by Vicki Delany
“Nicely handled,” I said to Pierre. “No muss, no fuss.”
“What?”
“Your men stayed calm. So everyone else stayed calm.”
The three cops walked up to us. Big grins on their faces. We all high-fived each other.
My cell phone rang. A Miami number.
I pushed buttons. “Robertson.”
“Sergeant Robertson. Doctor Fisher here in Miami. I’ve finished the autopsy on the female you sent to me. My report’s on its way, but I thought you might like a heads-up.”
“Shoot.” The hair on the back of my neck tingled. I edged away from Pierre and the cops. It was three days since the call to the Hammond house. I’d forgotten all about it. The doctor must have something important to say if he was making a phone call.
“The woman died from injuries to the side of the head.”
I let out a breath. “You mean she hit her head and fell into the water?”
“That might be the order in which things happened,” he said. “But she was not breathing when she went into the swimming pool.”
Meaning Marie Hammond was already dead.
“I’m releasing the body tonight.”
“Is it coming back to Haiti?” I asked.
I heard the rustle of papers. “No. It’s to be held in Miami pending the arrival of the next of kin.”
I thanked him for the call and hung up. I thought about what he’d told me. The soft spot on her head. I could imagine her falling, tripping maybe, striking a rock or the patio surface. But her husband had said he’d found her in the pool. The surface of the patio was flat. No way a dead body would have rolled into the pool. Not on its own.
I glanced at my watch. It was coming up to seven o’clock. Quitting time. The men had climbed into the back of the truck. Pierre was watching me. “Problem?” he said.
“Maybe. I’ll take the men back to the station. Then I have a call to make. Wanna come?”
“Sure.”
The guard who opened the gate for us was not the one who’d been there when Mrs. Hammond died. He snapped to attention at the sight of my uniform and told me that Mr. Hammond was at home. He made a phone call, and Hammond met us at the top of the stairs. On the verandah the flowers were gone, the vases empty. The ashtrays were full of butts. Hammond unlocked the gate and invited us into the house. I glanced down into the garden as we passed. Blue water sparkled, the patio was swept clean, bushes and trees were trimmed. A bright-yellow beach ball floated on the surface.
“Can I offer you gentlemen a beer?” Hammond asked, his French stiff and formal.
“This isn’t a social call,” I said.
“I didn’t think so.”
The wide French doors from the verandah into the living room were open. He led the way through. Gestured to the red-and-white armchairs. I did not take a seat. Pierre was about to, but then he changed his mind. Hammond sat down. He leaned back and crossed his legs at the ankles. He was wearing Italian loafers with no socks. I hate it when men do that.
From the back of the house, I could hear the sound of a TV. A children’s program.
“Are your kids home?” I asked.
“Where else would they be?” he replied. His eyes were fixed on me. Cold and unfriendly, and not trying to hide it.
“With relatives perhaps?” I said.
“They have no relatives in Haiti.”
“But your wife was Haitian?”
“They have no relatives who wish to see them,” he said.
I let that one slide.
“I heard from the coroner in Miami,” I said.
Hammond’s eyebrows rose. He leaned forward. “In that case, I will have to ask that we speak English. My French is not good enough. What did they have to say?”
I switched to English and hoped Pierre would be able to keep up. “Your wife didn’t drown. She died from a blow to the head.”
He nodded and leaned back. “You talk as if that’s a surprise, sergeant. We guessed that. She fell, hit her head and went into the pool.”
“I have trouble with how she got into the water,” I said. “I don’t see a…dead body…rolling in by itself.” I used the words deliberately. Hammond’s calm control was getting to me. We all handle grief in our own way. But I didn’t see that this guy was feeling much grief at all. Unless he was burying it very, very deep.
“You think someone killed her?” He rose to his feet in a movement so sudden that Pierre jumped. “You think she was murdered?”
“I think the possibility has to be considered.”
He began to pace. Back and forth across the living room. The sun was setting behind the hills in a blaze of orange and red. A soft, welcome breeze stirred the open curtains. Pierre gave me a questioning look. I said nothing.
“Fuck it,” Hammond said.
A woman’s head popped into the room. “Sir?” she said. “You want drinks?”
“If I wanted drinks I’d ask for them! Get back to the children.” He spoke in English, but his meaning was clear enough, even if the words were not.
She pulled back, eyes wide with alarm, and disappeared. She was in her twenties, early thirties maybe. Scrawny with a long face and a nose that had been broken at least once. Two front teeth were missing.
“Who’s that?” I said.
“A temporary child minder. Some cousin of Nicholas, one of the guards. She’s stupid and useless, but she’ll do until I can get the hell out of here. I want…I need to get back to the States. But I’ve been told I can’t travel.”
I nodded.
“Your doing, sergeant?”
“My suggestion. The death of your wife was suspicious. Now it’s more than suspicious. I assume you’ll want to be here to give the police any help you can.”
“I want to take my children home.”
“The United States”—Pierre spoke for the first time—“is not their home.”
“They are my children. Marie’s death doesn’t change that. The memories of their mother are everywhere in this house. This city. Jeanne-Marie is having trouble dealing with it.” He glared at me, as if expecting me to challenge him. “As you might expect for a girl that young.”
“And the boy?” Pierre asked.
“He’s strong. Despite his years.”
Hammond stood at the verandah doors and watched the sunset. The colors faded to gray. Then he turned. His face had changed. Become softer somehow. He wiped his hand across his eyes. “Okay, sergeant. You want my help in finding who killed Marie. I want to give you all the help I can. I’ll stay here as long as you need.”
As if he had any choice. I didn’t point that out.
“You met the gardener when you were here the previous time,” he said.
“Yes.”
“First, you have to understand that I wasn’t around much. Not as much as I should have been. I’m sorry about that now. Marie deserved better. My business takes up a lot of my time.”
“What business are you in?”
“Construction. My firm’s bidding to rebuild the presidential palace. I expect we’ll get it.”
“Big job,” I said. The palace had been destroyed in the earthquake. The ruins had been razed, the land cleared. Now it was nothing but a big empty lot with a fence around it. A monument to what might have been.
“Marie was bored and lonely. I tried to make up for it by entertaining in the evenings. But that wasn’t enough. Most of her husband’s family died in the earthquake. She’s been on bad terms with her own family since marrying him. I don’t know why, but they had no contact. Not even with the children. Some of the American women didn’t care for her.” He stared into my eyes. “Racism dies hard.”
That I didn’t believe. I’d found the expat community in Haiti to be almost completely color blind. Race didn’t matter. Income and status were all that did. If the American wives didn’t like Marie, it probably had more to do with seeing her as a gold digger than it did the color of her skin.
“She was having pro
blems with Alphonse, the gardener.”
“What sort of problems?”
Hammond let out a long sigh. “I’m not making any accusations. But you have to know. She wanted me to fire him. It wasn’t that simple. My company had hired him. Sort of a package deal for all the homes of our employees.”
“Did she say why she wanted him fired?” I asked.
“He was lazy, for one thing. Didn’t do a good job. Often didn’t come to work on time and left early. But more to the point, she claimed he was watching her. It made her uncomfortable.”
“Watching her?” Pierre said. “What does that mean?”
“My wife was a beautiful woman. Men liked to look at her.”
I assumed that was why he’d married her. I didn’t say so.
“I dismissed her concerns,” Hammond said. “That was a mistake.”
“You’re going to have to spell out what you’re saying, Mr. Hammond,” I said.
“He watched her when she was around the pool. Couldn’t keep his eyes off her. It was creeping her out. Just a few days before she died, she told me of one incident. She’d fallen asleep in the sun. She woke up suddenly, and he wasn’t more than a foot away from her. Just staring at her.”
“You didn’t think that a firing offense?” I asked.
“I’m a busy man, sergeant. I left the running of the house to my wife. I told her to tell him off. I was wrong. I know that now.” He dropped into a chair with a moan. He buried his face in his hands. “What kind of a man am I? I couldn’t protect my own wife in our own home.”
“Has he been coming to work since the death?” I asked.
“Regular as clockwork. He’ll be here tomorrow morning.”
“We’ll come back then,” I said. “And talk to him.”
“There was one other thing,” Hammond said.
“What?”
“Marie said some money was taken from her purse a week or so ago. Not a lot. About two thousand gourdes.” Around fifty bucks. “I told her she was imagining it. She wasn’t very good with money, and two thousand gourdes is pocket change.”
“Was the gardener working that day?” Pierre asked.
That was a heck of a leading question, but I didn’t have time to shut Pierre up.
“Yes,” Hammond said.
“We’ll be back tomorrow,” I said.
Hammond didn’t get up to show us out. Pierre and I headed for the door at the top of the stairs. Lights had been turned on around the patio. I heard a splash and looked down. The girl was in the pool. The new housekeeper watched while Jeanne-Marie played in the shallow end. She was an extremely pretty little thing. Huge dark eyes, long lashes and full pink lips. She wore a pink bathing suit and matching hair ribbons. The boy stood beside the pool. He was all knees and elbows. He saw me watching. We stared at each other for a few seconds. Then he leaped into the water. He gripped his knees in an impressive cannonball. The girl screamed in fright as a wave washed over her head.
FIVE
The accommodations here in Haiti are sweet. Not like the shipping container I had in the UN compound in South Sudan. I share a spacious, nicely furnished townhouse with another guy. He’s away a lot, so we don’t get on each other’s nerves. I like to cook, and it’s a treat to have my own kitchen again. The place comes with a beautiful shady garden and a big pool.
I dropped Pierre off and went straight home. I took off my uniform, locked my Smith & Wesson in the gun safe and pulled on my bathing suit. I got a jar of small but delicious Haitian peanuts out of the cupboard and a cold beer out of the fridge. I grabbed my book and carried my loot outside. It was dark now, but the heat of the day lingered. I settled into a lounge chair under a royal palm and read for a while. Then I hit the pool for a few laps.
Nice as this place is, I’m not allowed to bring my family here for a holiday. I went home to British Columbia last month on vacation. The visit did not go well. My girls are pretty much grown up now. They’re out of the house and making lives of their own. And that, I suspect, is part of the problem. Jenny, my wife, is lonely. She spent most of our time together sniping at me. And, I have to admit, I sniped back. I thought she was building to an ultimatum. I’d have to give up UN policing or our marriage would be finished.
But she didn’t say it. I’d been relieved to come back to Haiti and full of guilt at being relieved.
I thought of Steve Hammond. He was one cold fish. I knew better than to judge, but he didn’t seem all that upset at the death of his wife. One of the first emotions he’d shown had been when he remembered that Marie had asked him to fire the gardener. And he’d basically told her to suck it up.
I finished my beer and debated getting another. I heard the gate opening and two of my colleagues laughing. Footsteps on the stairs as they went to their own apartments, and then all was quiet again. I decided against another beer and went inside for the night.
“We’ll be right over,” I said. I put my phone into my pocket. “That was Hammond. The gardener’s arrived.”
Pierre slapped his hands together and jumped to his feet. He almost seemed eager. “I’ll let the judicial branch know.”
It was time to bring the big boys in. The detectives. I’d called them the night before and filled them in. Someone would be coming with us to talk to Alphonse.
We were in what passed for offices in the poky little police station. Dust and old computers and broken furniture. It was close to noon, and the temperature was in the high thirties. The single air conditioner in the window struggled to keep up. I’d been teaching my students about de-escalating a situation. I’d thrown in plenty of praise for their handling of the tap-tap accident the previous day.
I had no reason to continue to be involved in the Hammond case. At home, I’m not a detective. I wasn’t in Haiti to be one either. But I was interested. I wanted to see how they did things here.
“Let’s go then.” I got to my feet. “Just you and me, Pierre. The other guys can go on regular patrol this afternoon.”
Six cops coming to interview one old gardener might be overkill.
I dismissed the class, and Pierre and I drove to Hammond’s street. We’d been told to wait for the detective, and we did. I kept the truck running and the air-conditioning on. At midday the street was quiet. A few women walked past with shopping bags in hand or baskets on their heads. A group of men sat on cinder blocks in the shade. They eyed us but made no move to approach.
A sleek black Cadillac Escalade pulled up. The suv was polished to a high gloss. The driver gave us a nod. I put the car in gear and we followed. We parked our cars on the edge of the road and got out. Pierre introduced us in the dusty heat. The detective was named LeBlanc. He was a large man, muscle gone to fat, wearing a shiny suit and dark sunglasses. He told me his sister lived in Montreal. I was glad he didn’t ask if I knew her.
“You,” he said to Pierre, “can wait here.”
A nerve twitched in Pierre’s cheek. But he said nothing. Class and rank structures mattered in the Haitian police. I rapped on the garage door.
Nicholas opened it. The shotgun was slung over his shoulder. His eyes were wary. He said good morning but did not smile. “You’re here to talk to Alphonse?”
“Yes,” I said. “We have a few questions about Mrs. Hammond.”
Nicholas eyed LeBlanc. We didn’t make any introductions. Nicholas glanced behind him, at the stairs to the main house. He put the gun on the desk. The TV was on, turned to some sort of church program. A gospel choir belted out tunes.
“I have something I must tell you,” he said.
“What?” LeBlanc said.
“It’s about Alphonse. The gardener. I did not trust him around Mrs. Hammond.”
“Can you turn that TV off ?” I said.
He hurried to do so.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“We do not go into the house,” he said, “or the swimming pool area. But I do my rounds every hour. Around the house, to the kitchen door, to the fe
nce on the hill above the pool. Mrs. Hammond liked to spend much of her time by the pool. She was”—he hesitated—“a good swimmer.”
I doubted Nicholas was interested in her breaststroke. But I said, “Go on.”
“On several occasions, I saw Alphonse. Watching her when he should have been working.”
“Watching?” LeBlanc asked.
“Spying on her. It was not right. I chased him off.”
“How did he react to that?” LeBlanc asked.
“He didn’t like it. He was very angry. But he knows he’s to do what I say.” Nicholas puffed himself up a bit.
“Why didn’t you tell us this the day Mrs. Hammond died?” I asked.
Nicholas glanced to one side. “I didn’t want to cause trouble. It isn’t right that he is still here. There is Jeanne-Marie. The girl.” He spoke to LeBlanc. “Mr. Hammond’s daughter. She is young and very innocent.”
“You are right to tell us,” LeBlanc said.
I had no reason not to like Nicholas. But I didn’t. I wondered if he’d decided to squeal on Alphonse all on his own or had been told to do so by Hammond. If the gardener was a Peeping Tom when it came to Marie Hammond, he’d have no interest in a girl as young as her daughter.
“We’ll see,” I said. I led the way upstairs. Hammond waited on the verandah. I made the introductions.
“I’ll send for Alphonse,” he said.
“Is there someplace,” I said, “we can talk in private?”
“If you think that’s necessary.”
“I do.”
“Josephine!” Hammond called.
The housekeeper came out of the kitchen. She wiped her hands on her apron. Her eyes slid over me and settled on LeBlanc. I could see fear in their depths.
“Tell Alphonse to go to the laundry room,” Hammond said. “These men want to talk to him.”
She nodded and slipped away on silent feet.