Twenty-Seven Bones

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Vijay parked his patrol car, a Plymouth that had seen better decades, outside the washhouse, and led Pender down a narrow, walled alley. The fences on either side were six to eight feet high, built of various materials—corrugated tin, rusty chain link, old shipping crate sides—overgrown with flowering crimson bougainvillea or pink Mexican creeper vines. Every four or five paces there were doors set into the fence, some flush, some crazily askew, each one a different color, bright yellow, stoplight red, parrot green, vibrant purple. Vijay, counting doors, rapped at the seventh door on the right—a violet one.

  “Good mornin’, Mrs. Jenkuns,” he called loudly.

  “Who deh?”

  “Police officers.”

  “Come true, but don’ vexadahg.”

  “What?” whispered Pender.

  “She say, come through, but don’ vex the dog,” said Vijay, the tip of his pink tongue exaggeratedly scraping the bottom of his front teeth on through and the.

  “After you,” said Pender.

  Poinsettias, red and green as Christmas, grew in the postage-stamp yard. The dog chained to a post in the corner, yellow as every other dog in Sugar Town, with malevolent yellow eyes, barked furiously, hackles raised.

  The house was your basic Sugar Town shack, with mismatched wooden walls and a semiopaque green corrugated plastic roof fitted out with old PVC half-pipe gutters and downspouts, and barrels beneath the downspouts to catch and hold rainwater. To Pender, the wrinkled brown raisin of a woman standing in the doorway looked far too old to be the mother of a twelve-year-old…Sixteen, Pender corrected himself. The dead don’t age, but Hettie would have been sixteen by then.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Jenkuns.”

  “Good morning.”

  “My name is Ed Pender, I’m helping out Chief Coffee on this investigation.”

  “What investigation would dot be?”

  “Your daughter’s murder,” said Pender patiently. But he hadn’t interviewed many West Indians in his career—he’d misread her sarcasm for dull-wittedness.

  Vijay got it, though. “Eh, eh, none a dot,” he told her. “We turn every stone to find dot gyirl.”

  The old woman ignored him; she kept her eyes fixed on Pender. “You got a nex’ deadah, eh?”

  Vijay started to translate; Pender cut him off—he’d understood her well enough: you have another victim. “Vijay, I think I can find my way back to headquarters. Why don’t you go home, get some sleep—I don’t want to be responsible for you falling asleep on duty tonight. I think they shoot you for that.”

  “Dey do dot, ain’ be a policeman lef’ alive on the island,” muttered Vijay on his way out.

  5

  The bogeyman come to life on St. Luke. A real live Machete Man, but this one hacks off his victims’ hands instead of their heads. And the Sentinel wasn’t going to be printing a word of it until wishy-washy Perry Faartoft got the okay from the chief of police, who’d probably get it from the governor, who’d get it from the Chamber of Commerce, of which Lewis was a member.

  That’s how things worked on a small island, thought Lewis, waiting by the pool for Dr. Vogler on Wednesday afternoon. He had of course seen the ramifications immediately; suddenly, killing Hokey had gone from a vague, scarcely articulated idea to a very real possibility. There might never be another opportunity like this. When the wife dies or disappears, Lewis knew, the husband is always the first suspect. And unless he can come up with an airtight alibi, he might be the only suspect.

  Which is where having a serial killer on the loose comes in handy. If the wife is just another in a series of victims, and the husband has an absolute vacuum lock of an alibi, the cops aren’t going to look at him twice, especially with a news embargo in place. They couldn’t accuse him of being a copycat killer if he had no way of knowing about the original in the first place.

  But vacuum-lock alibis don’t grow by the side of the road, and time was of the essence. A lot of things could go wrong. The news might leak out any day, or even worse, the cops might catch the killer before Lewis could make his move. It would have to be soon, then, maybe even as soon as—

  No. Dammit, there was someone who knew that Lewis knew about the Machete Man: the reporter, Bendt. Which didn’t rule out the scenario entirely. It just meant that if he killed the one, he’d have to kill the other—a complication, but perhaps not insurmountable, once he’d figured out the alibi part. Because while he didn’t know for sure whether he had it in him to kill even once, it seemed to him a second murder would be less distressing, not more.

  Just then the houseman, Johnny Rankin, a short, dark, white-jacketed man with a long narrow face, threw open the French doors. “Excuse me, Mistah Lewis, Dr. Vogler is here.”

  “Thank you, Johnny. Send him out. And bring us some iced tea, if you would.”

  The second session took place by the pool, with both the doctor and the patient on chaise longues, sipping refreshing cold beverages. Not your usual analytic setup, but Lewis had the feeling that for what he was getting per session, Vogler would have agreed to hold it in the pool, if Lewis had so requested.

  “The U.S. Marines arrived from Guantanamo the morning after the hurricane to restore order.” Lewis picked up his story where he’d left off. “Panicked Lukes by the score, white and black alike, went swimming out to meet the ship. I’ve seen newsreels of the Guv in a combat helmet, wearing a borrowed flak jacket over his trademark white linen planter’s suit, waving from the bow. He probably thought he was cutting a MacArthurian figure—instead all he managed to do was remind his constituency that he hadn’t been there to share their ordeal.

  “My own ordeal was almost over. I’d made my escape the night before while the looters were busy with my aunt, and spent the entire night hiding in the dumbwaiter in the anteroom off the second-floor ballroom. Hungry, thirsty, and cramped as I was in that little box, I didn’t come out until the next morning, and then only to take a piss and look for food.

  “The kitchen was still underwater, but Auntie Aggie, I discovered, had squirreled away an assortment of cookies and candy bars in the top drawer of her bedside table. Aggie herself lay on top of the bed with a pillow over her face. I didn’t want to look, but the naked corpse held a magnetic fascination for me. I wasn’t terribly surprised that they’d killed her, but it puzzled me that they’d undressed her first.

  “I was still in Aggie’s bedroom when the Marines broke down the front door. They could have come in through the back door, which the looters had already broken down, but I guess that’s not the Marine way. I knew I was safe when I heard men speaking in stateside accents. I came out to meet them, a candy bar in each fist and another in my mouth, as they splashed up the staircase. The Guv was right behind them, still wearing the helmet and flak jacket. I burst into tears and tried to throw myself into his arms. He fended me off—I guess he didn’t want to get chocolate all over his white suit.

  “The following year, after the Guv lost the election—”

  Vogler interrupted him with a stagey cough. “Excuse me, Lewis?”

  “What?”

  “Let’s stay with this a while longer—I think there’s some more ore here to be mined.”

  “Such as?”

  “Did you see your aunt being raped and murdered? Did you feel as if you were to blame? How did it make you feel when your father pushed you away after all you’d been through? That sort of thing.”

  “I don’t remember; yes and no; bad.” Actually Lewis had hung around watching far longer than was compatible with a healthy sense of self-preservation—his auntie’s gang rape had been the impressionable young Lewis’s first immersion into the seductive world of voyeurism. But while he had no intention of giving Vogler too close a peek at his psyche, he knew he had to give him something, so he gave him the dying ram.

  “After the Guv lost the next election, we moved from the Governor’s Mansion, the only home I’d ever known, out here to Estate Apgard, the old family sugar plantation, which had been converte
d into a sheep and cattle ranch in the twenties.

  “The Great House was even older and larger than the Mansion. I had the run of the place for a year. It was paradise, except for one incident that gives me nightmares to this day.”

  Vogler looked up from his notebook, nodded encouragement.

  “It was Christmas Day. I knew I was getting a new bicycle for Christmas, so I got up real early to take it out for an inaugural spin. I was up by the sheep cotes when I saw one of the breeding rams coming toward me down the lane. Now I knew it shouldn’t have been out that early in the morning, on account of the wild dogs, so I decided to lead the ram back to the pen, maybe get an attaboy, if not from the Guv, then from Mr. Utney, the ranch foreman.

  “But I could tell right off that something was wrong. The ram was wobbling with every step, as if it were drunk, and its chest was stained reddish pink, like somebody had dyed it or something. When I got closer, I could see what had happened. How it had gotten out, whether the shepherd screwed up or there was a hole in the fence, I never found out, but it had, and the wild dogs had ripped its throat open.

  “I froze, couldn’t have taken a step if my bumsie was on fire, but the ram just kept coming, wobbling from side to side, its head hanging low, those big brown eyes staring directly into mine. Then, when it was only a couple feet away, its forelegs buckled, as if it were kowtowing to me, but its eyes never left mine, even when it toppled forward into the dirt.

  “And when I say never, I mean never. Because ever since that night, those eyes have been popping up regularly in my dreams in one form or another. Sometimes they’re where they belong, in the ram’s face, and sometimes they’re completely disembodied, which is spooky enough, but in the worst nightmares of all, they’re in a human face—those are the ones that wake me screaming, nine times out of ten.”

  6

  So far as he knew, Pender had no children. Sometimes he regretted it.

  Other times, though, like when he was interviewing the parent of a murdered kid, he didn’t regret being childless at all. There was so much pain, and it didn’t matter how long after the event you encountered them, every time they spoke about it the wound reopened. Sometimes, oddly enough, it was easier to interview them right away, when they were still in shock.

  One hour and two cups of chicory coffee after entering the one-room shack, Pender hadn’t picked up any information pertaining to the investigation, but he had learned a little more about Hettie. He’d seen her favorite dress and the bed she’d slept in and the raggedy old doll propped up on her pillow. At twelve she’d considered herself a little old for dolls, but she never slept without it, even took it on sleepovers. Spen’ nights, Mrs. Jenkuns called them.

  He also knew a little more about Hettie’s mother, about life in Sugar Town, a third-world city at the eastern edge of the great American empire, and especially about Julian Coffee, who had grown up only a few alleys away. Pender had always suspected Julian of having partially invented himself; now he understood why, and from what material.

  From Sugar Town to the Danish quarter quadrangle known as Government Yard was an uphill walk of fifteen minutes’ duration. Pender had to stop twice to rest. He wasn’t so much ashamed of himself as he was angry at how badly he’d let himself go to seed—for the first time, it dawned on him that all the weight he’d put on and all the Jim Beam he’d put down in the last year or so might have been his own way of eating his gun.

  Screw retirement, he told himself: when this was over, he’d get himself a job in law enforcement—private sector, at his age.

  Over lunch at the King Christian, Julian told Pender they had either a suspect or another potential victim on their hands: an itinerant sailor named Robert Brack, who’d hadn’t been seen on the island for some time, but whose post office box had apparently been used as a drop by the killer as late as July. That was the box number on the advertisement Tex Wanger had circled in the back of that month’s Soldier of Fortune.

  The postmistress had no idea who’d been picking up Brack’s mail, if not Brack—the glass-and-brass wall of post office boxes was around the corner from the counter. But she had agreed to let the police set up a still camera on the wall above the boxes, that would be triggered when anyone inserted a key into the box in question.

  “All we need now is a camera and someone knowledgeable enough to set up the triggering device,” said Julian.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Pender. “I can’t even program a VCR.”

  After lunch, Julian walked Pender across Government Yard’s slanting cobblestone courtyard to the morgue in the basement of the courthouse to view the two dead bodies on hand before Mr. Wanger was shipped back to Miami. The corpses were in airtight body bags, on roll-out slabs in refrigerated drawers. Even so, the coroner handed out cigars.

  The female’s body was in an advanced state of decay—the only trauma still visible was the severed wrist. Wanger’s body, six weeks dead, showed signs of severe battering, but the worst of the injuries were postmortem, the coroner explained, save for a few bruises, some rope burns at the wrists and ankles (no fiber evidence remained, unfortunately), and of course the missing right hand.

  Pender expressed surprise at how cleanly both victims’ right hands had been severed.

  Not surprising at all, Julian informed him—not on an island where machetes (machet’ in the vernacular) were as common as pocketknives stateside, and their owners kept their blades stropped sharp enough to harvest cane, chop kindling, or skewer fish in the shallows.

  Pender spent the rest of the afternoon familiarizing himself with the paperwork generated thus far in the investigation—autopsies, forensics, interviews, photos of the bodies at the base of the cliffs, and of Hettie Jenkuns’s makeshift grave.

  He left headquarters with Julian around five. They stopped by Apgard Elementary School to pick up Julian’s grandson Marcus at soccer practice on the way home. Julian parked the Mercedes in the yellow zone at the bottom of the school steps. Pender followed him around the back. Julian crossed the field to chat up the coach, while Pender joined a clump of adults watching over by the chain-link fence as the team went through a complex, weaving, passing drill.

  When Pender first noticed the handsome, shirtless mixed-race boy in the center of the drill, through whom every pass was routed, it took his mind a moment to grasp what his eyes were seeing. All he registered at first was a sort of what’s-wrong-with-this-picture? feeling.

  Then the knot of boys parted and it became obvious: the boy had no arms. Nothing at all depended from his shoulders to mar the smooth brown dolphinlike curve from neck to waist.

  “Would you look at that poor little bastard?” muttered Pender, to no one in particular.

  The woman standing in front of him—pretty Jewish- or Italian-looking gal in her thirties, with curly, close-cropped black hair—turned around, her green eyes flashing angrily. “That poor little bastard, as you refer to him, is my nephew. Not only that, he’s the best under-eleven soccer player this island has ever seen. So frankly, mister, why don’t you take your goddamn pity and stick it where the sun don’t shine?”

  7

  After her morning with the old folks at the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home, and her afternoon round at Blue Valley (she was preparing for the women’s match play tournament this coming weekend), Hokey drove straight home for a long, hot, and most importantly, private shower. She had always been shy about locker room nudity, a residual effect of her prep school days in the states. Hokey had been the last girl in her crowd to reach puberty; the other rich girls had teased her unmercifully.

  Hokey had the last laugh in the end. Puberty worked out just fine, and she ended up marrying the first man she set her cap for. Lewis Apgard was considered quite a catch among the Blue Valley set on St. Luke, as much for his golden blond good looks as for his name and money.

  But even as an adult Hokey still preferred to shower at home. This afternoon she was both surprised and pleased when Lewis asked if he an
d Clark could join her in the shower. She decided to permit him that treat—he’d been an absolute lamb all week, and she hadn’t smelled rum on his breath even once.

  “Mmm, that’s nice.” He’d begun soaping her back and buttocks.

  “Did you win your match today?”

  “Mmm-hmmm. Oh, that’s nice, too. Wait, I don’t have my diaphragm in.”

  “Let’s take our chances.” Lewis was powerful ready, as the men say on St. Luke—he’d been watching Hokey through the semiopaque glass of the shower enclosure for several minutes, fantasizing that he was peeping on a stranger.

  “Easy for you to say, me son.”

  “I mean it, let’s take our chances.”

  She turned to face him, squinting against the hot cascade. “Do you know what you’re saying, Lewis? Because this isn’t the sort of thing that—”

  His arms had snaked around her. He grabbed a buttock in each hand, pulled her body tight against him, kissed her tenderly on the lips. “Yes, I know what I’m saying,” he said over the roar of the hot water. “I’m aware of how the process works.”

  Hokey felt like crying. After all these years of wanting a child and being denied by her child of a husband, she’d all but given up hope, so to hear this at last was almost more than she could bear.

  For Lewis, what had begun in the shower as an improvisation designed to get himself laid, ended in the bedroom in a deadly earnest missionary position orgasm. The more time he spent with Hokey, he was beginning to find, the more he found himself thinking about ways to kill her, and the more he thought about killing her, the hotter it made him.

  Until he solved the Bendt problem, though, his recent brainstorm about copycatting the serial killer was still unworkable. And certainly the last thing on earth he wanted to do was raise a motherless child.

  But reasoning with the single-mindedness of a man with an erection, in a shower with a naked woman, it had dawned on Lewis that Hokey wasn’t going to be around long enough to bear any child they might conceive. And whatever plan he eventually adopted, it could only be furthered by winning her over, keeping her off guard.