I looked up at this, as though to ask a question.
“There was an understanding between them — that’s the rumor among the Haitians,” he said.
This was quaint usage, not uncommon in the islands, and it was more than merely usage. A certain part of the Haitian community was very formal about these things, very old fashioned.
“An understanding?” I said. Now I was thinking of a motive other than robbery.
“The daughter was at the hotel until almost midnight and she was home with Madame Dell after that,” said Constable MacMahon. “So it wasn’t her.” He had noted my suspicion. “It probably has to do with drugs.” He seemed resentful that the authorities in the capital were not more interested in our murder.
“Surely not,” I said. I had confirmed that the passbook was Pierre’s and now had a record of his current transactions before me. “He didn’t have enough money for someone in the drug trade.”
“Something to do with the tourists then,” said Constable MacMahon doggedly. It was a reasonable guess, for everything on the island was connected with either drugs or the tourists, or both.
“There’s nothing unusual in his bank transactions,” I said. To save Constable MacMahon the trouble of reading the figures upside down, I flipped the page half around on my desk, then waited while he fumbled in the breast pocket of his shirt for his bifocals.
“Lump sum deposits every now and then.” I pointed out the figures with a pencil. “Not so very large, really. That would be consistent with payment for the jobs he did. I believe he rebuilt Burnett’s dock last summer.”
That was how many of the Haitians eked out their living — doing odd jobs and the heavy labor of clearing land and construction, usually on an irregular basis, and usually for pitiful wages. Still, it was better than Haiti. They had crossed the sea in small boats to escape the Tontons Macoute, and they worked hard. Most of the illegal refugees were squatters: they lived in tarpaper shacks and rickety lean-tos which they built on Crown land in the middle of the island. Some had managed to bring a few possessions with them; some even a little money with which to buy the lots on which they lived.
Of the few Haitian families that had houses in the village, Madame Dell was the most prosperous. Her husband had been a professional man, educated in France, who had run afoul of the Duvaliers. She herself was trained as a nurse. As well as taking in laundry, she worked several days a week looking after an old woman from Connecticut who had a villa out on North Point. Madame Dell’s stepdaughter was a waitress at the Majestic Hotel; I had seen her there and she was very beautiful. She had a reputation for keeping to herself, almost sullen: I was surprised she had come to an understanding with anyone. The Haitians were illiterate and ill-clothed and some of them still practiced voodoo, but their culture was more profound, more arcane, and more formal than we knew.
After a couple of days I didn’t think of the murder much. I had not known Pierre and I was inclined to agree with Burnett that it was probably some trivial dispute, the settlement of which had been inflamed by liquor. We sometimes heard shrieks from the woods on Saturday nights. If people wanted to kill one another in the bush, well, there was little that could be done about it.
I mentioned the murder to Madame Dell one morning when she was delivering my crisp white sheets. A shadow crossed her face.
“Mr. Rennison, I don’t know nothing about it,” she said, “but that man, he was no good.” She paused. “Always chasing the woman.” She looked up as she said this and in her eyes there was a stony look.
Winnie, the girl who worked for me behind the counter at the bank, hinted at the same thing: something to do with women, that’s the way the talk among the villagers at Drover’s grocery store had it. And then Healey came over from the regional head office in Nassau for his weekly visit. I met him just after the morning ferry had come in. He was walking up the steps from the government dock with two bottles of dark rum which he customarily brought me.
“I hear Pierre the Stud was murdered in the woods.” The men who worked the ferry had told him; Healey had lived in the islands for several years longer than I had and he knew everyone.
“The Stud?” I said.
“A ladies’ man,” said Healey. “With the Haitians. With the villagers. Even went with some of the tourists, the flabby pink ones who come in on the yachts. He did it for money. That’s what they say.”
Perhaps there was something after all to Constable MacMahon’s idea that the killing was connected with the tourists. After Healey’s visit this theory started to gain credence; at the Yacht Club there was always fascination at the idea of sexual connections between affluent tourists and young men from the bush. Constable MacMahon asked around and was unable to find evidence of any work done by Pierre to account for the larger deposits to his account. The itinerants were sometimes hired by people on other out islands, but Pierre had not owned a boat and no one had lent him one. On the other hand, there were always visiting yachts in the harbor; there would never be a way of finding out what had taken place there. Perhaps one of the women had become attached, and then discovered that Pierre had an understanding with a local girl. Perhaps there had been an irate husband. It seemed a neat explanation and it meant that the murderer was no longer among us. Constable MacMahon was off the hook.
On the weekend there was a big regatta with sailboats from everywhere, and none of us thought of death.
The second murder was two and a half weeks later. Mrs. Rainey, on her way to deliver grouper to Madame Dell as she did every Thursday night late after the fishing boats came in, had heard the stepdaughter wail as she came into the kitchen from the hotel. Together they had seen that Madame Dell had been stabbed through the heart, and there was fear on the island. Pierre had been a drifter; this was different: we all knew Madame Dell. In the village we saw her every day; she was there among us. She did my shirts. Her house was not fifty yards from where I sat in the bank. That night the tourists remained snug aboard their yachts and locked behind the wooden shutters of their cabins and hotel rooms. The villagers stayed home, and the Queen’s Highway and the other paths that wound through the village were empty. At the Poolside Bar of the Majestic Hotel there was no clinking of ice in rum punches on the patio, no banging of Beck’s beer bottles on the iron table tops, no chatter of voices, only the click-clicking of the fronds of the high palms in the warm Atlantic trades.
I came across Constable MacMahon in the post office.
“Are the murders connected?” I asked him.
“I doubt it,” he said.
“What was it this time?”
“Ritual killing,” he said darkly. Constable MacMahon had an answer for everything.
Others said that the murders were the work of a madman. No one was safe: on a small island there is nowhere you can get away to. At the Yacht Club there was talk of exerting influence on the capital to get more attention paid, to get some real police work done, and indeed a day or two later men came from across the channel to take photographs, fingerprints, and measurements with a brand new metal tape.
“The constable thinks the killings are unconnected,” I said to Burnett. We were standing at the Yacht Club bar.
“I don’t know about that,” said Burnett. “The rumor in the village is that they were killed with the same knife. Let me get you another drink.”
Winnie, the girl at the bank, had told me that Madame Dell’s demise involved voodoo.
“But she was a Catholic,” I said.
It made no difference. To the evangelical villagers, it was voodoo. To the expats, it was the work of a maniac. As for the Haitian community, well, one way or another, they probably knew what had happened, but they weren’t saying. The different communities were three solitudes on that little island.