Greater Trouble in the Lesser Antilles

Chapter 1

St. Judas no longer felt much like paradise. The island wore a steel-gray hemispheric skullcap, and an unusually cool breeze ruffled the leaden waters of the bay. I could barely make out my gray Zodiac inflatable tied to the concrete dock, not to mention its gray Yamaha outboard. The myriad grays prompted me to ponder the ambiguity of life in Flamingo Bay and reminded me of the dull eyes of dead men. I figured the sun would shine tomorrow, and the blue waters would sparkle again, but one thing wouldn’t change: my friend Leif the Thief would remain dead.

Five days ago—the afternoon I returned from a voyage to South America—Leif’s body was found in Doctor’s cistern. I hadn’t been here to see that he behaved himself, and I hadn’t been here to learn if others behaved themselves. If I didn’t know better, I’d have to concede that everyone in Flamingo Bay was absent along with me, for nobody seemed to know anything. Nobody even admitted knowing how he died. And the asshole cops weren’t talking.

His death shocked and numbed us. Countenances grew quieter and grimmer. Suspicion, stifling. Custom, not spontaneity, sustained exuberance. We feared the killer could be one of us. Nobody wanted to believe it. Enough years had passed that only a few of us could recall the name of the last person murdered in Flamingo Bay.

Leif was a thief, but he was also a likeable guy. As long as he didn’t touch you for too much, you were inclined—after getting over the initial anger—to laugh and shrug your shoulders, but you couldn’t just laugh and shrug your shoulders when his corpse turned up in Doctor’s cistern.

The put-put of an ancient outboard caught my attention. I looked up to see Cherry Mary and Billie dinghy ashore from Sappho. Finally. I’d been waiting for Billie to help me transport the six-dozen T-shirts we’d silk-screened last night, the shirts she designed to commemorate Leif’s funeral.

I got to know Billie several months ago when she and Wendy and I formed the Flamingo Bay Literary Society. Since then, we’d shared something of a topsy-turvy relationship, though probably not as chaotic as the relationship Billie shared with Mary. What Mary and I had in common: we both liked girls. The other thing we had in common: we both loved Billie.

Billie tied up at the dock and said, “What’re you doing here?”

“Sitting on a dock on the bay, waiting on you.”

“Don’t tell me,” she said, climbing out of the dinghy and holding the painter for Mary. “Your truck is missing.”

I nodded, my eye drawn to the gold ring she wore on the second toe of her left foot, her only jewelry.

“Captain Brian, you okay?” Mary asked, stepping onto the dock.

“Pretty okay. You?”

“I don’t know. It’s the end of an era, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

Mary, a lanky freckled redhead, pushing thirty, was an advertisement for a healthy meatless lifestyle. She stood a head taller than her lithe yellow-haired companion.

Billie said, “I’ll get my jeep.”

The two of them headed toward the Congo Club.

A growing din drifted across the bay from Easys, where folk assembled for Leif’s last hurrah, downing Budweisers—the breakfast of choice—and getting rowdy, a fitting tribute to one of the rowdier members of the community. I closed my eyes against the hubbub, but my hearing remained equally acute. Then I retreated deeper into my mind and focused on my old friend.

Leif’s juvenile years were decades past, but the influence of his street-corner apprenticeship propelled him toward a career in delinquency, and though he acted as wily and exasperating as a too-hip teenager, I learned to love the guy, especially his ability to snatch poise from perplexity. Whether caught with his hand in someone’s till or up someone’s skirt, Leif either deflected accusation or convincingly argued he perpetrated a great kindness—always with boyish innocence and a compelling smile, the squint in his blue eyes revealing distress that anyone would dare doubt his sincerity.

Leif didn’t admit to being a career criminal, but he did declare—for whatever it was worth—that he robbed a Wells Fargo bank in California, under the guise of filming a movie. He maintained he got away clean and made it to Brazil. Feeling bigheaded over his success and untouchable in a country that didn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S., Leif mailed a video of the robbery to the FBI. Some months later, a federal agent, posing as a bounty hunter, abducted him. Hauled back to the States, Leif was tried and convicted. He spent eight years as the government’s guest at Leavenworth.

In Flamingo Bay, Leif reinvented himself as the rebel persona of James Dean all grown-up (cool guy) with a dollop of Edward G. Robinson (tough guy). Leif might not have possessed the finest criminal mind—he was no Professor Moriarty—but he did possess the most thoroughly criminal mind I ever encountered. He tended to examine first all of the criminal solutions to a problem before he entertained solutions that wouldn’t get him arrested. Maybe if he hadn’t acted so quickly on his thoughts, he could’ve turned his life around. Still, he was the unluckiest of men.

Barely running on all cylinders when he acquired them, none of Leif’s vehicles ran for long. He was a pedestrian the past several months and for most of the years he lived in Flamingo Bay. All his dogs died tragically—one shot, one poisoned, and one hacked apart with a machete. Both his boats sank—one during a hurricane, the other when electrolysis disintegrated the steel hull of his powerboat after the previous owner inadvertently removed the zincs. His only real girlfriend (a three-month relationship) had once been a man. Leif lived here and there, but he lived longest aboard an old wooden rowboat with only a tarp to keep himself dry.

I hadn’t seen a visible sign that the police were even interested in investigating his death. It pissed me off, though it didn’t surprise me: Leif relished spitting at authority. That didn’t surprise me either: the veneer of civilization is merely epidermal in thickness, and the rumble and tumble of living forty years on society’s fringe lacerated, contused, and abraded Leif’s hide.

Billie touched my arm and said, “You haven’t answered my question.”

Lost in my own world, I hadn’t heard her return.

“What question’s that?”

She tugged at the bill of her faded-green baseball cap, fighting the breeze that whipped her yellow hair.

“What you’re doing tomorrow?”

The question seemed simple enough—and the answer. Though my to-do list had grown to the length of a sumo wrestler’s bill of fare, I figured I’d do tomorrow and the day after whatever Billie wanted me to. One thing about Billie: she glowed, as if each hair on her body was the terminus of an overheated fiber optic cable seconds away from meltdown. In her presence, everything became more vivid, more intense, more profound. Except me. I became stupid. Stupid because I loved her. Not a problem except that she was twenty-three years old. Not a problem except that nearly a generation separated us. Not a problem except that she didn’t love me.

“What’re my options?” I asked.

“I think we should team up to find Leif’s killer.”

“Why do you care? You never gave him the time of day.”

“Only because he couldn’t keep his hands off me. But I live here. And I like living here. And I don’t want to think I’m sharing my energy with a murdering scumbag.”

“What’s stopping you from becoming Nancy Drew and finding the killer yourself?”

“Leif was your friend.”

“But I can’t bring him back, and I’m not sure that finding his killer will make me feel one bit better.”

“It would make me feel better and plenty of others as well. You have the history here. People know and respect you.”

“There’s no shortage of people who share those qualifications with me, but I’m a sailor, not a detective.”

She pulled off her baseball cap, loosened the adjustable band, and stuck it on my head backwards, tugging it to fit over my own cap. “There. You look just like Sherlock Holmes wearing his deerstalker.”

“Now I’m a detective?”

“If you want to be,” Billie said. “You have to admit we make a good team.”

I nearly choked on her words. From the earliest days of sea travel, any sailor worth his salt feared sirens. I feared sirens. No sailor wants to smash his boat against rocks, but more humiliating than crashing against rocks, more humiliating than being ignored, is being lured into the dreaded position of friendship with a beautiful woman.

“Team?” I asked, removing her cap and sticking it back on her head, pulling the visor down over her eyes with a sharp tug.

She stuck out her tongue and readjusted the cap’s band.

“Sure. We already collaborate on designing T-shirts.”

I got to my feet and walked a few steps to the end of the crumbling dock, lit a cigarette, and surveyed the harbor, protected on three sides by bulging hills—the overcast sky sharply delineating foliage in infinite hues of green. Clusters of modest buildings peeked shyly through dense vegetation. Red roofs capped the older cottages, and white roofs marked the newer dwellings. Elaborate structural frameworks, hidden by encroaching bush, anchored them to the steep hillsides—sometimes a concrete cistern and columns, other times crisscrossing lengths of dimension lumber that seemed as fragile as Popsicle sticks. A dozen fancy houses dotted the landscape as well. Ex-smugglers built some, but Statesiders built the greater number. Those folk stayed pretty close to home—the marine community tasted a bit salty to the discriminating palate.

Flamingo Bay—located on the east end of St. Judas—is roughly two miles wide, four miles long, and most days, eight miles high. The small harbor at the head of the bay didn’t offer the bay’s best anchorage, but it was convenient to the only dock and provided moorings for the marine community, a ragtag fleet of nearly sixty sailboats.

The fleet included sloops, ketches, yawls, and schooners. One boat was handmade, two were homemade, but most represented the modest offerings of shipyards—the Fords and Chevies of the yachting world. Diver Vaughn’s boat, Divertimento, was the only boat that didn’t rely on wind power.

Moored alone in deep water, about a hundred yards from the fleet, Island Trader—my boat—slept like an island. A hundred-ton, steel-hulled Great Lakes pilot schooner, built in Thunder Bay in 1899, she boasted three masts, but I no longer owned even a yard of Dacron to hoist on them. I lost every inch of it when we encountered a tropical storm on the return voyage from Venezuela. I almost lost Big Gary as well, but he survived a collision with a wayward boom, suffering only a concussion.

Sailors thrive on superstition, and I was as superstitious as the next. When the disasters befell, I kept count. I relaxed after the sails set their own course in the direction of Antigua, thinking that bad news came in threes. I’d already put down a mutiny and been scammed out of five grand. Thinking I could enjoy a period of grace, I arrived home to learn about Leif. I no longer looked for a period of grace. I steeled myself for the two additional disasters just beyond the horizon—or the five or eight.

Billie sing-songed, “Yoo-hoo. I’m wait-ing.”

“I’m think-ing,” I accented each syllable, mimicking her.

I wasn’t thinking. I was waiting for an epiphany. Sometimes it was like waiting for Godot.

I field-stripped my cigarette, dropped the filter in my pocket, and faced Billie.

“I’ve never been a team player,” I said, “and I’ve been under the strong impression that you didn’t want to play with me.”

“Not when the game’s like hide-the-weinie.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Men. All you think about is sex.”

Of course. Because men love sports, and sex comes closest to being the one pure sport—it can be participatory or not, there exist no allotted time-outs, no rigid conventions, it offers head-to-head competition and head-to-toe non-competition and everything in between, keeping score’s optional and totally artificial. Everyone can play.”

“Captain Brian, you’re sick, and you’re in love with your own mind. I like those things about you. But you’ve disproved your own point. Keeping score’s important in sports. And sex will never work as a varsity sport. Hester Prynne is the only person I know who was awarded a letter for sex, and as I recall, things went downhill for her after that.”

The problem with women is they’re too practical.”

“They have to be—in a world where men aren’t. But let’s be serious. You know as well as I do the cops will never find Leif’s killer.”

“Probably because they won’t look very hard.”

The authorities didn’t much care Leif was dead, but they’d probably come to miss him, too. There was now one fewer pre-packaged perpetrator to round up when the police needed an arrest. Though Leif was seldom charged and never convicted of any offense on St. Judas, the police did arrest him regularly. Whenever there was a crime on the island, he became the usual suspect.

We enjoyed watching the police take him into custody, and I suspected Leif enjoyed that bit of the routine as well. The cops never arrested Leif unless they had at least four armed officers—ridiculous because he’d didn’t own a weapon and he’d never even been accused of more than simple theft. Three drew their guns, while the fourth handcuffed him. Because he seldom admitted to anything, except with a coy smile, Leif’s adventures would never be fully chronicled in the Lore of Flamingo Bay.

“Captain Brian, I’m still waiting for an answer. Are you going to help me?”

“How am I supposed to find his killer? I can’t even find my truck.”

“Probably because you haven’t looked very hard.”

A mile away, from across the lifeless water on a Lady Jane day, Jimi Hendrix’s distorted voice screamed from Easy’s boombox: “You know you’re a cute little heartbreaker….”

As I bent to pick up the box of T-shirts that Billie and I spent half the night silk-screening, Billie plunked her butt on it.

I picked up the second box and hauled it to her jeep, careful not to trip over the thick planks of greenheart stacked neatly on the beach adjacent to the dock, lumber I hauled up from Venezuela, lumber the contractor demanded we unload immediately upon our arrival five days ago, lumber that sat untouched since.

When I returned, I kicked the box she sat on and said, “We’re going to be late for the funeral.”

“I still think we need to solve the mystery.”

“Some mysteries are unsolvable.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Why you’re still a virgin—”

“I’m not a virgin.”

“In the Virgin Islands, you are.”

“That’s no mystery.”

It was to me. Discounting the improbable chance that a recent warp in the space-time continuum caused Billie to be spontaneously reincarnated as of one of St. Ursula’s eleven thousand virgins—whose feast day Columbus celebrated when he named our archipelago—I hadn’t a clue. Then again, Billie did claim that this wasn’t her first go-round on planet Earth—in India, she’d tried on Eastern theology for size, and some of it fit.

“Enlighten me.”

“Another time.”

“Look, I don’t see any conspiracy here. Leif did something to someone, and that someone retaliated. If somebody local killed Leif, it’ll come out, and we’ll take care of it.”

Even as the words escaped my mouth, I doubted the veracity of my statement. If Leif had simply been engaged in his usual activities, why did someone wait until now to kill him?

“How?” she asked.

“Exile.”

Billie had been around here long enough to know that criminals in Flamingo Bay usually got their comeuppance without benefit of constabulary. Sometimes a few well-chosen words sufficed. Sometimes the penalty required the infliction of minor contusions. Banishment—the extreme penalty—always worked.

“How about something more severe?”

“Exile worked for Napoleon.”

“Not on Elba, it didn’t,” she countered

“It did on St. Helena.”

“Because the Brits probably killed him.”

“As Cicero said, ‘The people’s good is the highest law.’ Getting the scum out of the community seems in line with that sentiment.”

“I agree,” Billie said. “I am one of three members of the Flamingo Bay Literary Society, and I have done my reading.”

“Make that two members—”

“Wendy will be back.”

I wasn’t so sure Wendy would be back. Her new lover—the skipper of a sleek gaff-rigged schooner—possessed an enviable itinerary, and his sobriety marked him an immense improvement over her husband, Jason the Argonut. Still, Billie, like all of us, understood that the mystique of Flamingo Bay compelled people to return.

“If you agree with me, what’s the problem?”

“As I recall, Cicero also said, ‘Let the punishment match the offense.’”

I asked, “So what’s your solution?”

“In a place where the only reason to call the cops is to tell them to like go fuck themselves, I don’t have a solution.”

Billie did have a solution—at least on the one occasion she needed it. Some months ago, Officer Richards stopped her for driving a vehicle without a windshield, not even a traffic violation. He asked her to hold his baton, while he wrote up the ticket. As he wrote, he compared his baton to his dick—long, black, thick. Billie whacked him in the nose with the baton. I didn’t know if Richards felt embarrassed getting his nose broken by a woman or if he was still working on a plan, but he never arrested her, and he never came after her.

“Billie, we both have to live here. Snooping is going to make us no friends, and we may find ourselves as detested as the police.”

“But wouldn’t it be a better place to live if we didn’t suspect there was like a fungus among us?”

It would, but snooping would likely lead nowhere and mark me as an outcast on the island. I didn’t have many close friends left. While I straddled the equator, most of my friends had traveled north or south—selling out or giving up. The few that remained were dying. So many, it felt like an epidemic. Captain Lucky, Mad Max, Valerie, and Leif would all be missing Flamingo Bay’s New Year’s Eve party for the first time. I knew that medical examiners (had they been called in) could, in each case, point to specific causes that shut down the internal life support systems, but in my bones, I knew that all my friends died from immortality—the leading cause of death in Flamingo Bay.

“For argument’s sake, suppose I agree to help. What’s your plan? Do you intend to stop people on the street like the police do and ask if they’re guilty?”

“Hardly.” She folded her arms across her body and narrowed her green eyes. “I’m going to make a list of suspects first.”

“Do you really think someone we know killed him?”

The five-day-old knot in my stomach—solid as a bowline—tightened a bit.

Billie replied, “In a place where you know nearly everyone, as often as not, the people you know do the damnable things.”

“Okay, okay, let’s hear your suspects.”

She held up a single finger. “Diver Vaughn.”

“No.”

Two fingers. “Pirate Dan.”

“No.”

Three fingers. “Zeke.”

“No.”

Four fingers. “Jason the Argonut.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Ever hear about the fly-by-night dinghy deal?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Leif and Jason ingested large quantities of mushroom tea at a full-moon party on Tortola. Before heading back, they decided to stop in West End and steal the dinghies at one of the marina docks. They almost cleared the harbor before the authorities gave chase. They escaped, but they scattered dinghies all over the sea including their own.”

“So?”

“Leif and Jason teamed up in the past to create mischief. They could’ve teamed up again on a more serious project that ended in greater misadventure. That’s my only point. Billie, let’s go. We’re going to be late.”

“I have more suspects. Don’t you want to hear them?”

“Just tear out the three or four pages in the phone book that contain the listings for St. Judas, and you’ll have the definitive list of suspects.”

I watched as a glower transformed her face. Her green eyes widened, unblinking. Her lips puckered. I glowered back, but what I wanted to do was meet her puckered lips with my own.

Relaxing her facial muscles, she said, “I’m sitting here until you agree to help me.”

“Name someone who’s helped you more than I have.”

“That’s what friends are supposed to do for each other.”

“If I were to become interested in investigating the murder, why shouldn’t I do it on my own?”

“You do too much stuff on your own, and I want to help.”

“What do you bring to the investigation?”

“Captain Brian, that’s a mean thing to say. You know I bring more to the party than anyone.”

Billie did bring more to the party than anyone. She brought so much to the party that I’d come to accept that without Billie there could never be another party—none I’d care to attend.

“Just now, the party is waiting on you. Are you going to get off your butt?”

“No!”