“I understand,” I muttered, “you didn’t survive out here all these years trusting bush-men on Backstreet in the middle of the night.”
A voice came from behind me. “Boise, who’re you talking to?”
“There was a ... ” I looked around, but the dog was gone. “Aw, forget it. You have notes?”
Pickering tapped his shirt pocket. I’ll be damned if he wasn’t wearing a tie, a button-down shirt and dressy slacks to meet in this dive.
“You’re gonna stick out in here, you know?”
“Dress for success, Boise. Never be ashamed to look better than those around you any more than you should strive to be as gullible as the masses.”
“I need a beer,” I responded, holding the door for the lanky man, then continued holding until a wobbling woman on the arm of a grinning toothless man stumbled out. “You’re welcome,” I muttered, but they were clueless and unresponsive.
I tried to pull my hand off the doorknob and it came away sticky. I headed to the bathroom, which was really just a black hole with a toilet splattered with god-knows-what and a slippery floor that was stylish in the 1940s. There was no soap and no towels and only a trickle of water, so I wet my hands as best I could and wiped them on my shorts. Someone pounded on the door as I opened it.
A woman pushed past me with a whiff of cheap perfume and gin. She slammed the door to the men’s room in my face.
At the bar, Pickering sequentially pounded two shots of whiskey. Cutty Sark must have been his drink. After I joined him, he called for something off the top shelf and retired to sip it in a dark booth. My stomach was too bloated for Guiness, so I ordered a light beer.
I filled him in on what Leber had told me earlier.
“So, Widow Bacon was what, a reparationist?” he asked.
“She sold off some of the plantations, but we’re not sure who bought them or why. Maybe to liquidate so she had capital to distribute. You get anything from the computer?”
To my surprise, Pickering readily handed me a stack of hard-copies printed from Kendal’s computer. He smelled of Jurgen’s Lotion and starch.
He pulled three pages out that confirmed her plan to divest. Kendal even had one confirmation of sale of the plantation in Barbados to a land developer. My eyes grew wide when I read the name: Payne & Wedgefield.
A kidnapping case I’d worked involved the daughter of the man who owned the real estate empire. I hadn’t heard nice things about him, but, Payne and Wedgefield were in real estate, so not that strange that they’d be involved.
“There’s more, but I ran out of ink in my printer. I can give you more tomorrow.”
“Why not go to the paper and print?” I asked. “This relates. It’s gonna be a story.”
“Nighttime at the paper. The place feels off. I don’t know.”
He tilted the glass to his mouth and finished it. He returned with two more this time. Off my look, he said, “What?”
I sipped my beer, a little less eager to keep pace. Dana had made me feel guilty with her question about attending an AA meeting. “Nothing,” I said. “Go on.”
“As I was saying, there’s a lot here. He and Widow Bacon were working on something fairly monumental. If you look at that sales contract closely, you’ll see that the widow had the land rezoned so that it had to be low-income housing moving forward with the plantation house turned into a museum about the history of sugar and slavery. The influence you can have when you own thousands of acres and millions of dollars. Do you know much about reparations?”
“Making amends for past wrongs. My grandmother used to talk about it in regards to slavery.”
“Then you know slave reparations are rare birds.”
I nodded. Reparations for slavery had been bandied about for years, mostly right after it ended in the U.S. Not a ton of talk about it in the Caribbean to my knowledge.
Pickering continued. “The only real example of an entire nation providing reparations for past wrongs was Germany giving billions to Israel after World War II. The very act of forming the state of Israel was a form of forced reparations to the Jewish people, but it didn’t come out of Germany’s hide since Germany didn’t own the land used to form Israel.”
Sometimes it was interesting listening to Pickering’s historical diatribes, but tonight I didn’t have the patience, so I eased him out of lecture-mode and back on track.
Pickering shook his head in disgust. “Fine, fine, a man tries to color the narrative. This is why folks don’t like history, no patience for the payoff at the end of a good story anymore. You know, Boise, you could stand to gain some historical perspective about the racial divide that you’re a part of. Do you even know if your African grandmother willingly married a white man? Did she do it for love or out of necessity or something more sinister?”
His eyes had that watery glass over them, so I cut him some slack.
“Walter, what say we leave my dearly departed grandmother out of this conversation.”
He raised his hands in the universal gesture for “sorry, man, I wasn’t trying to offend you,” a staple of drunken insults the world over.
“Point is,” he spoke deliberately, enunciating each word like a scholar lecturing to his freshman English class. “I figured out their agenda and it might be,” he coughed, “they both bought the farm for doing the right thing.”
I threw back the last of my beer and got myself another. If I caught up with Pickering, maybe I’d understand what the hell he was trying to say.
When I
