The Things We Do for Love

by Benjamin M. Schutz

  “Okay.” I took out one of my business cards, turned it over and scribbled my home address and phone number on it. “There’s one thing you can do for Jane before we leave town.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Call the cop who papered this case, his name is Crawford, and tell him we’ll be out of town for a few days so that the prosecutor doesn’t think we’re ducking him.”

  “Yeah,” he grumbled.

  “How long are we going to be gone?” Jane asked.

  “They were able to get you four days. This place is booked a year in advance. I think somebody had to die so they could make room for you. I’m sure it could be extended depending on your decision.” That remark hung in the air like a fart in an updraft.

  “Haggerty, since your, uh, professional duties are now over, could you have a bill ready for me when we pick you up?”

  “Sure.” I wandered around the room looking for anything I might have forgotten to put in my bag. “I’ll go downstairs and have the hotel get a bill ready for our stay here.”

  “No need for that. I may add to the tab before Jane and I leave. I’ll pick it up when I go.”

  “Whatever.” After a last look around the place, I walked to the door. “See you in about an hour,” I said.

  I took the fire stairs down to the room Davey and I had slept in and cleaned that out. I went down to the garage, brought the car around to the front of the hotel, parked and went into the lobby.

  At the front desk I asked the woman on duty to call Martin Duncaster. He glided up to the counter, smiling. “Leaving us, Leo?”

  “Job’s done, Martin.”

  “Any complaints?”

  “Not a one. Here’s your keycard. The police have the other one.”

  “They can keep it. We’ll change the code as soon as your client leaves.”

  “Could you do me a favor, Martin?”

  “What is it?”

  “Ballantine wants the bill sent directly to him. Since I booked the room would you send me a copy also?”

  “Sure, Leo, no problem. Anticipating a problem with the fee?”

  “Can’t be too careful, Martin, you know that.”

  “Any damage upstairs?”

  “Two bullet holes in the door frame, inside the suite. Some bloodstains on the carpet. That’s it.”

  “I’ll add that after we get the repairs made.” Martin extended his hand. “Pleasure seeing you again, Leo.”

  I shook it. “Likewise, Martin.”

  On the way home I stopped at my bank and withdrew some cash for the trip. That done, I hurried home to throw some things into a bag.

  After stowing my gear from the job, I took my credit cards and driver’s license out of my wallet and slipped them and the cash into my passport case. In the bedroom closet I dug out my diving gear and tossed that into the bottom of my bag. Maybe my shoulder would feel better before I left. Underwear, shirts, shorts and a bathing suit went in on top of that.

  In the bathroom I scooped some essentials into my dop kit. I added the painkiller Dr. Szuszyski had given me and then searched for my bottle of Halcion, a hypnotic I had grown fond of.

  My last trip in the Caribbean, aboard Flaming Egret Airways, had not gone well. Our overloaded Twin Otter had taken off from an island whose airport was a school desk and a portable toilet under a palm tree. The runway was the beach. Taking off at dusk we flew straight into a storm. We couldn’t turn back because there were no lights on the beach. The co-pilot was shining a flashlight on the instrument panel and hitting the guages with his palm to get a reading. We shook and shuddered, up and down, side to side. All around me rosary beads sped between trembling fingers. I closed my eyes and clutched the seat in front of me. Samantha’s face rose up in my mind. A terrible sadness overcame me.

  An enormous hand had swatted the plane and the smell of ozone was everywhere. Lightning. We were falling fast and when the pilot regained control, the waves were close enough to touch. He fought for altitude and seemed to be gaining some when the stall alert went off. Not enough air speed to stay up. Too much of a headwind, too much weight. A simple physics lesson. We went down again.

  My eyes scanned the darkened cabin. I could see the sky off to the left. The lightning had blown a hole in the fuselage. As we kept falling, the stall alert blared on and off, and over that, the higher-pitched keening and wailing of my companions. My own terror had squeezed me into a silent clinical detachment. I observed from elsewhere this coffin we shared.

  We still fell and the only thing that escaped the cabin was hope. Our shrieks gave way to a collective moan of “No.”

  With that we touched down on the very edge of the runway at St. Thomas. Only eight feet from the crashing waves of the Caribbean Sea that battered the jagged concrete seawall.

  We bounced, skipped and careened down the runway and came to rest facing back toward the sea.

  I did not become religious after that, but I did ask Samantha to live with me. And I began taking Halcion with me whenever I flew.

  Tossing my dop kit into my bag, I added a Walkman and two tapes: Jane’s and my favorite band: Concrete Blonde. In went the McIlvanney I hadn’t finished, the last Travis McGee, and James Crumley’s One to Count Cadence.

  I zipped up the bag and hefted it. If I can’t wear it or carry it with me it doesn’t go. In the Caribbean, tourists’ luggage is considered a form of foreign aid. I just tell them I gave at the office.

  I wriggled into a white cotton shirt and then a cream colored lightweight silk suit. If the place was as nice as Nick said, they’d probably require a coat for dinner. It would wrinkle less on me than rolled up in my bag. I put my passport case in my pocket along with my sunglasses. A quick check of the house to make sure it was secure, then I washed the few dishes that were in the sink. The trash went out to the curb. Ballantine called to tell me he’d be by in a half hour. I pulled up a chair and called to have my mail held for me and the paper canceled. I had three calls left to place. First I called Randi, but she was in class. I left a message with her roommate that I’d be out of the country for four days and I’d call when I returned. I left the same message for Sam on her answering machine and with my service.

  My last call was to Arnie Kendall. “Yo,” he boomed, as socially correct as ever.

  “Yo’self, Arnie, Leo here. How’s the bounty-hunting business?”

  “Great. Just got back from Wyoming. Brought back your basic white supremacist-survivalist-rapist-killer-asshole.”

  Arnie can work with very small pigeonholes.

  “He was worth ten thousand dollars to me. Not bad for three weeks’ work. I’m starting to get the big ones now. Five-figure bounties. Sometimes I think I was born for this work. I sure as hell was trained for it. Anyway, what’s up with you?”

  “I’m going out of the country for a couple of days. I wonder if you could cover a couple of things for me while I’m gone?”

  “Sure. Name it.”

  “First I’ve got a car to return. It’s a specially equipped job and it’s costing me five hundred bucks a day. Can you take it back today? I’m set to fly out of here in about half an hour.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “The driver I was working with wound up in the hospital. I’ve got his things here at my place. Could you run them by his house? I’ll leave the address and his bag on the kitchen table along with the car keys. Tell him I’ll call when I get back. I’ll have my answering service refer all my calls to you until I get back. You’re welcome to all the work you can handle.”

  “Thanks. I’ll get the stuff to the driver. Frankly though, I’d rather keep myself open for the bounty work. I’ll return calls for you, maybe do some preliminary stuff so you can pick up the cases when you return. How’s that?”

  “Perfect. I’ll be gone at most four days.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Some resort down in the Caribbean.”

  “Business or pleasure.”

  “A littl
e of both, I hope.”

  “Sam going with you?”

  “No, she’s in New York visiting friends.”

  “You’d best keep your pleasure-quotient to a minimum.”

  “Yes, Dad,” I said and we hung up.

  I called my service and gave them Arnie’s number and instructions to refer all calls to him for the next four days.

  Fifteen minutes later a stretch limo pulled up in front of my house. I picked up my bag, locked the door behind me and walked across the lawn to the car. The long black car, with its smoked glass windows looked uncomfortably like a hearse.

  CHAPTER 26

  We spent the next six hours doing the peristaltic movement of international travel: hurry up to wait, hurry up to wait. In San Juan we had a two-hour layover. Jane wanted to shop. I suggested that we go to the loading gate and see whether our connector was still on time. A single plane sat on the runway. In fifteen minutes we watched the dispatcher announce the departure of four different flights, including our own. We ran to make the plane. The dispatcher kept calling flight numbers until the plane was full. Schedule, what schedule? Down here when the plane is full, they go.

  Landing at our destination we strolled through Customs and Immigration. While Jane stopped in the ladies’ room to freshen up, I wandered past the ticket counters toward the cab lines. A sharp voice grabbed my attention.

  A deeply tanned woman rapped her jewel-studded fingers on the ticket counter and snapped “What do you mean, no problem? I’m paying three hundred and fifty dollars a day to stay on this damn island and I’ve been in these clothes for three days. I smell like a buffalo. I want to know where my luggage is and don’t tell me ‘no problem.’”

  The clerk replied with a wide moronic smile. His next line of defense would be to deny that he spoke English. The woman got angrier and angrier. This seemed to trigger a form of reverse evolution in the clerk who acted more and more retarded. She was going to end up having a stroke and he’d still have her luggage.

  I looked down at my carryon and silently congratulated myself. Jane slipped alongside of me and said “Let’s go.”

  The cab line was under the direction of a government official. He motioned the next driver in line to pull forward. I asked the stationmaster what the fare was to the resort. We climbed in and I tried to convert U.S. dollars to Eastern Caribbean dollars. The driver had a warri board on the seat next to him and made one last move before he pulled away. I found that reassuring. He’d have to be a pretty cautious driver or he’d have warri stones all over the front seat of his car. I was wrong. He pulled away with a jolt and we bounced over the pitted patchwork roadway. I leaned forward for a second to check his board. As I feared, it was magnetic.

  We tore across open plains around the airport and began to climb over the mountains of the interior. The resort was on the far coast. Around blind curves he didn’t downshift, he didn’t brake, just one blow of the horn. In the Caribbean, all the rules of the road have been reduced to one: anything is permitted if you honk first. The honk says I’m coming through, give me a reason not to. No reply from man or beast and you’re in the right.

  The road was a mess of hairpins, S’s and switchbacks, rising and dipping through the mountains without guardrails, lights or signs. No shoulders, no lane markings. Jane looked queasy.

  I leaned forward. The cabby’s eyes flashed to my face in his rearview mirror.

  “Slow it down, please,” I said evenly.

  “No problem, man,” he replied, touching his brakes.

  Jane seemed to enjoy the rest of the ride better once the centrifugal forces stopped pulling her earrings out.

  We passed through towns of breathtaking squalor. It was rare to see a building that had four walls. Trenches of open sewage ran down the sides of the hill between the shacks of corrugated aluminum and plasterboard. I work for people who if their Perrier is flat will tell you that life’s a bitch and then you die. What would they say if they woke up in one of these hillside hovels?

  Just a few minutes out of the mountains we came to a driveway flanked by large stone markers. The resort’s name was on a brass plaque on the left marker. Passing between them we went up a small rise. The lawn on each side was as smooth and green as a billiard table. Passing over the rise the entire resort spread out below us.

  The resort had a white crescent beach around a small bay. Off to the right was a row of beachfront cottages. The peaked roofs of the main building rose above the palms. We descended slowly and pulled up at the front desk area.

  The cabby hopped out and held the door open for Jane. He was careful to extend his hand to help her out. He knew his tip was in jeopardy. Jane went by him without a glance and walked up the stairs to check in. I tipped him enough to leave him unhappy but not vengeful. A return fare was coming down the steps and he went around to open the trunk and put in the luggage.

  Jane had already checked us in when I got to the front desk. The man on duty asked, “Would you like some dinner? The dining room is closed now but room service is still available.”

  Jane and I looked at each other and shook our heads.

  “Well then, here’s the key to your room.” He handed it to me. “It opens the personal lockbox in your room. There are no locks on any of the doors here, so this is the only key you need.” There was a clear note of pride in his voice when he said that. Apparently such staples of modern life as the dead bolt, peephole and charley bar were unnecessary here.

  “Your room has an information packet that explains all of our activities and policies. Please feel free to ask anyone on the staff for assistance. We’re here to serve you.”

  “Thank you,” we said and turned from the desk. The key had number forty stamped on it. A sign on the wall facing the front desk pointed the way to rooms 1-26 and 27-50. We followed the arrow to the left.

  A gravel road ran parallel to the row of cottages. Small wooden signs told the numbers of the rooms in each cottage. Two rooms per cottage. Stone walkways ran between the cottages out to the roadway. Small lamps, with the bulbs hooded under green metal caps stood like rows of mushrooms along each pathway.

  Jane and I walked along in silence. The night air was sweet with honeysuckle. Over the rustle of leaves you could hear the pulse of the surf. A dull thud jarred us from our thoughts.

  “What was that?” Jane asked.

  “A coconut falling. Don’t stand underneath the palm trees or they’ll be pulling you out of the sand with tongs.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  Our cottage was halfway around the beach from the main building. We climbed the stairs to our room. Our balcony was between two palms and we had an unobstructed view of the beach and the sea. Jane pushed open the door. The beachfront wall and the one opposite were made of screens with adjustable louvers for privacy. There was a ceiling fan should the island’s breezes ever falter. We both sank into the chairs around the coffee table next to the door.

  “Whew, we’re here,” she said, surveying “here.” Fresh flowers, a bottle of rum and some mixers were on top of the coffee table. The room had a bedroom area with a folding divider and a sitting room with a Breuer bed and a dresser.

  I stood up and began to unpack. Clothes and diving gear in the dresser. Books and tapes on the bedside nightstand. Jane went into the bedroom and pulled the divider across. I went into the bathroom to put away my dop kit and take some painkillers so I could sleep. I was leaving it as Jane came in. We slid awkwardly by each other in the doorway. Both of us lingered a half second too long but said nothing. Jane closed the door so she could undress. I hung up my suit, and put my passport case in the lockbox. I was in bed punching my pillow when Jane stepped out wearing a halter top and bikini briefs.

  “Goodnight,” she said as she stepped behind the divider.

  “Goodnight,” I replied. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” I added, trying to remind someone of why we were here.

  CHAPTER 27

  I awoke to find a note on the nightstan
d that read: GONE TO BREAKFAST. SEE YOU THERE. After cleaning up, I slipped into a pair of khaki rugby shorts, a white cotton shirt and topsiders. Jane had left the lockbox key on her dresser. Pocketing that, I let myself out and closed the door behind me. I walked down the gravel road toward the dining pavilion. An army of gardeners labored to keep the vines trimmed, the lawns edged, the shrubs free of dead leaves, and to pick up last night’s coconut harvest.

  I trotted up the steps, past the check-in area and walked across the tiled floor to the dining room. Three giant conical roofs protected the eating area but it was open on all sides. Just beyond the dining area was a row of palm trees and beyond that the beach, the sky and the sea.

  I found Jane in a corner, sitting right at the edge of the beach.

  “Mind if I join you?” I asked in mock earnestness.

  Jane looked up at me. “Of course not. Glad you made it. I was beginning to think you were going to sleep the day away.”

  “Not a chance.” I looked at her empty plates. “What’s good?”

  “Everything.”

  A waiter appeared at my right. He handed me a menu, righted my coffee cup and at my nod filled it. I ordered fresh mango and kippers and eggs. The waiter departed and Jane leaned back and sipped her coffee. She wore a clingy white T-shirt dress with an aquamarine belt.

  “What do you want to do today?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know what the choices are.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you. I studied the activities board before I came over here.”

  “And?” I asked, as my mango arrived.

  Jane leaned forward, her hands around the mug, smiling at her secret knowledge. “Well, there’s tennis, windsurfing, Sunfishes, snorkel trips, scuba, deep-sea fishing, day sails, and they’ll even drop you off at one of the secluded beaches near here with an umbrella and a picnic lunch. Pick you up whenever you want.”

  “Well, at least we know God isn’t a couch potato.”

  “What interests you?”

  “Most of that stuff is too strenuous for me. I felt those slugs just brushing my teeth this morning. I might try the snorkeling or the scuba. Let my buoyancy take some of the load off my ribs and shoulder.”