her. It’s not to do with Doreen’s father—who was a Gombey dancer, so of course, you know—rather it’s plain evidence that we really are a family! All of us! But Doreen’s mum didn’t want that; she took a trending ideology and swallowed it right down. What nonsense. Real Bermudians are black, all other colors amount to greedy foreigners—and I believe I’ve just mangled one of your father’s campaign slogans.”

  “Please don’t remind me.”

  “My god, there was no one here at all till the Sea Venture got dashed up on the reefs! In any case, Doreen’s mother treated her as though she had something horrid to atone for, as though she, her own daughter, were some kind of Edwin-Epps-like figure who chased her mother round the house with a cat o’ nine tails.”

  Ingham paused to wet his palate. And in my astonishment, I said, “What? I mean—sorry?”

  “Can’t make it any clearer, mate. Doreen is Myrtle’s daughter, there’s no question. But Myrtle had very dark skin. Doreen’s white.”

  All I managed was a stare.

  “I’m quite serious. She’s as pasty as I am. Got yellow hair as well, her mum hated her for it. She made a prison out of Doreen’s childhood. Really. I don’t at all blame her for not coming to the funeral. The house and her mum’s things, all that can wait; I mean the old woman can’t get any deader.”

  My hands went up. Stop, they said. As Neil blinked at me, I tried to conceal my consternation by ordering more beer. When I found my voice, it stuck in my bone-dry throat.

  “Doreen wasn’t at the funeral? I mean, I—she and I just emailed. I assumed—”

  “Well, she didn’t want it spread about. But look, I mean from her point of view. She’s finally got free of her mother, she’s worked and worked, got her scholarship to Kent and then on up to Cambridge. Her oral examinations were the day of the funeral, did she tell you that? A doctorate. At forty-three years old. I mean decades of work, doing the program bit by bit when she could afford it. At last the end’s in sight and what happens? Her mum, healthy as a horse until her final moment, decides to jump ship. I mean, come on! It’s as though she was determined to use every breath in her body, right up to the very last, to prevent Doreen from feeling absolutely free. Well, the poor thing had job interviews scheduled up in London after her exams. After that it’s graduation. Next week, I believe. I told her not to bother.”

  The copper set his jaw, daring me to raise a challenge. How could I? I had no breath.

  “Myrtle’s got nephews and nieces. She’s got cousins coming out of every crevice. It was one of them handled the funeral. And of course I’ve made myself available. So, yeah. All of us decided Doreen would do just as well to go about her plans and get herself settled in a job. I mean the market isn’t exactly forgiving at the moment. And a woman in her forties? Just entering a profession? It’ll be hard enough for her as it is. The house and all that business will just have to wait. You appear not to agree.”

  My expression betrayed
me for the umpteenth time, obliging me to backpedal before I put the question to him straight.

  “Are you saying nobody’s been to Myrtle’s house at all?”

  “Well, to lock the place, of course. The cleaning girl did that after they took Myrtle to the morgue. Other than that, no, no one’s been down there; the family decided to wait. We’re not about to go peeking underneath the old girl’s furniture for wads of cash. Even if there were any, we’ve all agreed. It’s Doreen’s prerogative. And anyway one of the cousins gave the keys to some solicitor, I don’t know which one. I say, are you all right?”

  My head, you see. My head toppled sideways when the blood drained out of it. Luckily my hand was there to catch it.

  I don’t remember how I got away from him. I didn’t even notice my car parked in front of my building. I recall flinging myself at my desk, throwing open my laptop. No Doreen Trimm at Cambridge, but university websites always list current doctoral candidates, sometimes with photos. Cambridge: Department of Psychology: candidates in psychology—Doreen Eastbridge.

  Myrtle’s obit had a photo. I’d saved it, I brought it up. Myrtle’s puffy cheeks, Myrtle’s small, round chin. Myrtle’s wide nose. All of it but the lips. The lips at Cambridge were too thin, the eyes were beady like the mother’s but pale underneath large spectacles. And the coloring was wrong. Pallor and pink and blonde. Myrtle’s daughter, yes, with the surname of some English husband.

  So who was that in Myrtle’s house?

  Who ran through my undersurfaces, drawing power from my putrefying agonies of defeat, and dug in with her ankles at the base of my spine?

  Some gold-digging relative? My instincts railed against it. My body refused to allow me to believe it.

  My back stung with scrapes from the armoire. My mouth felt bruised where she’d shoved herself into it. Beneath the aftertaste of beer were traces of her tang.