The Sea Grape Tree (23 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

I
n the two-room police station in Port Antonio, Shad slid lower in the rickety chair, waiting for Sergeant Neville Myers to get off the phone.

“Go to the police,” Danny had said on the phone the day before. “Tell them what you told me.” Shad's first instinct had been to select a few choice words to describe the Port Antonio police force that never had time for little Largo, but he'd held his tongue and followed the suggestion, even if it meant taking his day off to do it.

“Yes, ma'am.” His police cousin nodded patiently into the receiver, raising smug eyebrows with each sentence. “It sounding suspicious, you right. But we can't come and arrest your helper. We don't have no proof that she stole the ring.” Neville swung his captain's chair toward the dusty window, adjusting the blue uniform shirt over his belly. Stumpy like all the Myers men, he made up for it with girth and authority.

The men didn't like each other. One was the representative of the Constabulary Force (on whose side Neville had invariably fought when they were boys playing in the bamboo), and the other a former renegade and convict, something that had hung in the air between them for the last seventeen years.

At a smaller desk behind their superior, no computer in sight, two young constables were reading the contents of a file folder, one standing and leaning over the other. The seated youth glanced up at his colleague with a grin, amused by what they were reading. They weren't making more than two hundred US a month, Shad knew, but the red stripes down their pants seams gave them the right to know people's private lives. Maybe carrying a gun made it worthwhile.

“Yes, sir,” Neville said, having disposed of his caller. He spoke wearily, his younger cousin still an embarrassment. “How can I help you?” He creaked back in the old captain's chair and swung it around, showing all three stripes on his right sleeve.

“How is Aunt Jasmine?” Shad smiled.

“She good, getting old,” Neville said. “So what bring you here?”

“An English lady, she used to come into the bar—”

“What happen to Beth?”

“Nothing like that. This woman is a artist, she disappear from Largo.”

“What you mean she disappear?”

“She was staying with another artist man in Largo, a man called Roper. You ever hear of him?” His cousin stared back blankly. “Anyway, she was staying there and she just disappear one morning. Her clothes gone, everything gone—well, almost everything—but she never come back and she don't contact nobody since then.”

Neville pulled a pad toward him. “What were the circumstances of her departure?”

“One day they come back to the house and she gone.”

“No forced entry?”

“No.”

“No witnesses?”

“No.”

Neville pushed the pad aside. “Pshaw, man. The woman just leave on her own.”

“She don't have no money.”

“How you know that?” Chubby cheeks getting chubbier, Neville shook his head, a man of the world. “She could have money and nobody know. White people don't talk their business like black people, especially money business.”

“She don't just move somewhere else. She don't know nobody.”

“The woman get on a plane and leave, you hear me?”

“Without a passport?”

Neville frowned. “How you know?”

“Somebody tell me,” Shad said, swallowing hard. “She leave it in the room on top of a closet.” He could still see the small, blue book hiding at the back of the shelf.

“She still on the island then,” the sergeant said, rubbing his chin. “She have any
enemies
?”

“No, she don't have no enemies.” Janet intruding into the bathroom didn't give her an enemy, nor the argument with Roper, not enough to make Neville sound more like a judge. “She not that kind of person, she quiet like. She just go about her business and paint every day.”

Neville harrumphed. “I think I know what happen. Them artist people like to smoke weed when they come down here. They free up themselves and do all kind of things.”

“You can't come to Largo and investigate?”

“Investigate what, some artist woman who smoke weed?”

“She not smoking weed, man. She don't even smoke cigarette.”

“Trust me, boy, the woman gone off to some Rasta man's yard to smoke weed. I have a case last year of a woman who never go back to New Jersey, and her parents come down and want us to investigate. And when we check, the woman was living with a Rasta in St. Ann. Them cases easy to solve. We don't have no time to waste on that kind of business. Is serious business we doing here, catching criminal and thing. We put our lives on the line every day.” Neville's eyes started to bulge, like when they were playing police and he'd caught Shad in his grip, yelling,
I catch you now, I catch you now.

He poked the desk with a fat finger. “You know is
sixty
police dead in Jamaica since 2002? This job is not a joke, not no cops and robbers we playing. Is
criminals
we have out there, mistah! You think we want to run around checking on some woman who don't come into the bar anymore?”

“She disappear, nobody know where she gone.”

“Then how come the people she was staying with don't come in? How come her father don't call us? How come the British diplomat people don't tell us to look for her?”

Shad rose to his feet. “I just saying that things looking suspicious—”

“You know what the word mean, though? All you doing is looking at detective show on television and you trying to play detective, saying things looking
suspicious
. Just leave the investigating to us, you hear me, boy!”

Feeling like a ten-year-old who'd just wrested himself out of a bully's hands, Shad galloped down the stone steps of the police station, reminding himself to tell Beth not to invite Neville to the wedding. It was one thing to have his idiot cousin suggest that he had a thing going on with the woman, but it was another to talk down to him in front of two green corporals. They were probably laughing at him right now.

The Jeep didn't cooperate either. It started bucking near Boston Beach, hiccupping like it was going to shut off at any minute. A mechanic in the gas station told him he had water in the gas tank, and it took another hour to drain the tank and two thousand Jamaican dollars from his wallet. By the time he got back to Largo, he was in no mood to deal with anyone, much less the seamstress waiting for him in the parking lot, her eyes bright with news.

“You hear from Danny?” Janet greeted him as soon as he stepped out of the Jeep. She was wearing shorts and gold sandals, their last meeting on her porch apparently forgotten.

“The phone not working since Saturday. They coming to fix it today.”

She patted the shiny, brown curls cascading to her shoulders. “He coming back.”

Shad slammed the car door. “What you telling me?”

“Danny coming on Wednesday, day after tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“He taking me to the American embassy in Kingston to get a visitor's visa.”

“I thought you was looking for a green card.”

“Pshaw, man, that take too long. I call them to find out. You have to get marry first and wait five years. Who have that kind of time?” To Shad's upraised eyebrows, she smiled, sweet moon eyes all innocence. “If I get a visa I can pay him a little visit in New York, give him some loving-up. Every man need a woman to keep him warm, like how it cold up there. You know what I mean?”

Shad's forehead deepened into a frown. “Is your idea, this visit you going to make?”

“Of course is my idea,” Janet said, tossing her new locks. “You ever hear a man have an idea that a woman don't put in his head?”

“Don't get me vex, you hear?” Shad started toward the bar, keys in hand.

“Don't forget,” she said, sandals clattering on the gravel behind him, “he want you to come for him at the airport. Wednesday at three o'clock, he say.” Shad kept walking, and she touched his arm.

“You hear me, Shad?” The bartender shook off her hand, raising one impatient finger with the keys, and the clattering stopped.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

E
ric threw the rest of his sandwich into the garbage can, guilty of having broken his own rule of not eating behind the bar. There was usually no one around to notice on Mondays, when he worked alone at the counter, few customers to impress.

In the parking lot, Shad was being detained by the dressmaker woman, who was stroking her wig as she talked. She'd come into the bar earlier asking for the bartender and Eric had told her he'd be back soon and she could wait there. Instead, she'd chosen to stand in the parking lot, slapping her thick, shiny legs for mosquitoes every now and again, and Eric had imagined Danny Caines riding the woman, and he'd thought that it must have been a pleasant ride because she was a round little thing with no bony hips to contend with. The thought had been followed by a trip to the kitchen, where he'd slathered mayonnaise onto a slice of hard dough bread, topped it with onion and two slices of ham, and started devouring it behind the bar.

“Boss,” Shad greeted him, a hard look on his face as he strode across the dusty concrete floor. “Business good?”

“Same as usual.” Eric dried his hands on the kitchen towel and perched on Shad's stool.

“You remember to sweep today, though?”

“The wind is doing it for me.”

“I returning the keys,” Shad said, placing them on the counter and putting his hands in his pockets. “But I going to need the Jeep on Wednesday. Danny Caines is coming back. I have to meet him at the airport.”

“Caines is coming back? Well, Janey Mac!” Eric beamed, delighted with his rhyme and his mother's favorite expression. “That must mean he's serious about the hotel, don't you think?”

Shad turned away, wiping his scalp. “I don't know—”

Eric slid off the bartender's stool. “You told him that we're free and clear to start construction, right? The permits are signed and we came to an agreement with Horace. You told him that, right?”

“I tell him long time.” The bartender was hovering, not rushing away like he always did on his day off. He was shuffling from one leg to the other, putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out.

“So, what's up, bud?” Eric said, still glowing with delight.

“I want to borrow the Jeep again. I want to go into Port Maria, since it's my day off—”

“I'll come with you. I'll even drive.”

“You working the bar.”

Eric spread his arms to the emptiness. “What work?”

With the liquor stored under the sink, the refrigerator and kitchen locked, the men were on their way in half an hour. It was the perfect afternoon to get out from under, low clouds scudding across the edges of a blue sky, sunshine everywhere.

“Not much traffic, eh?” Eric commented, changing down to fourth. “Why we going to Port Maria?”

Shad rubbed his hands on his jeans. “I think the artist lady, Sarah, still on the island, and I want to start looking for her.”

“It was her passport you were inquiring about, wasn't it?”

“Same thing.”

“I had a feeling, I just had a feeling.” Eric leaned toward the passenger seat, ready to wink if Shad had been looking at him. “Who found the passport?”

“Boss, some things you don't need to know.”

Guided by his companion, Eric drove toward the upper end of Port Maria and away from the ocean. The first lane they turned into was narrow and crowded with small cement houses, dusty yards separated by chicken-wire fences.

“Stop here,” Shad said, pointing to a house with high windows.

“Who lives here?”

“A man called Boxer. I know him long time—from Pen days. He know everything going on in Port Maria.”

“You know you're being melodramatic. She's probably somewhere—”

Before he could finish, Shad was knocking at the wire gate. A solid-looking man wearing boxer shorts came onto the tiny verandah. He greeted Shad and gestured for him to come inside. Beside the driver's side of the Jeep, a small boy in a stained T-shirt stared up at Eric, two fingers hanging on to the wire fence between them and two fingers in his mouth.

“You seen any Englishwomen hanging around?” Eric asked the child, who turned and ran into the house.

Five minutes later, Shad jumped into the vehicle. “Up the road,” he declared. He slammed the door twice until it caught. “Drive to the end and turn left.”

Eric slipped the gear into first. “Where we going?”

“We looking for a big yellow house up the hill.”

“Whose house?” Eric asked, turning left around a small bar with an umbrella table and three chairs out front.

“Janet's brother live there. They call him Lizard.”

Eric chuckled. “Sounds like a drug don or something.”

“Boxer tell me he in the business.”

“What kind of business?”

“Is three of them in town, Boxer say, three dons in Port Maria.” Shad slung his arm out of the window, his face expressionless. “Lizard is one of them.”

“Jesus Christ!” Eric exclaimed, hitting the steering wheel. The Jeep chugged to a stop. “Janet's brother is a
don
? How'd you make the connection?”

“I know she from Port Maria and, since Boxer know everybody around here, I thought we should start with him. He know her family, yes, just like I thought.”

“Does Danny know this?” Eric opened his eyes wider. “Oh, God, maybe he's—do you think Danny's—tell me it's not so, because I'm not going into business with a drug dealer!”

“We don't know anything yet, boss.” Shad was as cool as he'd ever been, wouldn't even look at him.

“What do you think we're going to do, knock on some don's door and ask about a missing woman who may not even be missing?”

“They can't do us nothing, we just inquiring.” Shad nodded. A smile played along his lips as he turned away. “And, besides, you safe. You disappear and embassy people coming around asking plenty questions.” A remark that did little to curb Eric's jitters.

The mustard-colored mausoleum was visible from the main road. It stood alone at the end of a long uphill road, dominating the banana trees on either side of the road leading up to it. The cantilevered verandahs on the upper floor made it look like a dusty bomb above the wall surrounding it.

Eric stopped the car a hundred yards in front of the elaborate wrought-iron gate. “This is crazy—you know that, right? We shouldn't even be here.”

“We just looking, boss, just looking.”

“I'm not driving any closer, I'm telling you right now. Just because we can't see anybody, doesn't mean they're not watching us. I bet they have a camera on us.” He gestured with his chin, not daring to point. “And if you hadn't noticed, there's an eight-foot wall around the place. They're going to have dogs.”

Shad shook his head and grinned, the gap between his teeth none too comforting this time. “Boss, you never going to make a private investigator.”

“You damn straight.”

“You saying, you not coming inside with me?”

“Shit, I wouldn't go inside with my own mother.” Eric pulled his head back. “You know what those people do for a living? They don't only export and import drugs, you know. They wouldn't think twice about killing you if you asked too many questions. Hell, they don't even have to have a reason to shoot.”

“Don't worry, I seen enough,” Shad said, patting the air. He settled back in his seat. “I just wanted to check it out.”