Read Twenty-Seven Bones Online
Authors: Jonathan Nasaw
Tags: #Caribbean Area, #Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #Murder, #True Crime, #Mystery fiction, #Serial Killers, #Suspense, #Americans - Caribbean Area, #Mystery, #Mystery & Detective - General, #Police Procedural, #Thrillers, #Detective, #Serial murders, #Mystery & Detective, #American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, #Fiction - Mystery, #General, #Fantasy, #Americans, #Mystery & Detective - Police Procedural
Twenty-Seven Bones (11 page)
1
Second morning on the island; a pounding at Pender’s door.
“Good mornin’, Edgar! Are you awake?”
Eight o’clock, according to the watch on the nightstand, next to the motionless gecko. “If I ain’t, I’m dreaming about you. That can’t be a good sign.”
Julian pushed the door open. He was already in uniform—pressed khaki pants, pressed khaki short-sleeved shirt with navy blue tabs at the shoulders; no rank, no insignia. He handed Pender a mug of steaming coffee under the mosquito net. “Time to get cracking, me son. I just got off the phone with the Machete Man—we may have another victim on our hands.”
“He called you?”
“No, I called him, what do you think?”
Pender took a life-giving sip of hot coffee. “Get me up to speed.”
“A call came in twenty minutes ago. Man’s voice, muffled. ‘It took you so long to find the others, this time I’m going to give you a hint. The old mill tower.’ Hangs up before I can ask him which one.”
“Your home number—it’s listed?”
“Always has been.”
“And you didn’t recognize the voice?”
“He spoke in a whisper, used a phony British accent.”
“That tells us something then,” said Pender.
“What?”
“That he’s not British. Do I have time to take a shower?”
“Make it a quick one—bodies don’t keep well in these latitudes.”
In the bad old days, when King Cane ruled St. Luke, every plantation had its own grinding mill, Julian explained to Pender as they drove east along the southern arc of the Circle Road. Some were powered by wind, some by steam, some by oxen, some by slaves—and every last one of them had been rendered gradually obsolete after emancipation and the development of the sugar beet made growing cane economically unfeasible.
There were only a few producing cane fields left on the island, said Julian—you can’t make decent rum from beets. But there were still at least a dozen old mill towers standing, or falling, in various states of repair, all across the island. “I have my people checking out each of them, but the most likely spot for a body drop is the tower on Sugar Loaf Hill. It’s isolated but well-known and easy to drive to—I reserved that one for us.”
“Lucky us,” said Pender.
Sugar Loaf Hill was a rounded lump standing alone in the middle of a burned-out autumnal canebrake. The tower was conical, crumbling, thirty feet in diameter at the bottom, ten at the jagged top. Great round stones were tumbled about at the base, along with broken fingers of mortar, dry worm castings, sandwich wrappers, broken bottles, empty pop and beer cans, used condoms. Julian parked the Mercedes at the bottom of the little hill. Pender followed him up the slope and around the ruins to the arched doorway. A date was chiseled into the lintel stone in triangular strokes: 1792.
Julian squatted just outside the archway; Pender peered over his shoulder into the dimness. Inside, no grinding wheel, no mill works. Just a round dirt floor speckled with grayish white bird shit, and a naked corpse lying on its side in the center of the room, with its back to the doorway and its head resting on its outstretched right arm, which had been severed at the wrist. The end of the stump was covered with swarming blackflies. Their buzzing was the loudest sound in the ruins, with Pender’s heavy breathing a close second.
“Caucasian,” said Julian—the corpse’s skin was tanned all over, but the hair was whitish blond in the light pouring through the broken top of the tower.
“Female,” said Pender—there was no mistaking the cellolike curve of a woman’s back, the narrow waist, the flaring hip, the heart-shaped ass.
“I’ll be right back,” said Julian. “Don’t muck up my crime scene.”
As Julian hurried back down to his car to use the police band radio—no cell service on St. Luke as yet—Pender stepped carefully into the tower and circled wide around the body, keeping to the perimeter of the conical stone walls so as not to disturb any transfer evidence left by the killer. There were no visible footprints except for his own, which meant the killer might have swept his way out of the tower—but you never knew what a good criminalist could pick up.
“Hello there,” murmured Pender as he approached the corpse from the other direction. “Tell me a little about yourself.”
But she didn’t have much to say, other than that she was, or had been, a Caucasian female, between twenty-five and forty years of age, tall, slender, with long, blond hair that matched her pubic hair. Full body tan, no bikini line, no stretch marks. No marks anywhere, except for a few old tomboy scars on her knees—and of course the missing hand.
The ground beneath the severed wrist was dry, which meant this was a body drop and not a murder scene. Pender squatted down, took off his hat and waved it to shoo the flies away so he could get a better look at the wound, but they ignored him. Her other arm, her left arm, was drawn up at her side, bent at the elbow, the fingers splayed out stiffly as if she were modeling her diamond-studded gold wedding band. (Robbery not a motive, Pender noted.) Close to full rigor, somewhere between ten and twelve hours postmortem, at a rough guess.
“Edgar?”
Pender looked up, startled. Julian was standing in the arched doorway with his daughter Layla, a handsome young woman with light brown skin, bright green eyes, and wavy brown hair.
“And whom do we have here?” asked Layla.
“You tell me.” Pender stood up, backing away from the body as the other two walked in his footsteps around the perimeter of the chamber.
Layla drew her breath in sharply. “Daddy, is that…?”
“Oh shit,” said Julian, and for a moment there, as he started to raise his arm, then put it down hastily, it looked to Pender as if he’d forgotten that Layla was a grown woman, and a trained criminalist to boot, and was trying reflexively to shield his little girl from a terrible sight.
“Shortly after my seventh birthday the Guv sent me away to boarding school in the states.” Lewis and Dr. Vogler were in Lewis’s study for their third appointment. Vogler had offered to postpone it when he learned of Lewis’s head injury, but Lewis said no, he’d just as soon get it over with. And of course it kept his mind off…things he didn’t want it on.
They’d begun the session out by the pool, with Lewis’s Miami Dolphins cap covering his bandaged crown, but a morning shower blowing in from the west had passed briefly over the island. By the time the sun returned to dry things out, they had already moved inside.
“Then came prep school, then came college: for the next fifteen years I saw my home island only during Christmas and summer vacations, and it wasn’t until I flunked out of Princeton my junior year that I returned to St. Luke for good.
“When I turned twenty-one, the Guv moved me into the old overseer’s house and put me in charge of collecting rents. Looking back, I can see now that my marriage was all but predestined, Hokey being a Hokansson and me an Apgard, but since she had undergone the same boarding school, prep school routine that I had, we’d rarely met as children. I remember her only as a tall girl in a party dress; she remembers me only as a brat in short pants. But we ran into each other again at a dance at Blue Valley the year I came back, and it was love at first sight.
“Even then, I don’t know if I’d have asked her to marry me quite so soon if it hadn’t been for the Guv’s offer, upon the event of my marriage, of the deed to the overseer’s house, several choice plots on the ridge, and a substantial property in the middle of the island known as Estate Tamarind, which included a working cane piece that stretched from the Circle Road to the old Peace Corps training village at the edge of the—”
A rap at the study door. “Mistah Lewis?”
“Yes?”
The houseman opened the door. “Beg pardon, Mistah Lewis.”
“What is it, Johnny? You know I don’t want to be disturbed when I’m with—”
Johnny had just come on duty. Still buttoning his white tunic, he crossed the room to whisper into Apgard’s ear. Apgard whispered a reply behind his hand, then turned back to the psychiatrist, who was already glancing at his watch. “I’m sorry, Dr. Vogler, a situation seems to have developed.”
“No problem. I’ll have to charge you for the full hour, though.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Lewis.
The white-jacketed butler—houseman was the St. Luke title—showed Coffee and Pender into the drawing room, which was decorated in gilt and green, with ancestral portraits hung on the wall above the enormous fireplace. Pender stopped at the edge of the handsome carpet and toed off his muddy Hush Puppies. He and Julian had been caught in the same storm that had driven Apgard and Vogel inside. Within five minutes, as they struggled to help Layla set up a crime scene tent over the body, it had turned the dry earth around the mill tower to mud—so much for tire track imprints—and five minutes later it was gone, leaving the sky a clear, innocent,
what, me rain?
blue.
Pender settled himself onto an uncomfortable antique chair with bentwood arms, bowed legs, and a dark green, pancake-thin cushion. “Nice joint.”
“Not going to be much consolation to Lewis when he finds out his wife has been murdered,” said Coffee, whose shoes had somehow remained immaculate.
“You seem pretty sure he’s innocent. He
is
the husband, after all.”
“You’d have to know the guy,” Coffee replied. “Lewis Apgard’s no Machete Man. The only way he could kill somebody would be to charm them to death.”
Superficial charm, thought Pender—a characteristic shared by many psychopaths. “Do me a favor anyway—grill him about his whereabouts before you break the news.”
“I’ll let you do it,” said Julian. “Lewis Apgard is a very influential man on this island—I’d like to keep my job a bit longer, if that’s all right with you.”
The drawing room doors opened. Apgard strode into the room wearing shorts and a blue-and-yellow-striped rugby shirt with the collar turned up in back. He was unshaven, his dark blond hair sticking out from under his aquamarine baseball cap, and when he saw that Pender had taken off his shoes, he grinned—charmingly.
“What ya tryin’ ta do, mon,” he said in dialect, after he and Coffee had exchanged good mornings, and Coffee had introduced Pender. “Put the maid out of work?”
“My momma raised me not to track mud on carpets that cost more than I earn,” replied Pender.
“Johnny, would you run those down to the kitchen, see if you can get the mud off them?” Apgard instructed the butler.
“That won’t be necessary,” said Pender.
“No trouble,” said Apgard. “And can I offer either of you gentlemen a drink?”
“Little early in the day for me.”
“Tea or coffee, then. Johnny, would you ask Sally—”
“No, thank you,” said Julian. “Sit down, would you, Lewis?”
“Sure. That’ll be all, Johnny.”
Apgard sat in a bentwood chair across from the two cops. Julian nodded to Pender.
“Mr. Apgard, can you account for your whereabouts since last night,” Pender began.
“What’s this all—”
Pender cut him off. “Mr. Apgard, I don’t mean to be rude, but we need to do this my way. Can you account for your whereabouts since last night?”
“Yes,” said Apgard, tight-lipped now—apparently he didn’t like being interrupted.
“Please do.”
“Starting when?”
“Say, supper.”
“I didn’t eat supper.”
“What about your wife?”
“What does Hokey have to—”
“My way, Mr. Apgard.”
“It was cook’s day off. I brought a supper tray up to the bedroom for Hokey.”
“Wasn’t she feeling well?”
“Why don’t you ask—”
“Mr. Apgard.”
“She’s…we’re trying to conceive. We made love—she stayed in bed. On her back. Now do you understand? Cheese-an’-bread, mon, will ya please fuckin’ tell me what’s going on?”
Pender ignored the outburst. “You brought your wife supper in bed. Did you stay with her while she ate it?”
“No, I went downstairs, read the paper, had a few drinks. Probably a few too many—I fell asleep. When I woke up, I went out back to clear my mind, missed the last step, fell backward, hit my head.” Apgard raised his turquoise cap to show them the rectangular bandage, stained brown in the middle, either from blood or Betadine. “Bled like a stuck pig.”
“Go on,” said Pender.
Apgard replaced the cap. “I might have lost consciousness for a second or two. When I came to, like I say, I was bleeding pretty bad. I took off my jacket, used it to stanch the blood, went inside, called upstairs to Hokey. She came down, drove me to the hospital. The resident stitched me up and insisted on keeping me overnight for observation.
“This morning I felt fine—little sore in the coconut, that’s all. I called Hokey to come pick me up, but there was no answer. I figured she was probably out at Blue Valley practicing for the tournament, so I took a cab. Got home around an hour and a half ago, had a session with Dr. Vogler, and next thing I know, Johnny tells me the police are at the door. Now what the fuck is going on?”
“Almost there,” said Pender soothingly. “Let me get this all straight first. You fell down, hit your head. Your wife drove you to the hospital. Did anyone see her with you?”
“Everybody. She stayed at my side through the stitches and everything. I practically fainted—she was a rock. She left around, I don’t know, midnight? She’d have stayed with me, but there were no private beds left.”
“Did you leave the hospital at any time during the night?”
“I didn’t even leave the bed—they made me piss in a pot.”
“And there was someone with you all night?”
“Three roommates, one of whom never slept a wink. And the nurses’ station is right outside the door. And now that I’m beginning to see the light, Agent Pender, whatever you’re trying to pin on me, if it happened last night, you talkin’ to the wrong buoy. So if you don’t mind…”
Pender glanced at Julian, gave him a back-to-the-drawing-board shrug. Alibis didn’t come much tighter than that.
Apgard looked from one man to the other. “Chief, I’m starting to get worried here. Would you please tell me what’s going on?”
“Lewis, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. It’s about Hokey.”
“What happened? Has she been in an accident? Where is she? Is she all right?”
Julian told him his wife’s body had been found in the mill tower. Apgard buried his face in his hands and began to sob. Coffee crossed the room, stood behind Apgard’s chair, placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. He remembered Lewis from the days when he was known as the Baby Guv. Lewis’s wet nurse, Queen Charlotte, had been a Coffee on her mother’s side—Julian had once lifted the two-year-old Baby Guv onto his shoulders so he could see the Three Kings Day parade pass by. That would have been January of ’71, the year before Julian joined the FBI.
It took Apgard a few minutes to get hold of himself again. When he did look up, his eyes were bloodshot and his voice hollow. “Chief?”
“Yes, Lewis?”
“Whoever’s responsible for this?”
“Yes?”
“I want to be there for the hanging.”
“I think we can arrange that, me son,” said Julian. “I think we can definitely arrange that.”