Twenty-Seven Bones

7

After the formal identification of Hokey’s body, Lewis accompanied Chief Coffee back to headquarters, where he allowed the lovely Layla to take a DNA sample. If she hadn’t been the chief’s daughter, Lewis would have suggested a few more interesting ways for her to extract her sample. As it was, he settled for having the inside of his cheek swabbed for epithelial cells.

There was of course no danger of Lewis’s DNA betraying him. The test could only bear out his story: that the widower had made love to his wife on the last night of her life. Poor chappie.

Chief Coffee himself drove Lewis home afterward, though it was out of his way. Lewis expected to find the Great House torn apart, but the police had been unusually considerate, and Johnny Rankin had taken it upon himself to call in an extra housekeeper, so by the time Lewis returned, things were more or less back to normal.

Lewis didn’t think he was hungry, but when Johnny brought him a plate of sandwiches in the study, he surprised himself by absentmindedly gobbling them down, crusts and all, while he pored over the latest statements from his brokerage. What remained of his portfolio had taken a few more hits in the last several days. But now that the airport project would be going ahead, the losses weren’t nearly as painful.

It was a little like exploring a bad tooth with your tongue on the way to the dentist, Lewis thought as he washed down the last of the sandwiches with the last of the Red Stripe beer Johnny had poured out for him: knowing it would soon be over made the pain sort of enjoyable. And kept his mind off Hokey.

When Johnny returned to clear the tray, he asked Lewis if he wanted him to spen’ night. “It bein’ ya firs’ one alone, an’ all.”

“No, you go on home,” Lewis told him. “I think I’d rather be alone.”

“Good night, den, Mistah Lewis. An’ m’say again, sah, fa boat of us, how terrible, terrible sorry we boat are for ya loss. Dissa terrible, terrible t’ing, what hoppen. Sally, she say-”

Lewis cut him off. “Thank you, Johnny. See you tomorrow.”

“T’ank ya, sah. Dis a terrible-”

“A terrible, terrible t’ing-yes, I know. Good night, Johnny.”

Lewis felt Hokey’s absence more acutely when the Great House was empty. Struggle to suppress them as he might, the good memories started to flood his mind once he was alone. The honeymoon, the early years when the sex was still good, winning the mixed doubles tennis tournament at Blue Valley and dancing in the moonlight at the Champion’s Ball afterward.

And while Lewis was not superstitious, he did find himself looking around nervously as he wandered through the big empty mansion clutching a bottle of St. Luke Reserve by the neck and taking a slug every now and then. It wasn’t that he believed in ghosts-just a nagging what-if, a reluctance to enter a dark room, and a little voice in his ear whispering don’t turn around.

If Hokey did come back, she was going to be extremely pissed, thought Lewis, trying to josh himself out of his funk. And what a vengeful-looking spirit she’d make, that small head floating above that long neck, that whitish blond hair, that rabbity nose, and those buggedy eyes. And of course she’d be waving her stump and looking for her hand and-

What was that? Sounded like footsteps, out back by the patio.

Eh, eh, well me gad, and what poppyshow are you frettin’ yer-self over, me son? Ain’ no ghos’, ain’ no jumbies. A deadah is a deadah an’ dey don’ come back, Lewis reminded himself as he hurried into his bedroom.

The police had thoughtfully replaced his revolver in the nightstand drawer. Keeping a firearm by one’s pillow was both a right and a time-honored tradition among the Twelve Danish Families, and had been ever since the slave uprising that led to the emancipation of 1848. Lewis, dressed in the same rugby shirt and shorts he’d been wearing all day, checked the cylinder to make sure there was a round in the firing chamber, clicked off the safety, and crept softly out of the bedroom and down the back stairs.

The Epps were out by the pool, in bathing suits. The little Indonesian was nowhere to be seen-which didn’t mean he wasn’t hiding in the bushes someplace. If Lewis had learned one thing last night, it was never to take Bennie’s absence for granted.

“What are you two doing here?” he whispered, though the next nearest occupied dwellings after the overseer’s house were half a mile across the pasture to the north, where the ranch foreman and his family lived. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“It’s the most natural thing in the world,” said Emily, dipping a toe into the water lapping the top step at the shallow end of the pool. “We came over to pay a consolation call to our nearest neighbor-it would have been unnatural if we hadn’t. How’s your head?”

“A little sore.”

“Did you remember to smear some blood out here for the cops to find?”

“I did, they did.”

“Everything go smoothly?”

“Like guava jelly. How about you?”

“Five-minute interview with a Detective Hamilton. I’ve known more intelligent carp.” Emily started down the steps. When she was in the pool up to her waist, she turned, stooped, stretched out the neck of her black tank suit to splash water down her bosom, then glanced up sharply. “What are you staring at, Lew-Lew? Didn’t you get a good enough look when you were spying on us, you perv?”

But there was no heat to her words-in fact, she pulled the neck of her suit out even farther and bent over to give him a better look, though he couldn’t have seen much in the darkness.

“Put the zeppelins away, honey cakes.” Phil was climbing the ladder to the five-meter board Hokey’d had installed a few years ago. “The man has just lost his wife.”

“All the more reason,” replied Emily, chuckling.

Lewis was thoroughly disconcerted. He didn’t know how to take it-in its own way, this moment was as weird as all the weird moments that had preceded it in the course of the previous twenty-four hours.

“What’s the matter with you people?” he whispered urgently, wishing he’d gone a little easier on the Reserve. “My wife is dead, cops are all over the fucking place, you come over here for a swim, flash your titis, and crack jokes? You must be insane.”

“At the risk of sounding petty,” said Emily, “you should have invited us over for a swim a long time ago. It would have have been the neighborly thing to do.”

“Look, you’re going to get your money-it’s just going to take a few weeks, until I get-”

“Didn’t come for the money.” Emily dived forward, breast-stroked fifteen feet to the side of the pool, came up blowing like a porpoise. “Say, Lew, would you mind turning on the pool lights?”

Exhausted after a near-sleepless night in the hospital and a stressful day with the police, Lewis decided that the path of least resistance was the only path for him.

“Sure, what the fuck,” he said, slipping the pistol into the waistband of his shorts with one hand and holding out the half-empty bottle in the other. “Care for a drink?”

Lewis might have been an exception to the St. Luke saying that white folks shouldn’t drink white rum-after all, he bahn deh-but the Epps were certainly not. By ten o’clock Phil was stretched out high above the turquoise glow of the illuminated pool, snoring through his beard-how he’d gotten back up on the high board in the first place, nobody could say-while Emily appeared to Lewis to have reached that stage of alcoholic clarity and bonhomie that customarily precedes either a blackout, a bar fight, or a drunken screw.

“Em?” said Lewis. They were reclining side by side on chaises, protected from mosquitos by a subsonic pulser from the Sharper Image catalog, and from the slight evening chill by plush pool towels the size of bedsheets, embossed with the Apgard crest-two royal palms superimposed over the red field and white cross of the Danish flag. Lewis hadn’t gone into the water on account of his stitches.

“Emily?”

“Lewis?”

“Tell me.”

“About what?”

“You know.”

She sighed. Her head lolled toward him. Her wet hair was brushed straight back from her rounded, somewhat bulbous forehead. Reflections from the underwater lights, silver-blue Tinkerbell flashes, played across her homely features. “No.”

“I want to know.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Was it quick? Did she suffer?”

“Did you want her to?” Emily reached under Lewis’s towel, patted his thigh.

He removed her hand before it could creep any farther, gave it a firm but gentle squeeze, and let it fall between the chaises. “No.”

“Then she didn’t.”

“What’s it like?”

“Dying?”

“Killing somebody.”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Hunh?”

“Our deal,” she said sharply-so sharply that Lewis found himself wondering just how drunk she really was. “It’s changed. We don’t want the money.”

“You don’t?”

Emily reached under the towel again, but this time she didn’t bother patting his thigh. Instead she went straight for his package, gave it a friendly squeeze under his shorts. “No, we don’t. Not the money.”

“Then what do you want?”

“An alibi as good as yours for the Machete Man’s next murder. And you want to give us one.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

The squeeze turned into a caress. “Because you’re in this as deeply as we are. Because leaving us without an alibi is tantamount to leaving yourself without one. Because if they nail us, they nail you.”

Lewis felt himself sobering up fast. “Let me get this straight: you want me to chop off somebody’s hand? I’m sorry, Emily, I don’t think I can-”

“Lewis!” Her voice was sharp, the hand creeping under his shorts was gentle, knowing. “Remember what Ben Franklin said: if we don’t hang together, we shall all hang separately.”

Lewis shuddered, partly because she now had his balls cupped in her palm, and partly because up to that moment he had never thought of that particular old saw as applying to himself-and literally, at that.