by Louise Penny
“Yes, but why do you ask if someone did something to him?” I realized my error and was impressed that McWilliams, who, working as a policeman in St. Pierre for so long and not having to do much detective work, quickly picked up on my blunder.
I shrugged. “Why would the police be here if not,” I muttered, hoping to cover up my carelessness.
He nodded slowly, still examining me. “It seems so, Mr. Len. He got beat up pretty bad. You don’t know anything about this, do you?”
“Me? No . . . I was driving down to Garrison and saw the lights. Grainey is a friend. He stops into the Sporting Place almost every day.”
McWilliams nodded. He was looking again for any hesitation or doubt. He was looking for the truth. And the truth was, I didn’t know what was going on. All I had were hunches.
“Today?” McWilliams asked, keeping his unwavering eye on me.
“He was in today,” I responded, with a nod.
“Did he say anything to you about someone after him? Was there anything different about today that you noticed?”
Yes, there were two breadfruits on my bar, which appeared out of nowhere. And I gave them to him. A few hours later a man appeared, inquiring about a breadfruit business. A man not from St. Pierre who had bad skin, bad teeth, a tattoo on his neck, and wore his hair in a male hair bun. That’s what I probably should have told Superintendent McWilliams, but I didn’t. What I muttered instead was a barely comprehensible “No . . . nothing.”
“Poor Mr. Grainey . . . he de kindest man.” All of us turned to see Netty Langford, covered in an old robe, thick glasses that were slightly crooked, and a net over her thin gray hair. She had been right behind us, listening to our conversation. “And de man stop by my house just a couple of hours ago.”
“You say you were with him tonight?” McWilliams said to her in his deep, slow delivery.
“Before dark. I was in the yard tidying . . . he stopped to chat. We chat for just a little while and den he say he need to fix he supper. I offered to fix something for he, but de man, he never say yes to dat. Just a supper is all I offer he. Why de man think I want something else?” She looked at the three of us.
“Did you see or hear anything from his house after he left?” McWilliams asked her.
She thought for a moment. “I had the radio on . . . my hearing . . .” Her eyes, through those thick lenses, looked hurt, ashamed that her minor handicap prevented her, in some small way, from helping. “Why would someone hurt him? Please say de man recover?”
McWilliams looked down. “We certainly hope he will,” he mumbled.
The ambulance sped off to St. Elizabeth Hospital, its siren blaring through the otherwise quiet night. I could see Netty Langford staring at it with worried eyes. “Jesus take care of the good,” she muttered, and then she turned and shuffled back to her house.
I watched as she went back into her house. McWilliams turned to me. “I trust, Mr. Len, I will hear from you if you have any information for me.” His red-rimmed, almost hound-dog eyes were boring into me.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll do anything to help you find who did this to Grainey.”
I waited in my jeep, pretending to talk on my cell phone, until McWilliams’s police car left, and then I got out. I walked over to Netty Langford’s house and knocked on her door. There was harmonic gospel playing from a radio. It was loud enough to be heard from outside. Through the screen door I could see her in her small living room, her Bible in her hand as she sat in her chair. I knocked again and she got up, turning toward the door. “It’s me, Mrs. Langford,” I said. “Len from the place up the hill.”
“Yes,” she said, slowly rising from her chair and turning to me. “Come in then.”
I pushed the screen door open and entered. The kitchen was just to the right of the living room, the two rooms separated by a thin linoleum black-and-white-checkered walkway. There was a small round dining room table on the side of the room of the kitchen with three chairs around it. On top of the table were the two breadfruits I had given Adolphus Grainey.
“Grainey gave those to you?” I asked, looking at her as she made her way slowly to me.
“He did. De man such a kind one.” She shook her head. “He say he get dem on the way back from his work. I tell him I don’t need breadfruit, but he insist.”
I thought about what had happened. What Grainey did. Or really, what he didn’t do. What he must have endured by saying nothing. He knew what they were after, but he was protecting his neighbor. My eyes seemed to narrow as I realized more and more of what was going on. I had long ago learned to keep my mouth shut even when I wanted to roar. This was one of those moments. It took all I had to remain calm in front of Netty Langford. I picked one of the breadfruits up in my hand and then the other.
“Mrs. Langford, do you mind if I take these?” I asked, knowing my request would most likely puzzle her.
She laughed. “You can have dem. Dey no good anyway. I don’t know where Mr. Grainey find breadfruit like dis.”
“No good?” I looked from her to the breadfruit I held.
“You feel dem, sir. Dem breadfruit not real or something. A breadfruit heavier den dem you hold. Take dem. Dey good for nothing, not even for porridge.” She shook her head.
I thanked her and, with the breadfruits in my hands, went back to my jeep. I sat in the jeep in the dark in front of Mrs. Langford’s house for several minutes. I could call Superintendent McWilliams with what I knew . . . or suspected. He would ask why I didn’t tell him earlier. I wouldn’t have an answer, but it would be better than getting in any deeper. He could handle it from here on in. I knew that was what I should do. But I wasn’t going to do that. I had been on St. Pierre for almost five years without incident. I loved my new home and wanted to remain on the island. I knew what I was planning might jeopardize my citizenship, but I didn’t care. I felt a certain obligation to take care of this myself. And on some primal level I very much looked forward to it.
I drove back to the Sporting Place. Tubby was behind the bar, talking to Garnett Evans, who was on a stool nursing a beer. They both looked at me when I walked in.
“I hear Mr. Grainey someone beat he bad,” Tubby said. “Is that where you go? You knew?” He stared at me suspiciously.
“I didn’t know,” I said, being as truthful as I could be. I didn’t want anyone else to have any idea what I was thinking. I didn’t want to bring anyone else into this. This was for me to handle alone.
“Where you go?” Tubby inquired, his eyes still on me.
“I needed to check on my house,” I lied. “I forgot to leave food and water for the dogs.”
Tubby hissed through his teeth and shook his head. He was putting clean glasses into the cabinet below the bar. He knew me well enough to know I was bullshitting him, and it wasn’t making him happy. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t bringing him in on this.
“Ferguson come in here while you gone and tell us they find the body of Ricky Sagee in the lagoon,” Garnett said.
“Sagee?” Ricky Sagee was a local small-time hustler who worked the beaches and cruise port, selling ganja, hallucinogenic herbs, Viagra, sex, and anything else perceived as exotic to tourists.
“Gunshot,” Garnett added, pointing his finger to his forehead and pulling the trigger. “Executed what Ferguson say.”
And McWilliams said nothing about that to me, I thought to myself. So we were keeping information from each other.
I quickly thought of the dark figure running down the hill earlier in the day. The one who put the breadfruits on my bar counter. Was it Sagee? I had no evidence. I didn’t know for sure. I was what they called surmising.
“What that man say to you earlier? The skinny man with the hair,” Tubby asked, looking me in the eye. “He tell you something about all this? About Grainey or Sagee?” He was demanding answers. I wasn’t giving any.
“No, he didn’t tell me anything about any of that,” I responded truthfully, looking back into his eyes.
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But Tubby didn’t believe me, as I knew he wouldn’t. He stormed out of the bar, grumbling loudly about “a crock of shit.”
I could have told him that the man just talked to me about breadfruit, Captain Bligh, and the mutiny on the Bounty, but Tubby would have read that as an insult to his intelligence; that I was busting his balls while withholding information. So though I wanted to tell him all, to confess what I knew, I said nothing. It was better he knew nothing, even if it potentially destroyed our relationship.
One of the four televisions was on, this one to ESPN Caribbean. There was a rugby match from the U.K. playing. I turned it off and began shutting everything down.
“Garnett, I’m closing up,” I told Johns. “You should go home now.”
He slowly got off the stool, took one last drink from his beer, and put the empty bottle on the bar. “Okay, but why you make Tubby so angry?” he asked. He waited a moment for an answer but, knowing he wasn’t going to get one, made his way to the door without looking back.
I was probably closer to Tubby Levett than anyone else on St. Pierre. I met him within a month of my arrival on the island. The first time was when he drove me up to look at the house I would eventually buy on the east coast, overlooking the Atlantic and the island’s rocky bluffs. He was filling in for a friend who owned the minibus he was driving, which was also used as a taxi. The next time I saw him, a few days later, he was working behind the bar of the Garrison Yacht Club, where I was to meet a real estate man about the property I was interested in purchasing where I would eventually build my sports bar. He remembered me immediately. “Mr. Len,” he said, smiling broadly.
“Call me Len,” I tried to correct him, but he wasn’t listening.
“You bought that little house on East Road,” he said.
“How did you know that?” I asked. He just shrugged. The longer I stayed on St. Pierre, the more I realized that everyone pretty much knew everything about everybody on the small island.
“What are you drinking, Mr. Len?” he asked, his smile wide and generous. “You know I make the best rum punch on de island.”
“Oh yeah? Well, let me be the judge of that,” I said. After a month on the island I was becoming an expert in rum punches. They say the recipe is “one part sour, two parts sweet, three parts strong, four parts weak.” Tubby made it differently. I took one sip and immediately was overpowered by the rum.
“Damn, Tubby! You got the strong and the weak mixed up. Not that I’m complaining.” I laughed.
He laughed with me when he saw my reaction. “I don’t believe dat old recipe. A true rum punch should be ‘one parts sour, two parts sweet, three parts weak, and four parts strong, and if you finish it, you’ll know that you belong.’” He grinned. “At least that’s what we say here in St. Pierre.”
I did finish it, but even after drinking many more of Tubby’s special rum punches over the years, I still wasn’t sure if I belonged.
A few days after meeting him in the Yacht Club, I ran into Tubby again. I had decided to go for a dive on St. Pierre’s acclaimed Purple Reef, a protected underwater site where the coral gave off a purplish glow and the variety of tropical fish supposedly was unsurpassed at any other dive sites around the island. To my surprise, it was Tubby who would accompany me on the dive.
“You drive a taxi, make a mean rum punch, and now you’re gonna go on a dive with me?” I asked him as we sat in the boat in our wetsuits. I was bewildered by his work ethic. “What don’t you do?”
He just laughed softly at my question. “Well, Mr. Len, I don’t play the piano. But I really wish I could.”
After purchasing the land where I planned to build the Sporting Place and hiring a local construction crew, I was having trouble communicating exactly what I wanted done. It wasn’t that the crew chief and I didn’t literally understand each other; there were subtle things I couldn’t convey. I needed someone local as a go-between—a liaison between myself and the crew. I thought of Tubby immediately.
I tracked him down at a high school where he was refereeing a cricket match. I sat in the grandstand in the hot sun for almost three hours while the crowd clapped and cheered at action on the field I couldn’t follow. A batsman swatted the ball with the flat end of the bat and then ran to a post and back. Sometimes another runner would run while a different batsman hit. Fielders would try to stop a ball from getting through to what looked like an outfield, and the pitchers, or what I learned were the “bowlers,” threw with as much velocity as some hard-throwing baseball major leaguers. Sitting there, I had no idea who was winning and how the game was scored, but when the small crowd began to get up and leave, I guessed the match was finally over.
I met him on the field and offered to buy him a beer. We got together at a picnic table near the field out of the sun and I laid out my proposal. I wanted him to work for me. To help me get the Sporting Place off the ground. I told him he could work part-time and continue his other gigs, or I could use him full-time with the promise of continuing once the bar was done as its manager and main bartender. He didn’t hesitate. He told me he would take the job even before I told him how much I would pay him for his services. “You pay me fair, Mr. Len, I’m sure of that,” he said while looking me in the eye. “I don’t want to have to fill in driving Murvin’s minibus or working at the Yacht Club only when they call. It’s time I do one thing good, not many.”
Tubby became more than just an employee. He was really a partner. And he was a friend. The best friend I had on St. Pierre. The Sporting Place was as much his as mine. Despite how close we had become, how much I trusted him, I wasn’t going to bring him in on what was potentially a very dangerous affair. After I hired him he got married, and now, with three young girls and his wife pregnant with a fourth child, there was no chance I would risk getting him involved.
I put the two breadfruits on top of the bar exactly where I found them earlier in the day. I reached under the bar and pulled out the cutlass I kept there for whenever Tubby or I needed to crack open a coconut. I slowly sliced through the top of one of the breadfruits. It came apart easily—its center had been hollowed of flesh and seeds. As it split in half, the tinted brown plastic packets filled with white powder spilled out onto my mahogany bar. I stared at them for a moment. I did the same to the other breadfruit. More brown packets fell out.
All of the Caribbean islands were ripe for smuggling, but St. Pierre had a reputation as being mostly immune to hard drugs and drug smuggling. The island did have its share of ganja, and occasionally there would be a big bust in the waters around the island or at customs at the port or airstrip, but for whatever reason, the hard stuff and what followed was kept out.
I continued to stare at the plastic packets of powder. I knew where I could reach Superintendent Keith McWilliams. He was who I should have called. But I remembered what I felt when I saw the flashing lights of the ambulance in front of Adolphus Grainey’s house. What the man took from them to protect his neighbor—from something I gave to him. I reached into the back pocket of my jeans and took out the card I was given earlier by Mr. Arjoon. I turned on my cell phone and punched in the numbers that were on the card.
“Mr. Buonfiglio,” he answered. I could hear the satisfaction in his voice. “How did I know I would get your call?”
The sound of his voice made me cringe. “I don’t know. I guess you have skills others don’t.”
He laughed. “I think not, just business instincts. That’s all. And you are calling to tell me you have what I need to conduct my business?”
“Yeah, I’ve got them at my place. I can meet you there in an hour.”
There was a pause on the line. “I hope you use good sense, Mr. Buonfiglio. It would be bad for all if there were a lapse in your judgment. I know a bit about you. As I said, I think it’s good business to understand what motivates potential partners.”
“You don’t know a thing about me,” I grumbled. “I’ll see you in an hour.” I cut off the line and sat for a
moment. What I did in New York was public record. Why I did it I knew, wasn’t.
I quickly turned off all the lights in the bar and headed out to my jeep. I was moving on pure instinct now. There were no deep thoughts and introspection about what I really should do. I was just letting my mind follow my body, rather than the opposite. The same feeling I had on that morning in June. I know now I should have handled things differently then. Doing what I did on that day changed my life. On that day for those people, they had no choice; their lives, their futures were not in their hands. But mine was. And my family’s. I had a choice then, and I had a choice now. Or did I really?
An hour later I was sitting alone in the semidarkness of the Sporting Place. The only lights on were the lighting under the bar and behind the bottle display; they gave off a dim greenish glow. You couldn’t see much in the bar overall, but when Arjoon arrived, the two breadfruits on the bar would be easily visible.
I was sitting at one of the tables. I had thought about keeping the cutlass close by, but then decided against it. The cutlass was what I had always known as a machete, a tool for cutting away brush. But since moving to St. Pierre, I had adapted the Caribbean term for the tool. It was a household staple on the island. You could see them dangling from the hands and even belts of men walking to work in the mornings. There was almost no gun violence on St. Pierre. Gun laws were strict, and firearms were illegal without a series of hard-to-obtain permits and expensive tariffs. Attempts at gun smuggling, and there had been a few since I had lived on the island, were dealt with harshly. As an alternative, the cutlass was often a cause of violence and crime. And when it occurred, it wasn’t pretty. Thankfully those instances were also rare. But whoever put a bullet in Ricky Sagee’s head had a gun. It very likely could have been Arjoon. The cutlass, even if I were skilled in using it, would do me no good if Arjoon had a gun. What would? I really had no idea.
I had left the door to the bar open, and as I peered from my seat at one of the tables, I could see the approaching headlights of the black Lexus make their way toward the Sporting Place. The headlights shone into the doorway as the car turned into the three-car parking lot in front of the bar.