Sun, Sand, Murder

by John Keyse-Walker

She leaned into me, pushed up on her toes, turned her face up. The lovely emerald eyes closed, slowly and with well-rehearsed sensuality. Her lips tested mine and parted, allowing her tongue to dart and explore. “I’ll make it up to you, Teddy. Let’s start now. We have a few minutes before I have to leave for the airport.” Her hand strayed below my waist, caressing.

  The ache of desire rose in me. I heard myself groan from the back of my throat. Cat worked industriously down the front of my body, kissing my neck, then my chest, pulling out the tails of my uniform shirt from the front of my shorts.

  What the hell am I doing? I’m not sure if I actually said it or just heard it inside my head. Cat was on her knees, diligently prying at my belt buckle, when I stepped back. One step, but it might as well have been a mile. For me, Cat’s spell was broken.

  For Cat, it did not quite register. In a sultry murmur, she said, “Don’t worry. We have time. They can wait on the runway for a few minutes.” She reached out for the buckle. I took another step back.

  “I need to talk to you about John Ippolito.”

  The lovely eyes played Judas to their master for half a heartbeat. “Who is John Ippolito?” Cat asked, all puzzled innocence.

  “He flew with your father in Vietnam. He was your father’s business partner in his air charter business in San Juan after the war.”

  “Teddy, what are you talking about? I don’t know anything about that. I wasn’t even born. And I’ve never heard of John Ippolito.”

  “He was killed at Spanish Camp last week. He was traveling under an assumed identity as Professor Paul Kelliher. Why would he be doing that?”

  “How should I know that, Teddy?”

  “You visited him while he was out at Spanish Camp, didn’t you? You flew supplies to him at sunset a few times a month. You know, the unscheduled landings you made that weren’t cleared through customs.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Cat shook her head in mock disbelief. “This is crazy, lover. This is just crazy.”

  “Didn’t you fly to Spanish Camp? I’m sure we could check with the US Customs and Border Patrol about the flight plans you filed for the last few months.”

  “Are you calling me a liar? Just because I may have taken a few sightseeing tours around the island without landing?”

  I said nothing.

  Cat rose from her knees, pulling herself to her full height at the same time she worked herself into a state of anger. A state of feigned anger, contrived and calculated.

  “I don’t have to take this from you! You have no reason to call me a liar. Just because you have no lead in your case is no reason to start picking on me.” The lovely eyes flashed sham anger while studying me closely to measure the effect.

  It had none. We stood apart for a long cold moment.

  Cat decided to escalate. “You ungrateful bastard! I come to this godforsaken rock and show you a little fun and this is the thanks I get? You’re lucky I gave you the time of day, you rube, with your tattered clothes and your cheesy story about your wife not understanding you. You’re the liar, but I went along with it because I wanted the sex. That’s right, I wanted the sex, just for my amusement, and you were convenient. Convenient and not even that good. Not that it wasn’t the biggest thrill of your pathetic bumpkin life. Well, I’m done with you, Teddy. Done with sneaking around this sand pile to service you. Done with hiding from your holier-than-thou wife. I wasn’t getting much out of it in the first place and now all I seem to be getting is accused. You can take your accusation and shove it. I’ve got a flight to catch.”

  Cat moved toward the bag by the stairs. As she did, I reached out and caught her by the elbow, bringing her up short. She turned and slapped me with her free hand, hard.

  I had been slapped before. Madda cuffed me once or twice because I brought home and used a word I had heard whispered on the playground at school. Another time, on the same playground, I stole a preadolescent kiss from Judy Soares and received a swat that was more “come hither” than “back off.” But the blow Cat delivered was a new experience for me, an ear-ringing wallop inflicted for decisive effect.

  It worked. Cat twisted her elbow free and was quickly out the door with her bag. I stepped out in time to see the approach of the VI Birds Piper Aztec from the south. It must have cleared customs in Tortola, at Lettsome International Airport, so I was not informed it would be arriving. Cat flung her bag into the passenger seat of her car and lit out for the airport, the rear tires of the Mitsubishi scattering bits of crushed coral against the fender of my Land Rover.

  I did not follow. There was no reason to follow. I understood she would not speak to me except to evade. Her actions confirmed her involvement—some involvement—in whatever had brought Ippolito/Kelliher to Anegada but I could not hold her on suspicion of her involvement in something to which I could put no name or explanation.

  Having carried out and mucked up my brilliant investigative strategy for the morning, I decided it was best to move in the opposite direction from the airport. Perhaps an hour at Walkover Set Bay, boring holes in the waves with my eyeballs, would clear my head and provide direction for my next effort. But before I made the turn off the lonely north shore road toward the bay, my destination changed. The washboard pounding of the road must have jarred some sense into me because I finally realized De White Rasta’s scrawled note to Nurse Rowell was not a request to her for a cigarette.

  It was a message to me.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Just before the little bridge over the mouth of Bumber Well Pond, there is a turnoff with barely enough room to park a single vehicle among the mangroves. The turnoff was unoccupied that morning. The turnoff was always unoccupied. Nobody ever went to Saltheap Point.

  I realized I would make my first visit to Saltheap Point in years when I grasped that Anthony Wedderburn’s communication of the word “shag” was not a request but a reference to a place. The place was Saltheap Point, the location of De Rasta’s shag patch.

  Navigating the short path from the turnoff, I was reminded of the reasons why nobody went to Saltheap. The scrub thorn was dense, pricking and plucking at my clothing and skin. Hand-sized spiders decorated the bushes with gossamer webs. Mosquitoes circled and droned. The ground, if it could be called that, was a slippery amalgam of decaying plant matter and brackish effluent from the nearby salt pond. The hot air was putrid with sulfur, rotten seaweed, and dead mullet. Not exactly Disney World.

  The path ended at a flat mud beach. The mosquitoes hung back in the foliage, biding their time until my return trip. Turning west, I saw De Rasta’s shag patch a stone’s throw away.

  It wasn’t much. Three rows of yellowing tobacco plants, elevated on earthen mounds, stood listlessly under the unblinking sun. A few racks made of mangrove sticks dried the most recent harvest in the shade of a palm-frond lean-to. A circular limestone sinkhole appeared to be the water supply. A five-gallon paint bucket with a dipper made from a plastic bleach bottle stood beside the sink.

  I picked up the bucket, examined it, put it down again. A tour around the drying racks and lean-to revealed nothing. No information could be divined from the sinkhole, after some minutes of peering into the turgid water. It might have helped if I had known what I was searching for but I did not. I only knew that De Rasta felt it was important that I find it and that it would be found in this place.

  The shag patch itself was next. I walked it row by row, a solitary general reviewing the ranks of wilting tobacco troops. De Rasta had marked each corner boundary of the patch with a weathered piece of coral. On the edge of the patch closest to the sea, the marker was a slab of brain coral. I almost missed it, so faint were the lines, but the letters “TC,” newly etched in the coral, caught my eye.

  I picked up the coral and looked at the underside. Nothing. The soggy ground beneath it seemed undisturbed but I took a driftwood stick and poked at it anyway. The stick struck something solid with a hollow thunk. Digging with my bare hands in the mu
d produced a jar with a metal lid. The scrap of label clinging to it read MATOUK’S PICKLED PEPPERS.

  I carried the jar to the water and washed the mud from it. Inside was a sheaf of notebook papers, covered in Anthony Wedderburn’s practiced public school cursive. I drew the papers out, unfolded them, and read the top page:

  Hello, Teddy,

  Last night, as I worked late, I heard noises outside the church which have me jumpy and a touch paranoid. It is probably nothing. While my presence at the church is no secret, I have told no one of the nature of my work for you and I assume you have not either. Nonetheless, I think it prudent to make an extra copy of what I have done to date and leave it here for you in the event my paranoia is not unfounded.

  If you are reading this, old man, the news cannot be good for me. Please know that whatever may have befallen me is not your fault. Any risk involved in my working for you was undertaken with open eyes.

  Know too that the work on this project has made me feel more vital and my life more meaningful than anything I have done in the past twenty years. For this you have my genuine gratitude.

  Hope you solve it, old chap!

  Your Friend,

  Anthony

  Below this first sheet were half a dozen others, also in De Rasta’s hand. While they were not labeled as the text of the coded notebook, their content left little doubt:

  My Dearest Mary Catherine,

  The doctors now tell me they have diagnosed my problem. I will not bore you with the details. They say I will die any day now unless I have open-heart surgery, and even then I will be restricted in my activities and probably be an invalid for the rest of my life.

  I will not let those cold-blooded butchers cut me open. I will take my chances with the ticker that the Good Lord gave me. It has served me adequately until now and I would rather die than spend my last years in a rocking chair or a nursing home bed anyway.

  If what the quack bastards say is correct, I may not be here when you return from your service to our country. I do not have much to leave you in the way of material goods. Business and money have never been my strengths. The only real success in my life has been to raise a beautiful, intelligent, and talented daughter. I like to think that a small part of your many good qualities comes from what I have taught you or shown by way of example. You are the pride and joy of this old soldier, and I love you.

  While there is no material wealth to leave you, I can leave you a chance at wealth, or what I believe to be wealth, hidden on a Caribbean island called Anegada. I know this sounds like the old pirate’s-treasure games we used to play when you were a kid, but it is no game. The pirate involved never sailed the sea to plunder and rob; he was a modern-day buccaneer, a con man, named Nigel Brooks. The treasure is a product of the con he pulled off and should be in the millions.

  I had hoped to find the treasure myself but life, and, it appears now, death, intervened. You must have found my note to you and the key to the code allowing you to read these words. I am sorry to be so mysterious but I wanted to make certain that you, and only you, would be able to use this information.

  Here is what happened and what I can tell you about the treasure.

  You know you were born on Puerto Rico. Your mother and I were there because, after I got out of the army in ’66, Johnny Ipp and I decided to start an air charter business. Johnny thought the Caribbean was going to explode with tourism and a helicopter charter service would do well there. He scouted the islands and persuaded me that San Juan was the place to be. We set up a company named after our old call sign from Nam, Hamburger 5 Air Charters. We scrounged up a surplus Huey and we were in business.

  The problem was, we didn’t know how to get customers. In a matter of months, we were about to lose everything.

  Then one day a fellow named Nigel Brooks showed up at our cubbyhole office at the hangar, dressed to the nines like someone’s idea of a yachtsman. He said he didn’t have time to take a boat back to his place in the British Virgin Islands and asked if we could fly him there. We jumped at the chance. It didn’t hurt that he paid in cash.

  We had never heard of Anegada before that day and had never flown to the BVI. There was no airport on Anegada, no real roads, and there was a shack town that looked no better than an in-country hamlet in Nam. We landed on a beach on the south side of the island, near a big house Brooks was building for himself and his wife.

  Brooks spent most of the trip from San Juan jabbering about the plans he had for Anegada. He said he was in the process of developing the island as a luxury resort. At the end of the flight, he asked if we would be able to procure and transport supplies from SJ to Anegada once a week, and occasionally fly him from Anegada to SJ for meetings. He offered cash in advance, then and throughout the time we worked for him.

  That began more than a year of flights by Johnny Ipp and me to Brooks’s house or to an abandoned American radar tracking station on the island. We had a regular weekly supply flight and a steady income from Brooks and his project. It was enough to keep us in business and keep food on the table.

  Then one day Brooks approached me just after we landed on a supply run and asked if I would accompany him and one of the locals on a boat trip that evening and then fly Mrs. Brooks to SJ. It was the first time he had asked us to do anything other than flying but he was our good and only steady customer, so I agreed. Johnny and I hung around that afternoon, killing time swimming and sleeping in the shade of the Huey.

  At dusk, Brooks appeared in khaki pants and shirt, carrying a bag made of shagreen, a kind of leather tanned from sharkskin. It looked like an old-style dispatch bag. I walked to the end of the short dock in front of the house with Brooks while Johnny Ipp stayed with the aircraft.

  In a few minutes, one of the local men, whose name I did not know, approached from the east in a small fishing boat fitted with an ancient three-horsepower outboard motor. I helped Brooks down off the dock into the boat and climbed in after him. Brooks sat in the stern seat next to the local. I sat in the bow seat to balance the boat. Brooks spoke to the local but his words were lost in the sound of the outboard.

  Brooks seemed nervous about the bag, clutching it tightly even when seated in the boat. He had not said it but it was my impression that he did not entirely trust the local. Perhaps he believed if I was along the local would not try anything.

  We left the dock, turning south for a few hundred yards, and then ran straight east. The sunset had been dramatic, with large cumulus clouds on the horizon. As night closed in, more clouds appeared, blocking out the stars. The moon had not risen yet and consequently it was soon pitch-dark. There were no lights on the little boat. I could not see the south shore of the island, but it seemed like we were running parallel to it. The old outboard was unmuffled and it drowned out all other sounds. We continued for a good hour, then swung north for a few minutes, and with a final loop a few yards west, we pulled into the shallows along a white sand beach.

  The local cut the engine, jumped over the stern into knee-deep water, and pushed the boat further toward the beach until it grounded. Brooks stepped into water barely covering his ankles and waded onto the beach, still clenching his bag. I followed with the local, dragging the boat onto the shore. By now a full moon was rising at the sky’s edge. The heavy clouds parted and then rejoined, allowing a fleeting glimpse of the shore, empty but for flotsam and jetsam, and the dune ridge beyond.

  Brooks said, “Be back shortly,” as if he was going out for a stroll; marched across the beach, up and over the dune; and disappeared. The local yanked a corked pint of rum from his pocket and perched against the gunwale of the boat. He seemed to think we would be there for a while. He offered me a pull on the bottle but no conversation.

  I sat on the sand. Long minutes passed. The moon moved in and out of the clouds, taking us from pitch black to daylight bright as it rose in the sky.

  I asked the local the name of the place we were at. He said, “The Camp of the Great Admiral,” as if that explaine
d all, and fell silent again. I did not pursue it further. The man obviously did not want to talk, and anyway, the beach was as unremarkable and unidentifiable as the miles of similar beach girdling the island.

  We waited for an hour before the figure of Brooks reappeared, cresting the dune and picking his way along the beach. The moon broke from a veil of cloud as he reached us. He no longer carried the bag. Coming up to the side of the boat, he brushed against me. He was wet from head to foot, even though he had only gone in to the top of his ankles coming ashore. I thought he might have fallen into a salt pond on the inland side of the dune but then I rubbed my finger against my arm where he had come in contact with me and tasted. It was freshwater.

  Brooks and the local immediately dragged the bow of the boat seaward, while I pushed. When the boat floated, we jumped in and the local started the motor. The moon was completely visible now and I could see that the local had targeted a gap in the waves breaking over the reef. After piloting us expertly through, he angled northward into the Anegada Trench. In a quarter of an hour, an unlighted shape appeared on the horizon. In another quarter hour, the shape had sharpened into a bedraggled two-masted schooner.

  The local killed the engine two hundred yards from the sailboat. A searchlight beam was shined directly at us. Brooks called out in Spanish, saying he was “Mr. Smithson” and he was ready to come aboard. The light blinked out, the outboard was restarted, and we pulled alongside.

  Brooks turned to me and asked again for Johnny and me to take his wife to SJ on our return trip. He pushed a soggy wad of fifty-dollar bills into my hand, saying that it should cover the evening’s work and his wife’s airfare. A rope ladder was tossed over the rail of the sailboat and Brooks climbed aboard. I never saw him again.

  The local remained mute on the return. He deposited me at the short dock without even tying up and turned to the west as soon as I had clambered out. By then it was nearing midnight but Mrs. Brooks popped out the door as I approached the house, traveling bag in hand. By two in the morning, we had cleared customs in SJ. Mrs. Brooks roused a dozing taxi driver at the terminal entrance and sped off into the night.