Twenty-Seven Bones

by Jonathan Nasaw

By then Pender could sense he was losing his audience’s attention, so he closed with his customary pep talk. “Getting a serial killer off the streets is the most demanding and rewarding task in all of law enforcement. What we do here, how many hours we put in, how hard and how smart we work, how well and how quickly we do our job, will have a direct effect on how many people live and how many people die. Yeah, luck has a lot to do with it, but it’s always been my experience that the harder I work and the more prepared I am, the luckier I get.

  “I’m not asking you to neglect your families, mind you, and of course Chief Coffee will have the final say on overtime and payroll matters. All I’m asking is that you think of your husbands and wives and children as potential victims and let your conscience be your guide as to how many hours you put in.

  “And one more thing I want to stress to you: we may be looking for a monster, but the person we eventually catch won’t look like a monster. The Machete Man will look just like you or me. More like you, if he’s lucky,” Pender added, to polite—or were they impolite?—chuckles.

  “So don’t rule a suspect out just because you know them, even if you’ve known them your whole life. We’re looking at three dead so far, the victim pool is the entire population of St. Luke, plus tourists, and as far as you’re concerned, the Machete Man could be anybody you weren’t actually in bed with when a murder occurred. Any questions…? Nobody…? Okay, if any questions come up, technically my office doesn’t have a door, but if it did, it would always be open.”

  The stuffy room cleared quickly, except for Pender, Coffee, and a rookie cop Pender had taken note of earlier, as he embodied several departmental extremes. Vijay Winstone appeared to be the youngest person in the room; he was certainly the tallest and the darkest complected. His uniform looked to Pender as if it had been slept in, which proved to be the case. He explained that he’d had come off night shift at 8:00 A.M. and caught a quick nap in one of the holding cells before the meeting, and volunteered himself for a second shift—either he had taken Pender’s pep talk to heart or he was particularly eager to suck up some overtime.

  Pender turned to Julian. “Chief?”

  Julian turned to Winstone. “You on golden time yet?” Double pay.

  “No, sah—straight.” Time and a half.

  “I’ll authorize four hours, then I want you to get some sleep, me son—I’m going to need you to stake out a phone booth tonight.”

  That would be the phone booth outside the Bata supermarket that anchored the island’s largest strip mall, whose number had appeared several times on Tex Wanger’s July and August phone bills. And according to the printout from the St. Luke phone company, Tex had been called from the booth several times thereafter, always between 11:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M., up until the day he left Miami for St. Luke. Thanks to the news blackout, there was no reason to believe the killer would change his or her pattern; hence the stakeout.

  “Do you know your way around Sugar Town?” Pender asked the young officer, after Coffee left.

  “I bahn deh,” replied Vijay, a St. Luke native of mixed African/East Indian descent.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Bahn deh, I bahn deh.”

  “Oh, you were born there! Can you tell me how to get to…” Pender showed him the address he’d jotted down in his spiral-bound pocket notebook. “Washhouse Lane?”

  “I bettah take ya, sah—if ya cyan’ understand me, ya gahn ta need a translatah down deh.”

  2

  Lewis Apgard left the Great House late Wednesday morning feeling a little logy from the sleeping pills Vogler had prescribed. His first stop was the office of Apgard Realty, on the second floor of an eighteenth-century stucco building on Dansker Hill. A jewelry store featuring coral necklaces and duty-free timepieces rented the first floor from Lewis. His secretary Doris, an attractive distant relation from one of the darker branches of the family, was just updating the rent accounts when he arrived.

  “Good mornin’, Cousin Doe. Tell me a good word,” he said in dialect, walking around behind her and peering over her shoulder at the computer screen.

  “Good mornin’, Cousin Lewis. Only two delinquents dis mont’, two Corefolk,” she said, scrolling back up to the beginning of the file: Arena, Andrew; Bendt, Francis. The first was a surprise: as a full-time bartender at the King Christian, Arena was one of the more solvent denizens of the little village in the forest.

  The second was not. Fran Bendt was a freelance reporter for the Sentinel, whose career in the States had been derailed by a coke habit and a penchant for voyeurism, but whose nose for news was somehow still as sharp as ever. If he was short of funds, he might have some information or candid (extremely candid) photos to offer in lieu of rent. Lewis asked Doris to beep Bendt and set up a meeting at the Sunset Bar at Bendt’s earliest convenience, as long as his earliest convenience was no later than high noon.

  On St. Luke, high noon was high noon all year round—the island did not observe daylight savings time. The freelancer Bendt, an unprepossessing man with a scruffy beard that failed to hide a complexion moonscaped with adolescent acne scars, was sitting at the bar nursing a beer when Lewis arrived, wearing chinos, a short-sleeved white shirt, sandals, no socks.

  After Lewis had taken care of some business with Vincent, involving half an ounce of rain forest chronic (Hokey hadn’t said anything about giving up weed), he and Bendt walked fifty yards down the beach, the reporter carrying a beach umbrella and two plastic folding chairs.

  Bendt set up the umbrella and chairs. Lewis filled his corncob pipe with chronic, took a wasteful toke, more than his lungs could hold, then, wreathed in smoke, passed it over. “So what do you know that I don’t, chappie?” he said when he’d finished coughing.

  Bendt took a more circumspect hit and waited for it to dissipate entirely in his lungs before he spoke again. “I do have something for you, but you’re going to have to give me your word it doesn’t go any further. ’Cause it’s big, and it’s real tightly held—only about a dozen people know, and most of them are cops.”

  Lewis was impressed. “Word,” he said, and they dapped knuckles.

  “Okay, you remember that little girl that disappeared two years ago?”

  “The one whose body was found under the Judas Bag tree?”

  “Right. Well, you know she was murdered, right?”

  “No, I thought she cut off her own hand and buried herself for a gag.”

  “Very funny.” Bendt took another toke before handing the pipe back; again he held it in until his exhale was devoid of smoke. “Last Friday I’m monitoring the police band, I hear there’s something going on in the north end, by the cliffs. I get there, every cop on the island is climbing around the rocks. It turns out two bodies have washed up with the hurricane tide, one male, one female, and guess what body part both of them are missing?”

  “I’ll take a wild guess—a hand?”

  “Right hand. Same as the Jenkuns girl. Which means we have a serial killer on our little island. And according to Mr. Faartoft, he’s been asked not to print it—so much for the public’s right to know. Oh yeah, and they’re calling him the Machete Man.”

  Lewis suppressed a shudder: Queen Charlotte and Auntie Aggie used to frighten him with stories about the Machete Man. “Who else knows about this?”

  “Lemme see…Faartoft, the cops, the coroner, and of course us—you and me. But that’s not all. Did you see this morning’s paper?”

  “Not yet.”

  “There’s a picture on the front page—missing man from Florida.”

  “What’s the tie-in?”

  “He’s one of the victims who washed up last week. But all the story says is that police are looking into a disappearance, anybody who might have seen the guy please contact the SLPD, blah blah blah. Not exactly journalism at its finest. I’ve been thinking seriously about selling the story to one of the Virgin Islands papers, or the San Juan Star, so the news will filter back down here and people can start watching their
asses a little closer.”

  Lewis blew a smoke ring, watched the breeze coming off the sparkling sea tear it to rags, passed the pipe back to Bendt. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, chappie.”

  “Why not?”

  “Blow your job for one story? That’s the definition of killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”

  “Golden egg, my honky ass! That cheap sonofabitch Faartoft ain’t paying me in golden eggs.”

  “Think of the rest of us, then. You weren’t here for Blue Valley, you don’t know what can happen.”

  “You mean other than more people getting their hands cut off?”

  “I mean, news gets out that there’s a serial killer called the Machete Man active on St. Luke, you can kiss the cruise ships bye-bye. Then there’s a ripple effect. No cruises means no tourists, no tourists means restaurants start shutting down, people can’t pay their rent, which is bad for me, ad revenue in the Sentinel drops, which is bad for you….”

  “Okay, okay, I get it.” Bendt took a last hit, handed Lewis back his pipe. As Lewis rose to leave, though, Bendt gave him the wait-a-sec-I-just-thought-of-something-but-I-don’t-want-to-blow-the-toke wave. “Hey, I almost forgot.” He handed Lewis an envelope. “I snagged these a couple weeks ago, been saving ’em for you.”

  Lewis peeked into the envelope. The photos were of Holly Gold in the shower, shot from above, through the screen window of the building known to the Corefolk as the Crapaud.

  “What do you think?” asked Bendt.

  “I think we’re even-steven on the rent this month,” said Lewis with a grin.

  3

  Wednesday afternoon at the overseer’s house. Bennie was out shopping. Emily was online, confirming arrangements for their trip to Puerto Rico this coming weekend, for the annual meeting of the Caribbean chapter of the Association of Anthropologists and Archaeologists of the Americas. Phil was at the typewriter again.

  After logging off the computer, Emily lugged a footlocker over to the wall and climbed up on it. Phil heard her, turned, saw his wife from the nose up, peering over the wall. “Zeppo, you look like Kilroy-was-here,” he commented. Zep or Zeppo, short for Zeppelins, was one of Phil’s pet nicknames for his wife.

  “What are you writing about now?”

  “Dwayne.”

  “Ah, more smut.”

  “Don’t knock it,” said Phil, turning back to the typewriter.

  “I’m not—I can’t wait to read it. The last excerpt got me moist.”

  “Here, then.” He took the page he’d just finished out of the typewriter, bundled it with the rest of the chapter, and carried it across the room. “I warn you, though—if I hear that vibrator going, I’m coming in there.”

  “If you hear the vibrator,” said Emily as she reached over the wall to take the thin sheaf of paper, “I don’t need you.”

  Chapter V

  By this time it had become obvious to both P and E that the receptive, strictly opportunistic approach they had been using was simply not going to cut the mustard. They had continued to volunteer for night watches at the various hospices and nursing homes in the area, but now instead of waiting for the final breath, which was hard enough to predict, and hoping they were alone when it did arrive, which happened all too infrequently, if left alone with a patient in the so-called “active” stage of dying, they would help the process along.

  Eventually, however, they began to get the impression that concerns were starting to be raised about them at the institutions at which they were volunteering. They were left alone with a dying patient less often, and when they were, they often felt as if they were being watched.

  With the customary domains of the dying denied them, and serendipities like the homicidal prostitute or the dying medicine woman not likely to present themselves on a regular basis, the couple was in a quandary. But their problem, they came to understand, was rooted not in the suspicions of the small-minded guardians of the dying, but in their own minds. They had allowed themselves to become trapped by their Judeo-Christian cultural assumptions. The customs and superstitions of their own tribe, so to speak.

  So if it was acceptable to hasten the imminent, inevitable demises of the hospice and hospital patients, they began to ask themselves, why then was it unacceptable to hasten other demises which were equally inevitable, if not quite as imminent? And yes, that would encompass the entire human race.

  A daring proposition. Frightening to some, insane to others. But those others had never experienced what they had experienced. It was like the joke about the pope setting birth control policy: you no play-a da game, you no make-a da rules.

  So E turned the analytical laser of her brilliant scientific mind to the problem of how to attract, isolate, and overpower subjects. Although as stated previously, neither P nor E could be considered conventionally attractive, E did possess one particular set of female attributes which in the couple’s native culture were valued above all other female attributes: overdeveloped mammaries. Theirs was a breast-ridden society, if one may coin a phrase, and when it came to attracting male subjects and isolating them in conditions of absolute privacy, there was simply no better bait than E’s twin forty-fours. Overpowering the subject, of course, would be left to P.

  It should be noted that in these early days, the couple, still constrained to some extent by residuary Judeo-Christian ethics, agreed to confine themselves to subjects they found morally objectionable. Subjects whose hastened demise could do nothing but improve the DNA pool. Subjects like D.

  They met D in a working-class tavern in the same city where P had his apotheosis with the homicidal prostitute. They drove to the bar in separate cars. E, in extreme décolletage, played the scorned woman at one end of the bar. P, armed with a snub-nosed revolver, kept an eye on her from the other.

  E fed the jukebox. E muttered about the inconstancy of men in general and her husband in particular. D, a swarthy man in his midthirties who’d been ordering shots of cheap Scotch, beer back, all night, slid onto the stool next to her. E allowed him to buy her a drink. She danced with him. He pawed her drunkenly, mumbled filth into her ear. She feigned arousal. The seduction was accomplished with ridiculous ease. All three left the bar separately. E met D at her car and took him back to their house by a route circuitous enough to permit P to get there first.

  P hid himself in the bedroom closet. (B was off playing poker at an all-night card room.) The front door opened. He heard giggling, a slap. Footsteps stumbled up the stairs. The bedroom door opened. Peering through the keyhole, he watched E and D disrobe.

  E lay back upon the bed. D positioned himself between her legs. P waited for the signal: E was to bring the back of her hand to her brow. She did not signal. D entered her. She did not signal. D began thrusting brutally. She did not signal.

  It was clear that E was no longer feigning arousal. Her eyes closed, her wide aureolae puckered and pebbled, her nipples hardened to thimbles. She did not signal. Her knees rose higher. Her heels drummed a tattoo against D’s clenched buttocks. D spewed filth: fuckmeyoucuntfuckmeyoucunt. E commenced her orgasmic moan and locked her legs around the small of his back as she came. D continued to thrust and swear. She tightened her legs around him. He swore, he thrust. She signaled.

  The closet was only a few feet from the side of the bed. P waited until D’s head was turned away, then emerged from the closet, revolver in hand. E’s eyes were glazed. The back of her hand still rested against her brow. P raised the revolver, brought the butt down against D’s occiput so forcefully that one of the plastic grips broke off the handle.

  D slumped across E. She rolled out from under him. P rolled him over. He had either been feigning unconsciousness, or recovered quickly. He grabbed the gun by the barrel. As the two men grappled, E, thinking quickly, seized D’s scrotum and squeezed. He shrieked. P wrested the gun back, cocked the hammer. D curled up like a pinch bug, holding his privates and whimpering.

  P was by then enormously aroused, as much by the fight as by
the previous voyeurism. He had never felt so savage, so animalistic, so primitive. He told E he wanted to do to D what D had done to her. She was surprised, as he’d never shown bisexual inclinations before, not even when he and B had sex with her simultaneously.

  But she was also aroused. They stuffed one of E’s stockings into his mouth. They rolled him over onto his stomach, tied his hands to the headboard with a rope, then tied one end of another rope to one of his ankles and looped it under the bed and around to the other ankle, securing his legs in a spread-eagled position.

  P didn’t bother to disrobe. He just pulled down his pants, then started to pull them back up when he had finished. E stopped him, told him it was her turn, and positioned herself atop D, straddling him with her thighs. Her husband positioned himself atop her—an E sandwich—and entered her from behind. They climaxed together. All that remained now was the dying, and the dying breath….

  Once again, Emily finished reading with one hand pressed between her legs. She put the manuscript down, reached into her bedside drawer, took out her lipstick-sized vibrator. She heard a chair scraping the floor in the next room; out of the corner of her eye she saw Phil peering over the wall.

  “Oh, oh,” she said in a breathy falsetto. “I think I’ll masturbate now, with my nightgown pulled up to expose my overdeveloped female attributes. I do hope no one is watching.”

  4

  Sugar Town. Dirt streets and porticoed wooden sidewalks. Women balancing bundles of laundry on their heads on their way to the washhouse, loafers drinking rum on the bench under a Ginger Thomas tree, old men slapping dominoes down on the wooden tables in front of the bars on Wharf Street. Yellow dogs lolling in the yellow dirt, oblivious to the scruffy chickens crossing the road to get to the other side. Young men selling conch out of the back of old pickup trucks, women in bright headkerchiefs peddling eggs, or limes from the public grove.