Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

“The U.S. Marines arrived from Guantanamo the morning after the hurricane to restore order.” Lewis picked up his story where he’d left off. “Panicked Lukes by the score, white and black alike, went swimming out to meet the ship. I’ve seen newsreels of the Guv in a combat helmet, wearing a borrowed flak jacket over his trademark white linen planter’s suit, waving from the bow. He probably thought he was cutting a MacArthurian figure-instead all he managed to do was remind his constituency that he hadn’t been there to share their ordeal.

“My own ordeal was almost over. I’d made my escape the night before while the looters were busy with my aunt, and spent the entire night hiding in the dumbwaiter in the anteroom off the second-floor ballroom. Hungry, thirsty, and cramped as I was in that little box, I didn’t come out until the next morning, and then only to take a piss and look for food.

“The kitchen was still underwater, but Auntie Aggie, I discovered, had squirreled away an assortment of cookies and candy bars in the top drawer of her bedside table. Aggie herself lay on top of the bed with a pillow over her face. I didn’t want to look, but the naked corpse held a magnetic fascination for me. I wasn’t terribly surprised that they’d killed her, but it puzzled me that they’d undressed her first.

“I was still in Aggie’s bedroom when the Marines broke down the front door. They could have come in through the back door, which the looters had already broken down, but I guess that’s not the Marine way. I knew I was safe when I heard men speaking in stateside accents. I came out to meet them, a candy bar in each fist and another in my mouth, as they splashed up the staircase. The Guv was right behind them, still wearing the helmet and flak jacket. I burst into tears and tried to throw myself into his arms. He fended me off-I guess he didn’t want to get chocolate all over his white suit.

“The following year, after the Guv lost the election-”

Vogler interrupted him with a stagey cough. “Excuse me, Lewis?”

“What?”

“Let’s stay with this a while longer-I think there’s some more ore here to be mined.”

“Such as?”

“Did you see your aunt being raped and murdered? Did you feel as if you were to blame? How did it make you feel when your father pushed you away after all you’d been through? That sort of thing.”

“I don’t remember; yes and no; bad.” Actually Lewis had hung around watching far longer than was compatible with a healthy sense of self-preservation-his auntie’s gang rape had been the impressionable young Lewis’s first immersion into the seductive world of voyeurism. But while he had no intention of giving Vogler too close a peek at his psyche, he knew he had to give him something, so he gave him the dying ram.

“After the Guv lost the next election, we moved from the Governor’s Mansion, the only home I’d ever known, out here to Estate Apgard, the old family sugar plantation, which had been converted into a sheep and cattle ranch in the twenties.

“The Great House was even older and larger than the Mansion. I had the run of the place for a year. It was paradise, except for one incident that gives me nightmares to this day.”

Vogler looked up from his notebook, nodded encouragement.

“It was Christmas Day. I knew I was getting a new bicycle for Christmas, so I got up real early to take it out for an inaugural spin. I was up by the sheep cotes when I saw one of the breeding rams coming toward me down the lane. Now I knew it shouldn’t have been out that early in the morning, on account of the wild dogs, so I decided to lead the ram back to the pen, maybe get an attaboy, if not from the Guv, then from Mr. Utney, the ranch foreman.

“But I could tell right off that something was wrong. The ram was wobbling with every step, as if it were drunk, and its chest was stained reddish pink, like somebody had dyed it or something. When I got closer, I could see what had happened. How it had gotten out, whether the shepherd screwed up or there was a hole in the fence, I never found out, but it had, and the wild dogs had ripped its throat open.

“I froze, couldn’t have taken a step if my bumsie was on fire, but the ram just kept coming, wobbling from side to side, its head hanging low, those big brown eyes staring directly into mine. Then, when it was only a couple feet away, its forelegs buckled, as if it were kowtowing to me, but its eyes never left mine, even when it toppled forward into the dirt.

“And when I say never, I mean never. Because ever since that night, those eyes have been popping up regularly in my dreams in one form or another. Sometimes they’re where they belong, in the ram’s face, and sometimes they’re completely disembodied, which is spooky enough, but in the worst nightmares of all, they’re in a human face-those are the ones that wake me screaming, nine times out of ten.”

So far as he knew, Pender had no children. Sometimes he regretted it.

Other times, though, like when he was interviewing the parent of a murdered kid, he didn’t regret being childless at all. There was so much pain, and it didn’t matter how long after the event you encountered them, every time they spoke about it the wound reopened. Sometimes, oddly enough, it was easier to interview them right away, when they were still in shock.

One hour and two cups of chicory coffee after entering the one-room shack, Pender hadn’t picked up any information pertaining to the investigation, but he had learned a little more about Hettie. He’d seen her favorite dress and the bed she’d slept in and the raggedy old doll propped up on her pillow. At twelve she’d considered herself a little old for dolls, but she never slept without it, even took it on sleepovers. Spen’ nights, Mrs. Jenkuns called them.

He also knew a little more about Hettie’s mother, about life in Sugar Town, a third-world city at the eastern edge of the great American empire, and especially about Julian Coffee, who had grown up only a few alleys away. Pender had always suspected Julian of having partially invented himself; now he understood why, and from what material.

From Sugar Town to the Danish quarter quadrangle known as Government Yard was an uphill walk of fifteen minutes’ duration. Pender had to stop twice to rest. He wasn’t so much ashamed of himself as he was angry at how badly he’d let himself go to seed-for the first time, it dawned on him that all the weight he’d put on and all the Jim Beam he’d put down in the last year or so might have been his own way of eating his gun.

Screw retirement, he told himself: when this was over, he’d get himself a job in law enforcement-private sector, at his age.

Over lunch at the King Christian, Julian told Pender they had either a suspect or another potential victim on their hands: an itinerant sailor named Robert Brack, who’d hadn’t been seen on the island for some time, but whose post office box had apparently been used as a drop by the killer as late as July. That was the box number on the advertisement Tex Wanger had circled in the back of that month’s Soldier of Fortune.

The postmistress had no idea who’d been picking up Brack’s mail, if not Brack-the glass-and-brass wall of post office boxes was around the corner from the counter. But she had agreed to let the police set up a still camera on the wall above the boxes, that would be triggered when anyone inserted a key into the box in question.

“All we need now is a camera and someone knowledgeable enough to set up the triggering device,” said Julian.

“Don’t look at me,” said Pender. “I can’t even program a VCR.”

After lunch, Julian walked Pender across Government Yard’s slanting cobblestone courtyard to the morgue in the basement of the courthouse to view the two dead bodies on hand before Mr. Wanger was shipped back to Miami. The corpses were in airtight body bags, on roll-out slabs in refrigerated drawers. Even so, the coroner handed out cigars.