Bob Morris_Zack Chasteen 02 (6 page)

“Gosh, you mean I bought you those fur-lined handcuffs for nothing?”

Barbara swatted at me.

“Stop it,” she said. “You know what I mean. And if you really did buy fur-lined handcuffs, then you should bloody well take them with you to Libido. Lord knows you’ll find plenty of willing wenches down there.”

“You worried about that?”

“Not in the slightest,” she said.

“Right answer,” I said.

Then she took me by the hand and led me to the house. She was much better at reading minds than I was.

After Barbara left I did some things that needed doing before I could leave for Jamaica, which is to say I mostly just piddled around, burning time and trying to convince myself that I was indispensable around the place. Truth was, all I needed to do was pack my bags. Boggy could take care of everything while I was gone.

The previous year had been a prosperous one, at least by my standards, thanks largely to the proceeds of what Barbara generously called my “Bahamas investment venture.” It had been slightly short of legal, but since no one had lost money except those who deserved to lose it, and they were now either dead or in jail, I didn’t feel much in the way of guilt.

Besides, it was the sort of enterprise that, had I been forthcoming about it, would have created a great deal of extra work for an already overburdened IRS. That’s why I had thoughtfully decided not to bother them with the details of it. Just call me Good Citizen Chasteen.

I sank much of the cash from that venture into my favorite investment—fiberglass. There were two new boats in my boathouse, a 27-foot center console that I use for offshore fishing and the occasional dive trip, and a 17-foot flats boat that’s ideal
for working Redfish Lagoon, the mangrove-lined sanctuary that spreads out for miles behind my house.

I showed the boats some attention and talked to them and told them not to miss me while I was gone. Then I hosed down my trawler,
Miz Blitz,
let her engines idle for a few minutes, shut them down, and went off looking for Boggy.

I finally found him at the south end of the nursery, atop a small bluff that overlooks a narrow finger of the lagoon. It is one of only a few small chunks of open space on the property. Everywhere else is crammed full of palm trees.

Boggy and Karly Altman were on their knees, digging dirt from near the base of a tall, scraggly solitary palm tree and placing it in several glass jars marked with labels. They stood as they saw me approaching.

In all the years I’ve known Boggy, I’ve never been able to figure out what attraction he holds for women. But they attach themselves to him like holy on the pope, which is especially curious when you consider that he stands five-foot-four with a face that looks like it was molded out of Silly Putty and a physique somewhere between that of a suitcase and a bowling ball.

“He’s like a little brown god,” is how Barbara once described Boggy. “You just want to hug him.”

Beats hell out of me.

Karly Altman stood at least a head taller than Mr. Huggable, and she was beaming at me.

“Congratulations,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. “What did I do?”

“Why, it’s your carossier,” she said. “It has fruited.”

“Hmmm,” I said.

“Aren’t you excited?” she said.

“Mere words can’t express,” I said.

I looked at Boggy. He nodded at the tall scraggly palm.

“That’s the carossier,” he said. Then he turned to Karly. “Zachary, he just own the place. About palm trees, he does not know shit.”

Karly looked at me with unmasked pity.

“You mean to tell me you don’t have a clue what it is you
have here?” she said. “No wonder you can’t grasp the immensity of the occasion.”

“Clueless, graspless, don’t know shit. That’s me,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I tend to lose sight of the fact that not everyone’s a palm nut like I am.”

She wiped dirt from her hands and rapped her knuckles against the trunk of the palm tree.

“
Attalea crassipatha.
One of several species of the American oil palm. Native habitat, southwestern coast of Haiti. Number of specimens known to exist in the wild, no more than thirty. Number of specimens successfully propagated in private nurseries, zero,” she said. “But we’re about to change that.”

“We are?”

“Oh, yes. Just look at those,” she said, pointing to the top of the palm. A yellow stalk protruded from the tree’s crown. It was studded with dozens of tiny white flowers. Bees were buzzing around them.

“The blossoms should fall off in the next week or so, and I’ll bag the stalk in plastic mesh after that,” she said. “Otherwise, we run the risk of losing the fruit to birds.”

“Can’t have that,” I said.

“Then it will take four to five weeks for the seed pod to mature and be ready to plant,” said Karly Altman.

She grabbed one of the jars of dirt.

“It’s critical that I analyze the soil. I’ll need to set up a small lab to do that. I was hoping to use a portion of your kitchen,” she said. “Is that OK?”

“Sure,” I said. “I won’t be needing it. I’m getting ready to leave for . . .”

“Great,” said Karly Altman. “And would it be OK if we built a potting house? We can probably make do with the scrap lumber and screen that’s in the storage shed. Boggy said he could slap something together.”

“That’s fine. I’d offer to help you, but I’ll be . . .”

“Oh, this is so exciting. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” said Karly, giving me a hug. “Now I have to go send out some e-mails. This is big news. A carossier fruiting in Florida. Who could have ever imagined?”

“It’s really that big a deal, huh?”

“Omigod, it’s giant,” she said. “Wait until the International Palm Society finds out. There will be all kinds of people swarming in here to get a look.”

She gathered up the jars of dirt, put them in a cardboard box, and hurried off toward the house. Boggy and I watched her go.

“Woman’s got a lot of enthusiasm,” I said. “Didn’t know it was possible for someone to get that excited over a palm tree.”

“She has a big spirit,” Boggy said.

I looked at Boggy.

“So, you and her . . . ?”

Boggy didn’t say anything. And his face gave up nothing. It never does.

“Aw, c’mon,” I said. “What’s the deal with the two of you? Is it serious?”

It sounded stupid the minute I said it. With Boggy everything is serious.

So we stood there atop the bluff, enjoying the view. To the west the lagoon sprawled out like a giant jigsaw puzzle, a dazzlement of curlicue islands and snakelike sloughs. From the east came the Atlantic’s low grumble. The surf was choppy and the water was the gray-green it gets after a summer’s worth of hard rain and outflow from the lagoon.

Minutes went by. Neither one of us spoke. Boggy is one of exactly two people in the world with whom I can feel comfortable in the quiet. Barbara is the other one.

Finally, Boggy said, “Barbara, she wants me to go with you.”

“So you know what’s going on, about me heading down to Jamaica?”

Boggy nodded.

“Barbara found me as she was leaving and told me about it,” he said. “She is much troubled, Zachary.”

“Funny, she didn’t act much troubled when I last saw her.”

“Sometimes she puts on a face for you because she knows that is the face you want to see.”

“And what? She puts on another face for you?”

He shrugged. He didn’t say anything.

“Well, she’s got nothing to worry about,” I said. “I’ll be back before she knows I’m gone.”

“So you do not wish me to go with you?”

“I can handle it,” I said.

Boggy turned and faced me. He looked long and hard into my eyes. His gaze seemed to bore into some deep core of me that not even I can penetrate. He does this every now and then. It is more than mildly creepy.

Then he turned away and said, “It will not be quite so easy as you expect, Zachary.”

“That a fact? Or is this one of your hunches?”

“It is what it is,” he said.

“You know, it really ticks me off when you say crap like that. You might as well be writing newspaper horoscopes. Nothing is ever as easy as anyone expects. And everything is what it is. Tell me something I don’t know, how about it, instead of all the mumbo jumbo.”

Boggy didn’t say anything. He folded his arms above his little potbelly and looked west across the lagoon.

“No way,” I said. “It doesn’t work like that. You don’t just throw stuff like that out there and then clam up and let it hang. Give up what you’ve got.”

But I didn’t get anything else out of him. When I walked away he was still standing there, gazing into the distance at something I couldn’t see.

Monday morning I got up long before sunrise and drove to Orlando and caught a flight to Miami. I was glad to be flying early, well ahead of the afternoon thunderstorms that close in from the coasts and collide with a fury and make flying in Florida such a come-to-Jesus experience.

The pilot banked the plane east, took us out over Port Canaveral, and we cruised south along the condo corridor. An hour later, the Miami skyline poked itself out like jailbait in a bikini and drew us thither.

Miami International has two redeeming features. One is a killer Cuban cafeteria, La Carretta, on Concourse D. I grabbed a stool at the take-out counter and ordered café con leche and a crab relleno. Then I sat there admiring the airport’s other redeeming feature—a steady stream of Latina lovelies from the Caribbean basin and beyond.

Had Barbara been with me, we would have rated the contenders as they walked past and speculated about where they came from.

“Pink tube top with the black capris. An eight-point-five. Puerto Rico.”

“What is it with you men and tube tops? She’s slutty. Barely
a six. But those shoes of hers, they’re darling. Brazil. She’s definitely from Brazil.”

I ordered a pastelito, filled with sweet guava paste and cream cheese, and another café con leche. Someone had left behind a copy of the
Miami Herald
. I flipped through it.

The
Herald
’s news staff had been caught short in its coverage of the bomb in the skybox for Sunday’s edition, but had more than made up for it in Monday’s paper. There was a flashy piece stripped across the top of the front page under the headline: “Resort Mogul No Stranger to Danger.” It portrayed Darcy Whitehall as a consummate risk-taker both in business and in his personal life. It told how he had beaten the odds as a music producer, then cut his own path as a renegade hotelier. And it showcased his penchant for adventure—trans-Atlantic sailboat races, diving with whale sharks in Belize, hot-air ballooning across the Andes.

The story jumped to a full page inside with lots of photographs of Whitehall from over the years—palling around with Peter Tosh and Mick Jagger backstage at a 1980s-era concert, soaking in a hot tub at Libido with a bevy of fetching babes, dancing with a pair of leggy supermodels at a South Beach nightclub. There were quotes from various people who knew him, but nothing in the way of explanation, or even reasonable speculation, as to why someone might have planted the bomb.

A paragraph near the end of the story, however, caught my attention.

“While Whitehall has never taken an active role in Jamaica’s often-bloody political arena, his son, Alan, is no stranger to public life. Having founded a high-profile relief program that provides low-income housing throughout the Caribbean, the younger Whitehall has set his sights on a seat in the Jamaican parliament and was recently nominated by the ruling People’s National Party to stand as a candidate in the Trelawney Northern district.”

My “Ah-ha!” moments are few and far between, but this was one of them. I thought back to the scene in the skybox, the little incident between Alan Whitehall and his sister. She’d blamed
Alan for the jam their father was in. Then she’d stormed away and left him with Darcy.

“If this is my fault, I’m sorry,” Alan had said. “I’ll quit. I’ll drop out.”

Had he been referring to his budding political career? Did someone want him out of the race? And was that dud-of-a-bomb their way of underscoring the seriousness of their intentions?

All questions I could ask Monk DeVane soon enough.

A half hour later I was at the gate for Air Libido. It was part of Darcy Whitehall’s empire, a charter operation that flew guests to the islands on which his various resorts were located.

And what an operation it was. Instead of the typical airport hellhole of molded plastic seats and crummy carpet, the Air Libido waiting area resembled a beachside tiki bar. There were comfy divans, rattan chairs, and even a couple of hammocks strung between fake palm trees.

Perched on a stool by the boarding gate, a guy in dreadlocks was strumming the guitar and singing Bob Marley standards. The check-in counter resembled a little grass shack by the sea.

All in all, it was a masterful piece of marketing. Air Libido stood out like an orchid in a sandspur patch. Vacationers on their way to other airlines walked past Air Libido and thought: Man, next time I want some of that.

The flight to Montego Bay was already boarding. A young man and a young woman were working the check-in counter. Both looked like catalogue models ready for a frisky day at the beach.

The young man wore his flowered shirt open, all the better for displaying his pecs and abs. The young woman wore a
gauzy blouse over a halter top and shorts, all the better for displaying her everything.

I handed the young woman my ticket and she gave me a boarding pass. Then she held up a tray and offered me my choice of rum punch or a bottle of Red Stripe beer. Not even ten o’clock in the morning and on Air Libido it was already time to cut loose.

I reminded myself that I was heading to Jamaica on a serious mission, a possible matter of life and death, a situation in which it might be a good idea to keep my wits about me.

I took a Red Stripe.

Boarding the plane was like walking into a party that had started long before I got there. The buzz was lively, the cabin speakers were blasting reggae, and several people—including a couple of the flight attendants—were boogeying by the bulkheads. The island vibe was so pervasive that I halfway expected the copilot to step out of the cockpit and pass around a giant spliff.