Nelson Algren - The New Black Mask Quarterly (№ 1)

From the air, one side of the island didn’t look any different from the other — it just looked like one tiny green teardrop surrounded by a blue-green sea that seemed to change color on a whim — but according to the Caribbean guidebook I’d picked up in the Miami airport gift shop, St. Maarten/St. Martin had the distinction of being the smallest island in the world with two sovereignties. The French and Dutch both settled the island in the early 1600s, and legend had it that instead of fighting for possession, they’d decided to divvy it up by a walking contest. One man from each side walked around the island in opposite directions, and where they met determined the border. I hoped the resolution of my current case would be as peaceful.

I checked in at the Sheraton near the airport and caught a cab into Philipsburg, the Dutch capital. It was a cloudless, balmy day in the small, dusty town strung out along a sandbar that ran between the sea and a large salt marsh. Front Street, the main drag, was narrow and congested with cars and people, and the cab seemed to make about four feet an hour.

I tried to get into the laid-back Caribbean mentality by sightseeing out the window.

The town had an eclectic ambiance to it, which was a nice way of saying it was a mish-mash of architectural styles. Modern glass-sheeted shopping malls were stuck between old, pastel painted, colonial-style buildings and slat wood, front-porched houses. No matter how different the buildings were in appearance, they all had the same function — to sell to the shorts-clad, window-gaping army of tourists laden with cameras and chicly imprinted shopping bags as they thronged the sun-drenched sidewalks.

The police station was one of the older colonial buildings, at the end of Front Street. After identifying myself to the desk sergeant, I was turned over to a surly black cop named Cribbs who had handled the Anixter investigation. His attitude thawed a bit when I assured him I had not come all this way to question his competence, rather to consult his expertise.

Chip Anixter’s diving equipment was in a storage room in back. There was a weight belt, an air tank with the regulator still attached, and what was left of a pair of trunks. The trunks were shredded but the eight or nine cuts in the weight belt looked too clean to have been made by any fish. When I mentioned that to Cribbs, he just shrugged, and said in his West Indian accent, “You ever see a shark’s teeth? They are as sharp as razor blades.” There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing with him. Besides the lacerations in the weight belt and the fact that the tank was empty of air when it was found, the equipment checked out okay and did not seem to have been tampered with in any way.

The diving instructor Chip had gone down with, Stuart Murphy, was a California transplant who had come to St. Maarten eight years ago and started Mako Water Sports, an operation specializing in recreational dives. Except for Chip, the company had a perfect safety record, and Cribbs considered Murphy beyond suspicion. As for Rhonda Anixter, Cribbs thought her “cold” considering what had happened, but that was no crime. She couldn’t have had anything to do with the accident, because she had never left the boat during the dive. The entire incident was an unfortunate accident, but that was all it was. I thanked him and left.

Mako Water Sports was in a small wooden building that sat at the edge of a yacht marina. The desk inside was surrounded by racks of life vests, regulators, and air tanks. The man sitting behind it was a rangy, freckled, beachy type with a bleached-out mustache and pink splotches on his prematurely balding head where the skin had sunburned and peeled off. He wore swim trunks and a short-sleeved shirt covered with red hibiscus.

“I’m looking for Stu Murphy.”

“You’ve found him,” he said, smiling broadly. He had a lot of nice, white teeth.

“My name is Asch.” I handed him a card. “I’m down here working on the Anixter case. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you could spare a little time—” He looked at the card and frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t. I’m very busy.”

I looked around the room. There didn’t seem to be too much happening in it.

“I told everything I know to the police,” he said, picking up my skeptical look. “Why don’t you talk to them?”

“I did. They absolved you of all guilt in the matter. That’s not why I’m here. There is a lot of insurance money involved and Chip’s father is concerned that his son’s death might have been the result of foul play. Was there anything that struck you as peculiar about his disappearance?”

“Yeah,” he said sourly. “The whole damned thing. Believe it or not, mister, I’m not used to having my clients disappear on me.”

“That wasn’t what I was implying.”

He made a face and let out a breath. “Look, I don’t mean to sound rude. But all I want is to put this thing behind me.” He waved a hand at the room. “It wasn’t exactly the greatest publicity for my business, as you can see.”

I took out my wallet, extracted a fifty-dollar bill, and laid it on the desk in front of him. “Would that cover a quick run out to where Chip disappeared? No equipment. We wouldn’t even have to break the surface.”

“What do you expect to see from the surface?”

“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully.

He looked at the money, bit his lip thoughtfully, then put his hand over the bill and slid it toward him. He stood and went over to the rack of life vests, selected one, and tossed it at me. “You’d better put this on. If I lose one more client, I might as well close this place up and go back to the States.”

The trade winds were kicking up a good chop and my clothes were soaked by the time Murphy killed the engine of the speedboat and dropped anchor. “This is it,” he said.

We were two or three miles offshore and the water was dark blue, not green as it was in the sandy shallows closer to the island. The sunlight was clean and hard and glinted white off the surface of the sea. I looked down.

“How can you tell this is the exact spot?”

He smiled cryptically. “It’s my business.”

I let it go at that. “You two went down alone?”

He nodded. “He didn’t want to out with a group. Wanted a more personal dive, he said.”

“What kind of a diver was he? Good?”

The welcome warmth of the sun seeped through my wet clothes, taking the chill off.

“So he said. He was certified.”

“So what happened?”

“Good question. One minute, he was behind me, the next, he wasn’t. The only thing I can think of is that he got absorbed in something and got carried away by the current without realizing. It’s pretty strong here.”

“If the current is so strong, why did you pick this spot to dive?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “He did.”

“When was that?”

“The day before, when he came into the office. He said a friend of his wife who dove around here all the time recommended it.”

A mill wheel in my mind turned a notch and caught. “A friend of his wife?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Did he mention a name?”

“I don’t think so. I would’ve remembered if it was anybody local. Anybody local would’ve known there are better places to dive around here.”

The boat rocked in the waves and I put a hand on the windshield to steady myself. “Which way does the current run here?”

He waved a hand toward the green mountains of St. Maarten.

“Where did you find his gear?”

Again, he waved toward the island. “About four hundred yards from here.”

“I saw the stuff,” I said. “Cribbs seems to think a shark did the damage.”

“That’s possible,” he said. “They’re around.”