Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

Garrett stared blankly from one policeman to the other. “What made you look there?” he asked finally.

“We figured it would be near where the other two bodies were found,” the older man told him. “Or, rather, your neighbor here figured that—and we agreed with her.”

Loretta spoke up. “One of the evils of drink, Mr. Garrett, is that it muddles the mind. If you had been thinking more clearly, it might have occurred to you to erase the broom thumps from your recording.”

Originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine , April 1981.

Ostensibly Pamela Quillan purchased the island of Paraquito from General Alfredo Mendez because she wanted an isolated retreat to recover from the breakup of her sixth marriage. But the underlying reason was simply that she didn’t own an island, and when you are a chain store heiress with four hundred million dollars to ease your boredom, you can afford to indulge multi-million-dollar whims.

General Mendez’s reasons for selling the island, whose ownership by his family traced back to a sixteenth-century royal grant by the king of Spain, was more apparent than Pamela’s reason for buying. Technically Paraquito, which was situated in the Mona Passage halfway between the islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, was part of the Dominican Republic. After backing an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government of the Dominican Republic, General Mendez thought it discreet to unload his ancestral home and run for Europe before it occurred to the government to confiscate it. Pamela got it lock, stock and barrel for eight million dollars.

Although supposedly subject to the laws of the Dominican Republic, for all practical purposes the only law on Paraquito for 400 years had been the decrees of the Mendez family, whose power rested on the simple economic fact that the Carib natives were living on and farming Mendez land, which put them in the same relationship to the island’s owner as that of medieval serfs to their barons. The Indians, still nearly as primitive as they had been when the first Spanish conquistadors landed on the island, were used to and accepted despotic rule.

Pamela inherited this absolute power when she acquired title to the island.

Although the initial idea behind the purchase had been to isolate herself from the outside world, Pamela quickly fell so in love with the island that she seldom visited the various other homes she maintained around the world, even after her marital scars healed. Paraquito possessed something increasingly difficult to find anywhere: a combination of unspoiled primitive beauty and all modern conveniences. The twenty-room house, surrounded by several smaller buildings that housed servants and livestock, was as up-to-date as a Hilton hotel, yet was within walking distance of primeval jungle.

Pamela’s favorite spot became the tide pools on the coral reef off the north shore, clear across the island from the house. The south shore was an unbroken stretch of white sand beach. The northern shore was bounded by a solid line of towering cliffs that looked down onto a pounding surf. A single wide stream, fed by a central lake, poured through a gap in the cliffs, giving the only access to the reef. The tide pools were always full of fascinating things such as star fish, sea horses, sea anemones and baby octopuses, as well as a great variety of colorful shells. Pamela could spend hours investigating them.

On her first visit she innocently suggested to her muscular young Indian guide that they take a dip in the relatively calm stretch of water between the reef and the cliff some hundred yards away. Paxhali gazed at her with his mouth open.

“Shark,” he said finally. “Too many shark.”

Frowning at the gently rolling surface. Pamela suddenly saw three large fins simultaneously emerge and race away in formation. Paxhali saw them too.

“Great white shark,” he said. “All big fellow, maybe eighteen, twenty feet long. Sometimes grow thirty feet long.”

“Are there any off the south shore too?” she asked apprehensively, thinking of the many times she had swum there.

“Oh, no. Water too shallow. Deep here, also full of fish. No worry about swim off south beaches.”

Learning that the lagoon was infested with man-eating sharks didn’t spoil Pamela’s enjoyment of the reef because it seemed apparent there was danger only if you went swimming. Because of the excellent fishing, the lagoon was always dotted with native canoes, which the sharks made no effort to molest. Pamela felt that if the flimsy canoes were safe, her fiberglass speedboat had to be.

A small thorn in her garden of happiness was her discovery of the title the natives had bestowed on her. She learned of it the day Paxhali brought a shy teenage Indian girl to the house and asked Pamela’s permission to marry.

“Why do you ask me?” Pamela inquired.

“Because you are La Madre .”

“I’m not your mother,” Pamela said indignantly. Only forty-two, and looking no more than thirty as a result of diet, exercise and plastic surgery, she resented the suggestion that she was old enough to give motherly advice.

Looking confused, the young Indian guide said, “You are the mother of all, Señora .”

“All who?” Pamela demanded.

“Those on the island. I can no marry Wawaiya without you permit.”

While being regarded as a mother figure by some 1200 Carib Indians didn’t particularly appeal to her, Pamela grudgingly found some humor in it. “All right, you have my permission,” she said. “When’s the wedding?”

“At the new moon. Twenty day.”

“Am I supposed to give away the bride?”

“Wawaiya and I would be honor.”

“All right,” Pamela said indulgently. “Give me a few days notice.” Later she inquired of Juan DiMarco why the natives had bestowed the La Madre title on her. Pamela had inherited the affable thirty-six-year-old bachelor from General Mendez, for whom DiMarco had served as overseer. In Europe the general didn’t need an overseer, but the island still did. DiMarco supervised the native farms and the fishing industry, handled the export of grain and fish, the import of needed goods, and generally ran the business of the island.

“The natives are essentially children,” the overseer explained in answer to Pamela’s question. “The senior male member of the Mendez has been called El Padre for generations. You are the first female ruler Paraquito ever had.”

“What do you mean, ruler?”

“Don’t you understand that you have absolute power here, Pam? You could order natives whipped, or even shot, if you wanted to.”

“That’s terrible! I would never do either!”

“There’s nothing to prevent you being a benevolent dictator, if that’s your bag,” DiMarco said with a smile. “It will bemuse the natives, because the Mendezes were pretty despotic. But they’ll adjust to it. They’ve been adjusting to the whims of dictators for four hundred years.”

“Don’t call me a dictator,” Pamela objected. “I just bought the island, not the people on it.”

“You bought the whole ball of wax,” the overseer told her. “You may as well get used to reigning.”

When Pamela was ready to come out of her self-imposed isolation, it was unnecessary for her to leave the island in order to rejoin the international jet set. She merely let it be known that she was back in circulation, and the Beautiful People came to her, the possession of 400 million dollars being a powerful social magnet.

She started in a small way by scheduling what she whimsically called her “coming out party” for about two dozen of her closest friends. One of the invited guests was the internationally famous race car driver, Baronet Ambrose Harding. He was an old friend, but it occurred to Pamela that there was at least a possibility that their relationship would now ripen into something even more intimate. The baronet had been divorced from his second wife about the same time Pamela was shedding her sixth husband. He was about ten years younger than her, but all except her first husband had been several years younger. While she was not yet consciously husband hunting, she looked forward to seeing the baronet in his new bachelor status.