“I have to tell you, Chasteen, you are one ballsy motherfucker.”
“That mean you’re in?”
“Yeah, asshole. I’m in.”
67
When I got back to Libido I swung by my cottage before heading up to Darcy Whitehall’s house. I went into the bedroom, started working the phone and eventually connected with an international operator who found a main number for Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Two calls later and I knew what I needed to know.
When I stepped out of the cottage, Otee and Boggy were sitting on the front porch.
“Thought the two of you had deserted me. Where you been?”
“Been talking to the mother of those dead boys, the two I had to shoot on the road out of Benton Town. It was his idea,” Otee said, nodding at Boggy. “Me, I didn’t want to go see her, but him say we had to do it.”
Boggy’s eyes were tinged with red, but other than that he showed no apparent ill effects as a result of his cohoba-induced trance the evening before.
“They came to me last night,” said Boggy.
“Who came to you?”
“The spirits of those two who died. They were lost. They wanted to go home,” said Boggy. “And so we took them there.”
“What, you just opened the car door, told them to hop in, and drove them back to where they lived? Or used to live? You in the spirit-transporting business these days, Boggy? You make them wear seat belts?”
Boggy didn’t say anything. He’s accustomed to me unleashing a minor rant whenever he starts talking about communicating with the spirits. If he wants to sit around and snort cohoba, fine, we all have our vices. God knows, I love my rum. And I like where it gets me. Nothing wrong with getting a good buzz on, but that’s all it amounts to. No need to attach anything more to it than that. All that stuff about connecting with the other side? Unh-uh. It begins to wear thin after a while.
Otee said, “Him come get me early this morning and say we need to find where them two dead boys lived. I remembered their names from the paper and so we drove into Mo Bay, asked around. Soon enough we found their mother’s house. She live up on Camp Hill.”
“You tell her you were the one who shot her sons?” I said.
Otee shook his head.
“No, I didn’t tell her that. I let him do most the talking. And he found out much.”
Boggy said, “Those two who died were her oldest. The woman, she was filled with much sorrow.”
“Yeah, well, I’m afraid I don’t have much sympathy. Not after what they did,” I said. “She happen to mention how her sons came to get mixed up with the NPU?”
“That just it,” said Otee. “Them mother, she say them not NPU. They always been PNP. Just like her. Them just doing what them did for the money. She say another one of her sons, a young one, just thirteen, him get paid, too. And guess what him get paid to do?”
“Paint NPU slogans on the Libido wall?”
Otee nodded.
“Yeah, him and some him friends. Getting paid good, too. One hundred dollars U.S. every time they do it.”
“She say who paid them to do that?”
Otee shook his head.
“No, say she didn’t know. But she say that younger son of hers, the one thirteen, he’ll be back at her house this evening. Said we come back she make sure he talk to us then.”
“What about the police? Do they know about this?”
“No,” Otee said. “She said they come by but she wouldn’t talk to them. Afraid they’d take her younger son away and lock him up. Me, I didn’t think she was going to talk to us either. Stood there at her door, she not wanting to let us in. But then Boggy, he set her down and talked with her soft-soft. Then she was crying. And then she was talking, telling us everything.”
I looked at Boggy. His face was as neutral as neutral could be. I knew he bore me no ill will for having unloaded on him a few moments earlier. While I’d never buy into that whole speaking-with-the-spirits thing, I didn’t begrudge him the fact that it sometimes got us where we needed to get.
“So, Mr. Silver-Tongued Shaman, what exactly did you say to this woman to get her to talk to you?”
“I told her that I had spoken with her sons, and that she no longer had to worry,” said Boggy. “I told her they were standing right there with her and that they had found peace.”
Otee shivered as Boggy spoke.
“I tell you true, mon, there was something in that room with us when he was saying all that,” said Otee. “Hair was standing up on my arms. This cool draft come blowing through the house while it hot as all hell outside. Me want to run out of there, but me no can make me legs move. Me hope like hell them two duppies at peace.”
68
“I should have come clean about everything from the start, when the phone calls first started,” said Darcy Whitehall. “But I didn’t trust the police. I didn’t trust anyone. I thought I could handle it myself, make it all go away.”
We sat in the living room at Whitehall’s house—Whitehall on the sofa with Ali and Alan on either side, me in a rattan chair, facing them. Their morning soul session had yielded results—a family détente, an easing of whatever ill will had been between them, mostly on Ali’s front. She leaned against her father, her hand in his.
I felt like the Grand Inquisitor. I’d been hammering Whitehall with questions from the moment I’d arrived.
At first he’d been defiant, telling me I had no business meddling in his affairs. But then I showed him the accordion file that Cumbaa had given me at the Bird’s Nest, the one that provided a money trail for the years he’d been fronting for Freddie Arzghanian.
Whitehall skimmed through the file. Then he excused himself, stepped into his den. He returned a few moments later, holding a file of his own. I looked it over. The pages were identical to the ones Cumbaa had given me.
“It was the first contact they made with me. I found it sitting atop my desk one morning, as if it had materialized overnight. Believe me, it got my attention immediately,” said Whitehall. “It’s quite devastating to see something you’ve labored so hard to keep secret laid out in black and white, and in such detail. I felt like the whole world had come crashing down on me.”
Whitehall shuddered, took a deep breath. Ali patted his knee. He put his hand on hers. I let the moment play out.
“When Margaret died—that’s Alan and Ali’s mother, my wife—it was a wake-up call. It was like I’d been living in a fog and it took something like that to bring me back to my senses.”
He looked at Ali.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything.”
“I know, we’ve been through that,” Ali said. “You don’t have to tell me again.”
She smiled at him, sadly, sweetly.
Whitehall looked at me.
“I went to London to get Ali, and as soon as we returned I went straight to Freddie Arzghanian and told him I wanted out.”
“What was his reaction?”
Whitehall shrugged.
“Freddie was Freddie. He gave me that cold hard look of his and said we had an arrangement, one that was irrevocable. But I’d made up my mind. I cut off the pipeline coming in, and I cut it off going out. I got financing, at no small cost I can tell you, and got the operation over the hump. I cut, I trimmed, and I didn’t solve problems simply by throwing money at them. In the end, we turned the corner. But all the time, I was watching the door, thinking that Freddie Arzghanian would be coming after me.”
“Why didn’t he?”
Whitehall shrugged.
“Don’t know, really. Point of honor, perhaps. I went to him face-to-face, dealt with him on the up-and-up. For all his foibles, felonious though they might be, Freddie plays straight with those with whom he does business. And he expects that in return,” Whitehall said. “Plus, I think I might have humbled him somewhat with my remittance.”
“Remittance?”
Whitehall nodded.
“Yes, that was my point of honor. Over the y
ears that I did business with Freddie, I kept a loose running tally of exactly how much the resorts had benefited from his transfusions. A sizable amount, to be sure, but after I factored in certain operational costs—I was very generous on my side of the equation—I came up with a specific dollar amount that I felt I owed him. Somewhat less than Freddie might think I owed him but still a very considerable sum, mind you. I took that figure, put it under a proper amortization schedule, applied an interest rate to it—again, quite generous on my side—and began sending monthly checks to Freddie. All very kosher, of course, applying that sum to my business costs and using it as a deduction against corporate income tax. I’ve been sending Freddie Arzghanian checks on the fifteenth of each month, going on five years now. That’s my remittance. All at my own doing.”
“What was Freddie’s response to that?”
“Don’t know. He’s never mentioned it. But I tell you this much: he’s cashed every damn one of those checks.”
It gave us all a chance to laugh.
Whitehall said, “I looked at the books the other day. One hundred forty more payments, not quite twelve years, and I’m all cozy with him. Deal even.” He picked up the file he’d brought from his den, shook it. “So when this arrived, yes, it set me on a pretty good spin.”
“Who’d you think was behind it?”
“I didn’t know. At first, I thought it could have been Freddie actually, just doing something to keep the hooks in. Then I got the first phone call.”
“When was that?”
“Same day the file arrived, a bit more than a month ago,” he said.
“Monk was already here then, right?”
“Oh yes,” said Whitehall. “He was here for several weeks before all this got started.”
“How did he come to be here?” I said. “How did the two of you connect?”
“It was through the U.S. Embassy, actually,” said Whitehall. “They sponsored a two-day gathering to discuss what action we resort owners in Jamaica were taking to protect guests against violence and threats of international terrorism. We were invited to attend. Actually, it was rather more than an invitation. It was more like, ‘If you intend to keep having paying guests from the U.S. fill your rooms then you damn well better attend.’
“So I went. The whole affair was rather ho-hum, though it did involve a bit of the scare treatment, giving us the idea that these terrorist sorts are lurking all about, ready to have a go at us at any moment. The embassy had brought in a couple of security consultants for the occasion. Monk was one of them. Some chap from the embassy staff introduced me to him.”
“The guy who introduced you to Monk, you remember his name?”
Whitehall shook his head.
“No, but he was a rather fresh-faced fellow, eager and well turned out, the very image of a diplomat,” Whitehall said. “He worked for your Homeland Security department, I do remember that.”
I caught Ali’s eye. We were thinking the same thing: Jay Skingle.
I said, “And you hired Monk shortly after that?”
Whitehall nodded.
“Yes, but first he spent some time here at the resort, giving it a thorough inspection, then submitting a report on what our weak spots were, securitywise. I was reasonably impressed. I mean, it wasn’t something I didn’t altogether know, but I certainly wanted to have the U.S. Embassy seal of approval, so I offered Monk a six-month contract. It helped that his salary was subsidized.”
“What do you mean subsidized?”
“I was told I wouldn’t have to pay him his standard rate because your government was footing the bill for half of it. Made it an attractive proposition, really. I would have been a fool not to hire him.”
69
I sat back in my chair, sifting through the pieces. The sun was a half-hour gone and the sky was sucking up the afterglow.
Ali asked if anyone wanted coffee. We all said yes, and she stepped into the kitchen to make it.
“Take me through the phone calls,” I asked Whitehall.
“There’ve been, let’s see, six of them,” he said. “As I mentioned, the first one came the same day I discovered the file on my desk.”
“And you couldn’t identify the voice?”
Whitehall shook his head.
“No, it sounded artificial, electronically generated, something not really human. But it was a man, definitely a man.”
Alan said, “They were probably using one of those voice-scrambler devices. You can buy them online for next to nothing.”
“What did the man say?” I asked Whitehall.
“He asked if I had received the gift. He called the file a gift. I kept asking who he was and he got angry, said I was not to ask any questions. He said many people would like to receive such a gift, a document that contained so much information—the newspapers, the police, Alan’s political opponents, the U.S. government—but I had the opportunity to make sure no one would ever see it except me. He named his price—five million U.S. dollars. I told him to go piss in his pocket. And he hung up.”
“Did you tell anyone about the call?”
“No one.”
“Why not go to the police?”
Whitehall gave me a look, didn’t even bother to answer.
I said, “And you didn’t say anything to Monk about it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It was something personal, directed at me, nothing that would jeopardize the safety of the guests,” Whitehall said. “I would have had to reveal many things to him that I did not want to reveal. I wasn’t prepared to do that. Besides, I was keenly aware that Monk had connections with your government and, while I’ve done my best to tidy up the operation, the closet is something of a mess.”
“Did you ever suspect that Monk might be reporting to someone at the embassy about his work here?”
“Why yes, of course. Indeed, I considered it a distinct likelihood. After all, there was no subterfuge about the fact that he was on their payroll, too.”
“OK, let me ask you this: Is there any chance that Monk might have been the one making those calls?”
It threw Whitehall for a loop. Alan, too. Whitehall mulled it over before saying, “No, not a chance of that. He was sitting right where you are sitting when the second call came.”
“When was that?”
“The day after the first one. Alan, you were sitting here with us, as I recall.”
“Yes,” Alan said. “I remember the phone rang. You took it in your den.”
“What did the caller say this time?”
Whitehall thought about it for a moment.
“He said: ‘Have you decided to accept the gift in the spirit in which it was given?’ I told him he could go screw himself. And a few other choice remarks. Then I hung up. And I returned here to the living room.”
“And you didn’t mention that phone call to Monk?”
“No, not at all. Nor to Alan. Although I presume both of them might have heard me shouting into the phone. I was rather worked up about it.”
Alan smiled.
“Yes,” he said. “We did hear that. I remember saying something to Monk about how you must have been having a fight with one of your girlfriends.”
Whitehall looked at him, with mock offense.
“Son, you know very well that I would never speak to one of my lady acquaintances in such a manner. Besides, I never fight with them. Nor they with me.”
He looked at me.
“I remember that call distinctly because not five minutes after I hung up came the explosion in the maintenance building.”
I recalled driving past the burned rubble of the building in the golf cart with Otee on the evening I’d arrived at Libido.
“I thought it was a fire,” I said.
“An explosion, then a fire.”
“I didn’t know it was related to any threats.”
“Nor did anyone else. But, bright fellow that I am, I made the connection immediately.”
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“And it happened just like that, right after the phone call?”
“Just like that,” Whitehall said. “I hung up the phone, came back here, sat down, and—kaboom.”
“And Monk was sitting right here when it happened?”
“Yes. We all jumped up and ran to the balcony. We could see the building ablaze from here.”
“You find any evidence what might have caused it?”
Whitehall shook his head.
“We were doing everything we could just to put out the fire and make sure it didn’t spread. Luckily it was far enough removed from the rest of the resort that it didn’t even register with the guests,” Whitehall said.
“What about the third call?” I said.
“Came later that night, after I returned to the house. The man said, ‘You’ve seen what we can do. Has this changed your mind?’ I told him, yes, I was prepared to negotiate. He said there was nothing to negotiate, the price was firm, five million dollars. Said if I didn’t come up with the money then Alan’s political career was over and I’d be in jail. I told him it could take some time for me to gather that sum of money, and he said he’d give me two weeks,” Whitehall said. “I hung up with him and immediately called Freddie Arzghanian and made an appointment to meet him later that day. That’s when I proposed selling him the property off Old Dutch Road.”
“But you didn’t tell Arzghanian that someone was blackmailing you because of your dealings with him?”
“No, I didn’t want Freddie to know the details because, well frankly, I was scared. I was afraid that if Freddie knew about that file then he would see me as a liability, and Freddie has a way of, shall we say, reducing his liabilities,” Whitehall said. “So I just told him I needed the money and proposed selling him the property as a way of creating a framework for the transfer.”
“Didn’t Arzghanian realize he was paying way too much money for that property?”
“Of course he did,” said Whitehall. “But it didn’t matter. The deal wasn’t really about the land; it was about me getting the money and Freddie having an opening for running his pipeline through Libido again.”
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