“But the busybody two doors down pokes her head out and asks me what do I want. There’s one in every building in these old neighborhoods. I showed her my badge and told her I wanted to talk to the occupant. She practically wet her pants with excitement and spilled everything she knew about the guy who rented the apartment, which was a lot.
“Your man rented under the name of John Ippolito. He had lived there for about a year. Never had any visitors and kept to himself. Then he moved out about three months ago, never said a word to any of the neighbors about leaving, just there one day and gone the next. A moving company packed up all his belongings and carried them away. Unfortunately, the busybody couldn’t remember the name of the moving company. But she did recall what Mr. Ippolito did for a living. He worked for an asphalt paving company, Calabria Brothers. She remembered seeing that on the uniform shirt he wore to work each day.
“A quick visit to Calabria Brothers filled in the blanks. The receptionist was a real badge bunny, made a point of saying she always wanted to date a cop. Not much to look at, but then neither am I. I played along and in ten minutes I knew everything there was to know about John Ippolito from Calabria Brothers, plus I got her phone number.
“Ippolito ran an asphalt paving machine and, like most of the Calabria Brothers employees, was laid off each winter when it got too cold for asphalt paving. The employees would be recalled each spring when the temps rose again, but that hadn’t happened yet this year, so no one had missed him at work. He was a loner, civil but not real friendly, and not known to socialize with the other employees. He told the boss he had no family and his personnel file had no emergency contact information. No one knew what he did when he was off in the winter, but the receptionist remembered he always came back with a tan.
“I showed Miss Badge Bunny the Paul Kelliher passport photo and she ID’d it as John Ippolito. The address the company had for Ippolito/Kelliher was the Fulton Street address he had already vacated. Probably left there right after his work for the season ended and headed down to your island to get himself killed.
“Anyway, Constable, that’s as far as I got with it before calling you. I still don’t have any lead on next of kin but I’ll run some more with it, if you think it would be helpful.”
“I would be grateful if you would, Sergeant.”
“That’s what the good citizens of Boston pay me to do. I’ll call you if I get anything more. And maybe the whole ghost identity thing will help you find who killed him.”
“I hope so, Sergeant. Your efforts are most appreciated. And I meant what I said about you being welcome here if you ever get down to the Caribbean.”
“Pretty long odds on me making it down there on a Boston cop’s salary, especially when you deduct the alimony payments. But I appreciate the invitation. And if I turn up anything else on your man, I’ll be in touch, Constable.” The line clicked dead.
I dropped the telephone receiver into its cradle. The dullness of the headache lingered, a thin wash of pain from the root of my eyes. The unrelenting brilliance of the Anegada midday sun blasted through the office window, adding heat and light to the throbbing. I closed the shade, put the side of my face down on the cool metal of the desktop, and willed myself to think.
Paul Kelliher was not Paul Kelliher at all, but John Ippolito. Not a biologist, but an asphalt paver. He came to Anegada year after year not to study the rock iguana, but to do what? Run drugs? Dig up the desolate interior of the island searching for treasure? You could do either without a change of identity. Why did John Ippolito become Paul Kelliher? Why couldn’t he accomplish what he wanted here as John Ippolito? Who was John Ippolito?
I slipped into a state of half-sleep and heard myself mumble “John Ippolito” in the silent room.
Then I sat bolt upright.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be, the voice inside me repeated as I bolted down the short hall to the administrator’s office. It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be, as I fumbled the worthless 1-2-3-etc. password from the keyboard to the screen of Pamela Pickering’s computer, pulled up Google, and pounded “Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association” into the search box. It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be, as I scrolled and clicked my way to the link to the haphazard website of the Sixty-Eighth Assault Helicopter Company veterans.
But it was, right there in the gauzy photograph of the crew of Hamburger 5 taken at Vung Tau, Vietnam, in late 1965, separated from CWO Neville Wells by two intervening crew members.
“Warrant Officer John Ippolito,” the old typescript said, the “J” tilted at a crazy angle and the “t” struck over a premature “o.”
Peering at the man in the photo, I tried to match him with my memory of Paul Kelliher from the times I had seen him at the Cow Wreck Beach Bar and Grill. The face in the photo was younger and leaner but the eyes were intense and unmistakable, twins to the eyes of Paul Kelliher before death extinguished their light.
There was no other information on WO Ippolito on the Sixty-Eighth AHC website. A return to the VHPA “Post-Tour History” page showed he also had been assigned to Fort Buchanan in San Juan, Puerto Rico, following his tour in Vietnam. Like Neville Wells, he received his honorable discharge from the army at that posting in 1966. Unlike CWO Wells, he never reenlisted. The VHPA had no further history for him.
Other confirmation that Warrant Officer Ippolito was the John Ippolito who had stolen young Paul Kelliher’s identity was easily obtained. Googling “Vietnam Veterans Index” directed me to the US National Archives. Searching in its archival databases, I quickly found the enlistment record for John Ippolito, born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1945, single with no dependents, civilian occupation construction laborer, enlistment date June 9, 1963. Though there were enlistment records for other John Ippolitos in the database, there was only one with the correct era, geography, and age.
There was no question or doubt. The mutilated corpse found sprawled on the baking sand at Spanish Camp was that of the man who had been stationed in Vietnam and Puerto Rico with Neville Wells, father of Mary Catherine Wells. Cat Wells, my mistress.
Cold coursed through my veins, sending a tremor along my spine. The headache that had plagued me was gone, replaced by dark foreboding. I would have much preferred a return to the headache but there was no turning back. For the first time, I knew a connection existed between Cat, her father, Ippolito/Kelliher, and Anegada, a connection dating back to the late 1960s. The matter that formed and forged the connection was still a mystery but not a total mystery. Whatever it was, I knew it was worth a half century of time. I knew it was worth lies and deceit.
I knew it was worth killing and dying for.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Anegada got an early start, as recorded history in the Western Hemisphere goes. But after the visit from Chris Columbus and the buccaneer period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the island dropped off the radar screen of history, a condition from which, blessedly, it has never recovered.
Only now I needed to know about Anegada in the late 1960s, to determine if Neville Wells and John Ippolito ever came here, and why. And I needed to know what it was that would bring Wells’s daughter and Ippolito, under an assumed identity, back here after over four decades.
There are no written histories of Anegada during the sixties; there was so much happening in the wide world that places like Anegada could be ignored. To learn about Anegada in the decade before my birth, I could not read about it. I had to speak with someone who had been here then.
In most places, finding someone who had been in the area forty or even fifty years before would not be difficult, but it was a tall order on Anegada. The population back then was even smaller than today, fewer than one hundred souls. The ticket to prosperity then was the same as in many of the world’s rural places, a ticket away, to a big place, a big city. In the case of Anegada, the big city of choice was one of the biggest on the planet, New York, New York. Eve
n today, there are almost five times as many people who claim Anegadian ancestry in New York as there are on Anegada itself. Those who opted not to emigrate were subject to the third-world perils of backbreaking manual labor, poor medical care, and bad nutrition, and few of that era lived beyond their fourth decade.
Fortunately, there is one old soul still on Anegada from those days, with an encyclopedic memory and a sharp eye for detail. He is part sage, part institution, and part community conscience. I am talking about my father, Sidney Creque.
Sidney Creque was born on Anegada in 1929. Though the years of his youth encompassed the period of the Great Depression and the Second World War, the isolation of the island insulated him from the effects of those events. As a young man, he survived by subsistence farming, clawing a living from the niggardly soil, watering his crops of corn and pumpkins from the same limestone sinks that had provided water to Columbus on his brief visit four and a half centuries earlier.
A dearth of marriageable women, combined with a need to market the small surplus of his crops, sent my dada regularly to St. Thomas in a boat he had constructed from driftwood and scavenged nails. The trips did little to advance his search for a wife but did cause him to acquire a taste for Cruzan rum. He began to bring bottles back on his return voyages, and learned others on Anegada had a similar taste for the distilled cane, despite the stern temperance of the local Methodist minister. Soon he was making a monthly rum run to the USVI. He gradually expanded his product line and became the only importer of goods on an island where almost everything, other than fish, flamingoes, iguanas, and sand, must be imported.
Dada had become the most prosperous businessman on Anegada when his third cousin, Lily Brathwaite, came from Barbados to visit her aunt and uncle in the summer of 1958. By then he had given up on the St. Thomas girls and was a confirmed bachelor. Dada and Madda’s eyes still shine as they speak of their love at first sight when they were introduced at a church supper. They were married two months to the day after that first meeting, and immediately embarked on an effort to more densely populate the island, Madda giving birth to my nine brothers and sisters in the next nine years. I brought up the rear of the offspring parade in the fall of 1969.
As Dada and Madda grew older, they gave away bits and pieces of their Anegada enterprises to my siblings until all that remained was Creque’s Gas Dock and Gas Station. While Dada had begun the operation by barging in fifty-five-gallon drums of kerosene for lamps and pumping the contents with a hand pump, the facility was now modernized. Once a month, a gasoline barge lumbered over from Tortola to fill the single steel underground tank buried in a cut in the limestone just east of the government dock. The fuel from that tank ran all the boat motors, automobiles, and generators on Anegada.
Dada dispensed his product from an electric pump beside the road, shaded by two stubby coconut palms. While awaiting customers, he passed his time in a decrepit smudge-green Chesterfield chair housed in a shed just large enough for it and a metal cash till. He opened and closed when he felt like it, but nobody seemed to mind the irregular hours, even if they came halfway across the island and found the hand-lettered CLOSED FOR THE DAY sign on the pump at noon.
It was late in the afternoon when I rolled into the single space beside the pump. The CLOSED FOR THE DAY sign was nowhere to be seen, surprising at that hour. Dada was almost always closed by five o’clock, as Madda was punctual with supper at five thirty.
I found Dada seated inside the crowded shed, head back, mouth agape, sleeping like a stone. I made a rustling shuffle of my feet outside the door and the old man popped awake, fresh as the dawn over Table Bay rock.
“What are you doing here so late, Dada?” I asked.
“No reason to go home. Your madda is at a church meeting. Cold supper for me and a cold bed until the middle of the night,” he said, slyly smiling his just-between-us-men-of-the-world smile, dentures dazzling white. “Ain’t nothing like a church meeting to put a woman off in the bedroom.”
Too much information, Dada, I thought. “I came to see if I could get your help on a police investigation, Dada,” I said, hoping to shift from the topic of his and Madda’s bedroom activities before he further expanded on it.
“Of course, you can have my help, but what can a skinny old man do to help you on an investigation?” he asked, puzzled.
“Don’t worry about skinny, Dada, and the old part is just what I need. I want to ask you about Anegada in the nineteen sixties, just before I was born.”
“Good thing you don’t want the skinny body, boy, ’cause I’m saving all of that I can for your madda,” he said, leering. No wonder I have nine siblings. “What do you want to know?”
“Do you remember any men by the name of Neville Wells or John Ippolito coming to Anegada then?”
“No. Those names aren’t familiar. Who are they?”
“John Ippolito is the real name of Paul Kelliher.”
“The lizard scientist? That fellow who got killed out at Spanish Camp?”
“That’s right.” I paused, trying to think of a way to explain my interest in Neville Wells that did not bring Cat into the discussion. “And Neville Wells was an associate of his back then. Wells has been dead for a couple decades.”
“Was he white, too?” Dada asked.
“No,” I said. Dada’s query made sense. Seeing white folks is common on Anegada nowadays. Most of the tourists who visit are white. There are even some white families, like the Soareses, who have settled here during my lifetime. But in the sixties, there was no tourism, and whites, even in Tortola, consisted mostly of government bureaucrats sent by Her Majesty to administer the then-colony. There was no reason for a white British bureaucrat to visit Anegada, an island in the hinterlands of their hinterlands posting, and they never did.
“In the early part of the sixties, the only white men here were the Americans, the ones who built and manned the tracking station on the West End.” Dada gestured westward like he was describing the far side of the moon. “There was no road out there back then. They kept mostly to themselves, I guess because they didn’t want to walk all the way around to The Settlement on the beach. Not that there was anything to walk to then, not a store, not a bar, not even Cardi’s Pool Hall. Just the houses and the Methodist church.
“When they first built the tracking station, some of the boys took their boats there with fish they caught, hoping to sell to the Americans, but that didn’t work. The Americans had dynamited a hole in the reef so they could barge in building materials. There was dynamite left over, and when they wanted fish, they would take a stick or two out to the reef, toss them in, and have all the fish they wanted for a week without paying anything. Besides, they mostly ate out of cans, disgusting stuff flown in from San Juan by helicopter.”
“By helicopter?” My antenna went up.
“Yes. Well, not at first. When they were building the Quonset huts and the big dish they used to track the space shots, they barged in all their supplies. But shortly after they finished construction, a supply barge ran aground on the reef. Those boys weren’t even smart enough to put the barge through the hole they had blown open. They spilled a few hundred gallons of diesel fuel and sank the barge right where the wreck still sits today.
“After that, they didn’t take any chances trying to navigate the reef; everything came in by helicopter. Usually it was one flight a week from San Juan. Once the place was built, there were only a half dozen personnel manning it, so they could easily resupply by air.”
“Whose helicopters did they use?” I asked, though I felt the answer was already known to me, like watching a test match between West Indies and the boys who play pickup cricket behind the school on Saturday afternoon. The outcome was certain, even before the first ball was bowled.
Dada squinted, forcing recollection. “All US military. Mostly navy but some army from the San Juan base.”
“Dada, did you ever meet any of those fliers?” I held my breath after asking, hoping against ho
pe he had.
“No. They flew in and flew out, never stayed more than the time it took them to unload. I don’t think they found Anegada to be a very attractive place to spend time.”
“Did they ever fly to different parts of the island, or fly around the island?”
“The first few times they came in, you would see them circle, maybe to take a look around, but after that, they went straight in and out.” It sounded unlikely that one of them might have spotted something or even landed at Spanish Camp.
“How long did the flights continue?”
“Right up until the Americans moved away in 1968. They picked up and left so fast it seemed like they were gone overnight, but it actually took them a couple weeks to get everything out. There was no notice to us on Anegada, not from the Americans or from Tortola. One day in the fall of ’68, an old World War II landing ship arrived and anchored about a mile off the West End. It stayed there for a few days, with small-boat shore parties coming in every morning and leaving at sunset. They dismantled the buildings and the tracking dish and on the last day brought the landing ship through the hole in the reef, got it right that time, and dropped the ramp on shore. By nightfall, they had loaded everything—buildings, equipment, and men—on the ship and they were gone. The only trace they left was the steel matting from their helipad and the angle-iron post still out on the West End.”
“Did the Americans ever come back, even temporarily, after that?”
“No. Why, did someone tell you they had?”
“No, it just seemed unusual for them to take almost everything but leave the helipad.”
My father settled back in his chair and sighed. “I guess it wasn’t worth taking with them, even for scrap. Anyway, the Americans never used the helipad again. The only ones who used it after that were Nigel Brooks’s men.”
Sun, Sand, Murder Page 13