stiffened with the onset of rigor mortis; I couldn't make it bend all the way in the middle. The dead weight put a staggering strain on my knees as I carried it outside. I stood braced against the door jamb, looking up at the street, listening. No headlights, no engine sounds, nothing but the calls of night birds flying again after the blow. I moved slowly, to keep from stumbling, as I crossed the few yards to the garage.
I eased the thing through the Mini's open passenger door. Getting the legs and arms bent so it would fit low into the seat, the sailcloth draped over and around it to make it look like a shapeless bundle, was a ten-minute chore. I was running sweat by the time I finished.
I waited until I had the Mini out of the driveway onto Quartz Gade before I switched on the headlamps. There was no traffic; I didn't see another car as I came down across Dronningens Gade to Veterans Drive and turned west, and only one, heading in the opposite direction, on the drive to Harwood Highway. The road was deserted in both directions when I made the swing onto the narrow lane that led to the old French cemetery.
What better place to hide a dead thing than in somebody else's grave?
I shut off the lights, coasted up to the closed gates. If the gates had been locked, I would've had no choice but to turn around and head up Crown Mountain. I had neither the tools nor the facility for busting locks, and even if I had I couldn't risk arousing suspicion by breaking and entering. But I'd counted on the gates being unlocked, and they were. The place was ancient, overgrown, not much used anymore. The only reason to lock it up at night was vandalism, and there hadn't been any of that.
The rusted iron squeaked and sprayed me with rain-wet as I pushed the gates open. I ran back to the car. Just as I shut myself inside again, headlights appeared on the main road, coming from the west.
I hunkered down on the seat. For a few seconds the light glare seemed to fill the Mini. If it'd been a police patrol, they'd have stopped, sure as hell, and I would have been as dead as the thing beside me. But it wasn't. The car whooshed past without slowing down.
I let out the breath I'd been holding, straightened up. When the taillights passed out of sight, the highway was a shiny black smear empty in both directions. I drove ahead into the cemetery. Got out quickly to close the gates again.
It was thick dark in there, a place of indistinct shapes like figures on a nightmare landscape. Not enough light filtered through the cloud gaps for me to make out more than a few feet of the rutted mud-and-gravel lane, and the mist-streaked windshield made it even harder to see. I rolled down the window, leaned my head out. Better, but I had to move ahead at a crawl.
I'd been to the cemetery a few times to walk around looking at headstones and grave markers, and once when I followed an old-fashioned Cha-Cha funeral procession led by a robed priest, the coffin balanced on a donkey cart. I remembered the layout of the place. Visualized it, fixed it in my mind, before I put the Mini in gear and crept forward.
Rain puddles had formed in the ruts; the tires splashed deep into a couple of them. Twice I lost sight of the verge, veered off onto softer ground and barely managed to correct in time to keep from getting stuck. When I reckoned I'd gone far enough, I stopped and shut off the engine and got out with the flashlight.
Pale shifting rays of moonshine came and went among the clouds, enough for me to orient myself. I was near one of the branch lanes that led toward the rear wall. I set off that way on foot, shielding the flash beam with my hand and aiming it downward. The whitewashed tombs seemed to shine faintly, as if with an inner ghost light; the trees were like shadowy, skeletal figures performing weird gyrations. In the night hush, the sound of dripping water rose above the mutter of the wind. My shoes and pantlegs were sodden before I'd gone fifty yards.
The older section I came to was heavily overgrown with grass and vines and gnarled sapodilla and gumbo- limbo trees, all but forgotten. I prowled a short distance through the tangle until I found what I was looking for, under the sprawling branches of a gumbo-limbo and half hidden from the lane by a scabrous tomb. If it hadn't been for the lean of a wooden marker, you wouldn't have been able to tell that there was a grave beneath the thick grass mat. I shone the torch briefly on the marker. So old that the wood was split and insect-pitted, and whatever had been written on it had completely faded away.
I drove the Mini as close to the grave as I could. I pried the thing out of the passenger seat, using the handle of the shovel to loosen one of the stiffened legs, then carried it through the wet grass and dumped it a dozen feet from the grave. To the car again for the shovel and the piece of Dacron and the rubber gloves. When I had the sailcloth spread on the grass, I paced off a distance of six feet back from the marker and dug the rough, shallow outline of a rectangle six feet long by two feet wide. I cut the inside of the rectangle into small squares. These I dug up in three-inch-deep clods, setting them aside under the tree one by one to preserve the tall stalks of grass. Then I scooped out the new grave, shoveling the muddy soil onto the Dacron.
It was hot, filthy work. But not as hard as you might think. The clearing sky now shed enough moonlight and starshine to give me some visibility. The earth was sandy and moist from the rain; the only difficulty I had was chopping through straggles of tree root. I don't know how long it took to open up that six-by-two rectangle to a depth of six feet. There were no visible lights, no sounds except for the wind and the dripping water and the bite of the shovel into the earth—nothing to make me aware of the passage of time.
The muscles in my back and shoulders were on fire by the time I'd gone deep enough to uncover the buried coffin. There wasn't much left of it, just rotted crumbles of wood; the blade sliced through and clanged against something that sounded like bone. I scraped away shreds of wood and flung the pieces up onto the pile of dirt, widening and deepening the hole a little more. The flashlight was hooked onto my belt; I turned it on to take a quick look at the partly exposed skeleton and the grave walls. Deep enough, wide enough.
I climbed out, wet to the skin and covered in slick mud, a quivering in my arms and legs from the strain of digging. For a little time I sat under the gumbo-Umbo with my back against the trunk to rest. When my strength returned, I went to Uft the thing again and haul it to the grave. It wouldn't lie flat when I dropped it in, and I had to get down there with it and use the shovel in a couple of ways I'd rather not talk about. It fitted the space well enough when I finished.
I shoveled and scraped most of the dirt back in. Picked up the ends of the sail and dumped in the rest. Firmed it down, replaced the clods of grass, dragged over a couple of dead tree limbs and some brush and vines. You could still see the seams here and there, tell that somebody had been excavating, but you had to be standing right on the spot. From a distance of a few feet there were no visible signs of disturbance; I put the light on briefly to make sure. If nobody came poking around back here in the next week or so, enough new grass would sprout to hide the seams completely.
I shook out the sailcloth, folded it, took it and the shovel back to the Mini. Off with the gloves and filthy clothing, into the garbage bag with them and the rags I used to scrub mud off my arms and face. On with the clean shirt and shorts. I rested again for a time before I started the engine and got the car turned around.
The highway was deserted when I reached the gates. It stayed that way as I rolled through and closed them behind me and turned toward Charlotte Amalie. My hands were steady on the wheel. I drove slowly, carefully. None of the handful of other cars I passed was a police patrol, and none of the drivers paid any attention to me.
Home safe and sound. Exhalisted, so relieved I was weak and tin-gUng. I admit to a feeling of exhilaration, too—the kind you can't help but feel after a dangerous job well done.
There were still a few things left to do. In the garage, I dropped the plastic bag into the trash can, rinsed off the shovel and the Dacron in the utility sink and put them away, and hosed mud spatters off the Mini. In the house, I scrubbed down under a long, hot shower. Afterward, I shaved off my beard and mustache, then used a pair of scissors and a hand mirror to trim my hair all around—preparations for the solution to the next problem.
It was full dawn when I crawled into bed for few hours' sleep.
The Hotel Caribbean was a small, old-fashioned hotel on Kronprind-sens Gade off Market Square, built before World War II when the Virgins were sleepy islands and the tourist trade was at a relative minimum.
It's long gone now. In the early eighties it was staggering along on its last legs, catering to small package- tour groups and individuals who wanted a little island ambiance on the relative cheap. Naturally Fred Coder had gravitated there; it was the only inexpensive hotel in the downtown area.
The lobby was crowded when I walked in at ten o'clock. It was my first visit to the hotel, so there was little danger of my being recognized as Richard Laidlaw. Shaved, hair trimmed, talcum powder lightening my sun- weathered skin, wearing a Madras shirt and white slacks, I blended right in with the snowbirds. I was even blue-
