Twenty-Seven Bones (5 page)

Some wit had once described Washington, DC, as a city of northern charm and southern efficiency. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, thought Pender, this was largely true of Miami as well.

The taxi dropped him off at a whitewashed bungalow in a neighborhood that looked as if it had seen better days. As have I, Pender mused as he shambled up the walkway in his garish Hawaiian shirt and gaudy white Panama—as have I.

The woman who answered the door looked to be in her mid-sixties, but lean and tan, dried as jerky. The vee of skin at her neck was creped, but her face was eerily unlined and immobile. Botox, thought Pender, and plenty of it.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Wanger?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Ed Pender, I’m with the FBI, I need to ask you a few questions about the missing persons report you filed recently with the Miami PD. May I come in?”

She looked up—and up; she was a tiny thing. “Do you have some identification?”

Pender still carried his old Department of Justice shield in his wallet, next to his driver’s license. Couldn’t hurt, he figured, and it might even save him a speeding ticket someday. He tinned her; she stepped aside and ushered him into a tiny, foyerless, and blessedly air-conditioned living room.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” she asked him. “How about a nice cold glass of lemonade?”

“Sounds great.”

Alone in the living room, Pender took the opportunity to look around. Spotless white carpet, two small sofas facing each other across a driftwood coffee table. The armchair at the head of the grouping almost certainly belonged to the master of the house, whose picture—broad-faced man in a white cowboy hat—was featured prominently on the mantel and the coffee table.

When Mrs. Wanger returned, Pender was still standing. “After you,” he said, as if he were the type of gentleman who could never sit in the presence of a standing lady. Not true—he just needed to see where she was going to light first, so he could set up his interview space accordingly. As he could have predicted, she sat on one of the sofas; he took the armchair so as to be at the optimum interviewing angle of forty-five degrees.

Pender balanced his hat on the arm of the chair and took a sip of his lemonade, which looked delicious—tall, frosty glass, sprig of mint—but tasted like heavily sweetened fusel oil. Some powdered mix: no doubt the only lemon involved in the manufacture of this beverage was the painted one on the label. He smacked his lips and forced a smile. “Just like Grandma used to make,” he said.

“How very awful for Grandpa,” she replied drily.

Sharper than she looks, thought Pender. “I guess my first question is, do you have any idea where your husband might have gone?”

“As I told the officer who took the missing persons report, treasure hunting is Tex’s hobby. Since he retired, it’s become more like an obsession. This trip was different, though. He was very secretive about the destination—said he was
sworn
to secrecy. Wouldn’t even give me a hint—just said he’d be back in three weeks at the latest.”

“This was when?”

He started to put his glass down on the coffee table; she quickly slid a coaster under it. “Six weeks ago—middle of August.”

“Did he tell you anything at all about the expedition—whom he was meeting, how they contacted him or vice versa?”

“I told you, he said he was sworn to secrecy. I think he enjoyed that part of it—Tex is such a romantic.”

“Take a guess for me, then: how would you say your husband might have hooked up with whoever it was he was going to be treasure hunting with?”

She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Probably one of his
Soldier of Fortune
magazines.”

“Do you have any of them around?”

“All of them—Tex never let me throw a magazine away.”

“Could you get them for me?”

“Of course.” But she didn’t move.

“Mrs. Wanger…?”

She looked up from the coffee table; their eyes met for the first time since she’d asked to see his ID. “Agent Pender, this isn’t really about the missing persons report I filed, is it?”

Gently, Pender told himself. Easy does it. “No,” he said. “No, it’s not.”

“Is Tex in some sort of trouble?”

“You might say that.” It sounded coy even to Pender. Jesus, he thought, I am so fucking out of practice.

“How bad?”

He set his glass down. “The worst.”

“What does that mean?”

“His body was identified through a fingerprint match last night.”

No reply. Thanks to the Botox, her face remained a mask, but Pender could sense something crumpling behind that rigid armature. “Mrs. Wanger, your husband has been murdered,” he continued urgently, hoping to forestall the inevitable meltdown. “That’s why it’s so important that we learn everything we can about his trip—so we can catch whoever did it.”

“You’re sure?”

Pender nodded. “I’m so sorry.”

After a long silence, marred only by the hum of the air-conditioning and the distant roar of a leaf blower, the new widow pushed herself up from the sofa. “I’ll get you those magazines you wanted,” she said dully.

“Appreciate it,” said Pender.

There were certain advantages to being an Apgard on St. Luke, where Lewis’s father, and his father before him, and his father before him, had run a government that distributed more per capita federal aid than any state or territory except the U.S. Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia.

The plan was for Lewis and Dr. Vogler to meet for a fifty-minute hour every weekday this week, then three times a week until further notice. But because Lewis was an Apgard, and didn’t want to be seen entering the psychiatrist’s office, Vogler had agreed that their sessions would take place at the Great House. For a house call premium, of course.

They began at the stroke of noon, facing each other in twin red leather armchairs in Lewis’s study, which was still furnished as it had been in his grandfather’s day. “What I’m hoping to accomplish in our first session,” the psychiatrist began, “is to get an appreciation of your perception of why we’re here, why you’re entering into therapy, and what you hope to get out of it.”

Lewis, who could charm the birds from the trees when he set his mind to it, flashed the shrink a shy, skewed grin. “I’m afraid the better half insisted on it.”

Vogler, a plump bespectacled man who favored bow ties and seersucker sport jackets, nodded understandingly. “Tell me about yourself.”

Lewis began, as any Apgard would, with his pedigree. “My great-grandfather was the last Danish governor of St. Luke, my grandfather and father were the first two American governors. I was born in 1968. Scorpio, not that I believe in that shit. I’m an only child. My mother died two days after my birth. Something called eclampsia—you ever heard of it?”

“I received my MD from Johns Hopkins,” said Vogler, providing a little pedigree of his own.

“I guess that means yes. Anyway, my earliest memory is being hauled around by my wet nurse.”

“Wet nurse,” Vogler echoed, blinking furiously behind his thick lenses—wet nurse stories were catnip to psychiatrists.

“Her name was Queen Charlotte. When I wasn’t sucking her titis, I was riding her big old round hip like a little white monkey. Which is what she used to call me—her little white monkey. She used to take me everywhere—to market, to the washhouse, to church on Sunday morning. I cried like a baby—well, I
was
a baby—when the Guv canned her.”

“The Guv?”

“That’s what I called my father. That’s what everybody called my father. And his father before him. Anyway, the Guv declared unilaterally that my titi days were over, and I was put in the charge of his maiden sister Agneta.

“Given a choice, I’d have preferred a wicked stepmother. Auntie Aggie was of the opinion that children should be seen and not heard, and from what I could tell, she wasn’t all that crazy about seeing them, either. Or maybe she really liked children in general and it was only me she couldn’t stand. For whatever reason, she was a royal pain in the bumsie, from the day she moved into the Governor’s Mansion to the day she was raped and murdered.”

“Raped and murdered,” muttered Vogler, scribbling intently in his notebook.

“During Hurricane Eloise. You want to hear about it?”

“If you’d like to tell me about it.”

“I probably should—it was my fault.”

“Definitely, then.”

“Okay, well, I remember the rain and the wind, for sure, the bruised look of the clouds, that astonishing blue sky and the way my ears popped when the eye passed over us. Which happened twice—from what I understand, after stalling over St. Luke, the storm circled the island in a clockwise spiral and hit us a second time. I also remember how surprised I was and how strange it seemed when I looked out the window of my room on the third floor of the Governor’s Mansion and saw that Sugar Town had disappeared, swallowed up by the rising water.

“We lost phones and power the first day. On the second day we lost our water and ran out of batteries for the transistor radio, and by nightfall everybody had fled to higher ground except for Aggie, myself, Mr. Featherston, my father’s houseman, and his wife Bougainvillea, who was our cook. The Guv was in Washington, on government business, but he called just before the phones went down and told us to hold the fort.

“So hold the fort we did, but with Sugar Town gone and Dansker Hill half underwater by the third morning, looting had already begun. Then the looters freed the surviving prisoners from the holding cells in the basement of the police station, and all hell broke loose. The prisoners who’d survived, we later learned, had done so only by killing, stacking, and standing on the bodies of the ones that hadn’t, which meant that nature had Darwinned out all but the meanest of the mean and the toughest of the tough. And of course having been left by the authorities to drown in their cells hadn’t done anything to improve their dispositions.

“From that point on, anarchy reigned in the streets of Frederikshavn—those that were still above water, that is. Although I suppose it reigned in the drowned streets as well. The loyal Mr. Featherston, whom I remember only as a bald brown head with a woolly gray fringe, locked the spiked wrought-iron gates of the Mansion and sat outside under the dripping portico with a big old horse pistol across his lap. I suppose he was thinking that the mere sight of the antique Colt would serve as a deterrent. Instead, somebody shot him dead from outside the gates.

“Auntie Aggie dragged me into the huge mahogany wardrobe of her room, next to mine on the third floor, when the looters broke in a few minutes later. I still remember the smell—stale cedar potpourri mingled with Aggie’s sour powdery eau-de-old-maid—and the darkness, and the terrible sound of Bougie, who’d been screaming downstairs, being cut off in midshriek by a shotgun blast.

“After that there were footsteps and shouting, doors banging open and shut, heavy furniture being dragged around. I heard the worst language I’d ever heard in my life and so, I suspect, did my auntie, who clapped her hands over my ears. I wriggled away and put my eye to the crack between the wardrobe doors just as the bedroom door came crashing inward and two men burst into the room. One of them began rummaging through Aggie’s bureau; the other lowered his double-barreled shotgun and pointed it directly at the wardrobe—directly at me. It was an ancient side-by-side; I remember looking down those two black barrels. I pushed open the wardrobe doors and stepped out, hands in the air.

“ ‘Eh, eh, well me gad,’ said the man with the shotgun. ‘Look heah, mon, we done ketch us a scuppy.’

“ ‘Me ain’ no scuppy,’ I told him. ‘Me a titi-bitah!’ ”

Lewis had dropped into the dialect that was a first language to him. Me ain’t no was pronounced as one word, meeyaino, the u sound in scuppy was halfway between uh and oo, a scuppy was a bony saltwater fish, an utter waste of bait, and titi biter was the local name for the freshwater mullet,
Agonostomus monticola,
which according to local legend lurked in streams in order to bite unsuspecting maidens on the breast when they went bathing.

“I remember the two men glancing at each other in surprise to hear a little white boy talking pure Luke—and full mout’ing them, at that.”

“Full mowting?”

“Sassing. That’s probably what saved my life. Instead of killing me on the spot, they laughed. Then the one with the shotgun waved it in the direction of the wardrobe, and whispered, ‘Anybody else in there?’ so softly I had to read his lips.”

As he paused for a much-needed sip of water, Lewis glanced at the psychiatrist, still scribbling furiously in his notebook. Vogler looked up. “What happened next?”

“Good question. What I told the Guv and the police was that the men just yanked me and my auntie out of the wardrobe.”

“I gather that’s not what really happened?”

“No. What really happened was that I nodded and stepped aside, out of the line of fire.”

Mm-mmmmm mm-mmm, mm-mmmmm mm-mmm
…

Holly found herself humming the theme from
Gone With the Wind
as the Apgard Great House, alabaster white, winged and colonnaded, appeared at the end of a half-mile-long, ruler-straight driveway with a whitewashed five-rail fence on either side to separate the hybrid Senepol cattle in the fields on one side from the woolless sheep on the other.

But the Great House was not Holly’s immediate destination. Just before she reached it, she turned left and followed a rutted dirt drive lined with handsome bay rums until she reached the eighteenth-century stone house that had once served as the overseer’s quarters for the Apgard sugar plantation.

The overseer’s house was one and a half stories high, built in the Danish manner with thick stone walls mortared with crushed seashell and molasses, and deep windows with dark green shutters. The half story was represented by the original Danish kitchen under the main floor, now a hollow, stone-walled ruin recessed into the landing of the outside front staircase, accessible through a low stone archway.

Holly parked Daisy in the driveway. Bennie, a wrinkled brown man wearing his customary
sarung,
came out to meet her and carried her fold-up massage table into the house.

As always, she set up the table in the living room, which was decorated with artifacts and souvenirs the Epps had brought with them from Indonesia. Ornately carved bureaus and tables, rattan chairs, batik wall hangings, bamboo screens, woven straw mats on the floor. Masks and spears, brass gongs and gamelan chimes. An Indonesian wedding headdress flattened behind glass. Two-dimensional shadow puppets in rough wooden frames, so lifelike they looked as if they had been frozen in mid-dance.

Holly did the woman’s massage first. Emily wasn’t in bad shape, but her back was always sore from the strain of supporting that enormous, gravity-challenged bosom (whenever she worked on women like Emily, Holly thanked her genes and lucky stars for her own, somewhat more modest endowment), and from the way she groaned when Holly deep-massaged the quads and hammies of her stubby thighs, Holly could tell she’d been overexerting recently. “No rest for the wicked,” Emily explained, when Holly mentioned it.

Compared to Emily, Phil Epp had a difficult body to massage. Long, tense muscles, very little body fat, very little pectoral sag for a man in his sixties or seventies, however old he was. One of the hairier apes, too: arms, legs, chest, belly, back, covered with curly black hair, gone white at the chest and loins, that seemed to repel the massage oil. And although Holly had massaged him at least once a month for the past year, his muscles were as tight as if they’d never been rubbed before.

“Have you been overexerting, too?” Holly asked him, as she worked his spinal muscles with the balls of her thumbs.

He grunted with pleasure. “Just a little treasure hunting.”

“Find anything?”

“Getting closer.” He turned his head to glance at her. “You ever have any interest in that sort of activity?”

“Treasure I could use—hunting I don’t know about.”

“Maybe we’ll take you along sometime—but only if you promise not to tell anybody—I mean, not a word to anybody, not even about this conversation.”

“Hey, a masseuse is like a doctor or a lawyer: what I hear on this table stays on this table.”

Holly’s next appointment was only a few hundred yards away, at the Great House. As she took her massage table out of the bus, Holly pictured horse-drawn carriages
clippety-clopping
up to the wide marble steps, being met by liveried servants, and discharging Danish beauties in décolleté silk ball gowns, accompanied by planters in white suits and wide-brimmed Panamas.

Lewis Apgard trotted down the steps to meet her halfway. He was wearing white bermudas and a blousy white shirt open at the throat. His golden blond hair was cut short and neat, parted on the side; the turquoise stud in his left ear matched the color of his eyes.

“Good afternoon, Miss Holly. Glad you could make it. I decided to give up booze—I’m detoxing like a madman.” He took her fold-up massage table from her, carried it the rest of the way up the steps, through one set of French doors, past a tastefully appointed formal drawing room furnished with museum-quality Danish West Indian pieces carved from mahogany, purple heart, and other endangered rain forest trees, and out a second set of French doors to the patio. The Olympic-sized pool was as turquoise as Apgard’s eyes and earring. Holly, who’d worked up a pretty good sweat on the Epps, asked him if she could take a dip before they started.

“Sure thing,” said Apgard. “My wife is playing golf out at Blue Valley, and it’s the servants’ day off, so we have the place to ourselves all afternoon.”

Holly’s uh-oh alarm went off again. “You make it sound as if we were having an affair,” she said—lightly, she hoped—and forced a laugh.

“Is an affair so out of the question?”

“So
out of the question,” Holly replied.

“Too bad,” said Apgard. “Let me know if you change your mind—we could just write off the rent.”

When pigs fly, thought Holly. When kosher pigs fly.