The Crimes of Jordan Wise

by Bill Pronzini

  THE CRIMES OF

  JORDAN WISE

  By the Same Author

  Blue Lonesome

  A Wasteland of Strangers

  Nothing but the Night

  In an Evil Time

  Step to the Graveyard Easy

  The Alias Man

  The Nameless Detective series

  THE CRIMES OF

  JORDAN WISE

  A NOVEL

  BILL PRONZINI

  Copyright © 2006 by Bill Pronzini

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  First published in the United States of America in 2006 by

  Walker & Company

  Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book, write to Permissions, Walker & Company,

  104 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.

  All papers used by Walker & Company are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  eISBN: 978-0-802-71825-9

  Visit Walker & Company s Web site at www.walkerbooks.com

  Typeset by Westchester Book Group

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3

  For Marcia,

  for all the good years

  and

  for Barry Malzberg,

  because of all the wasted years

  CONTENTS

  ST. JOHN, VIRGIN ISLANDS: THE PRESENT

  SAN FRANCISCO: 1977

  SAN FRANCISCO: 1977-1978

  SAN DIEGO AND CHICAGO: 1978

  ST. THOMAS: 1978-1982

  ST. THOMAS: 1982

  ST. THOMAS: 1983-1984

  THE VIRGIN ISLANDS: 1984-2005

  ST. JOHN: THE PRESENT

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  ST. JOHN, VIRGIN ISLANDS

  THE PRESENT

  AS ON MOST DAYS, I sit at my usual place in Jocko's Cafe, in front of the open-air window facing Long Bay.

  Jocko's isn't much. Just your standard back-island roadside bar and grill, mostly frequented by locals black and white and a few slumming tourists; on the southeastern tip of St. John, the smallest of the U.S. Virgins. The road that loops around from Coral Bay ends fifty yards from Jocko's dirt parking lot. End of the line.

  The building is two-storied, made of pink stucco, flanked by palmettos and elephant ears; bar and food service downstairs, Jocko's quarters upstairs. Pocked plaster walls hung with nautical paintings, none of them very good. Dozens of color snapshots of customers with and without Jocko. Old, mismatched furniture. A couple of ceiling fans, a bleached steer head mounted above the bar, a dartboard, and a blackboard with the daily menu chalked on it. Today's specials are every day's specials—conch chowder and callaloo, a pair of West Indian dishes.

  This is because Jocko is West Indian, a native of St. Croix. Plump, hairless, skin as sleek and shiny as a seal's. In one ear he wears a big gold hoop that gives him a lopsided, faintly piratical appearance. He smiles a lot, laughs often. Jocko is a happy man.

  The open-air window frames a view of the narrow inlet, where a handful of fishing boats and catamarans bob at anchor, and the broad expanse of Long Bay and Round Bay beyond. If you sit at the table in the exact center of the window, you can also see much of the far shore—the villa-spotted hills above Coral Bay and the jungly slopes of Bordeaux Mountain, the highest point on St. John at 1,277 feet. That table and chair are mine by tacit agreement. On the rare occasions when I'm not in the cafe, Jocko refuses to let anybody else sit there. My seat, my window, my view.

  In front of me on the scarred tabletop is a double shot of Arundel Cane Rum. I won't drink anything else. Jocko imports it for me from Tortola in the neighboring British Virgins, once the largest pirate community in the Caribbean. He does it because he likes me. And he likes me for the same reason he reserves my table: I'm his best customer.

  We are the only two people there when the big, belly-fat man in the yachting cap comes in. About time. I've been waiting for him. He has been in twice before this week, once to eat lunch and once to drink a beer and cast curious looks in my direction. I know that look. It was only a matter of time until he came back again.

  This visit, he doesn't sit at the bar. Thirty seconds after he walks in, he is standing between me and the window, smiling in a tentative way. His rough-textured face is like something sculpted out of wet sand. The yachting cap has no significance; he isn't off any of the pleasure craft anchored in the inlet or up at Coral Bay.

  I say, "You're blocking my view."

  "Oh, sorry." He gestures at one of the empty chairs. "Mind if I join you?"

  "Why?"

  "No particular reason. I've seen you here three times now—always alone. I thought you might like some company."

  "As long as you don't block the view."

  He positions the chair carefully to my left, sits down, and fans himself with his hand. "Hot."

  "Not so bad today. You should be here during hurricane season."

  "I'd rather not, thanks. My name's Talley, John Talley."

  I already know this, but I don't admit it. I say, "Richard Laidlaw. No.

  Jordan Wise."

  "Which is it?"

  "Take your pick."

  "How about the one you were born with?"

  "Then it's Jordan Wise."

  He gives me a penetrating look. "Buy you a drink, Jordan?"

  "I wouldn't say no. Arundel Cane Rum, a double, neat."

  "I'll just have a cold beer. Too early and too hot for rum." He calls out the order to Jocko. "I'm a writer," he says to me.

  I know this, too, but I say, "Is that right?"

  "Books, stories, magazine articles. The Man in the Glass Coffin was a modest best-seller a few years ago, maybe you heard of it?"

  "I don't read much."

  "You're not alone there," Talley says ruefully. "I'm between projects now. Down here on vacation and to soak up a little local color."

  "And you think I might qualify in the color department. Rumpled, unshaven, rumsoaked—an old character."

  "Well, I'll admit you interest me. My sixth sense says you might have a story to tell."

  "Everybody's got a story to tell."

  "But only a few are worth listening to."

  Jocko brings the drinks and I taste some of mine. Out of the corner of my eye I see a sleek blue-and-white ketch tack in from the sea, her Dacron sails fat with wind. Forty-footer with a clipper bow and enough beam to handle weather in blue water. She reminds me of Windrunner. A little larger, and Windrunner was a yawl, but the two types are similarly rigged. It'd be cool out there on her foredeck. The trades are blowing today.

  "I'm staying up at Coral Bay," Talley says. "I like St. John better than St. Thomas and this side of the island better than Cruz Bay. Fewer people, none of the conventional tourist atmosphere."

  "So do I. For the same reasons."

  "Been in the Virgins a long time, have you?"

  "Twenty-seven years."

  "Practically a native. You live out here on the tip?"

  "That's right. A saltbox not far away"

  "What's a saltbox?"

  "Small square house. Cheap rent."

  "Mind if I ask what you do for a living?"

  "I don't do anything," I
say.

  "You mean you're out of work?"

  "No. I mean I don't do anything. Except come here to Jocko's most days."

  "Retired?"

  "No."

  "Independent means?"

  "No."

  "Then how do you make ends meet?"

  I empty my glass. The blue-and-white ketch glides up toward Hurricane Hole, passing a big motor sailer flying the British flag. Her sails and bright work gleam in the hard glare of the sun.

  After a time I say, "You want to know about me? All right, I'll tell you. Here's the short version: I moved down here after committing a crime, a perfect crime. Later on, I committed two more. Three perfect crimes over a period of about six years."

  Talley sits still, his beer bottle poised halfway between us. His eyes reflect sharp interest for a few seconds. Then his mouth quirks and he lowers the bottle to the table.

  "You're putting me on," he says.

  "Am I?"

  "Three perfect crimes?"

  "That's right."

  "One would be a hell of a trick. But three?"

  I smile. "Damn few people can make that claim."

  "If it's the truth. What kind of crimes?"

  "Oh, they were all major felonies."

  "And you got away with them?"

  "I wouldn't be sitting here if I hadn't. That's what 'perfect crime' means, doesn't it?"

  "You must've been born lucky, then," Talley says.

  "Lucky? Well, luck had something to do with it. Other factors, too. But mainly it was ingenuity All three, in one way or another, were creative as hell. If I do say so myself."

  "You made money from these crimes?"

  "Just the first one. A small fortune."

  "But the money ran out, is that it? Or you squandered it."

  "Wrong on both counts. I still have a fair amount left. That's how I make ends meet."

  He frowns. "Then what're you doing living way out here on the cheap, spending your days drinking in a place like this?"

  "That's the long version of the story."

  "And I suppose you wouldn't care to provide details."

  "I didn't say that."

  "So you are willing? Why?"

  "Why not?"

  "Oh, I get it," Talley says. "After more than twenty years, the statutes of limitation on your crimes have run out."

  I don't answer. The motor sailer has cought my eye again. I watch it move down the bay, cleaving the water smoothly, her wake a long smear of cream on the dark blue surface. I have always preferred sailing vessels—ketches, yawls, schooners—to those big power yachts, but there is something majestic about any boat taking the sun on her way out to sea. For a few seconds, I feel a stir of the old yearning. But it doesn't last long. It never does.

  "Wise? Did you hear me?"

  I look at Talley again. He taps a small device he has taken from the pocket of his shirt. "Voice-activated tape recorder," he says. "Of course I won't use anything you say without your permission. I'll give you a signed statement to that effect—"

  I wave that away. "Go ahead and turn it on. But it'll take a while to tell it the way it needs to be told."

  "I've got plenty of time. And a spare cassette."

  "Talking's thirsty work."

  Talley says, "So's listening," and signals to Jocko for another round.

  When I have a full glass in front of me, I say, "From the beginning, then. The summer of 1977, when I met Annalise . . ."

  SAN FRANCISCO

  1977

  NONE OF IT would have happened if I hadn't met Annalise. Sure, I know—that's the way a lot of stories start. Mister, I met a man once. Mister, I met a woman once. You go along living a normal life, more or less on the moral high road, and then you meet the wrong person and suddenly everything changes and you find yourself losing control, running against the wind. It's almost a cliche. Hell, it is a cliche.

  But it wasn't like that with me. Annalise was no Circe-like temptress luring me to ruin. The reverse was true, in fact. I was the one in the helmsman's seat all along. The tempter on the first crime, the prime mover on all three. She was the catalyst. If it hadn't been for her, I wouldn't have and couldn't have done any of them.

  Yet I didn't corrupt her, any more than she corrupted me. I don't believe one person can corrupt another by intent alone. I think you have to be born with the capacity to commit acts of what some might term moral anarchy; to possess a dark side that you might not even be aware of until the right set of circumstances reveals it. If you meet another person who has the same sort of dark side, as Annalise and I did, fusing the two spreads the darkness through both, until they're consumed by it. Like when you mix chemical agents that individually are harmless but that together produce a volatile reaction.

  I was thirty-four when I met her, the summer of 1977. But before I get to that, I should give you a little background on those first thirty-four years of my life, so you'll understand the man I was then.

  Born and raised in Los Alegres, a small town north of San Francisco. Father a cabinetmaker, mother a clerk in an arts and crafts store. I was their only child, a surprise change-of-life baby—they were both forty-two when I was born and had long since given up any hope of having a family. You might think, given my sudden arrival, that they'd have lavished a great deal of love and affection on me, but you'd be wrong. It wasn't that they resented me, or that they didn't care; it was that I was a new and difficult complication at a point in their lives when they could least afford another one. They were hardworking, gray little people who'd spent the years of their marriage in a constant struggle to maintain a comfortable lower middle-class existence. Before I was born my father developed a lung disease that ate up most of their savings and kept him from working more than two or three days a week. My mother had to quit her job to take care of me. There was no family member on either side to help out, and no money to hire someone to do it.

  So I grew up in a shabby rented house with no frills—a radio instead of a TV, few toys, no books because my parents had no interest in reading. Just enough food to keep from going hungry, just enough clothing to keep me warm and dry, just enough of everything to get by. I grew up listening to long silences broken now and then by mild complaints and heavy sighs and my old man's dry, consumptive coughs. I grew up pretty much alone.

  School wasn't much better. I didn't make friends easily—too quiet, too shy. Average student, except for mathematics, the one subject I excelled in. All types of math, anything to do with numbers and calculations. That's the kind of mind I have. Logical, deliberate, precise. Give me an equation in algebra or trigonometry or calculus, and sooner or later I'll work out the answer. Present me with a nonarithmetical problem to which I can apply the principles of mathematics, and the same is true. There has never been any conundrum, no matter how difficult, that I haven't been able to solve. That gift is the central reason my three crimes remain perfect to this day.

  My father died when I was a senior in high school. My mother was so tightly bound to him that she went into an immediate decline and died four days after my graduation. Both of them had small life insurance policies that they'd managed to keep up the premiums on. I was my mother's beneficiary, and there was a little left from my father's policy as well—a total of about five thousand dollars. I took this money, and another few hundred from the sale of my parents' meager possessions, and moved to San Francisco.

  The only career option that seemed both worthwhile and affordable was accountancy, so I enrolled at Golden Gate University to pursue a BA; they offered a very good accounting program and had a reputation for placing their top graduates in well-paid positions. I found a studio apartment on the fringe of the Tenderloin, I took a part-time job to help with expenses, and I spent most of my free time studying. The hard work paid off. When I graduated I was second in my class and highly regarded by my professors.

  I was hired at the first place I applied to, as a clerk in the accounting department of Amthor Associates. You may have
heard of Amthor—a large San Francisco-based engineering firm along the lines of Bechtel Corporation, with the same sort of worldwide activity. I applied myself there as determinedly as I had at Golden Gate University and received my first promotion, to junior accountant, in less than three years. Over the next ten years I worked my way up to assistant chief in charge of accounts payable, at an annual salary of $37,000 with health benefits and stock options.