I couldn't look at his face any longer. I lowered my gaze to the front of his shirt, fixed it there. You could almost see the sweat stain spreading. The shape, if you looked long enough, seemed oddly trapezoidal.
"She come down here with you?"
"No way. She's had it with this island."
"The blackmail—her idea?"
"Mine," Cutter said. "We were drinking one night, she had a little too much and dropped your name, and I dragged the whole story out of her. But she didn't try to talk me out of it, I'll tell you that. She needs money, same as me."
"Why does she need money?"
"Dumb question, Jordan. Everybody needs money. The shittier your job, the more you need."
"What kind of shitty job?"
"Quit trying to pump me. You got all the information you're going to." I had something else I wanted to say, something I wanted him to tell her, but the words seemed clogged in my throat. Even after another swallow of rum I couldn't push them out.
Cutter pasted one of his dark-brown cheroots into a corner of his mouth, left it there unlighted. His drink was gone; he rolled the tumbler over his forehead again, then tapped the melting ice cubes into his mouth and began to chew them, the cigar bobbing up and down with the motion of his jaws. The sound he made was like glass being crushed.
He said, chewing, "So you'll go down to your bank tomorrow and get the twenty-five thousand, right? No arguments?"
"Yes."
"Good man." He took the cheroot out of his mouth, scowled at it, spat out a shred of tobacco, and extended the empty glass. "Do this again, Jordan. Tastes like crap, but at least it's wet. Then you can drive me back to my hotel."
I got up slowly, took his glass, went around behind him and across to the sideboard. The shaking had stopped; my hands were steady. I put ice in the glass, picked up the heavy decanter. And then I just stood there.
Annalise. Annalise and Fred Cutter. The twenty-six thousand she took with her—gone or almost gone. The clothing manufacturer, the shot at being a fashion designer—gone, too. A different kind of life on the edge now, after only eight months. Back to working at shitty jobs, like the one she'd had in San Francisco. Bedding down with a muscle-bound halfwit, resorting to blackmail. Scraping bottom.
Outside, the wind was rising. I could hear it making a frenzied rattle in the palm fronds, feel its sultry breath swirling in through the open terrace doors.
"Hey," Cutter said, "hurry up with that drink. I'm dying over here."
I turned around. He was leaning forward, rubbing slick off his face again. There was a wet spot on the back of his shirt, too, between the shoulder blades. Another geometric shape, this one a ragged-edged circle with a darker circle in the middle where the cloth stuck to his skin. It reminded me of something, but I couldn't think what it was. Couldn't seem to think clearly at all.
Twenty-six thousand. Five thousand. Another twenty-five thousand. And more bites to come, little ones and big ones until they bled me dry.
Screaming, that wind. Like jumbees in the night.
Some piece. Great in bed. Suck the varnish off a table leg. Lucky to hang on to her as long as you did.
It was as if the coming storm, the jumbees, were inside me now. Blowing hot and wild. Screaming.
Cutter and his Good man, good man. Cutter and his smarmy grin. Cutter the lowlife blackmailer. Hurry up, I'm dying over here—I don't remember crossing the room.
I don't remember hitting him with the decanter.
One second I was standing in front of the sideboard, looking over at him, the storm wind shrieking inside my head, and the next I was beside the chair staring down at him on the floor. The back of his head was crushed and there was blood mixed with rum streaked over the fair hair, blood and rum on the floor, blood and gore on the decanter and spattered across my shirtfront.
I knew then what that sweat stain on the back of his shirt reminded me of.
It looked exactly like a target.
Either I dropped the decanter or it slipped out of my hand, I don't know which. The sound of it hitting the tile floor dragged my gaze away from Cutter. An edge of the heavy cut glass had gouged a triangular chip out of a tile.
Now how am I going to fix that? I thought.
I kept on standing there. Looking at him again, at what I'd done to him. The wildness was still inside me, but it had mutated into a near panic overlain with numbness—
What? Yes, I know that sounds contradictory, but it's an accurate description. All the crazy rage and fear held down under the weight of dazed confusion, like a lid on a bubbling pot.
Time seemed to have gone out of whack, to stop and stutter with long spaces between the ticking seconds. I couldn't think; my mind was a wasteland. Then I grew aware of something moving on my cheek, like a fly walking. I raised a hand, brushed at it. The fingers came away wet and sticky. When I looked at them I saw that they were smeared with blood and something else, a whitish gelatinous substance that must have been brain matter. That broke the spell.
Bile pumped thick and hot into the back of my throat. I ran blindly for the bathroom, barely made it to my knees in front of the toilet before the vomit came spewing out. I pliked until there was nothing left but strings of saliva. It left me weak but calmer. I flushed the toilet, rinsed my mouth. Washed the blood off my hands and face. Pulled my shirt off, found more blood spots on my chest and neck and washed those off. Better still by the time I finished, both the wildness and the numbness starting to fade. I went back through the living room, not looking at what lay sprawled on the floor, and out onto the terrace.
The storm clouds were a dark, fast-moving mass, the wind blustery and hot, the air thick with moisture. When the rains came, the downpour would be heavy for a while but the storm wouldn't last long; before morning the skies would be clear again. You get so you don't need the Caribbean Weather Center to gauge the severity and length of each blow, from squalls to hurricanes. I had developed a mariner's eye, ear, and feel for any barometric change and what it meant.
I sat on one of the wrolight-iron chairs, letting the wind fan my naked torso, listening to it moan in the palms and guava trees while I ordered my thoughts. I was all right by then, my mind working more or less clearly again. It seemed incredible that I could have killed a man, any man; that in the span of a few seconds I had gone from blackmail victim to taker of human life. But the fact didn't have as profound an effect on me as I would have believed beforehand. Didn't frighten or disgust or even sicken me any longer. Temporary insanity, irresistible impulse. The product of circumstances and of my dark side. I was sorry it had happened, if not sorry that the life I'd taken was Fred Cutter's, but it was done and I couldn't undo it. The only thing to do now was to find ways to protect myself from the consequences.
I approached it as I'd approached the Amthor crime: as a series of mathematical problems—three of them—to be broken down and solved one at a time, by a combination of logic and creative planning.
First and most important: what to do with the body.
Limited options, on an island of just thirty square miles. The optimum solution would be to take it off the rock, dump it at sea, and let the sharks have it. But that wasn't possible. No way could I transport a dead man onto Windrunner without being seen. The slips at the Sub Base harbor were well lighted at night, and there was a watchman on duty and others like Bone who lived on their boats.
Wait until late and leave the body in Frenchtown or out near one of the beaches? Crime was becoming a problem on the island, and there were occasional acts of violence against tourists; Cutter's death might pass for a mugging or a drug deal gone bad. No, that was no good either. The last thing I wanted was a murder investigation. Suppose one of my neighbors had seen him come here? Suppose he'd mentioned Richard Laidlaw to someone at his hotel, or at the harbor the day before? If he had, and the police found it out, it would bring them straight to my door.
Hide the body in the jungle? There were stretches of dense growth on both Crow
n Mountain and St. Peter's Mountain, and there'd be very little late-night traffic on the roads during or after a storm. I wouldn't have to carry the body far to conceal it. But the disadvantages outweighed the advantages. It would mean parking on a turnout or overlook—I couldn't just leave the Mini in the middle of the road—and what if a passing police patrol stopped to investigate? Snakes, prowling animals, unseen hazards made a night foray into a tropical jungle dangerous. And even if I managed that part of it, there was no guarantee the remains would stay hidden. Turnout and overlook areas were magnets for road crews, curious tourists, hikers. Dead flesh attracted scavenging animals and carrion birds. If just one human bone surfaced, the rest could be tracked down and identified through forensic means. Even a cold trail might someday lead back to me. I'd always be afraid something like that would happen.
Still, I might have to do it that way. The only other solution I could think of was to cut up the body, get rid of it piecemeal. I liked the irony in that, given the bastard's name, but I knew I didn't have the stomach for such grisly work. Or for that matter, any idea of how to go about it.
I didn't waste any thought on the other two problems. They were secondary concerns until I dealt with the major one. Annalise? No. I wasn't ready to think about her yet. Dangerous to let myself think about her. An emotional overload was what had led me to smash the decanter into Cutter's skull; I couldn't afford to let it happen again and interfere with the job ahead. For the next several hours I had to be as disciplined as I'd been at any time in my life.
The longer I sat there, the icier my resolve and the clearer my thinking. The combination produced another solution to the disposal problem. The best one, if a potential obstacle didn't stand in the way. Bold, clever, audacious—all the adjectives the newspapers had applied to the Amthor crime. I knew I was going to try it. If I were successful, I would have no cause to worry about Fred Cutter's body ever being found.
The blow started shortly after nine. Gusty winds that whipped the trees into a frenzy, scraped palm fronds across the roof tiles, hammered at the closed doors and shutters as if clamoring for admittance; mutters of thunder, flashes of lightning, driving torrents of rain. Even with the jalousies closed I could smell ozone mixed with the sweet fragrances of white ginger and hibiscus.
I had just finished emptying the thing's pockets and rolling it into the yawl's old storm jib that I'd brought home and hadn't gotten around to restitching. The thing. It. That was how I was thinking then. What was wrapped in that piece of Dacron wasn't Fred Cutter, wasn't the shell of a man; it was a thing, an it, a large bundle of trash to be hauled away.
I'd also found a roll of duct tape in the garage and I used strips of it to tightly bind the sail in the middle and on both ends so there would be no leaks. The dead weight put a strain on my arms when I lifted it, lugged it into the kitchen. I'd have to use a fireman's carry after this, I thought as I lowered it to the floor near the side door that led out to the garage.
The storage closet yielded a plastic bucket, some rags, a pair of rubber kitchen gloves. I filled the bucket with warm water and dish soap, found a can of cleanser under the sink. In the living room I cleaned off the decanter first and replaced it on the sideboard. There was still some Arundel inside and I badly wanted a drink, but I didn't let myself have one. No more liquor until after the job was done.
On my hands and knees, I scrubbed the red and gray-white spatters, the spilled rum, off the tiles and the chair and table legs. A few blood spots stained the chair fabric; I couldn't get them out no matter how much elbow grease I used. No sense in worrying about it. People spill things on furniture that leave dark stains; the fabric was a brownish weave and you couldn't tell that the spots were blood. No sense in worrying about the gouge in the floor tile, either. If the real estate agent or his cleaning staff noticed the minor damage, the cleaning deposit would cover it.
When I finished, the wind was still howling but the rain had already let up. Fast-moving storm. The worst of it would be over an hour or so past midnight. I emptied the bucket, rinsed it out, washed off the gloves, put the rags in the washing machine with my stained shirt and pants. Then I went into the bedroom and sat on the bed to look through what I'd taken from Cutter's pockets.
Wallet. Folded piece of paper with a crude map and directions to the villa written in Annalise's backslanting hand—all the proof I needed of her duplicity. Folder of traveler's checks. Handful of change. Room key attached to a piece of plastic with Hotel Caribbean embossed on it. The package of cheroots and a book of matches. That was all. No other keys, and no return airline ticket; those things must be in his hotel room.
The wallet contained $72, three snapshots, and a driver's license, social security card, and U.S. Post Office ID all in the name of Frederick Coder. The address on the Ucense was Hollyoak Street in Yonkers, New York, but the license had been issued in 1977 and the address might or might not be current. There was no street address on the postal identification, but the city was the same.
So his name had been Coder, not Cutter. A small, sly deception in case I had any intention of trying to track him down.
And he'd worked for the Post Office. A mailman? The fact struck me funny. Annalise and a mailman! Some progression she'd gone through. From an accountant and embezzler to a cheating divorce lawyer to a manufacturer of women's clothing to . . . a mailman. From San Francisco to Chicago to Charlotte Amalie to New York City to . . . Yonkers. From a department store buyer to accomplice in a major embezzlement to thief to blackmailer to . . . what? What next, Annalise? Shoplifter, bag lady, hooker? Somebody else's mistress—a truck driver's, a garbage collector's, a pimp's? Yonkers to Harlem or the Bowery? How low can you sink? Not low enough to suit me. Hell wouldn't be low enough to suit me.
It wasn't funny any longer; the anger had begun to burn hot and bitter again. I forced it down, forced the thoughts of her out of my mind. Cold focus. Rigid control.
None of the snapshots was of Annalise. One depicted a much younger Coder (I had to think of him by his real name) in a dark blue suit, and an attractive redheaded woman wearing a white gown and holding a bouquet of flowers. Another in color was of the same redhead, older, heavier, staring at the camera with a tight little leer on her mouth and her middle finger upraised just below the point of her chin. The third was an old black-and-white portrait of a graying, sad-eyed woman. Written on the back of that one in ballpoint pen was "Mom, '62." Fred Coder, the sentimental blackmailer.
Was he still married, screwing Annalise on the side? Possibly, but he hadn't been wearing a wedding ring and he'd implied that he lived alone. And a man would be more likely to keep a photo of an ex-wife giving him the finger than of a current wife making that gesture. Much better for me if he'd been divorced. A wife would likely try to find him when he failed to come home; an ex might never know he'd disappeared, or care if she did know.
I flipped through the folder of traveler's checks. Seven altogether, each in the amount of $50. Except for the "F" and the "C," his signature was an illiterate squiggle like the up-and-down lines on a seismograph or a lie detector graph I'd seen once in a movie. I studied the signature for a time, then located a pen and a pad of paper and tried to duplicate it. The first few attempts, the initials didn't look right, but then I got the hang of it. After a dozen or so, I was able to match the scrawls on the checks fairly closely.
Fatigue had given me a headache, put an abrading graininess in my eyes. I set the alarm clock for two A.M., stripped, shut off the light, and sprawled naked on the bed. I was out in less than a minute.
The alarm dragged me up out of a sticky, restless sleep. I put on the nightstand lamp long enough to take an old pair of blue pants and a dark-blue long-sleeved pullover out of the closet. I dressed in the dark, then rummaged up a clean pair of shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. In the kitchen I reviewed the mental list of items I would need from the house. The flashlight I'd used in the garage earlier. The rubber gloves. A plastic garbage bag. A handful of clean rags.
I gathered everything, shut off the light, and went outside.
The wind still blew in noisy glists but it was no longer raining. Some of the humidity was gone; the air had a fresh, sweet taste, the way it does after a storm has passed. Clouds moved sluggishly across the sky now, thick piles of them—cumulonimbus, not rain-swollen cumulus. Here and there you could see a random star shining faintly in a ragged patch of clear. The only lights showing in the neighboring houses were night lights, tiny islands surrounded by restless dark. It would be another couple of hours, I judged, before the cloud cover broke up enough to free the moon and stars.
I shut myself inside the garage. Gloves, garbage bag, rags, and the change of clothes went into the Mini's trunk. The flash beam picked out a folded section of sailcloth I'd planned to use for patching, and the largest shovel among the gardening tools against the back wall. I added the shovel and the torch to the other stuff in the trunk, put the sailcloth on the roof, and left the passenger door standing open.
The Crimes of Jordan Wise Page 15