The Tropical Issue: Dolly and the Bird of Paradise

by Dorothy Dunnett

  I remembered the fuss about the phone bills and the bet over the sledge, and concluded she didn’t know her bloody Johnson. I said, ‘I enjoyed it.’

  Which was not so far from the truth. Bossy Rita. Says my aunt.

  ‘In that case ...’ said Lady Emerson, and stood up. She was frowning. She said, over my shoulder, ‘Really, this wasn’t in the contract. Come and do your own dirty work.’

  I turned round and got up as well.

  As I’d hoped, she did have a dressing-room. The door to it opened behind me. A black-haired man wandered out of it and, steering past the bureau and table, hitched himself on to a chair arm. After the photograph, I wasn’t all that surprised to see who it was.

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ said Johnson Johnson. ‘Hyped up on sherry. But I’ve got to do all this cold. Miss Geddes, I’ve kidnapped you again.’

  It wasn’t an Owner voice or a Maggie voice. More the ordinary style of the guy in the kitchen.

  ‘So I notice,’ I said. ‘Can I leave now?’

  ‘If you like,’ Johnson said. ‘But you’ll miss my Black Belt throw and another sherry. I just wanted to tell you something.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  I wasn’t worried. I could beat them both to the door.

  ‘That I think you’re right,’ Johnson said. ‘That I think Kim-Jim Curtis was killed. And that I’d like your help in finding who murdered him.’

  Chapter 12

  I have heard of some revolting faces in my time, but that from a guy who had taken the trouble he had to pour cold water on all my suspicions ... that beat everything.

  I stayed on my feet. I had no doubt what to do.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to the police with you.’

  There was a short silence. Johnson, I saw, was looking over my head at Lady Emerson. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I need a sherry.’

  ‘Jay. You mustn’t,’ she said.

  From the way she said it, he had to be an alcoholic.

  ‘Yes, I must,’ he said.

  He didn’t rush for a drink, but turned the bifocals without fuss on me.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Before you believe me, I have to tell you why I won’t go to the police, and why I want your help anyway. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘But you want to stay handy for the door. Frances, lady mine, could you turn that chair round? Miss Geddes? Would you feel safe in that? Frances used to be a great quarter-miler but she’s got a tight skirt on, and as you have cause to know, I am still just held together by paperclips . . .’

  His mouth got wider. ‘Anyway, I bet you left a message for Scotland Yard on your tape recorder,’ he said.

  Bloody Owner. I sat down. I couldn’t help it. So did Lady Emerson.

  Johnson stayed where he was, looking rather uncomfortable on the edge of the desk. The Madeira sun had caught his face a bit and taken some of the deadness out of it, and his hair had more life in it. He didn’t have cancer.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Begin at the end.’

  He drew out the hand in his pocket and threw down two woollen objects. They lay on the carpet, and I looked at them.

  A pair of gloves. My gloves. The gloves I’d left at 17b when I’d walked Bessie. I said, ‘Where were they?’

  ‘I hid them,’ said Johnson. ‘Just to see if I was right. And you did get lost, didn’t you?’

  The bastard.

  I could feel Lady Emerson looking at my face. She said sharply, ‘What are you saying to her?’

  ‘Look at the palms,’ Johnson said.

  The double bastard.

  She did, turning them over to look at the embroidery. An ‘L’ on one, and an ‘R’ on the other.

  Johnson got up, and taking the gloves from Lady Emerson, laid them on my lap and took a chair opposite me.

  ‘Drink, and listen,’ said Johnson. ‘Without her gloves, Miss Geddes doesn’t know her left hand from her right. She can’t find her way to her own home, never mind how to reach an address she’s never been to. That’s why she doesn’t drive, and why she goes everywhere by taxi.’

  I hated him. I drank my sherry, because it was spilling. He hadn’t finished.

  ‘Without a tape recorder, Miss Geddes can’t accept telephone messages, because she can’t write. Separated from her notes or her diary, she can’t make phone calls because she can’t remember the numbers for long enough. The notes she makes are mostly drawings, because she can interpret them quickly, whereas she reads words very slowly indeed, or not at all.

  ‘She can’t with any ease master books or newspapers, therefore the television is her main source of information. There are, of course, lots of others. She has learned what is likely to stick and what isn’t.

  ‘Miss Geddes is used to being regarded, as a result of all this, as of below average intelligence. Her intelligence is in fact higher than average. The result is that she has learned also to become extremely resilient. Her reactions are amazingly fast. She is a hard worker, and a perfectionist.

  ‘She is creative, with a sure eye for colour and design, and quite brilliant in a job which happily makes the most of her talents, without giving away her weaknesses.

  ‘As a one-woman business, she has hedged herself about with accountants and other professionals who handle her affairs. And handle them very successfully. Even without Kim-Jim’s legacy, I imagine she could live off her investments, if she wished, to the end of her life.

  ‘She is, you see, a successful, intelligent young woman, as well as a bloody courageous one, who has merely had the misfortune to be born with a disability.

  ‘Miss Geddes is word-blind. She suffers from what is officially known as dyslexia, for which there is no absolute remedy.’

  He stopped.

  No one spoke. My heart was wagging my head up and down, and my blood had gone into patterns all over my face and head like a sort of prickly moquette.

  I could have stood it better if Kim-Jim’s death hadn’t happened so recently. I did stand it, though. I couldn’t speak, but I didn’t go for him. Or burst into tears, or anything.

  Lady Emerson said, ‘Well, now you’ve delivered your lecture, I don’t suppose there’s any reason why we shouldn’t have another good slug of sherry. I’ll bring the glasses. You pour.’

  She took mine from my hand. As she carried it over the room, she said over her shoulder, ‘I don’t know why he imagines nobody else has ever heard of these things. I know two dyslectics. Boy and a girl. It’s not as rare as you’d think. But he’s quite right. It does need courage.’

  She came back and handed me my glass, and sat down with her own. She said, ‘What do you do in the summertime? Ink your palms?’

  ‘I wear rings . . . Who are they?’ I said. ‘The ones you know?’

  ‘They’re young. They live in America, where the schools tend to look out for that sort of thing. Over here, teachers often don’t understand.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I had spilt some of my sherry again. I put it down and said, ‘All right. That’s what it’s like. You know all about it. So what?’

  This time, he had brought back a drink for himself. He put it down, sat down restlessly on the arm of the chair he had just left, and hitched up a hip to get at his pipe and tobacco pouch, his eyebrows requesting permission.

  Lady Emerson said, ‘If Miss Geddes doesn’t mind, I think I’m going to leave you to tell her the next bit on your own. I don’t think perhaps that was very fair to her.’

  ‘Yes it was,’ I said flatly. ‘But I don’t see how it matters.’

  She got up, still carrying her drink and looked down on me. ‘Oh, I can see that,’ she said. ‘He’s showing you that you would be the better for a partner. And that if he knows all that about you and wants you to help him, then you must be more of an asset to him than you know.’

  She looked at Johnson, who had his head bent over the ritual pipe ceremony. She looked at me. ‘I shan’t be far away if you want me,’ she said, and left the ro
om.

  I said, ‘It doesn’t make sense unless you’re the police, or unless you’re on Roger van Diemen’s side. And so far, I know you know van Diemen. I know you tried to tell me the sledge thing was an accident. I know you tried to stop me going after Eduardo and making a fuss about whether Kim-Jim’s death was a suicide. And none of that puts you on the side of the police. Or on my side.’

  ‘You think not?’ said Johnson. He finished lighting his pipe, and shaking out the match, found somewhere to toss it. Then he put the pipe stem in his mouth, his elbow cupped in his hand, and watched me quietly through the smoke.

  After a bit he took his pipe out and said, ‘You’re quite right. I didn’t want you to start a witch hunt, but not to protect Kim-Jim’s murderer.

  ‘I do know Roger van Diemen. He has become addicted to drugs. If he’s committed murder, then he must be punished, like anybody else. The trouble is that there are two sets of witches in this story, and by crashing about after Roger, you were in danger of warning off mine. Because Roger is the common link.’

  ‘How?’ I said. I seemed to have drunk off my sherry. I put it down.

  ‘Financial Director of Coombe International, with its own fleet, and offices all over the West Indies, and in Europe and South America. Come on,’ said Johnson. ‘It’s a script conference. What do you think he could be up to?’

  I thought, thumbing my headband and staring at my toes in the Jesus sandals.

  The smell of heroin. The blue and yellow flag of the Coombe Regina, slipping out to her next port of call with her refrigerated cargo.

  Bananas. And drugs.

  I said it aloud. I said, ‘You’re going to tell me you’re with Necrosis.’

  ‘Narcotics actually,’ Johnson said. ‘That was shrewd.’

  I said, ‘Not really. Hash and heroin are always coming into the Clyde. Everyone knows one parlour junkie.’

  ‘And you? Do you take it?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve tried most things,’ I said, which was true. I tried most things once, and then dropped them. The central thing I hadn’t tried was none of his business.

  He set down his glass, which was half empty. ‘Then try this,’ he said.

  ‘I said Roger van Diemen was the link between two witch hunts. One arises out of the series of assaults on you and Kim-Jim. The other is concerned with the very early stages of a plan to use Coombe International as a way of smuggling drugs out of South America.

  ‘The other top brass in the company are not involved. Van Diemen is just, in classic language, the inside man with the job of setting up the system. We want him, of course. But we also want the man outside, his partner, or more likely his boss, who buys the dope and puts up the money and will eventually make the whole thing work.

  ‘We know about van Diemen. We don’t know who the other is. We know he’s working at present through a chain of go-betweens and is contacting van Diemen very little. We think that’s because van Diemen is busy fact-finding just now: collecting all the data they’ll need to construct the final operation.

  ‘What I am waiting for therefore is the next stage, when van Diemen finishes his tour, presents the big fellow with the results and then discusses the final plan with him.

  ‘They have to have a meeting at that point. If I keep on van Diemen’s tail, we’ll have our first real chance of finding out who his principal is. There may be enough evidence to put them away at that stage, or we may have to go along with it for a bit longer. But at least we’ll be on the way. And since all that is going to take a bit of time, it’s pretty important not to have van Diemen worried beforehand.’

  Johnson stopped. He put out his hand, lifted his glass, drank, and put it down again. ‘Do you buy it?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, thank God,’ said Johnson. ‘For a moment I thought you were going to conform there. What’s worrying you?’

  I said, ‘Lots of things. Van Diemen knows you. He flipped when he saw you at Funchal. The Necropolis people . . .’

  ‘Narcotics,’ Johnson said.

  ‘. . . the Narcotics people’d be stupid to use you to tail him. And there’s Kim-Jim.’

  Johnson stuck his pipe in his mouth, got up and transferred himself a bit stiffly into the chair itself. ‘Yes, I know. Go on,’ he said.

  I said, ‘If Roger van Diemen is on the point of making millions, I don’t see how he should have bothered to risk arrest, risk losing his job, risk letting this drug-ring boss of his down by fooling about with all that stuff in Madeira.’

  Johnson unfolded his pipe-holding arm, and laid the hand holding the bowl on his knee. He said, ‘I think he knew it was a risk, all right, from the way he dodged away from me at the airport.

  ‘I think perhaps he couldn’t help himself. He really seems to be infatuated with Mrs Sheridan. He really seems to have thought that you and Kim-Jim were taking his place, and would cheat her. He may even have worked out that whatever he did, his boss would try to get him out of it, because as far as the dope business goes, he’s irreplaceable.

  ‘Added to which, he’s on drugs. He took a cure, but it doesn’t seem to have lasted. So you can’t look for normal behaviour.’

  He gave me, briefly, a glance I remembered from the Owner days.

  He said, ‘And you can’t look for evidence against him either. There isn’t any. If you want Roger van Diemen shopped, there is only one way to do it. Wait for me to get him first on the dope charge . . . You’ve forgotten what you originally asked me.’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ I said. ‘Why should the Narcissus . . .’

  ‘Narcotics,’ said Johnson. Patiently.

  ‘. . .why should the Narcotics Department use you? He knows you.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Johnson for the second time.

  In a world where people always try to tell you things, it was a change to be asked.

  I thought. I said, ‘Because he’ll argue the same way. If you’re hanging about, you can’t possibly be an agent of anyone.’

  I had another idea. My headband snapped, and I took it off. I said, ‘But all the same, you could be after his blood for what he did on Madeira. Off your own bat. Outraged ex-friend.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ said Johnson. ‘I’ve protested Roger’s innocence all the way through. You were extremely cross about it.’

  I stared at him. ‘That was why?’

  Another thought. ‘Then was that why you tried to persuade me to drop it? So he wouldn’t think I was after him either?’

  ‘Well, it worked,’ Johnson said. ‘Not that I frightened you off. Not that anything could frighten you off, I imagine, unless Scott Joplin rose from the grave with your legwarmers on.

  ‘But since Kim-Jim’s death, you haven’t actually run about calling it murder. From van Diemen’s point of view, you’ve got all you want, and a nice inheritance. He may not be the chap you’d most like to meet in a taxi, but with Kim-Jim gone, he can’t feel threatened by you any longer.’

  A sort of silence fell. I was thinking again. I said, ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnson. ‘Of course. Any Coombe’s office will tell you where Mr van Diemen is at any given moment. Regular as All-Bran. He looks after a big empire, and there’d be questions asked pretty quickly if he started dodging the mandatory meetings.

  ‘He travels all the time, and that, of course, is how he’ll find it so simple to collect the data he needs. Different sides of Coombe’s business are split off into different departments and sometimes even subsidiary companies. The bottom line on everything will find its way to the central computer, but for detail, he’ll have to pick up local records.

  ‘My guess is that he’ll do that on his regular visits. He’ll look at the likeliest crews, the handiest plantation managers, the possible container men and drivers and storemen and make up a scheme and a dossier. As I said, it’s going to take time.’

  ‘And the meeting?’ I said. ‘Where do you think they’ll hold that?’

 
His pipe had stopped drawing. His head bent, he poked at it for a while, slowly; then, collecting it in one hand, used the other to drag off his bifocals. He looked up and straight at me.

  I’ve seen more movies than most. I know an act when I see it. I knew, too, we’d come to the crunch.

  He looked worn. He looked pretty convincing. He said calmly, ‘In the West Indies.’

  I said, ‘And where’s your yacht? Where’s Dolly?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask. Crossing the Atlantic,’ Johnson said. ‘Crewed by Lenny, with friends. Raymond flew to join him early this morning. I’d be on board before you got to Martinique with Mrs Sheridan.’

  He didn’t have to say any more.

  He had told me why he couldn’t go to the police. Now he had told me why he wanted me to help him.

  Because of all people, I had a cast-iron excuse to be in the West Indies. All over the West Indies.

  Of all people, I had the motivation to get even with Roger van Diemen.

  Of all people, I was likeliest to louse up his whole bloody programme unless he kept me there, under his eye. For whatever happened, I was going to get Kim-Jim’s murderer.

  The only problem was, whether I could believe Johnson’s story. Or whether he was just a rich crock recently dropped on his head, never mind what he’d told Maggie.

  I should go to the West Indies for nothing, and Clive Curtis and Porter would stay in London and mop up my clients.

  ‘Two to one against,’ said Johnson, apparently reading my face. ‘You’re a distrustful blighter, aren’t you? What would convince you?’

  He found his glasses in his hand and put them back on. It was an improvement.

  ‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘I seem to be doing all the work here.’

  He said, ‘Thought you’d been lectured enough. It’s better if you think it through and work out the pros and cons for yourself. Work out the . . .’

  ‘I know what pros and cons are,’ I said. ‘The cons have it.’

  ‘And nothing would persuade you to believe me?’

  ‘Why should I rack my brains? It’s your problem,’ I said.