“I’m part of the investigation,” I told one of the soldiers.
A slight exaggeration maybe, but I might as well try to see where it could get me. The soldier eyed me suspiciously.
“Who you with?” he said.
I was trying to figure out what bogus official-sounding acronym I could throw at him when I spotted Eustace Dunwood speaking with some uniformed patrolmen in the airport parking lot.
“Just tell Inspector Dunwood that Zack Chasteen is here to see him,” I said.
The soldier motioned me to step aside and then went off to have a word with Dunwood. Dunwood looked my way, studied me for a moment. He waved the patrolmen away and gave the soldier a nod. The soldier had me put my name on a sign-in sheet and a few moments later I was standing with Dunwood in the parking lot.
“You find someone to verify that I was indeed taking a leak at the airport yesterday when Monk DeVane was walking to his car?”
“No, guess I’ll have to take your word for it,” Dunwood said. “What you doing here?”
“Just thought I’d check in, see if there was anything I needed to know.”
“Well, if there were then I wouldn’t be the one to tell you,” Dunwood said. “All they got us doing is combing the airport grounds, seeing what we can find. Your people are in charge.”
“My people?”
“FBI, Homeland Security, whoever else they flew in last night. They the ones calling the shots now.”
“That piss you off?”
Dunwood looked at me.
“Pissed off, pissed on, doesn’t matter,” he said. “You seen the hole?”
“The hole?”
“The one the bomb dug out.”
I shook my head.
“Well, you come all this way you might as well get a look at that,” he said.
We walked across the parking lot, toward where the flamboyant trees once stood, making our way around chunks of pavement and twisted shards of metal.
We stopped just short of a dozen or so U.S. Marines spaced along a row of plastic orange barricades. Beyond them I could see the hole—maybe a hundred feet across, a dozen feet deep, like the beginnings of a hellacious swimming pool.
Wasn’t much to say. I had this image of Monk getting in the van, starting the engine . . . I tried to put it out of my head.
Twenty or thirty people were in the hole, combing through dirt and debris.
“Biggest piece of that van they found was part of the bumper, no bigger than this.” Dunwood held his hands about a yard apart. “Just picking out tiny pieces now. It’s like the whole van just vaporized.”
“What’s your thought on who did this?” I said.
Dunwood sucked his lip, shook his head.
“Got to figure it was directed at Darcy Whitehall, after what happened up at that football game the other day,” he said. “Got to be tied to that. Your friend just got in the way.”
“So who has it in for Darcy Whitehall?”
“That’s just it, I can’t think of anyone right off,” Dunwood said. “He’s pretty much a hero in these parts. Local boy made good, all that. Gives a lot of people jobs, puts money back into the community.”
“What about the NPU? We came across some of them last night, painting slogans on the wall at the resort.”
“Flies on the cow’s ass,” said Dunwood. “They a damn nuisance more than anything. Just like that embassy man came to see you in my office.”
“Jay Skingle?”
“Same one. He filed his report just like he said he would. Had it into the prime minister’s office first thing this morning and we’re already catching the heat. Blamed us for a lapse in airport security and said we’d been lax in our monitoring of domestic terrorist organizations.”
“The NPU a domestic terrorist organization?”
Dunwood looked at me.
“They are now,” he said. “Thanks to that embassy man.”
“Inspector!”
We turned to see two of the patrolmen Dunwood had been talking to earlier approaching us from the other side of the parking lot.
“Just found this,” one of them said, handing something to Dunwood. He looked at it then showed it to me: A big gold ring. On the face of it, tiny diamonds in the shape of a football. A Super Bowl ring.
“That’s Monk’s,” I said. “Where did you find it?”
Both the patrolmen pointed to the other side of the parking lot.
“By the fence,” one of them said.
I looked at the fence. I looked at the hole. A hundred yards, easy. My god, what a blast it had been. I closed my eyes.
“You alright?” Dunwood said.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
He took a plastic bag from his pocket, put the ring inside it.
“I’ll give you a call if we find anything else,” he said. “I need to turn this in.”
27
On the way back to Libido, entering Falmouth, I saw the sign that said: “Falmouth, Capital of Trelawney Parish.”
I pulled off the Al, followed a road to Water Square, and parked near a historical marker. Back in the nineteenth century the site had held a huge stone reservoir where all the townspeople came to get their water, but it had been leveled and was now a public garden. Not much of one—it seemed in serious need of the water that once resided there—but a nice thought anyway.
Across from Water Square sat Albert George Market, named for Queen Victoria’s two sons, a tumbledown collection of craft stalls, shops, and produce stands. After a few minutes of asking around, someone finally figured out what I was asking for and pointed me in the direction of the Government House annex, a two-story white clapboard building next door to the Anglican Church.
I wandered around inside it for a few minutes before finding the office of deeds and surveys. Behind the tall counter, a young woman sat at a computer, the only person in the office. She looked up and smiled.
“May I help you?” she said.
I’d brought Monk’s daybook with me. I opened it and showed her the legal notice that had been cut out of the Gleaner.
“Can you show me on a map where I might find this piece of property?” I said.
The young woman studied the notice, then took it with her to the computer. She punched something in, then started scrolling down, studying the screen. A few minutes later she returned from the counter.
“Do you have your own map?” she said.
“No.”
“Then I must charge you two hundred J’s for a parish geographic survey map,” she said. “Or an aerial map is two thousand.”
“Parish map will be fine,” I said.
I gave her the money and she produced the map from a drawer. She unfolded it on the counter and took a moment getting her bearings. It was a pretty big map. She finally spotted the area she was looking for and circled it with a pencil.
“It’s right here,” she said, showing it to me.
“Can I drive there?”
“Hmmm,” she said. “Partly, yes. You go to Oyster Bay, take the B11 south about six miles, past Lucy Bend. Old Dutch Road, it will come in on your left. It’s not marked. You might have to ask for it. Old Dutch Road, it’s just an old cattle-cart road. You have to walk it a few hundred yards in and that’s where the property begins. You can look down the hill, see the morass.”
“That’s Fishkill Morass?”
The woman nodded.
“That’s it,” she said.
I thanked the woman for her help and headed for the door.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she said. “I just thought of something.”
I turned and went back to the counter as the woman sorted through a stack of papers on her desk. She found a folder, opened it, and pulled out another newspaper clipping.
“Part of my job is to file all the legal notices about Trelawney Parish that run in the Gleaner,” she said. “This just came in today, that same piece of land.”
She handed it to me. The heading said “Notice
to Sell.” The legal description was for the same piece of property. The notice said: “Owner, Libido Resorts LLC, hereby registers intent to sell said parcel to Equinox Investments. JD$350,000,000.”
I did the math.
“Three hundred fifty million J’s, that’s five million U.S.?”
The woman made a face, looked at the notice.
“Must be a typo,” she said. “More like three hundred fifty thousand J’s, if that. Nobody pays that for land on a morass.”
Apparently Equinox Investments did. But Darcy Whitehall hadn’t wanted to talk about that.
“What can you tell me about Equinox Investments?”
“Nothing. I don’t know the name.”
“Can you make a copy of this?” I said, handing her the Notice to Sell.
“Surely,” the woman said.
She walked to a back room and returned a minute or so later with the copy. She handed it to me and smiled.
“That’ll be fifty J’s,” she said.
28
I followed the woman’s directions and, sure enough, after driving back and forth several times on the same steep and winding stretch of highway, I had to ask for help finding Old Dutch Road.
“Just up da hill, here,” said an old man who was walking along the B11, a machete in one hand, a small dog at his side. “You carry me, I show you. My daughta and her child they live off the Old Dutch Road. I’m coming from Gallville to see her.”
He picked up the dog and was sitting with it in the front seat of the Mercedes before I could object.
“Dis Sir William,” he said, meaning the dog. “Got no teeth.”
Sir William grinned at me, showed its gums. Seemed healthy enough for a toothless dog. And pretty cute for one that seemed to have a serious case of mange.
We drove for about a mile and then the old man said: “Stop da car.”
He and Sir William got out. I got out with them.
“Dis Old Dutch Road,” he said, pointing his machete at a rutted path of clay that snaked into the underbrush.
We were at the top of a hill. Beyond other hills to the north I could just barely see a patch of the Caribbean down in Oyster Bay. It was cool up here, the temperature a good ten degrees lower than it had been in Falmouth. It was quiet, too. Not another car had gone by on the B11 since we had pulled over.
The old man and the dog set off down Old Dutch Road and I followed them.
“Jes sightseeing?” the old man said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Out stretching my legs.”
“Dis a good place to stretch them,” he said.
He was right about that. Old Dutch Road was surely the crookedest road I’d ever followed. It went up and down, around and around, then seemed to switch back just to admire itself. There wasn’t a flat part to it, and I was grabbing hold of every tree limb that presented itself just to keep my footing.
Sir William scampered ahead and the old man kept up with him. They stopped at a clearing, waiting for me to catch up. By my guesstimate we were well into the two hundred and fifty-four hectare parcel of land that had been described in the legal notice.
The clearing was a narrow strip that stretched a hundred yards in either direction. Goats and skinny cows grazed on part of it. Another part, less than an acre, had been tilled, and whoever had done the tilling had invested some serious sweat equity. Rocks and a few small boulders were piled along the edges of furrowed loam. Rows of corn, beans, and squash struggled to make a meager stand.
I smelled a wood fire burning and saw smoke coming from a far end of the clearing. I spotted a dozen or so makeshift dwellings—blue tarpaulins stretched over saplings, some lean-tos thatched with palm, the beginnings of a small frame house. I heard children laughing and shouting.
Past the clearing ahead of me, I could see down the hill to where, several hundred feet below, Fishkill Morass filled a wide depression in the terrain until the next hill began. As swampy a swamp as you could ever hope to see.
“This where your daughter lives?” I asked the old man.
“Yah, dey making a home here. ’Least until someone come to run them off. My daughta, she want me to come live here, too. I see I like it, maybe I will,” the old man said. “You going to walk down there with me? Smells like they got a pot of goat stew on the fire. Dey nice people, don’t mind a visitor.”
“No,” I said. “I appreciate it, but I think I’ve stretched my legs enough.”
The old man raised his hand good-bye and headed off across the clearing, Sir William racing ahead of him and yapping as a group of children ran to meet them. A woman followed them, a hoe in one hand, waving to the old man with the other. I turned and headed back to the car.
As I recalled from some cobwebby corner of my brain, the same corner that had swallowed everything I ever knew about algebra, a hectare equaled about two-and-a-half acres. Which meant a two hundred and fifty-four hectare parcel was equal to, oh, let’s call it a little more than six hundred acres. Which translated to just about eight thousand dollars an acre. For a rocky, hardscrabble chunk of land well removed from the main road and bordered by swamp. With some serious squatters on it.
Someone was getting robbed by this deal-in-the-making, and it didn’t appear to be Darcy Whitehall.
29
It was dark by the time I got back to Libido. I went up to Darcy Whitehall’s house to check in with him. Otee met me at the door.
“Him back in his office working. Say he want no interruption,” Otee said.
“We still on for tomorrow? I understand you and I are supposed to go with Alan when he makes a speech somewhere.”
“Yah, mon, to Benton Town. Way up in da mountains.”
“What time we heading out?”
“Don’t know dat,” Otee said. “Best check with Alan.”
He told me how to get to Alan’s house. It sat on the west end of the resort property, about a ten-minute walk on a well-lit footpath that wound down along the beach then cut up to a rocky promontory. The house was perched at the end of the point, on stilts just like Ali’s, but minus all the vegetation it looked stark and alone.
Alan opened the door and waved me in, a phone to his ear. I followed him to the living room as he spoke to the person on the other end.
“I’d say we’re about eighty percent there on our funding for the Mandeville project,” he said. “I’m still trying to get the suppliers to knock off another ten percent in costs, and I’m asking Scotia Bank to cover the rest with a no-interest loan. If that all comes together . . .”
He put a hand over the receiver and said to me: “Sorry. It’s a reporter from the Gleaner.”
“No problem,” I said.
Alan went back to his conversation. I looked around the place. One word came to mind: austere. A wooden desk in a corner with a laptop in the middle of it, no clutter of papers or files. A round dining table with four cane-back chairs. Wood floors, no rugs. No television, no stereo, no art on the walls. The only adornment—a floor-to-ceiling bookcase along one wall, filled with hardbacks, nonfiction mostly, and a few framed photos.
It wasn’t exactly cold—the killer view provided décor plenty—but it was the kind of place where a guy like Gandhi would have felt right at home.
I heard Alan saying, “Yes, that’s right, we have at least fourteen homes already under way there, and with luck there will be another dozen added to it. Can you excuse me for just one moment?”
He put a hand over the phone again and said: “Zack, I’m sorry, but this could take a while.”
“That’s OK. I just wanted to know what time we need to head out in the morning.”
“Oh, let’s say by eleven. That’ll put us there by one o’clock with time to spare.”
He went back to the phone. I showed myself out the door.
On the walk back to my cottage I swung by the resort’s beachside restaurant and hit the buffet line—jerked pork, corn pudding, and sliced mangoes. The tables were all filled with couples, or couples with ot
her couples, or people getting ready to be couples. I could have sat by myself but I didn’t want to risk someone sitting down with me and trying to make friends. So I wrapped the food in a plate and took it with me. I ate it sitting on the cottage porch. It was gone in about five minutes. That included picking my teeth.
I went inside, took off my clothes, and stepped in the shower. The water was hot. It felt good. I kept inching up the temperature, letting it get good and steamy, fogging over the glass shower stall, turning the tiny bathroom into a sauna.
I do some of my best thinking in the shower. And I was sorting through the pieces of the day—Darcy Whitehall’s circumspection, the scene at the airport, the property off Old Dutch Road—when I heard laughter. More like giggles, actually. Women’s giggles.
I turned off the faucet, slid open the shower door. And there, looking in from the bedroom, stood Darlene and Lynette. They were all dressed up for a big night out, and they looked fairly fetching. Skimpy dresses, little left for the imagination.
I fumbled for the rack, came up with a face towel and used it to cover up as best I could. More giggles from the two of them.
“You don’t have to be shy,” Lynette said. “We already saw you.”
“Boy, did we ever,” said Darlene.
They looked at each other and whooped it up.
Lynette said, “We were standing here trying to decide if we should step in there and join you.”
“It’s a very tiny shower,” I said.
“Uh-huh, and you’re a very big boy,” Darlene said.
They laughed some more, really cracking each other up. I stepped out of the shower, found a larger towel, and wrapped it around me.
The two of them looked around the cottage. They weren’t impressed.
“Excuse me for saying so,” said Lynette, “but this place is a dump compared to ours. How come they stuck you up here?”
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