Murder at the B-School Page 27

  Brouillard refocused her cop’s eye, scrutinizing the restaurant’s decor. A mass-produced wooden sign nailed to a beam above the two women read, “We will drink no wine before it’s time. It’s time!” A little farther down the beam she spotted a broken oar with “distance to Halifax, Nova Scotia” hand-painted on its blade: “2,412 miles.”

  Dumb, she thought, but she could definitely get used to this.

  The passionate young couple departed first, leaving half-eaten sandwiches behind them. Next, the snorting ladies weaved out a little unsteadily, leaving separate wads of crumpled cash on the table and yelling good-bye to Amanda, who stuck her head out of the kitchen to wave back. “Walk carefully, girls,” she said. This prompted still more snorts and laughter.

  Another few minutes went by before Amanda came by Brouillard’s table again. “Want another, miss?”

  Brouillard didn’t, but she nodded yes. Amanda came back with a fresh Corona. “No lime, right?”

  “Right, thanks,” Brouillard replied. “Nice place you’ve got here.”

  Amanda looked around the four corners of the dining room and then around to the L-shaped bar area. She shrugged. “It’s a living.”

  “Got a minute to talk?”

  “Sure. Why not? But let me get myself a beer first.” When she returned, beer in hand, she pulled out the chair across the table from Brouillard.

  “I’m Barbara. From Boston.”

  “Amanda. From Vieques. By way of Syosset.”

  “I’m just interested in what it’s like to live down here full-time,” Brouillard said. “It just seems like such a beautiful place. And laid-back. The people seem so friendly.”

  “Yeah. It’s all of that, and then some. But like everyplace else, it’s not perfect, either. You thinking of moving down here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m kind of fed up with the winters in Boston. I was talking about moving someplace warmer, and this guy I know said I should look at Vieques. So I sort of combined a vacation and a little exploring.”

  “Not a new story,” Amanda said, smiling. “I did it myself, a while back.” She studied her beer bottle, then took a sip. “Well, the first thing you gotta understand is, it’s a hard place to make a buck. I’ve been at this for ten years, and I’m still just squeaking by. It’s a tourist economy with not enough tourists. Or at least, that’s how I see it. Some people here would like no tourists.”

  Brouillard nodded. “I’ve thought about the money side. I’m a writer, so a lot of what I do could get done long-distance.”

  “Well, you know your own business,” Amanda replied, “but my advice to you would be, check it out carefully. Doing business down here can be very frustrating. If you can bring the money with you, fine. Otherwise, look before you leap.”

  Brouillard frowned. “I hear you.” She waited a moment. “So is it easy to make friends down here? I really only know this one guy, who’s not even here most of the time, and I don’t know him very well at all. And I’m not usually this forward—you know, talking to strangers and all.”

  “Do you mean, make friends with the Americans who live here full-time? The expats?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Brouillard said a little haltingly. “My Spanish stinks. So of course I’d want to take Spanish lessons.”

  “Eventually you would,” Amanda agreed, “although I bet you’d pick it up pretty quick. No, actually, that’s the good news. Making friends here is a snap. There’s a community of, say, between two hundred and three hundred American expats on the island at any given time. A combination of business owners like me, a couple of trust-funders, and a bunch of American caretakers, who tend to be people who’ve left their old lives behind. There are local people in this group, too, but they all speak very good English. So Spanish wouldn’t be a problem in the social scene, but eventually you’d want to speak enough to keep from getting ripped off by the guy at the gas station, or whatever.

  “And it’s a real active scene down here. Real active. Of course, I’m stuck here almost every night, so what would I know, but my friends tend to eat at each other’s houses a couple nights a week—more than they ever did back home, according to most of them. And in general, new people are made to feel pretty welcome, pretty fast. Those two ladies who were sitting over there in the corner, for example? They invite newcomers over for sushi as soon as they find out about them. It’s real friendly in that way.”

  “Sounds great. Sounds better than being single in Boston.”

  “Yeah,” Amanda said, “it is great, in most ways. On the other hand, there’s never quite enough new stuff to talk about. Too little fresh talent, too many people with too much time on their hands. Sal and Suzie, god bless ’em, being a case in point. There’s a huge rumor mill on the island, and when it doesn’t get enough raw material, it tends to give itself what it needs. Little stories pop up—who knows where?—and get juicier as they make their way across the island. You can spend a lot of time chasing down rumors, if you worry about that kind of stuff. Me, I mostly don’t. I just do my thing.”

  Brouillard smiled, nodding. “I really appreciate you telling me all this, Amanda. I feel like I’ve got a bead on the place already. And you haven’t talked me out of it yet.”

  “Well, I guess if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t be in my tenth year of frying frozen powdered potatoes. Don’t tell anybody about that.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “So who’s this guy you know? Your honey?”

  “Hardly,” Brouillard laughed. “He’s a big professor over at Harvard. My mom worked for him until she retired. He’s got some kind of place down here, although I don’t know where.”

  “What’s his name? I probably know him.”

  “Pirle. Marc Pirle.”

  Amanda made a little noise in her nose, then studied a glossed fingernail at arm’s length. “Well, dear,” she finally said, “you didn’t hear it from me, but with friends like that, you’ll need other friends down here.”

  “Why do you say that?” Brouillard was wide-eyed. “Like I said, I don’t really know him that well, but he seems nice enough. He’s European, or something. From Europe, I mean.”

  “Hey, look, honey,” Amanda said, shrugging, “I don’t want to badmouth your friend. You run a restaurant, you’ve gotta be everybody’s friend. You know what I mean?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Put it this way. This is a small community, like I said. Everybody knows everybody. We look out for each other. We sleep with each other and cheat on each other. We lie about each other, and then we stick up for each other when someone else lies about us. We’re tight.

  “Your friend Pirle doesn’t choose to be any part of any of that. He stiff-arms everybody that tries to be friendly with him. He won’t let any locals near the place—to cut the grass or clean or whatever. He threatens to sue people at the drop of a hat, and he seems to have enough juice to pull it off. He’s arranged for special police patrols when he’s not in residence—how, nobody knows. Nobody else gets that kind of VIP treatment. His caretaker is someone he shipped down here from the States—a real mean prick; pardon my French. The locals think your friend is a high-and-mighty because he’s European, as you say. Me, I just think he’s another prick.”

  Brouillard maintained her wide-eyed look, now injecting a little hurt into it. Amanda sighed, reached across the table, and patted her on the arm. “Hey, look, Barbara, I don’t mean to dump on the guy. Maybe he’s not as bad as his reputation, you know? I’ve only run into him a few times myself, and I had no problem with him. Like I said, things get exaggerated here. I will say, though”—and here she brightened visibly, seeing a way out of the thicket she was in—“that a pretty girl like you could do a lot better than him in a flash, down here. Guaranteed.”

  “Thanks, Amanda. And thank you for being so candid.”

  “You’re quite welcome, dear.”

  “I have one more city-girl kind of question. Is it, well, safe down here for a single woman?”

 
“Oh, yeah,” Amanda said, nodding, “I should have mentioned that. It’s very safe. There’s a lot of what they call escalamiento—petty thievery. A kid with a drug habit breaks into an empty house, takes a TV or radio or whatever. The stuff goes into a closed van, then onto the ferry, then off to who knows where. Unless they open all the vans on the ferry, which they sometimes do. But I can’t remember the last violent crime, other than domestic stuff—spouse-on-spouse stuff, or kids mixing it up.”

  “Can you get your house wired up? I mean, are there ways to tie an alarm system into the police, so they’ll come in a hurry?” Brouillard wasn’t exactly sure where she was going with this, but it seemed to flow naturally enough.

  “Sure,” Amanda replied. “My house is tied into the police station, since I’m out a lot of the time. The one time I had a problem, they came quick. They told me they’ve always got three cars out on patrol, so they can get anywhere on the island within five minutes. You can believe as much of that as you like.”

  “Wow. I must have picked the best person on this entire island to talk to.”

  “Yeah, you did”—Amanda grinned—“and most of what I told you is even true. And you seem like a smart person, so I’m sure you’ll think long and hard and wind up doing the right thing. And now it’s time for me to get back to work. But can I give you two more pieces of advice that you didn’t ask for? Girl to girl?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “The first is, hon, don’t go falling in love.”

  Brouillard laughed out loud. “Excuse me?”

  Amanda smiled back, but it was clear that she was serious. “There’s something in the air down here, Barbara from Boston. Something that gets nice sober Catholic girls saying yes to a second beer in midafternoon, and persuades them that this smooth-talking guy they just bumped into in a no-star restaurant is Mr. Right. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have fun, dear. I’m just suggesting you keep in mind what my great-aunt Velma used to tell me: ‘Let ’em sleep with you, dear; just don’t let ’em put their boots under your bed.’”

  “It’s a promise,” Brouillard said, holding up her right hand, laughing. “No boots under the bed.”

  “And one more thing, my newfound friend.” Amanda put her forearm alongside Brouillard’s: mocha next to cream. “You have got to be the whitest white girl I have ever seen. So promise me that you’ll use plenty of sunscreen the whole time you’re here. And wear a hat. Otherwise, you will absolutely burn up. Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  38

  THE FIRST SURPRISE WAS THE INTERDEPARTMENTAL ENVELOPE that somehow had gotten under his door during his travels with Sandy.

  He recognized it immediately, even before he saw the words “Harvard University” printed in red across the top. A heavy-duty buff-colored envelope, with columns of spaces for addresses, and perforated by columns of front-to-back holes—the purpose of which had always confused Vermeer. Ventilation? For memos? These sturdy workhorses loped from Harvard office to Harvard office, with each new destination added on to the growing ranks of scrawled addresses—first on the front, then onto the back. In a bored moment, he had once read the addresses on a fraying old envelope, imagining it bouncing from place to place like a tired-out dollar bill.

  This one, though, bore no addresses at all. It was new. Through the holes, Vermeer could see some white papers. Also, some small marble-size lumps protruding from the package’s lower right-hand corner. Like cheap currency, they made a dull jingling noise when he picked up the envelope.

  It had an odd little sealing system: a piece of red string mounted on the body of the envelope, which the sender wrapped around a post on the flap. Good enough to make somebody rich, he said to himself. He unwrapped the string, lifted the flap, and dumped the contents of the package out on his bed.

  First he saw the keys. He recognized them: a pair of keys to a file cabinet. They were threaded together on a bent paper clip.

  Then he saw the photographs. A dozen black-and-white prints. In each, a male-female couple engaged in more or less standard sexual acts. Grainy, but the features of the people depicted were clearly recognizable. He recognized none of them.

  The second surprise came less than an hour later. He was half lying in a lounge chair on the small terrace overlooking the Rising Moon’s broad lawn, a green expanse that rolled slowly down to the edge of the Caribbean. He was preoccupied. As soon as he sat down, he forgot about the beer that sat sweating on the flagstone next to his left leg.

  Pondering, he heard the irritating noise of cheap sandals approaching—flop, flop, flop—and hoped that whoever it was would head off in some other direction. But no: now, just behind him, and now next to him. The noise stopped.

  He turned. For an instant, he didn’t recognize her. Then he did. The Boston detective. Brouillard. He gaped, mouth open and pursed like a landed fish.

  “We need to talk,” she said, easing herself onto the chaise longue next to his. She moved gracefully. She had on a large, floppy sun hat and shades that looked like recent purchases. And a two-piece robin’s-egg-blue bathing suit that—while modest enough—revealed more about her various curves than he had learned in all his previous encounters with her, put together. Her skin was alarmingly pale. She kicked off the flip-flops. She folded slender legs under herself.

  Too late, he stopped gaping. And said, “So what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Pretending to be several people I’m not,” she said. “And looking for you. And here you are. No doubt pretending to be someone you’re not.” Locking her fingers on top of her head, and in the process crushing her sun hat, she looked out at the Caribbean. Irrelevantly, he noticed that she didn’t shave her armpits. Or at least her left armpit.

  “Am I under arrest yet?” He meant it to sound off-the-cuff; it came out sounding surly.

  “No. In fact, you’re way farther away from being under arrest than you’ve been in a while.” She wasn’t looking at him; she continued to gaze at the turquoise ocean.

  “Hard to believe. My own personal Inspector Javert hunts me down God knows how many million miles from home and then tells me I’m in good shape?”

  She chuckled, remembering the broken oar at Amanda’s Seaside Café. “Well, I don’t know any Inspector Javert, but assuming that Boston is a couple hundred miles south of Halifax, you’re about two thousand miles from home.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes. The onshore breeze pushed steadily against their faces, blowing some of the tension out of the air.

  “Remember a while back,” she finally said, not looking at him, “when we cut our little deal? The deal to help each other out?”

  “Yeah. It didn’t work out like we planned.”

  Then she turned her head to look at him. “I think it’s working out okay. Even if not like we planned.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Listen,” she continued. “Let’s put our cards on the table. I never believed you killed anybody. In my gut, I never believed it. There was something too cute about the whole thing. Something about the way a helpful clue, pointing to you, always turned up just when I needed it. Too cute by a mile. And since I never gave much of a damn about your private life—” He started to interrupt, but she put her hand up. “Let me finish. Your private life is your own business, and I’m not going to help anybody else take you down on that score.

  “And so okay, I admit that for a long time I didn’t buy the whole someone’s-out-to-get-Vermeer thing. It didn’t make any sense to me. But at the same time, if it wasn’t true, then you looked guilty as hell. So you needed it to be true. And I needed it to be true, or else I had to believe that my gut was wrong, and that all these signs of someone being cute weren’t really there. And as it turns out, it was true. Why and how, I haven’t exactly figured out yet, although I’m getting there. But true all the same.

  “And so maybe I haven’t gotten you off the hook yet, but I haven’t done you any harm, either. I think I gave you good advice,
all down the line. And if I remember right, I saved your life at least once. So I really don’t think you have any good reason to sit there and be pissed off at me.”

  Now it was his turn to stare at the ocean. He remembered his beer. He decided he didn’t want it. “A virgin beer,” he said, holding it up. It dripped cold sweat on his thigh. “Want it?”

  “Nope.”

  He put it back down. “I don’t think you’ve told me yet exactly what you’re doing here. You don’t strike me as the vacationing type. And you’ve got murderers to catch.”

  “I came down here for two reasons. Neither of which alone would have been good enough to get me here. First, your B and G guy, Rodriguez, runs away from Boston when I put a little pressure on him, going home to the island of his birth to care for his critically ill father. And at just about the same instant, the mysterious Wim Vermeer takes off for the same little island. So my boss gives me permission to go there, too. On my own nickel, so far. Of course, if I catch a murderer, like you say, they’ll probably agree to pay me back.”

  “I guess I’ll let that last part go,” he said, allowing a small smile out onto his face. “The bounty hunter part, where you get an all-expenses-paid vacation if you catch me in the act. That sounds kind of bad for me.”

  “Yeah, it does,” she agreed. “When you put it just that way. Which I didn’t. And by the way, I’m not a cop down here. If anybody’s going to catch you in the act—of doing whatever it is you do—it’s not going to be me.”