Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

“You say you were with him tonight?” McWilliams said to her in his deep, slow delivery.

“Before dark. I was in the yard tidying… he stopped to chat. We chat for just a little while and den he say he need to fix he supper. I offered to fix something for he, but de man, he never say yes to dat. Just a supper is all I offer he. Why de man think I want something else?” She looked at the three of us.

“Did you see or hear anything from his house after he left?” McWilliams asked her.

She thought for a moment. “I had the radio on… my hearing…” Her eyes, through those thick lenses, looked hurt, ashamed that her minor handicap prevented her, in some small way, from helping. “Why would someone hurt him? Please say de man recover?”

McWilliams looked down. “We certainly hope he will,” he mumbled.

The ambulance sped off to St. Elizabeth Hospital, its siren blaring through the otherwise quiet night. I could see Netty Langford staring at it with worried eyes. “Jesus take care of the good,” she muttered, and then she turned and shuffled back to her house.

I watched as she went back into her house. McWilliams turned to me. “I trust, Mr. Len, I will hear from you if you have any information for me.” His red-rimmed, almost hound-dog eyes were boring into me.

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll do anything to help you find who did this to Grainey.”

I waited in my jeep, pretending to talk on my cell phone, until McWilliams’s police car left, and then I got out. I walked over to Netty Langford’s house and knocked on her door. There was harmonic gospel playing from a radio. It was loud enough to be heard from outside. Through the screen door I could see her in her small living room, her Bible in her hand as she sat in her chair. I knocked again and she got up, turning toward the door. “It’s me, Mrs. Langford,” I said. “Len from the place up the hill.”

“Yes,” she said, slowly rising from her chair and turning to me. “Come in then.”

I pushed the screen door open and entered. The kitchen was just to the right of the living room, the two rooms separated by a thin linoleum black-and-white-checkered walkway. There was a small round dining room table on the side of the room of the kitchen with three chairs around it. On top of the table were the two breadfruits I had given Adolphus Grainey.

“Grainey gave those to you?” I asked, looking at her as she made her way slowly to me.

“He did. De man such a kind one.” She shook her head. “He say he get dem on the way back from his work. I tell him I don’t need breadfruit, but he insist.”

I thought about what had happened. What Grainey did. Or really, what he didn’t do. What he must have endured by saying nothing. He knew what they were after, but he was protecting his neighbor. My eyes seemed to narrow as I realized more and more of what was going on. I had long ago learned to keep my mouth shut even when I wanted to roar. This was one of those moments. It took all I had to remain calm in front of Netty Langford. I picked one of the breadfruits up in my hand and then the other.

“Mrs. Langford, do you mind if I take these?” I asked, knowing my request would most likely puzzle her.

She laughed. “You can have dem. Dey no good anyway. I don’t know where Mr. Grainey find breadfruit like dis.”

“No good?” I looked from her to the breadfruit I held.

“You feel dem, sir. Dem breadfruit not real or something. A breadfruit heavier den dem you hold. Take dem. Dey good for nothing, not even for porridge.” She shook her head.

I thanked her and, with the breadfruits in my hands, went back to my jeep. I sat in the jeep in the dark in front of Mrs. Langford’s house for several minutes. I could call Superintendent McWilliams with what I knew… or suspected. He would ask why I didn’t tell him earlier. I wouldn’t have an answer, but it would be better than getting in any deeper. He could handle it from here on in. I knew that was what I should do. But I wasn’t going to do that. I had been on St. Pierre for almost five years without incident. I loved my new home and wanted to remain on the island. I knew what I was planning might jeopardize my citizenship, but I didn’t care. I felt a certain obligation to take care of this myself. And on some primal level I very much looked forward to it.

I drove back to the Sporting Place. Tubby was behind the bar, talking to Garnett Evans, who was on a stool nursing a beer. They both looked at me when I walked in.

“I hear Mr. Grainey someone beat he bad,” Tubby said. “Is that where you go? You knew?” He stared at me suspiciously.

“I didn’t know,” I said, being as truthful as I could be. I didn’t want anyone else to have any idea what I was thinking. I didn’t want to bring anyone else into this. This was for me to handle alone.

“Where you go?” Tubby inquired, his eyes still on me.

“I needed to check on my house,” I lied. “I forgot to leave food and water for the dogs.”

Tubby hissed through his teeth and shook his head. He was putting clean glasses into the cabinet below the bar. He knew me well enough to know I was bullshitting him, and it wasn’t making him happy. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t bringing him in on this.

“Ferguson come in here while you gone and tell us they find the body of Ricky Sagee in the lagoon,” Garnett said.

“Sagee?” Ricky Sagee was a local small-time hustler who worked the beaches and cruise port, selling ganja, hallucinogenic herbs, Viagra, sex, and anything else perceived as exotic to tourists.

“Gunshot,” Garnett added, pointing his finger to his forehead and pulling the trigger. “Executed what Ferguson say.”

And McWilliams said nothing about that to me, I thought to myself. So we were keeping information from each other.

I quickly thought of the dark figure running down the hill earlier in the day. The one who put the breadfruits on my bar counter. Was it Sagee? I had no evidence. I didn’t know for sure. I was what they called surmising.

“What that man say to you earlier? The skinny man with the hair,” Tubby asked, looking me in the eye. “He tell you something about all this? About Grainey or Sagee?” He was demanding answers. I wasn’t giving any.

“No, he didn’t tell me anything about any of that,” I responded truthfully, looking back into his eyes.

But Tubby didn’t believe me, as I knew he wouldn’t. He stormed out of the bar, grumbling loudly about “a crock of shit.”

I could have told him that the man just talked to me about breadfruit, Captain Bligh, and the mutiny on the Bounty, but Tubby would have read that as an insult to his intelligence; that I was busting his balls while withholding information. So though I wanted to tell him all, to confess what I knew, I said nothing. It was better he knew nothing, even if it potentially destroyed our relationship.

One of the four televisions was on, this one to ESPN Caribbean. There was a rugby match from the U.K. playing. I turned it off and began shutting everything down.

“Garnett, I’m closing up,” I told Johns. “You should go home now.”

He slowly got off the stool, took one last drink from his beer, and put the empty bottle on the bar. “Okay, but why you make Tubby so angry?” he asked. He waited a moment for an answer but, knowing he wasn’t going to get one, made his way to the door without looking back.

I was probably closer to Tubby Levett than anyone else on St. Pierre. I met him within a month of my arrival on the island. The first time was when he drove me up to look at the house I would eventually buy on the east coast, overlooking the Atlantic and the island’s rocky bluffs. He was filling in for a friend who owned the minibus he was driving, which was also used as a taxi. The next time I saw him, a few days later, he was working behind the bar of the Garrison Yacht Club, where I was to meet a real estate man about the property I was interested in purchasing where I would eventually build my sports bar. He remembered me immediately. “Mr. Len,” he said, smiling broadly.