“Round about the break of dawn,” Riley said, taking his cue, “out checkin’ the moorings, I come ’round the point and think maybe the first thing to do be to clean up the mess, seein’ these rags here, thinkin’ they was rubbish. Then I heard the flies, shooed away the birds, and seen what you now seein’, mon.”
Riley bent down and picked up a plank, which made Cooper notice the other pieces of wood, nailed together in groups, strewn across the rocks. Down by the water was a bigger grouping, big enough for Cooper to surmise the obvious-the body had come in on a boat. A small one, from the look of it.
“Not much left, but I figure maybe he a tourist,” Riley said. “Hurricane take down his big boat, lifeboat don’t make it all the way in.”
Cap’n Roy interrupted stiffly, “Ain’t a tourist though.”
Cooper said, “Islander?”
“He ain’t from ’round here.”
Cooper thought Roy’s answer was a little quick.
“Tell you what,” Cooper said. “Why don’t you sit on it. Wait it out a day or two. Maybe some poor St. Johnnie sends Riley here an e-mail, telling him our boy here didn’t come home from work. Ask around, find out if he was dealing. Couple weeks and you’ll have it all wrapped up.”
“No, mon,” Roy said. He shook his head. “That e-mail ain’t gonna be comin’.”
Cooper looked around at Roy’s posse, the cops slouching, mute, exhibiting an array of poses. “How about you take me back to the Marine Base,” he said, “so I can get home.”
Cap’n Roy gave him a sideways look and made a cluck-cluck sound with his tongue. “You know, strange murder case turning up in the police beat,” he said, “that’d be somethin’ people maybe want to keep an eye on. Case go unsolved-that call not comin’ in from your St. Johnnie-then the whole thing might just start lookin’ pretty bad on the head policeman. Look especially bad, that policeman up for chief minister next month.”
Cooper caught Riley checking him for a reaction.
“People say you know the kind of people I make a point not to know,” Cap’n Roy said, getting to it now. “Kind of people could take a body that wash up on the beach, take that body, and put it away. Nobody know a thing about it.”
Cooper said, “Those sound like some kind of people.”
Cap’n Roy grinned. “People say something else too. They say somebody need help, got himself in a bind he can’t fix, he can call on that Cooper, that spy on the island, mon, and he help you out.”
“Last year,” Cooper said, “that kid, the one got shot up on Blackburn Road-what was his name?”
“Entwine,” Roy said.
“You didn’t call me when Entwine died.”
The mobile phone on Cap’n Roy’s waist chortled and Roy made a motion with his hand, Cooper interpreting the gesture to mean that Roy had been expecting an important call, and would Cooper excuse him for a moment. After a few words into the phone, Roy reclipped the phone to his belt. He waved over the RVIPF cops, the men wearing the standard uniforms.
“Got a little crisis, mon,” he said, back with Cooper now. “Riley and Tim, they give you anything you need.”
Then Cap’n Roy reached out to shake Cooper’s hand.
Cooper looked at the hand. It was a clean hand, recently manicured. It looked like a hand that had never been dirty. It looked like a hand that had never done a single day’s hard work. Cooper thought that with a hand like that, someday Roy would probably be running more than just Road Town. He knew that Roy and his merry band of performers knew something about the body they weren’t telling him, which, to say the least, did not bode well. Still, he thought that if Roy happened to expand his kingdom, outstripping that self-imposed nickname of his, it’d be nice to have the man on his list.
“I might call you sometime,” Cooper said. Cap’n Roy kept his hand out. “I might have a question. I might need some help, or a favor. I take that body, and you’ll take the call.”
Roy thought about this for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah, mon.”
Cooper shook his hand, and with that, Cap’n Roy marched off around the breakwater and disappeared into the field of thick brown grass. The RVIPF men followed, leaving Cooper alone with Riley and Tim. He saw that Riley was smiling at him.
Cooper didn’t smile back.
“I assume you guys brought a bag,” he said.
3
A cadaverous man slathered Grecian Formula on his hair and admired his reflection. Eugene Little used watered-down Grecian Formula to maintain the natural color of his hair, primarily because he’d read in People that Ronald Reagan had used the same recipe during his White House days.
Eugene had made himself efficient in the morning. He bathed at night, eliminating the need for a morning shower; he’d roll out of the sack, gargle some Listerine, work the tincture of Grecian Formula into his hair, stir a cup of instant coffee-Folgers or Yuban, whichever he’d found a coupon for-step out the kitchen door in his bathrobe, grab his copy of the Virgin Islands Daily News, open his mailbox, dig out the periodicals he cherished-National Review, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report-come back in, get dressed, and get out the door.
This morning Eugene chose permanent-press trousers and a plaid shirt, the short sleeves showing off his pale, skinny biceps and matted forearm hair. He polished off the coffee, tucked the periodicals beneath an elbow, and skittered down the sidewalk. It hadn’t been fifteen minutes, alarm to exit. Eugene’s bachelor pad occupied a dirty corner of Charlotte Amalie, the only city in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The thing about a squalid neighborhood like Eugene’s was that the 7-Eleven was always open, so Eugene could swing by, pick up a plain doughnut and second cup of coffee, and still get to work before eight.
One mile down the road, 7-Eleven coffee in hand, Eugene shuffled up the stairs of a single-story building that looked like any other house on the street, but wasn’t, as evidenced by the words engraved on a plaque beside the front door: CHARLOTTE AMALIE MORGUE. Making his way down to the basement, Eugene turned on a bank of fluorescents and checked his in-box, which, as expected, contained nothing. This, along with the neutral scents in the room, meant there was no stiff awaiting his inspection. When they’d left one for him, he could always smell it.
He sat at his desk and whipped out the magazines, deciding to start with National Review. He’d broken off a piece of his doughnut and was pulling the lid off the coffee when the phone rang.
He snatched it from its cradle.
“Lab.”
“Eugene!” came the voice from the other end of the line. “Just the man I was looking for.”
A globule of spittle formed on Eugene’s lower lip and a snappy facial tic tugged at his left eye. “Cooper?” he said. “It is Cooper, isn’t it? Well, you can just fuck off.”
Standing on the Marine Base dock with his sat phone tucked against an ear, Cooper watched Riley and Tim carry what looked like a flattened inner tube down to the dock. The kid walked backward, checking his footing by looking over his shoulder, and Riley brought up the rear. Watching them do it, Cooper observed that the corpse filled the blue vinyl bag no better than a couple of bait fish.
“That isn’t a polite way to start a conversation,” he told Eugene, “so let’s start over. There’s something I’d like you to do for me.”
“What kind of something?” Eugene said.
“I need to dispose of a body.”
“Dispose?”
“That’s right.”
“Where are you calling from? Are you here in my jurisdiction?”
“No.”
“Well then, it’s out of the question. I don’t operate as some sort of freelance coroner.”