Murder on Naked Beach: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 1)

by J. J. Henderson

  "Love your suit, Harold," Lucy whispered. "Who's your tailor?" She watched Hanley as she spoke, and was impressed. A creole, he was exquisitely handsome, with a big square jaw, salt and pepper hair, thin mustache, and golden skin. He appeared to be in his late fifties. Dressed in a pale off-white linen suit, he was tall and slender and utterly charismatic. She wasn't around politically powerful people all that often, and usually unimpressed when she was. But Hanley had an aura that glowed all the way across La Terrazzo Grande.

  "Daffy Dan, who else?" said Harold. "Shall we find a table?"

  Ames Cavendish appeared at the podium, sober and a trifle disoriented for it. "Um, good morning, ladies and gentlemen," he intoned, and pulled his red and yellow striped tie straight. "And Welcome to the Grand Strand's Grand Gala. My name is Ames Cavendish, and I'm the Vice President of Marketing for FunClubs. Welcome, welcome to FunClubs latest and greatest: The one and only Grand Strand. If this isn't the finest hotel on the island I'll simply..." he picked up a straw boater and waved it..."eat my hat." He made as if to do so, and then went on. "And isn't it another lovely day in Jamaica? We've got a magnificent lunch planned for you...but first, as you know the Right Honorable Dexter Hanley is here to say a few words, along with Mr. Jackson Hababi, President of FunClubs... and then we'll do lunch and the official opening ceremony...so if you'll all take a seat, we'll get on with the festivities."

  Lucy followed Harold and Mickey down onto floor level in search of empty seats. En route, she passed Allie Margolis, seated between Mike Nack and Maria Verde at Jefferson Hababi's table. "Allie," she whispered over her shoulder, "How are you feeling today?"

  "Good morning," Maria Verde jumped in quickly, grinning at her like a deranged doll. "How are you, Lucy?"

  "I'm fine, Maria, if a little exhausted. I'm sure Allie told you about..."

  "Yes," said Maria, her dark, thick red eyebrows knitting together tragically, but the grin remaining below. Her face had this odd quality of appearing to be doing several things at once. "How sad for Angus. But let us not..."

  "Allie, did you manage to get some sleep?" Lucy interrupted Maria. Allie had stuffed her snake braids under a scarf, and wore dark glasses. She had, thus far, simply refused to acknowledge that Lucy was talking to her.

  Now she glanced up, and from behind her shades, dully, she said, "I'm fine, Lucy." Valium? She sounded like they'd given her a shot of nembutal last night; and maybe another one for breakfast.

  "Thanks for...helping out last night, Miss...Ripley," said Jefferson Hababi. Lucy gave him a look.

  "That's Ripken," Lucy said. She looked again at Allie Margolis, but Allie had gone back to staring at her plate. What was up here? Lucy followed Harold to a table, sat down, and got out her notebook.

  Three functionaries made brief remarks, the last being Jackson Hababi, who concluded his five uninspired minutes by introducing the Right Honorable Dexter Manfred Hanley, Prime Minister. Lucy drank another glass of beer, and fished out her tape recorder and notebook.

  A moment later, she wrote: "Eloquence, coming from a politician after my years of hearing American bullshit and blather is almost shocking, so unexpected is it. Shocking, and then refreshing, like a splashing fall into very cold water. But eloquent is the only way to describe the words and style of Dexter Hanley, Jam's PM." She recorded the whole speech, and later transcribed the high points:

  "You'll have to forgive me if I take a few moments to get started. I was dragooned into a lunch with a former American Vice President yesterday in Venezuela, and I have to work my linguistic way back from this strange dialect...um, shall we call it Quaylespeak...to English." The crowd laughed, except for a few of the American reporters. "First off I want to say hello to all my poorly paid, overworked friends, the ones who are waiting on you, ladies and gentlemen. I want to remind you to look at them, and see them, and don't forget who they are, for they are my people." At this the waiters, cooks, and busboys stopped, put down their trays wherever they could, and began applauding. Soon the served were embarrassed into joining the servers in applauding as well. After basking in it for a moment, Hanley continued. "Now I know I have a reputation for resisting this kind of...extravagance," he said, waving at the surrounding hotel ..."As representative of the worst aspects of colonialism in its late capitalistic form...and the reputation is well-deserved, I might add," he muttered aside, drawing a nervous laugh. "But I have no desire, and have never had any desire, to allow the Americans to make of Jamaica another Cuba, isolated, abandoned like a ghost ship at sea, ...I have spoken with my friend Fidel many times about this, and he will be forever embittered at how in the old days the Americans made his revolution so dependent on the fat, pale, humorless missionaries of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, this is not Puerto Rico, this is not the 51st state of the USA even if we are"...he glanced at Jackson Hababi..."in some respects, somewhat overdependent on the largesse of certain American bankers. Nevertheless, I want to say that I welcome...I welcome Mr. Jackson Hababi's efforts at developing hotels for the American tourists. If it be Grand Strands we need to bring in the dollars, then let a Grand Strand bloom on every beach...or every third beach anyway, since we want to keep the best beaches open for the people of Jamaica, for it is they, ultimately, who should benefit from these properties. Which reminds us, Jackson: how would you and your fellow hoteliers feel about another point on the room tax?" Hanley grinned as Hababi blanched, then recovered with a nervous laugh. "I've been thinking, with the rates a place like this charges, and the wages you pay your workers, there must be some space in that vast margin for a little more money for the government—for, say, perhaps, a new people's health clinic here in Ocho Negros...and some new air-conditioned buses for the public transit system which delivers these hardworking people to your hotel each and every day, and...well, as we all know here, ladies and gentlemen, the list is endless...for ours is a poor country. A most beautiful country, but very, very poor."

  He went on for another ten minutes in the same combative, populist vein, drawing more enthusiasm from the waiters and busboys than from the bourgeouis troops seated at the tables. After the speech, which ended with an invitation to a press conference after lunch and the grand opening moment, Hanley sat at Jackson Hababi's table, but they were at opposite ends.

  There was no wind that afternoon. Lucy lay on a lounge chair beneath an umbrella, looking out at the flat horizon where blue met blue, and both met, in the middle of her range of vision, the stone tower and graceful palms of Naked Island. Her body felt torpid from champagne and Red Stripe, but her head was humming.

  "I can't believe anyone would want to lie in the sun out there," she said to Harold, lolling in a lounge chair by her side. He was reading Derek Walcott, poet laureate of the Caribbean. What a guy, reading poems on the beach! He looked up. "It's hot enough to stop a clock."

  "God, no kidding," he said, squinting out at the island. "Look at that heat shimmer. Carcinoma Cay." He put the book down, and grinned. "But we really should be able to banish the sinners to the island, don't you think? Stick 'em out there and make 'em strip in the hot sun. Start with that Rollins woman, to be exiled for her foolishness at the press conference."

  "Really. Accusing Hanley of being anti-American. What a dimdome."

  "Hey, you know, the guy had an independent thought. How dare he! Hey, we could send that Nack clown out there too. What a worm!"

  Lucy laughed. "No shit. I'm surprised he didn't simply crawl up there and lick Hababi's feet like a dog might."

  "He is a dog, isn't he? Christ, thanking Hababi on behalf of all of us for a fucking press trip. Like the place won't get six tons of free PR out of the deal. A brown-nosed lap cur if ever I saw one." Harold sighed, gazing out to sea, and grew pensive. "But then again, we're all dogs on this gig, aren't we? Christ, for a minute there I thought Hanley was going to break that bottle of champagne over Hababi's head instead of on that idiotic "official welcoming" post, you know?—I mean, there's a real story here, in the political doings on
this island—but all we get to report on is the quality of the sand on the beach."

  "It is great sand though, isn't it?" Lucy laughed. "That was weird wasn't it, christening the damned hotel like a sailing ship. But Harold, there is a story here, for God's sake. You saw what happened when I asked Hababi about the death of Angus Wilson. He just brushed my question aside as if it was..."

  "Lucy, he answered the question," Harold interrupted, a little impatient. "He simply said that Wilson died of a heart attack. I don't think there's..."

  Lucy sat up. "And I'm telling you it isn't...it can't be that simple, Harold! I saw the guy dead, and...Allie Margolis is acting really weird today, so..."

  "Jesus, she's just a kid, she found a dead guy last night, it's not surprising she's acting weird."

  "Fine, Harold, say what you want. But I'm going to look a little further into this Wilson thing. I know it isn't politics, but it's life and death, and it means a lot more than critiquing the clam chairs in green sauce in the poison fish love cafe, or whatever they call the place. I think something happened out there. I'm gonna find out what." She touched his shoulder gently. "I could use your help."

  She didn't get his help that evening, for Harold, the beer-sodden swine, slept through the call for all reporters to gather at the porte cochere for the ride into town to Jack's Joint, where they were to be escorted by the indefatigable Susie Adams through the legendary island moment of Sunset at Jack's.

  Sunset at Jack's, Susie informed them en route, was where and when everybody in town gathered for cocktails, gossip, and dealmaking. "Like Rick's in Casablanca," she said, facing them from the front of the bus. "Everything happens there." Lucy had seen it before, in Malibu, in Provincetown, in Key West, all hip resort towns have their sunset spot. Every ganja dealer in town would be there, along with the hangers-on, hookers, gunrunners, drug runners, lowlifes, rumor mongers, and sleazoids of every elegant and not-so-elegant description who tended to congregate at such places. Jack's westerly siting on a little point sticking out of the coast did make it one of the best locations to watch the sun go down on the entire island. The sunsets were so consistently stunning, in fact, that almost every night, at the moment of sunset, every conversation would cease, every dealer would pause, every pick-up artist would hesitate, and all, all would applaud the miracle of the setting sun.

  Lucy shared a seat on the bus with Louise Rousseau. After Lucy had admired Louise's outfit—a white silk shirt and black pedal pushers and black sandals—and Louise had likewise expressed her approval of Lucy's black tank top and long, tight black bike shorts and black tennies—they got down to business. "So I gather you and Joey hit it off," Lucy said, her tone noncommittal.

  Louise grinned a Cheshire grin. "Yes...he's quite a guy, I must say...haven't slept so well in ages, it seems. You forget sometimes what a good hump can do." Her tone changed abruptly. "But God, I heard what happened to you. I meant to ask earlier, but there was just so much going on...When Joey told me I couldn't believe it!"

  "When did he tell you?"

  "When I got up this morning he had room service breakfast for the two of us waiting. I guess the waiter must have told him." She giggled. "I...We must have...slept through all the excitement."

  "Yeah, it was pretty intense," said Lucy. "By the way, where is Allie? She's not on the bus. I can't believe she didn't want to experience Jack's."

  "Joey said he was going to arrange for her to see a local shrink this evening. That's why he's not with m...on the bus now."

  "It was a pretty awful sight, I must say. Well, here's the Joint," Lucy added, as the bus rolled into an overgrown dirt parking area. Two old VW buses, painted 1960s style, were marooned on one side, enveloped in huge vines of green and yellow pothos leaves. The parking lot was thick with red and orange hibiscus. A pair of Ackee trees overhung the entranceway, their lovely poison-red fruits dangling; and a pair of ancient Dewey Weber surfboards were crossed like spears over the facade of the palm thatch-roofed arcade leading to the double swinging doors which opened in to Jack's Joint. From inside drifted the ubiquitous reggae. The journalists in their crisp New York resort wear climbed off the bus and clustered in a group, waiting for instructions. Lucy and Louise drifted away and headed in on their own.

  Inside, everything was driftwood and green leaves and soft lights, fishnets and shafts of sun peeking through the vines, reggae smoking up the air. You passed down a long hallway framed with old surfboards, paddles, boat signs, tropical plant life, and a couple of parrots and parakeets squawking in wooden cages; you stopped at a palm thatch booth where, from two red-eyed smiling rastamen, you bought the tokens with which all transactions were accomplished at Jack's. Money was not allowed, and the plastic tokens were white poker chips with a marijuana leaf stamped onto each one. Lucy bought ten bucks worth and finished the stroll to the bar alone. The bar formed a long, freeform curve, and the view from the cliffs beyond the bar was north and west, full of sea and sky and clouds and ships drifting past. The bar was jammed with the Ocho Negros’ beautiful people, and to Lucy's trend-jaded New York eyes, the place felt time-warped in a good way. The late sixties inspired the scene: the first guy she focused on in the lively crowd looked like John Lennon in his long center-parted hair incarnation, only this guy was wearing a Balinese-style wraparound "skirt," in a green jungle print, and a white tank top. He sat at the bar between two gorgeous black women in mini-skirts, high heels, and low cut tanktops, and another guy was filming the three of them from across the bar. The way the Lennon-clone sniffed and grinned, Lucy suspected he was a coke head. And the girls looked like old school Tenth Avenue hookers on holiday. Lucy slid past them up to the bar, took a seat, and ordered a Red Stripe from the bartender, a flower child with long blonde hair and a happy, vacant look in her eyes. Probably showed up here crewing on a yacht out of Boston, ran into a ganja cloud and got shipwrecked. Lucy now had a chance to scope out the film guy more carefully, and he was an odd one: a white boy with dreadlocks—now that took some work, when you had straight honky blond hair—wearing, of all things, a white suit, circa John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He pointed the little camera at her, said "Hey love, give us a smile." She turned away just in time to find Louise.

  "God, this place is quite a scene," Lucy said. "I'd forgotten."

  "You've been here before?" Louise asked.

  "Years ago. But I was pretty deranged at the time," Lucy said. "Some serious overindulgence in local product."

  Lucy emptied her Red Stripe, ordered two more, threw five ganja chips on the bartop, and chased Louise across the patio, dodging through a swarm of tourists and around two white guys in tie dye, long-haired, bearded, who had assumed the lotus position in the middle of the bar area, facing the sunset, on a table top, so as to share their moment of spiritual transcendence with the crowd.

  Up ahead, three sunburned American boys picked their way up a trail over the rocks between the dining area and the cliff. One of them suddenly jumped, flew thirty feet, belly flopped in the water below, and emerged to a round of applause. He swam out of the way, and another leaped, from a higher spot, and pulled off a smooth dive.

  Lucy and Louise found a spot by the railing, and watched a dozen dives, each more drunkenly brilliant than the last.

  And when in a cloud-crowned blaze of ephemeral brilliance the sun landed in the embrace of the sea, the stoned and boozed-up troops applauded on cue. Then Susie Adams found her, and said there was an early bus back and a late bus, and which did she want to take? Exhausted, Lucy took the early one. In her room she set her clock for five a.m., and fell asleep before nine p.m.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PICTURE THIS

  Up at four, Lucy beat the alarm by an hour. Not bad: nearly seven hours of sleep. She rose quickly and opened the sliding doors to step onto the patio. Cool air soothed her, sweet with the scent of night-blooming jasmine. The magic hour.

  She went inside, dressed in shorts and sandals and a t-shirt, and packed her cameras: a medium format
Mamiya and a 35 mm Canon, both digital of course, digital being all anyone ever shot any more except for certain die-hards who clung to their transparencies and film and would do so until they dropped. She threw in spare batteries and memory cards, and was ready to go.

  She sat at the desk for a moment and looked at what she’d shot the day before. For the most part her instincts had been right, but she could see ways to improve several of the shots. She also had a better look at the 12 dark, green-tinged images she'd shot the night before—a beached motorboat, a sinking silver moon, the death scene of Angus Wilson. After a moment, she turned off the camera, shaking off the grisly scenario. She got up and grabbed her tripod, slung it over one shoulder and the camera bag over the other, and headed out into the early morning darkness.

  She passed the bar area, for once still, and went first to Poissons de L'Amour, where she found the door unlocked per arrangements made the evening before. This room could be shot with artificial light only, and therefore done before dawn. She went in, put down her gear, and started playing with the lights. After she'd set them at a level bright enough to create some contrast between the highlighted tabletops and the darker surroundings, she positioned the camera, and took a picture.

  After looking the first image over, she adjusted the tripod. Then she got out a book of matches, lit all the candles in the candelabras, did another light reading, adjusted a few flowers in the direction of the camera, and grabbed a few more images.

  She repeated the process from another point in the room, shot half a dozen details with the 35 mm on a wide angle setting, made some notes on the shots, then packed up and left.

  As she had planned, the sun was on the verge of rising when she got outside. By the time she'd figured out the precise composition of the most important overall Terrazo Grande shot, positioned her tripod, and set up, the morning rays bathed the terrace in rich golden light. The foodservice counter was clean and clear, gleaming brass trimmed with copper; each perfectly placed table wore white linen, crystal, silver, a bird of paradise in a bud vase; the wood floor shone. She grabbed a couple of images, had a look, moved the camera six inches, and grabbed some more.