“That who I think it is?” asked Billy Smith from behind his bar.
“Who’s that?” deadpanned Walter. Billy threw his arms up in mock frustration. “Hey, go for it, Walter,” he shrugged.
On his way out, Walter passed a very old, stick-thin black man with a fuzzy white beard cut short and close. The old man, whose name was Ike, had a crooked, homemade cigarette dangling from his lips. Smoke completely surrounded his head, floating away in a line of blue haze, swirling out in the direction of the sea. A warm smile, one some said was always there, dominated his aged, wrinkled face. He sat alone at the table closest to the sidewalk, the one right up against the white picket fence that separated Billy’s from the street. He was protected from the sun only by the Florida Marlins baseball cap on his bald head.
“That’s Chita whatshername, ain’t it Walter?” Ike asked.
“Yes, it is.”
“Walter!” Ike called after him. “I thought you was retired.”
Walter Sherman kept walking, but he turned his head back toward the old man. “You’re right, Ike. I was retired.”
The frail black man looked at Billy, who had moved up the bar and was now as near to the front as he could get. This time they both shrugged their shoulders.
Walter Sherman had never officially retired. He hadn’t made any announcement, sent out any notices or thrown a party and invited his friends to celebrate the event. And, of course, there was no one to give him a gold watch. It just sort of happened. The last job he took was almost four years ago. After that one, he just stopped. He started saying no. People continued to come to him, continued to call. But, after the second year, they must have gotten the message. They stopped. It became known he no longer took clients. Nobody had approached him this way in more than two years.
When he quit, he told himself it wasn’t because he couldn’t do the work anymore. But he knew it really was. He was getting tired and his was not the kind of work to do if you weren’t up to it. In his busiest times as a younger man, he never did more than a dozen jobs a year. While occasionally he caught one he couldn’t wrap up in less than a month, two at the most, most of his assignments had been completed in a few weeks. Some took only days. He’d always had a lot of downtime. So, retirement didn’t call for a major personal adjustment.
About the same time Walter stopped working, he stopped eating meat, red meat and pork altogether, and he limited his intake of chicken to once monthly—a special day that was. He allowed himself to eat fresh fish two or three times a week, sometimes more often. He’d been told people who ate fish regularly lived longer, healthier lives than those who forsook it for meat, especially beef and pork. That sounded right. He reworked his diet to include a lot of fruits and vegetables, rice, beans and pasta. He cut out the French fries and most other greasy, fried foods. Out with the burgers—in with the grouper. It wasn’t difficult for him. Walter ate most of his meals at Billy’s and those he didn’t were cooked by the old woman, Clara, or since her death, by his new housekeeper. All concerned were happy to oblige his new, healthier habits.
Like most men his age, Walter had been at least twenty pounds heavier than he wanted for far longer than he cared to admit. In his first year of exclusive leisure and new eating tastes he shed them all, all twenty and then some. And he didn’t stop there. He was an inch or so under six feet, and by this time in his life, sensed he’d shrunk perhaps a half-inch or more. Racing headlong to sixty, he wanted to be fit again. He was scared it might be his last chance. He started his new diet the morning his scale read 215 pounds. “Holy shit!” he thought. “Old, fat and shrinking.” He never regretted the panic he felt that morning. He kept going when he hit 195 pounds and didn’t even try to level off until he reached 180. Finally, deep into middle age, he weighed only five pounds more than he did when he left the Army in 1977. With that he was satisfied.
He still wore his hair long in the back. It had thinned on top, but not remarkably. It had, however, grayed considerably in the last two or three years. Still, some people continued to mistake Walter Sherman for a man younger than he was. His pale blue eyes and rugged, tan, leathery face highlighted the effects of a long stay in the Caribbean. Sure, fewer women found him attractive than had been his experience ten or twenty years ago, but he still got a look now and then. It never bothered him that the women doing the looking were getting older too. One thing he certainly didn’t grow tired of was the sight of his recently reacquired flat stomach staring back at him in the mirror. He wore the same kind of clothes since he came to St. John—loose-fitting jeans, a bit baggier as the years went by, and an oversized, pastel-colored T-shirt with no pocket. He was always clean-shaven and although some mistook his casual approach toward dress for messiness, they could not have been further from the truth. A man completely comfortable in his own skin, Walter Sherman carried nothing with him. No wallet. No personal ID of any kind. No money. No habitual paraphernalia, cigarette lighters and the like—he neither smoked nor chewed gum. The key to his car was all he had on him, in his right back pocket with nothing attached. He didn’t like shorts—he thought they looked silly on him—and was never seen in them. His only shoes seemed to be the old-fashioned, low-cut, white tennis sneakers. Unless he left the island, Walter never wore socks.
His cholesterol was too high. His doctor prescribed drugs to lower it. He took a little blood pressure medication too and his prostate wasn’t the smoothly operating piece of machinery it used to be.
“I’m not as old as you are—yet,” he told Ike one day. “But, I’m getting there. I piss in Morse code.” The two of them had a great laugh at that while Billy was left slightly bewildered.
Retirement? Sure, why not. The time had come for Walter to call it quits. He didn’t need the money. He’d done well for many years and did one unique, unforgettable job—his last one—that set him up for life. When a man named Leonard Martin began his crusade, his relentless campaign seeking justice for his family, all of whom had died from eating ground beef tainted with E. coli bacteria, they turned to Walter Sherman to find him. In the beginning, Walter didn’t know—not about Leonard. He knew what he was searching for, but not who. Nor was he aware of the righteousness of Leonard Martin’s crusade. How could he have known these things? He had been deceived. The clients he worked for were, in fact, the ones responsible for Leonard Martin’s tragedy. They let it happen. They knew better. The corporate hotshots. The gang of criminals on Wall Street—the very ones who hired Walter. Millions of pounds of poisoned ground beef. They let it leave the packing plant. They let it go to store shelves. They let people—Leonard Martin’s family among them—eat it. Thousands sickened. Hundreds died. They did nothing to stop it. Too much was riding on the outcome. Billions actually. They chose the risk to people over the risk to money. In the end they miscalculated. And Leonard Martin extracted a heavy price. One by one he hunted them down. One by one he killed them. Those still alive at the time hoped Walter could find Leonard before Leonard found them.
Walter found Isobel Gitlin first. An obit writer for The New York Times, she was the first to understand, to see beyond the fog and mystery. Leonard Martin was the one. For a while, Walter was her sole supporter. Together, Walter and Isobel searched for him. They searched for Leonard Martin, who was the Cowboy. And Isobel. It was still painful for Walter to even think about her. In the end, she betrayed him. She hurt him. He opened his heart to her and with callous indifference she thrust a dagger in it.
Now, when Conchita Crystal smiled at him and touched his wrist, he was only months shy of being fifty-nine years old. For one magical moment she made him feel half his age. Ike saw it plain as day.
Finding people was a young man’s game. For Walter it began when he was only nineteen. Because it seemed like a good idea at the time, Walter Sherman made the horrendous mistake of joining the Army on his eighteenth birthday. His birthday present was a quick trip to the killing fields of Southeast Asia. In no time at all he went from “Good Morning America” to
“Good Morning Vietnam!” He survived. Many didn’t. It wasn’t just the bleeding, the dying, even the killing. It was drugs, disconnect from sanity, loss of a moral center. Saigon, and the tall grass, did many strange things to twenty-year-old American boys. But Walter made it. A year later he saved Freddy Russo’s life.
Walter found him after Russo went AWOL and was gone for a week. As surely as if he had carried the man’s broken body to safety in a jungle firefight, he’d saved Russo’s life. In Saigon—a world gone quite mad—if a man was AWOL more than a week, when they found him, they often shot him as a deserter. These executions were distinctly unofficial. It was easier that way. The worst of it was some of the MPs seemed to get off on it. Those who died in this fashion were always marked down as KIA—it was easier that way too—and there were many more of them than anyone back home ever knew. But Walter was there. He knew. He saw it. And that’s why he went after and found Russo, who turned out to be an ungrateful little prick.
After that episode, nineteen-year-old Sgt. Walter Sherman from Rhinebeck, New York, found himself transferred, attached to Headquarters Company. There, he did nothing else but look for people. He looked for Americans, Vietnamese, anyone at all, anyone he was told to find. Sometimes he knew why. Other times he didn’t. When he went after the pilot, and was gone three weeks, lost in the jungle—when the short odds said he’d never be seen again—and finally, when he emerged from Hell with enough of the pilot’s body to satisfy his commanders, Walter’s legend grew. By then he had already acquired his nickname, The Locator.
In between finding people for the Colonel, he was left alone. He had nobody to report to. He simply awaited the next call. Most of the time he didn’t even wear a uniform. He rented a small apartment, had a full-time cleaning lady who doubled as a cook, plus a valet of sorts, a teenage boy with a missing arm, ready and eager to do any errand Walter asked. Saigon was like a supermarket, isles jammed, stuffed, overstocked with women and drugs. Bob Dylan and James Brown serenaded the shoppers, with special guests the Rolling Stones and Bob Marley. The uniquely American cry of “Rock ’n’ roll!” was more than an often-heard command. It was the sound of invasion, the march music of occupation.
Walter wasn’t into drugs. Sure, he puffed the magic dragon—who didn’t?—but no cocaine, no heroin. Women on the other hand, were . . . everywhere, abundant, available, always there. Love you long time was damn near the Vietnamese national motto. Walter was as much a boy in a candy store as anyone. When his tour was over, he signed up for another. Nobody ever did a study of it, but many in the military believed that Southeast Asian sex was the leading motivator behind reenlistment. Another tour of Saigon’s bars and brothels or back to Applebee’s in Akron or Kansas City? Not much of a choice for some.
Walter spent more than seven years in Vietnam. He lived. When the war was over, he returned to America. But the war never ended. It stayed in his dreams long after the women faded away. Na Trang, Laos, the Mekong River delta. He never lost it, not all of it. It didn’t haunt him as it did others, but every time he thought it was gone, all gone—it wasn’t. There were still nights when he would awaken with the smell of Saigon, the stench of blood and napalm, burning huts and burning bodies—so close. Back in the United States, as seamlessly as could be expected, Walter resumed life as a regular soldier. However, there was no one left to find.
He left the Army at twenty-five and spent two uneventful years struggling to make a living back home in upstate New York. Then a distraught Colonel from Ft. Benning, Georgia, called, and Walter Sherman found his way in life. The Colonel, who had heard of Walter through another officer from Saigon, paid Walter a thousand dollars to find his sixteen-year-old, runaway daughter. The Colonel was the first of many. Although new clients had a hard time finding him, those who succeeded were not disappointed. The market sought him out. Rich, powerful and famous people needed someone they could count on to find their runaway children, drunken wives, or husbands off on a bender. Or it could have been someone else close to them, a brother or sister, mother or father, holed up a thousand miles from home with somebody they picked up in a bar. Embarrassment and scandal were to be avoided at any cost and Walter was seen as the answer to the most terrible question a public person of means could ask—Oh God, is there anyone who can help me?
Years later, in rare moments of nostalgia, he sometimes wished he’d saved at least a dollar of that first thousand bucks so he could frame it as many retailers frame the first dollar they make at their new store. Instead, he had no memorabilia. In fact, he had nothing but the money to indicate he’d ever done anything, worked for anyone, found anybody. Walter never took notes, kept no records, had no files. For the first few years he continued to live at home with his mother and didn’t even have a phone of his own. He was a model of discretion and confidentiality. He maintained total privacy and offered the same to every client. In addition to his uncanny success, it was this quality of total privacy above all others that justified his high fee. He was an honest priest and forceful sheriff, both at the same time. For someone to retain his services, they had to know someone who knew someone—just to find him. He worked only by referral, only for cash, paid in advance and totally without supervision.
All that was behind him now. “I don’t work anymore,” he told Conchita Crystal. As Ike said, Walter was retired. Ike never knew exactly what Walter did. Neither did Billy. But Walter’s friends had a pretty good idea it often involved some real danger and, perhaps—just perhaps—questionable legality. They saw the strangers who, from time to time, came into Billy’s Bar looking for him. They knew something was up when he left the island without notice and returned just as unexpectedly after a few days, a week, sometimes longer. Walter rarely said where he’d been. He never said why. Ike and Billy were sure Walter was mixed up in some very strange goings on. “Some serious shit,” said Billy once, to which Ike had vigorously nodded agreement.
Walter was in his early thirties when he and his wife, Gloria, bought the house on St. John. In those days, Ike too basked in his prime, no more than fifty, looking and acting half his age. The two men had been close friends for almost thirty years. When Billy Smith showed up—as William Mantkowski at first—in the spring of 1992, the trio was quickly established. Ike and Walter were already fixtures at a bar called Frogman’s. Billy Smith, the name William Mantkowski chose after a month on St. John, bought Frogman’s and as an extra bonus, he got his two best friends in the deal.
Ike now served as overseer, the wise elder, CEO emeritus of a family conglomerate of small enterprises. Together with his sons and their sons, he founded and guided everything from taxis to rental cars, charter boats to gourmet catering, specialty construction and a little politics mixed in. A widower for twenty years since his wife Sissy died, he was fiercely devoted to his family. One of Ike’s sons was a senator in the Virgin Island’s government. Over the years, the family businesses, which supported a large extended clan, enjoyed a warm and beneficial relationship with both local and federal government agencies. With the help of his sons and now his grandsons, Ike held court at the same table in Billy’s even longer than Walter occupied the last two barstools near the kitchen.
Billy Smith had arrived on St. John unheralded and alone. It was obvious he was eager to stay that way. Finally, a few years ago Billy met someone, a bushwhacker about his age, not a bad looking woman either. She had something going for her—spunk, spirit, a take-charge attitude mixed with a straightforward friendly nature and a strong appetite for sex. Whatever it was, Helen Mavidies captivated Billy. She was just a middle-aged schoolmarm from New Bedford, Massachusetts, on a Caribbean holiday by herself, but she was certainly a woman. One day she came into Billy’s for lunch and, like Ike and Walter before her, stayed. At first she was just there, Billy’s sort of girlfriend. Then she began to help Billy behind the bar and in the kitchen. It wasn’t long before she was pretty much running the place. Helen had moved into a small rental house, a cheap one as far from the water as a p
erson could get on St. John. She didn’t live there long. One morning Walter arrived for breakfast and there she was. Billy and Helen were an item. She moved in with him and they seemed quite happy with that arrangement. Ike told Walter he thought it was a very good thing Billy was getting some on a regular basis. “Man needs that kind of thing, you know,” he said. Walter wholeheartedly agreed, thinking, “Here’s the two of us who haven’t got laid in so long we can’t remember, talking about how ‘good’ it is Billy’s getting some.”
Billy was at least ten years younger than Walter and just a kid compared to Ike. Despite the age difference, the three men became attached to each other, tied together with a twine destined to form an unbreakable bond. Everyone knew what Ike did. His life on St. John was an open book. Everyone knew what Billy did—not necessarily what he had done or where he had come from—but they knew what he did now. And everyone had his or her own theory about Walter. Over the course of his years on the island, there had been hints, the occasional glimmer of light thrown upon his activities, enough so that Ike and Billy could worry about him and take pleasure and comfort every time he returned from wherever he went, doing whatever it was he did. They remembered Isobel Gitlin and her famous connection to the notorious Leonard Martin. All things considered, Walter’s friends were very happy to see him retire.
Now, Conchita Crystal, of all people, had waltzed right into the picture, upsetting everything.
BEFORE THE BEGINNING
I can tell the wind is risin’
The leaves tremblin’ on the tree.
–Robert Johnson–
November 22, 1963
The Czech—the one who had made himself known in America as Stephen Hecht—was a tall, thin man with a sallow complexion that because of his high cheek bones made him look rather sickly. On top of that, he rarely smiled. He brought the rifle with him. He carried it in a small bag, in pieces. He was recommended not only for his expertise, but also for his attention to detail. It was a certainty that many times he had put the weapon together in just a few seconds, each piece clicking neatly and swiftly into place. With only minutes remaining before the motorcade would enter the street below, he sent his new friend away. He said, “I know you are hungry. Go down and get something to eat. It’s okay, I’ll stay here.”
The Lacey Confession Page 2