“Oh, nothing.”
Twenty minutes later, Pender was grinning too as he left police headquarters, his enormous butt balanced precariously atop a tiny white Vespa motorbike that kept threatening to turn itself into a suppository every time it hit a bump, of which there were plenty on the cobbled streets of Dansker Hill.
It took Pender a few minutes to master the Vespa. He came close to spilling it at the bottom of Tivoli Street, when he turned into the wrong lane of the Circle Road, having momentarily forgotten about driving on the left, and had to make a desperate correction to avoid a truck full of naked-looking sheep.
No harm, no foul, though. Once he got the hang of it and was tootling down the cracked two-lane whitetop at an exhilarating twenty, twenty-five miles an hour, with a too-small white helmet jammed down snugly over his ears, the wind in his face, and the blue Caribbean winking through the gaps in the palm trees to his right, the song that kept going through his mind, God bless him, was Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild.”
Eight miles east of Frederikshavn, a wooden signpost marked the turnoff for Estate Tamarind. A tarred driveway ran for a mile, straight as a ruler, through flat brown fields of cane stumps. A wooden gate swung back on sagging hinges marked the entrance to the Core. Beyond the gate, two rows of august tamarinds, forty feet high, with rounded crowns of feathery leaves, shaded the dirt lane.
Quonset huts and cabins on stilts dotted the broad hillside rising to the right. Straight ahead more cabins lined either side of the lane. At the end of the rows of cabins, two tall, narrow A-frames faced each other across the lane. Beyond them, parked in a dirt clearing under a towering red flamboyant tree, was a collection of old cars, vans, and pickups that would have been classified as a junkyard in the States. Pender left the Vespa there, with the helmet hanging from the handlebars, and walked up the hill.
The first person he came upon was the armless boy from yesterday afternoon, sitting on the plank steps behind one of the cabins, the lower end of which was raised on stilts to level the floor. The boy was barefoot, holding a pencil between the big and second toes of his right foot, writing in a loose-leaf notebook he held down with his left foot.
“Excuse me,” said Pender. They hadn’t met yesterday. Thoroughly embarrassed after his dressing-down, Pender had stammered an apology and fled the field before soccer practice was dismissed. “Do you know which house Holly Gold lives in?”
Marley looked up from his homework. Huge bald white man in a black-and-green dragon shirt. He slipped the pencil into the loose-leaf and closed it with his foot. “Yes, sir.”
Pender waited…waited…. “Okay, which one is it?”
“Said I knew, didn’t say I’d tell.”
“I’m with the police-Miss Gold filed a missing persons report.”
“Tell me another one, mister-you ain’ no police.” Marley knew every cop on the island, from Chief Coffee, his friend Marcus’s grandfather, on down.
“I am, really.” Pender showed him the badge.
“I’ll fetch her,” said Marley. Balancing on his left foot, he opened the cabin door with his right, depressing the thumb latch with his big toe.
A moment later, the woman who’d given Pender what for yesterday appeared in the doorway in a Japanese robe that came down to midthigh-shapely midthigh, Pender couldn’t help but notice. Her dark curly hair was flattened on one side; she appeared to have been awakened from a nap. “You,” she said accusingly.
“Me,” he said apologetically. “I’m Ed Pender-I’m helping the local police investigate that missing persons report you filed on Mr. Arena. I was hoping to have a look at his house, talk to a few people, see if there are any indications as to what might have happened to him.”
Oops, thought Holly, wondering just how big a can of worms she’d opened with her little missing persons report. If Andy did come back, he wouldn’t be pleased to learn his A-frame had been searched. “Do you have a warrant to search his house?” she asked Pender.
“Don’t need one,” he replied. “Mr. Arena isn’t a suspect, he isn’t being charged with a crime, and just to set your mind at ease, any contraband I might happen to come across in the course of a warrantless search could not be used as evidence against him in a court of law, if that’s what’s bothering you.” Not strictly true, but Pender was no narc-he hadn’t made a dope bust since he was a sheriff’s deputy in Cortland County, and wasn’t about to start now.
“Of course not,” said Holly. “Wait here, let me get dressed, I’ll walk you down there.”
“I’ll take him,” Marley offered.
“Really? Finished all that homework already?”
“No, but-”
“No but me no no buts, young man,” declaimed Holly.
Marley looked over at Pender, as if for support.
“Yeah,” said Pender. “What she said.”
5
Shortly after Pender left police headquarters on his Vespa, Lewis Apgard arrived in a squad car to formally identify his wife’s body. His own vehicles were still being examined, though they hadn’t been officially impounded. Chief Coffee led him across the cobbled courtyard to the morgue in the basement of the courthouse, where Hokey lay in a refrigerated drawer, covered by a sheet.
Lewis felt a blast of cold air when Dr. Parmenter, an obstetrician who doubled as coroner-womb to tomb, he liked to say-opened the door and rolled her out on a slab. Coffee lowered the sheet as far as Hokey’s neck. Lewis glanced briefly at her face; her long rabbity nose looked even more pinched than usual. He nodded. Coffee started to pull the sheet back up. Lewis stopped him.
“Could I have a couple minutes with my wife, please? We never did have a chance to say good-bye.”
Layla had already taken her smears and gone over the body for trace and transfer evidence, so Coffee had no problem with that. He and Parmenter went across the hall to the coroner’s office to go over a few details about the autopsy scheduled for later that evening, leaving Lewis alone with Hokey.
He looked around to be sure there were no hidden cameras, then pulled the sheet down to her waist. It was sort of the ultimate peep, but he got no pleasure out of it.
At least she still had her full-body, no-line tan, Lewis told himself, and would for eternity now. Hokey would have been glad of that: she’d been terribly vain about her tan, all but suicidally so in this age of melanoma.
Poor Hokey-so much had happened in the last twenty-four hours that it was just beginning to sink in for Lewis that what had been only a vague plan the previous morning was now a fait accompli.
“I miss you,” he whispered. “And all over a few fucking trees. You stupid, stupid-” He was about to call her the C-word. He caught himself-he hadn’t come here for that. “Sorry,” he said, bending to kiss her.
He couldn’t do it, though-he could feel the cold coming off her in waves when his lips were only an inch away. He touched her blue lips with his forefinger instead, then pulled the sheet back up over her head and smoothed out the wrinkles with his palm.
6
“Pearl and I had just split up,” said Holly. “She had a chance to be an executive chef at a fancy ski resort in Banff, and I wasn’t about to move to Canada-I hate cold, I hate snow. That’s why I moved from New York to California in the first place. So I had this whole big house to myself. The plan, of course, was that I was going to wrap up Laurel’s affairs and bring the kids back to Big Sur with me.” Holly threw up her hands and laughed. “So much for plans.”
She and Pender were sitting on a split log at the very top of the clearing, the only vantage point in the Core from which to view the short but spectacular tropical sunset in its entirety. Holly was in the process of telling Pender her life story-a development that had come as a complete surprise to her. All she’d intended to do was keep
