Twenty-Seven Bones

by Jonathan Nasaw

  The island of St. Luke is shaped like the drumstick of a turkey, with a neat round bite known as Frederikshavn Harbor (a redundancy: havn means harbor in Danish) taken out of the southwestern edge of the meat end.

  The higher the city of Frederikshavn rises from the harbor, the more expensive the dwellings. At sea level, in the quarter known as Sugar Town, the houses are mostly shanties constructed of tin and unmatched lumber, roofed with sheets of corrugated green plastic. Above Sugar Town rises Dansker Hill, where the buildings are Danish colonial style, their tiled rooftops hanging out over the porticoed sidewalks, and their thick masonry walls arched, colonnaded, covered with lime-and-molasses stucco, and painted pastel pinks and blues and yellows. Above Dansker Hill, on the ridgetop to the east of town, safe from even the highest of hurricane tides, tastefully modern castles with cantilevered walls of timber and tinted glass look out over the harbor.

  Holly herself lived eight miles to the east of Frederikshavn, in a little village known as the Core, tucked into a fold of the rain forest ridge. (Everybody called it the rain forest—technically it was a secondary dry tropical, as the island received less than fifty inches of rain per annum.)

  Monday morning, as she did every weekday when school was in session, Holly drove the kids into town in her late sister’s old VW bus, a classic hippie ride, with psychedelic daisies painted on the side, and dropped them off at Apgard Elementary School, at the foot of Dansker Hill. She then wrestled the balky clutch into first gear and held on to the juddering wheel for dear life as the bus buckety-bucketed past the old Danish quarter up to the ridgetop where the real money lived.

  There was a new man standing guard at the entrance to the gated community. He eyed the psychedelic bus dubiously, then broke into a grin when he peered in and saw the driver. “Miss Holly!”

  “Oh, hi there.” She recognized him now. He was a customer, but not quite a regular, at Busy Hands, where she still worked two nights a week. He was a down-islander, but she couldn’t remember his name, or which island he came from. “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on. It’s been a while.”

  “Been savin’ up for a nex’ visit.” The grin widened as he waved her through. He had good teeth, strong and white—whichever island he was from, they didn’t grow sugarcane there.

  Holly’s first appointment every Monday was a wealthy, forty-five-year-old hemiplegic named Helen Chapman, who received a full-body, deep-tissue massage with special attention to her stroke-devastated left side. This was the kind of job Holly, a certified, Esalen-trained massage therapist, had had in mind when she chose her career. She set up her table in the solarium, and with a Steven Halpern/Georgia Kelly CD playing softly in the background, worked with a deft, sure touch for over an hour, kneading and stroking to bring blood to wasted muscles, until even the dystonal flesh was suffused with a healthy pink glow.

  The rest of the morning was blank on Holly’s schedule. After dropping off her dirty laundry at the washhouse in Sugar Town (where it would be washed, dried, fluffed, and folded by down-island women for no more than it would cost her to do it herself), Holly stopped by the Sunset, an open-air bar just outside of town. There Vincent, the bartender and proprietor, not only made what was reputedly the tastiest, most lethal Bloody Mary on the island (Holly wouldn’t know: she didn’t drink), but also sold the finest weed (her only vice) at reasonable, or at least nonruinous, prices.

  The circular bar in the middle of the raised cement dance floor was shaded by a round tin roof. Holly sat down facing the ocean. “What’s new and good, Vincent?”

  The Trinidadian leaned over the bar and beckoned her closer. “High-altitude, sout’-slope, two-toke rain forest chronic. Local grown, shade-dried, mellow as mudder’s milk, fifty an eight’.”

  “What’s old and cheap?”

  “Dirty Colombian for twenty-five. But I’ll make ya a deal—you work dis damn kink out of me neck, I’ll sell ya de chronic, same price.”

  “Take your shirt off,” said Holly. “And no extras.”

  3

  “Back in the day—waaay back in the day—when I was a sheriff’s deputy in upstate New York, my boss used to boast that there was no murder he couldn’t solve.”

  At the lectern, Special Agent E. L. Pender, FBI, Ret., paused dramatically; the red- and blue-shirted students waited with their pens poised.

  “What he’d do, he told me, he’d take the first person to find the body and the last one to see the vic alive, then beat the crap out of both of ’em until one of ’em confessed.”

  Muted consternation in the auditorium. The red shirts were the best and brightest of the nation’s law enforcement officers, attending the FBI’s eleven-week National Academy training course at Quantico; the blue shirts were FBI trainees.

  “Right,” said Pender. “Judging from your response, I can see I don’t have to tell you that those days are gone. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m just saying it’s over. And that is why I’m in front of you today to spread the gospel of the affective interview.

  “As you already know, when two interrogators team up for good cop, bad cop, it’s almost always good cop who ends up inside the interrogation room taking the confession, if any, while bad cop watches through the one-way glass. What you may not know, however, is that unless bad cop has the freedom to ratchet up to a realistic threat level, the game isn’t worth the candle.

  “For every perp who comes clean, you’ll get five who either clam up or lawyer up or have their confessions thrown out on the grounds of coercion—and that’s not even taking into account witnesses slash suspects who turn out to be innocent, but have information of probative value that they’re not going to share with an interrogator who’s been threatening or frightening them, or who reminds them even subconsciously of the schoolyard bully who terrorized them when they were itty-bitty citizens.

  “And to anticipate your next question: what if the person you’re interviewing is the schoolyard bully. Won’t he be more likely to respond to a show of toughness and a threat of force?

  “The answer, surprisingly, is no. Why? Because as any psychiatrist will tell you, it is a fact of life, a psychological home truth, that every human being from Mother Teresa to Jack the Ripper operates from the same basic needs, using the same basic defenses, and accessing the same basic pool of emotions as every other human being. Deep down below the surface, we all want to be safe, we all want to be loved, and we all want to be respected.

  “The affective interview takes all that into account, recognizes the basic emotional needs and the feelings of the interviewee, and makes use of them in order to extract what should, and I emphasize should, be the goal of every interview a law enforcement officer ever conducts: the truth. You’re not in that room to get a confession or to corroborate a theory, you’re there to elicit truthful information.

  “Now we have a lot of ground to cover this morning. Before break I hope to get through the basics of proxemics, kinesics, and paralinguistics, and if there’s time we’re going to break into small groups for role-playing. Any questions before we get started?”

  “Yeah.” Red shirt slouched in the fourth row of the auditorium, cowboy boots sticking out diagonally into the aisle. “You sayin’ if I want to get the truth out of some child rapist, I have to respect him going in?”

  Pender stepped out from behind the lectern. “You questioning my expertise, you shit-for-brains, redneck peckerwood?”

  The man was already on his feet—the only question was which way he was going to go, out the door or straight for Pender.

  Pender stepped back and held up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “Just making a point. What’s your name, man?”

  “Bafferd.”

  “See—I treat you with disrespect, I can’t get so much as a first name out of you.”

  “It’s Ray.” Bafferd sat back down—there were a few chuckles around the room, but none from anyone within arm’s reach of the man. />
  “The answer to your question, Ray, is that it wouldn’t hurt. But at the very least, you have to recognize that he has the same need for respect that you do, and if you doubt it, just ask yourself how likely you’d have been to cooperate with me thirty seconds ago, when I disrespected you.

  “Any other questions? Okay, let’s get started. Proxemics, the science of spatial psychology. Most people brought up in our culture consider eighteen inches the optimum distance for intimate conversations. Casual but friendly conversation: eighteen to forty-eight inches. Anything beyond four feet is impersonal, anything beyond six feet is public. So unless you’re dealing with somebody from another continent, which we’ll get to later, here’s how you want to set up your interview space….”

  4

  “Lewis, we have to talk.”

  Oh gawd. The last words any married man wants to hear. Even if he’s not hungover. Which Lewis Apgard was. Frightfully. On rum. White, hundred-and-fifty proof St. Luke Reserve. Lewis opened his eyes. The effort was excruciating. They say white men shouldn’t drink white rum. They could be right.

  “How much do you remember from last night, Lew?”

  Oh gawd again. Apparently there was going to be a formal recital of Letterman’s top ten list of phrases no married man wants to hear. Lewis glanced warily around the master bedroom of the late-eighteenth-century mansion known as the Apgard Great House, looking for clues. “Not much,” he had to admit.

  The better half emerged from the bathroom, wearing one of her golf outfits—tartan shorts, sleeveless white jersey. Her full name was Lindsay Hokansson Apgard—two surnames to reckon with on St. Luke—but everybody including the servants called her Hokey. Childless, slender, a strong swimmer, a good rider, and a scratch golfer, she looked both older and younger than her age, which was thirty-three, same as her husband. Older because the tropics wreak havoc on the Scandinavian complexion; younger because she still retained the facial mannerisms of the spoiled little rich girl—on this occasion, the proactive pout. “I didn’t think so.”

  Suddenly Lewis had to piss. He pulled back the covers, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and brushed past her on his way into the bathroom, not even trying to hide his morning hard-on.

  “Well? You gonna tell me or what?” he called over the sound of his stream hitting the water. Even with his hangover, it was a noisy, satisfying, damn-near-glorious piss—and the way his marriage was going, probably the most rewarding thing he’d be doing with his dick all day.

  “I’ll wait.”

  He finished, shook off, flushed, returned to the bedroom. She was sitting at her vanity, brushing her whitish blond hair with short, angry strokes. Her back was turned, but she could see him in the mirror. “Put some pants on,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m not having this conversation with your thing swinging in the breeze.”

  Now it’s my thing, thought Lewis, pulling on yesterday’s briefs, which were on the floor not far from the hamper. She used to call it Clark, as in Lewis and Clark, because in the early days of their marriage she rarely saw the one without the other. “That better?”

  Primly: “Yes. Thank you.”

  He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. “Look, whatever I did last night, I’m—”

  She cut him off. “Not this time, Lew. I’ve had enough. It’s over. I want a—”

  “Hokey, please.” His turn to cut her off, before she could get the D-word out. “Whatever happened last night, I give you my word, I—”

  “How can you promise if you don’t even know—”

  “How can I know if you won’t—”

  “Fine an’ dandy, me son, I’ll tell you.” Hokey stood up, tossed the brush onto the vanity, loomed over him (she was two inches taller even when he was standing) with her hands on her slender hips. “You reeled in dead drunk last night, you harangued me about selling the land near the airport again, when I refused you tried to hit me, but you were too drunk to land a blow, then you went all maudlin, falling all over yourself apologizing, then you got angry again and tried to force yourself on me, but you were so drunk you passed out on top of me.”

  Lewis groaned, and ran his hands through his thick, golden blond hair. It was coming back to him now—not last night with Hokey, but yesterday afternoon, closeted in his study, poring over financial statements, phone calls with his accountant, his business manager, his broker, his lawyer. Had there ever been a man so unlucky in his investments? First the tech bubble bursting, then the post-9/11 crash, then the Enron debacle.

  His portfolio had been decimated, his sheep, his cattle, and his cane scarcely paid for themselves, and although by island standards he was still a rich man, and a powerful one, most of his remaining assets consisted of real estate, and he couldn’t sell any of it, including the most valuable property, the sixty acres of mahogany forest bordering the St. Luke airport, unless Hokey agreed.

  So divorce was out of the question, at least until he’d solved his cash flow problems. Which he could do only by clear-cutting the mahogany at the edge of the airport, the lumber in itself worth millions, then selling the property to the St. Luke Improvement Corp., of which he was a charter investor. SLIC would level the hill and extend the airport runways until they were long enough to land jumbo jets. Then Lewis could sit back and watch all the real estate on the island, in addition to his shares of SLIC, double or triple in value.

  Of course there was another possibility, one that Lewis had been thinking about—obsessing about—with increasing frequency over the last few months, as he had watched what remained of his portfolio (energy: what could be safer than energy?) swirling down the crapper, and argued fruitlessly with Hokey about the airport property. If the marriage ended with a divorce, he would be ruined; if it ended with Hokey’s death, he would be a wealthy man again.

  But in the meantime, humble pie. Lewis lowered his head, buried his face in his hands. When he looked up again, his turquoise blue eyes were swimming with tears. “I love you,” he said in a choked voice. “I’ll do anything you ask if you’ll give me another chance.”

  Hokey sat down next to him at the foot of the bed, a Danish West Indian satinwood four-poster with a hand-carved headboard and hand-turned spindles. “You’ll lay off the rum?”

  “I’d have done that anyway.”

  “By rum, I mean—”

  “I know: the wagon.”

  “And you’ll start seeing someone?”

  “I hear this new guy, Vogler, is pretty good—I’ll give him a call this afternoon.”

  “And you understand this is the last chance?”

  “If I blow it, which as God is my witness I won’t, I’ll give you that divorce, uncontested.”

  “If you blow it this time, me son,” said Hokey, “it won’t matter whether you contest it or not.”

  5

  Extras were the bane of the masseuse’s profession. They’d never been an issue before for Holly—certainly nobody ever asked her for a happy ending at Esalen—but within three months of moving down to St. Luke to care for her dying sister, with both their meager savings depleted, the only masseuse job Holly had been able to find on the island was at Busy Hands. It was a legitimate enough operation for a massage parlor—not a whorehouse by any means—but extras, Holly soon learned, were the difference between big tips and no tips, repeat clients and no clients: in short, between earning a living and not earning a living.

  Oddly enough, however, after a few weeks Holly (though she’d have been happy to put the Busy Hands and the world of extras behind her, and had already begun networking her tail off to build a legitimate client base), found she didn’t really mind providing happy endings for her clients, despite her sexual orientation, which did not run to that half of the population possessing dicks.

  For one thing, she was in charge—if the men didn’t keep their hands to themselves, they were out on their behinds. For another, Holly had always thought it was a little strange to spend hours in intimate contact with a human body, oil
ing, rubbing, kneading, stretching, and pounding every part of it—every part, save one. When you make something taboo, it seemed to her, you only invested it with more power—as if most men didn’t already think the world revolved around their dicks.

  And lastly, Holly thought secretly that penises, in the proper context, were kind of appealing. Hard, they were like cute little bald orphans; soft, they were baby birds in the nest, it seemed to Holly, hungry for attention and ever so grateful.

  Still, Holly had her limits, which were breached that afternoon, in the massage room at Blue Valley Country Club, where she worked three afternoons a week massaging the sore muscles of rich white golfers exhausted from climbing in and out of their carts for two and a half hours. And while extras weren’t in quite as much demand at Blue Valley as at the Busy Hands, occasionally one of her clients would ask her for a happy ending—generally it didn’t take very long.

  This afternoon’s second and final client was the guest of a member, younger than most of her Blue Valley clientele, but in lamentable physical condition. His muscles were poorly toned, and sheathed in fat—if ever a body needed a good therapeutic massage, this one did. But Holly had scarcely started working on his shoulders when he rolled over and pointed to his crotch, where his arousal had made a pup tent of the white terry-cloth towel with the blue stripe and BV logo.

  “Honey, could you take care of that first? I’m down here on business, I haven’t gotten laid in a week.”

  Well, thought Holly. Well, well, well, well, well. Then she thought about the rent, due tomorrow, and the new clutch the bus was going to need any day now, and the money she’d just blown on rain forest chronic, and she reached under the towel and went to work.

  After a few minutes of stroking, though, he interrupted her again. “Hey, honey, this ain’t getting it. I’ll give you an extra Jackson if you put that pretty mouth to work.”