Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

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.”