Murder at the B-School Read online

  The Puerto Rican couple nodded politely, with one or the other making an occasional comment to the pilots. The kids on the back bench, pawing each other energetically, sometimes audibly sucking on each other’s tongues, missed the tour entirely.

  Vermeer looked out the small window to his left. There were coral reefs along the north shore, which occasionally broke through the wave tops. Underwater, the reefs looked warm and lively; above the water, they looked brown, dead, and dangerous. Windsurfers knifed in and around these reefs. To Vermeer’s eye, several hundred feet above them, the windsurfers all appeared to be skirting death. They must know what they’re doing, he thought. Which is more than I can say for myself.

  The truth was, he didn’t have much of a plan. His white-hot fury toward Pirle had cooled somewhat, which was probably a good thing: Now he was able to think things through a little more clearly. And concentrate on the fact that he didn’t have much of a plan.

  He could confront Pirle directly.

  If he did, one of two things could happen. Pirle could succumb to guilt. He could confess to framing Vermeer, and maybe a whole lot more. Then the two of them could walk down to the local police station together. Pirle could repeat his confession, arms outstretched, hands together at the wrists for the handcuffs, and throw himself on the mercy of Puerto Rican justice.

  Not likely.

  The other thing that could happen was that Pirle could call the local police and demand to have this madman, this stubble-faced stalker who had trailed him down from Boston, hauled off to some dank jail. The local police would make a few phone calls to Boston—they could call almost anybody—and they wouldn’t have much trouble picking sides.

  Much more likely.

  No, confrontation wasn’t likely to accomplish much. The deck was stacked. Pirle was on his home turf; Vermeer knew almost nothing about this island. He had a vague recollection that the U.S. Navy had maintained some sort of gunnery range here and that local protests had eventually driven the Navy out. Beyond that, nothing.

  Pirle spoke Spanish well, Vermeer remembered. Vermeer had made it through his high school Spanish courses, but that was years ago.

  Pirle was a wealthy landowner, probably connected to whatever local power structure existed. Vermeer was a nobody.

  Pirle was an accomplished liar. Vermeer generally blushed when he lied.

  He fingered the snapshot in his coat pocket, looking idly out the window. He needed evidence. He needed some way to tip the balance in his favor—to blow apart Pirle’s web of deception, to give himself a fighting chance of persuading the world that these deceptions had actually occurred.

  So, he decided, leaving the snapshot concealed within his pocket, he needed to take a look inside the villa. He needed to find something that he could use as leverage against Pirle. Something to wave in his face and rattle him with. Anything.

  Vieques was given away by a bank of clouds riding above it: a floating skyline. There were clusters of low-rise clouds, then the occasional neighborhood of skyscrapers. The Cessna, bouncing on some light crosswinds, waggled its wings as it approached a single strip nestled alongside the ocean: prime beachfront real estate, given over to the airport. Through the plane window, the terminal looked whimsical: a beige, green-roofed octagon like an old- fashioned seaside carousel, with covered green metal chutes plunging from its upper level to the ground at steep angles.

  Vermeer retrieved his bag from what he guessed to be the world’s shortest baggage-claim belt: twenty running feet of sectioned black rubber outside the building, and twenty feet inside. In the parking lot, a dapper gentleman with a deeply creased honey-brown face stood next to a white van. Yes, he acknowledged in formal, accented English, he was the taxi service. Yes, of course, he would be willing to take Vermeer to the Rising Moon, on the far side of the island. That would cost fifteen dollars. But truly, he would prefer to wait until the flight from neighboring Culebra came in. If there was another paying customer on that flight, then Vermeer would pay only ten dollars, and the other passenger would not have to wait so long at the airport. That would be better.

  They waited. Fifteen minutes later, the Culebra flight arrived with no paying customers.

  Sandy Silva had agreed to pick him up at his hotel after he checked in. He knew that engaging the services of a real estate agent was a roundabout way to scope out Pirle’s neighborhood, but it was the best he had been able to come up with on short notice. Hopefully, he looked affluent enough to be a potential villa buyer.

  The Rising Moon was an eclectic hodgepodge of connected structures, perched atop a knoll that overlooked green fields running down to the Caribbean. Its owners, Ariel and Rick, had relocated here from California a decade earlier, gradually transforming a seedy dance hall into one of the better places to stay on the island. The walls in his room fairly dripped with California bric-a-brac: several dozen end panels from fruit crates, each decorated with a gaudy, sometimes bawdy, grower’s label; and a series of black-and-white pictures of the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

  No doubt Ariel and Rick were happy to be out of the earthquake zone. But the earthquake shots—hollow-eyed survivors looked balefully at the photographer as smoke rose from mounds of rubble behind them—seemed to strike the wrong note for a Caribbean paradise.

  Sandy Silva uncovered him in the lobby. “Professor Vermeer? So nice to meet you!” Fortyish, short, and energetic, she sported a helmet of tight blond curls. She pumped his hand energetically. “Ready for your tour?”

  He had pulled her name off the Web. His cover story, improvised on the phone, was that he was a professor from the Boston area who had recently come into some money. He was looking to make an investment in real estate. From everything he had heard, Vieques was the hot place to invest, and Sandy Silva was the best person to help him do that. She sounded distracted, almost hurrying him along, until he said that he wasn’t interested in spending more than a million. Before renovations and upgrades, of course.

  They climbed into her Suzuki Sidekick, which was dented here and there but still new enough to imply that she was prospering. The deal that she had proposed on the phone was that he would pay her a flat fee of sixty dollars an hour. This, she said, helped weed out the window-shoppers and helped keep her available to the serious buyers, like himself. She took an imprint of his credit card on a machine that she kept in a gym bag between the front seats.

  “So,” she said brightly, handing him back his card, putting the car into gear, “which university are you with?”

  “MIT,” he lied. No sense connecting the dots unnecessarily. “Astrophysics.”

  “So that’s kind of like astronomy?”

  He didn’t think so. “Astronomy is what you would call a contributing discipline.” Sounded about right.

  “Oh, well,” she beamed, “then this is the place for you. Seat belt, please. Wait until you see the stars at night. Absolutely beautiful!”

  She chattered too much and drove too fast for the narrow road, which to Vermeer’s eye looked like it ought to be one-way, but wasn’t. The landscape was beautiful, he admitted: fields and forests descending from a central ridge down to the ocean, occasionally punctuated by a cluster of houses, most of which had farm animals pecking and grazing nearby. Too bad he wasn’t a millionaire, and too bad he was on the lam. Whizzing around a blind corner, Silva slammed on the brakes to avoid mowing down three horses standing placidly in the middle of the road, swishing their tails at flies. They ambled away in response to her honking.

  “So as I was saying,” she resumed, unabashed and again accelerating, “you really do have to drive carefully on Vieques, because not only do you have our world-famous wild horses, but you also have our wild cattle and goats, which are less world famous, but none of which you want to have running into your car.” She gave him a winning smile.

  They stopped first at a run-down property on the edge of Esperanza: an inappropriate color of pink, with a just-barely water view from the second f
loor. “Not exactly a million-dollar property,” he suggested in so many words. She nodded her agreement energetically and suggested that they move on. Their next stop, a half mile down the beach, was an elegant pure-white mansion with its own dock. In the bright sun, set off against the green sea and blue sky, it shimmered and seemed to float.

  “Nice,” Vermeer finally said, trying to look a little more interested but not interested enough.

  “I knew you’d like this one,” she enthused. “It’s at the top of your price range, though—before you get your heart set on it.”

  In his hotel room he had studied the snapshot of Pirle’s house carefully. The vista behind the house showed a large land mass on the horizon. Looking next at his tourist map, he realized that Pirle’s villa had to be facing west, toward the small city of Fajardo on the main island.

  “You know,” he confessed as they climbed back into the Suzuki, “having seen these two places, I think I might be better off putting my money into a view than into a dock. What are the chances of finding something up on one of those high hills I saw coming in on the plane? Something with a western exposure, so I could kick back and watch the sun go down?”

  She arched her eyebrows suggestively. “A romantic, eh? I can just see you sitting there on your deck with your honey, drinking piña coladas and watching the sun set over the Caribbean.”

  “In my hot tub.”

  “Oh, yes,” she enthused, smiling, lurching into gear and leaving the white mansion in a cloud of dust. “So with that in mind, I think that we should head over to Bravos de Boston. Especially appropriate for a man from Boston!”

  Bravos de Boston, she explained as they bounced along, was a hilly residential section of Isabel Segunda, the largest town on the island. Nobody seemed to know—or at least Sandy didn’t know—where the neighborhood’s name came from. “But hey, if you buy a nice big house up there,” she said, “as far as I’m concerned, you can just say they named the whole neighborhood in honor of you. Nobody’s gonna argue with you.”

  To get to Isabel Segunda, they had to go up and over the spine of steep hills that ran down the center of the island. On their way up the eastern slope, with the Suzuki laboring and smelling as though it might be overheating, Vermeer spotted an overgrown complex of what looked like half-finished buildings several hundred yards down a slope, off to his right. A large one-story central building was flanked by two boomerang-shaped arcs of what looked like grandstands. The paved areas around the buildings were sprouting weeds. Sections of roofing above the grandstands were missing, and treetops were poking through the holes.

  “What’s that? A failed racetrack?” At one point in his life, he had visited quite a few racetracks. This place looked a lot like a certain country track in New England—trotters and pacers only—where he had once lost what was for him a sizable amount of money.

  “Ugh,” Sandy said, not even looking sideways. “That eyesore? No. Not a racetrack. That was supposed to be a children’s athletic facility. Never opened. Nine million taxpayer dollars, mostly courtesy of Uncle Sam, down the drain and that’s what we’re left with.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Well, what nobody bothered to figure out when they started the thing was that this particular piece of property was right up the hill from the BioBay. One of the main tourist attractions of the island—you’ll have to go see it. Full of little sea creatures that glow in the dark. They give tours in these flat-bottomed tin boats. You can get out of the boat and go swimming with the little glowing creatures. Me, I never got out of the boat. It creeped me out. I mean, like, what if you swallowed the things, right?

  “But anyway, the environmentalists started saying that the light from the sports complex would wreck the BioBay. Which, if it got wrecked, would be very bad for Vieques, not to mention for the glowing sea creatures. So long story short, they just stopped the thing. Stopped it cold. Never finished, never used. A total waste. And as you can see, a very nice piece of property all chewed to hell.”

  That, Vermeer realized, would always be Sandy’s bottom line: real property removed from her potential inventory, probably forever.

  They cleared the top of the mountain and started flying down its western flank. He noticed that Sandy had popped the Suzuki out of gear. She now relied entirely on her brakes to keep the careening car on the twisting and badly banked road.

  Isabel Segunda came upon them too fast, announced by a few gas stations and convenience stores. The center of town was a square, with what looked like mostly public buildings huddling around the concrete community space in its center. On one side of the square sat what looked like a one-story public school, but Sandy zipped through the square too fast to let Vermeer be absolutely sure. Aggressively she claimed the tiny two-way streets as her own, at least until the last possible moment. “Shit,” she said at one point, as a battered Toyota pickup refused to give way. “Sorry. Bad language.” The driver of the Toyota yelled something at her in Spanish.

  Then they were past the ferry slip—“a place you want to avoid when the ferry comes in,” she complained. Then they shot out the other side of the town, climbing up a tiny winding street to the crest of a hill that overlooked the Caribbean, once ducking off to the right around a blind corner, where they scattered a mother hen and her three chicks, which appeared to be pecking on the remains of a dead sibling. Then a hard left, eliciting an angry yell from someone sitting inside an adjacent house, then two thumps as the Suzuki bulled its way across a drainage ditch, then up another hill. On both sides of the road were modest cinder-block bungalows, mostly nestled in an array of flowering shrubs. Dogs barked. Underweight cats prowled, but the chickens seemed to pay them no notice.

  “You see,” she said with a note of apology in her voice, “what we have is a bunch of nineteenth-century streets trying to keep up with the times, and not really doing a very good job of it.” She pointed at a huge billboard: Bienvenidos, it read. Welcome to Bravos de Boston, a comunidad especial. “But there are plans in the works to fix all that. And of course, you can go up the back side of this hill, too. From the back side of Isabel Segunda. But that road’s a little rough.”

  “Rougher than this?” Now, in deference to the monster potholes that loomed left and right, even Sandy was moving slowly, rarely getting out of second gear.

  “Well, steeper, anyway. But rough, too.”

  His response was cut off: His teeth snapped together as Sandy blasted her way over yet another drainage ditch. The kind of thing that Vermeer had trained himself to look out for, back in his days as a motorcycle rider. It was set at an angle transverse to the road, so she actually hit it with all four wheels separately: whunk-whunk, whunk-whunk.

  “So what happens,” he ventured, scrutinizing the road ahead carefully, tongue safely away from teeth, “if there’s a fire up here? What happens if the fire truck is heading this way and someone is coming the other way?”

  She pursed her lips, not welcoming this slightly negative, trouble-in-paradise line of questioning. “Well, what you’d expect. The fire truck comes and puts out the fire. It uses its siren, the people hear it coming, and they pull over. Or more likely, they’re up the hill somewhere sipping on a beer, watching the fire. Anyway, I can’t remember the last real bad fire we had. These places are pretty fireproof.” She gestured at a half-finished cinder-block structure, which looked abandoned behind its chain-link fence. It didn’t look as though it would burn under any circumstances.

  Five minutes later, they were high in the hills, mostly with their backs to the ocean. The winding road was now little more than a dirt track, sometimes eight feet wide and sometimes less, with the occasional sheer drop on the ocean side. Up here on the hilltops, with expansive views of the ocean, there were no modest shacks or unfinished buildings. Driveways veered off at sharp angles toward mostly invisible homes. Almost all the driveways had motorized gates, on tracks. All were closed tight. “I notice the driveway gates are all closed,” he said casually. “Secu
rity concerns?”

  She laughed, then shook her head. “Horse-poop concerns. People don’t like the horses wandering in and tearing up the lawns. Or falling in the pool. Ever wonder how much a dead wet horse weighs? Better to leave the gate shut.”

  Almost at the top of the hill, he saw it. Unmistakably: the blunt outlines of Pirle’s villa.

  36

  THE REAL QUESTION WAS, WOULD RODRIGUEZ SHOW UP?

  He certainly didn’t have to. Agente Montoya first had made that point clear to Brouillard. Then, Brouillard could tell, listening hard with her spotty Spanish, he had told Rodriguez over the phone that the detective from Boston was in his conference room and would like the opportunity to ask him a few questions—“Sí, sí, Isabel Segunda, sí; cuartel de policía, sí”—but that was entirely up to him, and Rodriguez was not obligated to come in.

  Montoya shrugged as he hung up the phone. “He said he will be happy to respond to your questions, Captain Brouillard, but he won’t be able to stay long.”

  “His father is sick, right?”

  “He didn’t mention that. But he said he’d try to be here within fifteen minutes.” Montoya leaned back in his chair and folded his arms above his head. The conference room was the only air-conditioned room in the police station, as far as Brouillard could tell. It looked as if Montoya wouldn’t mind passing a quarter hour here. Even in February the noon sun was hot and the weather was sticky.

  Her trip down to San Juan had been mercifully uneventful. Not a fan of small airplanes—or any kind of planes, in fact—she had hired a driver to take her from San Juan to Fajardo, on the eastern tip of the main island; from there, she caught the ferry to Vieques. Miraculously, her rental car was waiting at the ferry landing at Isabel Segunda. She signed the obligatory stack of papers, probably buying far more insurance than she needed, and then raised some eyebrows by asking for directions to the police station.