Black Rain Falling

by Jacob Ross

  ‘Nuh!’

  That was Chilman.

  ‘With all due respect, Edward, er, Mister Commissioner, I recalling right now the Dillon Case last year. Yankee coast guard catch the fella who was a national of Camaho. They disregard the fact that we forewarn them that the fella coming. They seize all the money and the drugs – and I got my suspicions what they done with it – and take all the credit for demselves. They never mention Camaho. All I saw was eight whitefellas on the cover of a Florida magazine posing as if dem is Tarzan’ children who just grab some sweeties from the apes. We not no addition to American police. We not suckin on nobody nipple. And we not addressing the problem facing us. Is we, Camaho Police, that got to show drugs people that we kin stop them. Is we to show them that if they tangle with us, we tangle right back with their arse too. And we tangle hard!’

  ‘How we s’pose to do that?’ Malan wanted to know.

  ‘You mean how you show them that you not only a man with woman – that’s what you asking?’

  ‘That was ah insult! Not no answer to my question,’ Malan grated. ‘Answer my question.’

  ‘I apologise.’ Chilman smiled without a hint of regret. ‘The answer is, we use the assets that we born with. Before boats and guns, we had brains! We still have brains.’

  The Commissioner shifted in his seat. ‘There is an agreement between the islands and the Americans. We can’t ignore it. The Minister of Justice will expect to know this time.’ He threw me a deliberate look. ‘It is also his business.’

  ‘Nuh!’ Chilman said again.

  The Commissioner stood up. ‘DS Chilman, can we have a word?’

  They walked out to the middle of the concrete courtyard. No sharp gestures, no agitated lips, just two ole fellas quietly exchanging words.

  ‘The MJ going to know,’ Malan said.

  ‘Who will tell him? You?’ Pet said.

  ‘Nuh. But he going to know.’

  ‘I sure people going to tell im.’ Miss Stanislaus did not even look at Malan.

  Malan opened his palms. ‘Why everybody shootin at me? What de hell y’all take me for!’

  ‘You really don want to know,’ Pet said.

  Chilman walked back in. The Commissioner addressed us at the door. ‘That’s it then, folks. I think we’ve covered it. Like you see, I’ve only dropped in. I’ve been open to the advice of officers on the ground. And given the informality of the advice,’ he gestured at his clothes, ‘it’s not going to be recorded.’ He turned his gaze on Pet.

  ‘Deleted,’ Pet muttered without looking up.

  Trickster, I thought. He not going to no beach. I couldn’t help shaking my head at him, and I was sure the geezer threw me a wink.

  ‘This is what I told DS Chilman,’ he said. ‘He is risking this unit again by insisting that you handle it yourself without the resources available to the government. If it’s a success, you’ll have strengthened your hand and more than justified your usefulness. If it’s not, well, let’s hope it works. Mister Michael, can I have a small tête-à-tête with you?’

  I walked out into the yard with him. ‘Is Mister Digson, Sir. Nobody calls me Mister Michael. It sounds ugly.’

  ‘You fret exactly like your sister, Lucia, Mister Michael. As far as I see, it’s all guesswork.’

  ‘Is all we have to go by, Sir.’

  ‘Not a lot then.’

  52

  I swung through Dessie’s gates, stopped the car and checked myself in the rear-view mirror. I’d chosen a dazzling white shirt – the two topmost buttons unhitched – which Dessie herself had selected. A pair of carefully pressed trousers.

  Theirs was one of those old colonial houses, all wood with gables and awnings, a latticework veranda and folding doors. It was built for light and air with a sloping downhill lawn, shaded in places by hybrid mango, dwarf coconuts, damsons and red-plum trees.

  Mrs Shona Manille met me on the step, her cotton-white hair swept up in a mound – the kind of middle-aged person you saw in glossy magazines.

  ‘Michael?’ she said. ‘We met before. You’re cuter than Dessie says. Can I offer you a drink?’

  I stepped into a wide hall with polished wooden floors. A table laid out with a regiment of twinkling cutlery on either side of plates.

  Raymond Manille, the father – a tall, spare man, brown like my father, the Commissioner. Grey-green eyes with not-quite-European hair that had probably been trained to a passable straightness by a lifetime of aggressive cajoling.

  ‘Michael Digson?’ He extended a hand as if I’d just entered a meeting. Unsettling eyes on my face, like he was examining every pore. ‘Nice of you to come.’

  Dessie came down the stairs, said a shy, ‘Hi’, and placed herself beside her mother. I was clearly on my own.

  Raymond Manille gestured at a chair. I sat facing Dessie. She could barely look at me.

  Mrs Manille fanned herself, deplored the weather and asked me about my work.

  Raymond Manille enquired about my education, didn’t wait for an answer but raised his head and said, ‘Mildred?’

  An aproned woman came out from the back with a food tray on wheels and served us soup.

  Raymond Manille gestured at the table. ‘Go ahead, Mister Digson.’

  It was a test, of course. I was good at tests. I prepared for them, had in fact just rehearsed the basics on my way up in my car.

  The order of the cutlery should mirror the order of the courses. Start at the outer edge. Move in towards the plate. Exceptions: you can put a butter knife on the bread plate and dessert cutlery above the plate but parallel to the table edge.

  Nice food, though – pumpkin and sweet potatoes, from their own estate somewhere inland and whipped to an impossible smoothness. Ground provisions that tasted familiar but looked foreign as they were cut in decorative slices. Fish, boned and marinated. Salad that sat like a bouquet in a polished wooden bowl.

  Mister Raymond asked me about my job again. ‘Crime detection,’ I said. ‘I’ve been doing for two years.’

  ‘Dessie said you specialised in England? Wasn’t it quite involved?’ Mrs Shona Manille brought her beautiful hands before her face, steepled her fingers in a prayer shape. Her chin dipped slightly, followed by a slow wink.

  I laid my cutlery to rest, patted my lips with the napkin and offered Mister Raymond Manille a minor disquisition on the intricacies of forensic pathology, thanatology and the critical breakthroughs that forensic osteology afforded people in my humble profession.

  ‘But you don’t have a degree,’ he said.

  ‘That’s true, Sir. Not yet. But I’m good at my job and I speak English as well as anybody on this island – if that’s any sort of parameter to judge a person by.’ I raised my head at him. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Sir. I came here for lunch?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re right. Dessima is my daughter. Maybe I’m a little protective.’

  Mrs Manille steered us through the rest of the meal with a series of chirpy observations and exclamations about gardening in the tropics and climate change.

  Through all of it, I felt Raymond Manille’s eyes on me.

  He invited me to follow him out into the front garden, pointed out the cattleya orchids and butterfly jasmines that took up so much of Shona’s time.

  ‘Digson – haven’t heard the name before. Are you related to the Dobsons, the ones on Morne Bijoux? Dessie told you she was married to Luther Caine who used to manage Camaho Co-op? He’s got a good business fixing boats now. We all regret it didn’t work out.’

  ‘And by that you mean he was the kinda fella who nearly killed her twice, right? Sorry, Sir, I been listening to you trying to make me feel as if I chasing after your daughter and your money. I don’t know what impression Dessie gave you, but I got my own place and I know where I’m heading. If Dessie can’t find the guts to make her own decisions, then putting me through this is a waste of my time and yours because I’m not going to be with any woman whose parents want to run my life
and hers. I thankful for the invitation. But I decide I have to go.’

  Shona Manille intercepted me by my car. ‘Mister Digson, he’s like that with everybody. With Luther too, first time.’

  ‘Then he got to learn to improve his manners, not so? Because I not taking that from him. As for family name, last time I checked, we all arrived here on a boat, and that trip wasn’t first class.’

  I rounded on Dessie who’d come out after me. ‘And what happened to you at the table? Cat eat your tongue? You dunno how to stand up for your man?’

  Mrs Manille excused herself and floated into the house. She was in there for a while. Then she sang out Dessie’s name.

  ‘Wait a minute, Digger. Please?’

  They were in there for a while. Dessie came out, a small indecipherable smile on her lips. ‘He’s going out in a minute. Golf course. Mom asks you to stay.’

  Raymond Manille walked out in shorts, polo shirt and sandals. He aimed his keys at his Hyundai. The vehicle made a startled sound. He threw me a tight smile, dropped himself in his seat and rolled off.

  ‘He told Mom he doesn’t think he likes you but you have balls.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I could’ve told him that. All he had to do was ask me.’

  ‘You could’ve, but you didn’t,’ I said. ‘Dessie, I got to go. I need to meet somebody.’

  Lunch with Raymond Manille, the conversation between us, brought my father, the Commissioner, to mind: my history with him, his ‘outside’ child, or rather the absence of a history.

  The rumour had reached him that Dessie and I were ‘meeting’. And again the same old story from the Commissioner: if they knew I was his son, it would help.

  ‘Help with what?’ I had asked when he called. ‘I carry the name of the woman who catch her arse to bring me up. No late-hour endorsement going to change that. They take me as I am, or to hell with them.’

  After leaving Dessie’s place, I phoned Miss Blackwood. Would she meet me for a drink? She was hesitant about the venue I suggested.

  ‘Too low class for you?’ I said.

  ‘Is not where I normally drink or eat. How about Saint Eloi – near my area? This evening?’

  We went north to Saint Eloi, a small restaurant that looked straight out to Salt Point and the international airport. We were surrounded by Camaho’s middle-aged, middle-class women – silver-permed with pleasant placeless accents. We talked over a plate of roasted aubergines and courgettes, frittered bananas and breadfruit.

  ‘You cook?’ she asked.

  ‘People like my cooking.’

  ‘And who’s people?’

  ‘The ones I cook for. How’s the golf course?’

  ‘I’m back in my place – I decided I’m not running from nobody. How’s the investigation going?’

  ‘Shadowman killed Jana Ray. I went after him once. He got away. He won’t get away next time.’

  ‘You don’t look like that kind of policeman.’

  ‘How’s a policeman s’posed to look?’

  She eased back in her chair. ‘I would kill him myself if I had the chance.’ Miss Blackwood adjusted her napkin on her lap. ‘I was married ten years. My husband walked off one Sunday. Last thing he told me was, I was cold. I used to overhear my staff saying the same thing. It was true. And then Jana Ray turned up in my veranda, offering to sell me marijuana oil. It was a cure for everything, he said. I told him I wasn’t sick and I wasn’t planning to get sick. And then he said “please” and I realised how desperate he was. He kept on coming and then, yunno, love happen. With him—’

  ‘You wasn cold, I know. Something I want you to do for me, Miss Blackwood. You got friends in the other banks?’

  ‘Depends on the bank.’

  ‘Camaho Co-op? Not the manager. I thinking somebody at your level.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ She’d gone wary, almost suspicious.

  ‘Is connected to Jana Ray’s death. You know Dora Wilkinson – Lazar Wilkinson’s mother. Twenty-two thousand dollars was put into her account a coupla weeks ago. I want to confirm where it came from. I got another coupla accounts I want to get at.’ I tore a leaf from my notepad, wrote the names and pushed it towards her. ‘You know anybody in there who can do that for you, apart from the manager?’

  ‘You can’t go direct?’ She looked worried.

  ‘I already went direct.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I asking you to do it for me. Please! If not for me, then for Jana Ray. You want another drink?’

  She nodded and slipped the note in her purse.

  Around noon the next day, a neatly dressed young woman tapped on the office door and asked for Mister Michael Digson. I remembered the face – one of the tellers at Miss Blackwood’s bank. She handed me a sealed envelope, turned promptly on her heels and walked back to the road.

  Three typewritten lines:

  Payment by LC Enterprise

  (Acc. no 105236) $22000.00

  To payee, D. Wilkinson.

  I messaged Blackwood. Recvd thnx. Who manages Acc?

  An hour later she responded: Manager.

  53

  There were two boat-fixing businesses on the island. Blue Dolphin was owned by a whitefella in Easterhall. A pleasant Camaho voice informed me that Blue Dolphin was closed for the time being because, two months ago, Missa Dudley’s heart attacked him and he was still in England receiving treatment. The other was LC Enterprise, owned and run by Luther Caine.

  The social calendar of Camaho’s middle class had been fixed since before the English declared the island profitless and abandoned it: business on weekdays, cocktail parties on Fridays, tennis or golf on Saturdays, buffet on Sundays with the occasional dip in the sea in-between.

  I’d been picking at an idea from the time I returned from questioning Mibo on Kara Island. Besides, it was Friday, I was home alone but had no desire to see Dessie anytime soon. In fact, I was more upset with her than I was with her father.

  I phoned Miss Stanislaus. ‘You want to be my woman for the weekend?’

  ‘Nuh.’

  ‘Only for tonight, then.’

  ‘Missa Digger! What got into you?’

  ‘I serious. Cocktail party. Residence of Luther Caine. Former manager of Camaho Co-op bank. I want you to wear me on your arm this evening.’

  I crossed my legs, laid back and waited through her silence.

  ‘Missa Digger, I not sure I up for that.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll take somebody else with me. I was offering you first choice. That’s all.’

  I rang off, checked my watch. Five minutes later, the handset buzzed. I let it vibrate a couple of times, then picked up. ‘Oh, Miss Stanislaus! Long time no speak. How you?’

  ‘Missa Digger, you too stupid! Is cocktail party you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, I got to dress-up like how cocktail-people dress?’

  ‘I don’t mind a lil extra touch from you.’

  ‘You not goin be wearin dat ugly belt ov yours? Else I not coming.’

  ‘So that’s a “yes”?’

  ‘The belt, Missa Digger.’

  ‘I’ll leave the belt. You coming?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  I left home at 6.30, waited seven minutes at Miss Stanislaus’s gate before she appeared.

  She’d pulled up her hair in a mound above her head, exposing a forehead and face I had never seen that way before. A gown – dark blue with silver trimmings – flowed from rounded, full-fleshed shoulders. Silver shoes.

  ‘That you?’ I said. ‘Where’s Daphne?’

  ‘She with Miss Iona.’ Miss Stanislaus eased into the car.

  ‘What’s the perfume?’

  ‘Is my bizness, Missa Digger.’

  ‘Never heard that brand name before. But it’s nice all the same – real nice!’

  She gave me a quick once-over. ‘You awright too. In fact, a lil more dan awright. Missa Digger, shall we persevere?’

  ‘Persevere we shall, Miss Stanislaus. But I, DC Digson,
taking my time persevering tonight.’

  Luther Caine’s house roosted on the summit of Lavender Hill, which overlooked San Andrews. Late Friday evening, the ocean lay still and wide in the near distance like a giant amber lake. Flamboyant trees dotted the lawn around the house, their branches spread like over-sized umbrellas, a carpet of deep red petals bloodying the lawn. A row of stunted palms crested the sweeping downhill flow of Julie and Ceylon mango trees. And I thought to myself if skiing lessons could pay for all this, I was definitely in the wrong job.

  We walked into women’s laughter, the muted roar of men in chesty conversation, the smell of roasted meat, the prattle and clink of silverware and cutlery.

  In the far corner of the big living room, I spotted Passiflores Arielle, Luther Caine’s personal assistant when he used to manage the bank. Passiflores – a darker-skinned version of Dessie – was in conversation with a bevy of light-skinned girls, her lovely arms making delicate shapes in front of her. She spotted me and froze, recovered almost instantly, except now, those night-dark eyes kept switching in my direction. Other heads turned with what looked like alarmed curiosity.

  I dropped an arm across Miss Stanislaus’s shoulders, her skin cool as spring water under my hand. We stood at the doorway for a while, taking in the high ceiling, the thick beige curtains running down the sides of tall glass windows.

  Somebody had to make the first move. Luther Caine did. Fair-skinned, grey-green eyes, all teeth – a Caucasoid Negro. Light-blue linen jacket. Matching raw silk trousers holding their own against the movements of his big body. He took Miss Stanislaus’s hand and bowed and I noticed the welts at his wrist were fading but still there. Miss Stanislaus curtsied slightly, held Luther’s gaze and radiated.

  ‘Mister Digson,’ he said. ‘Who’s the belle?’

  ‘My partner.’ I smiled at Miss Stanislaus, deepened my voice Schwarzenegger-style. ‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’

  That made him laugh – a short, sharp burst – then his face resettled and he was all cool-eyed again. ‘You’re welcome, of course, but you don’t mind me asking who—’