Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 32, No. 13, Mid-December 1987

The Haitian Murders by Gregor Robinson

The first victim was one of the itinerants who lived in the bush at the southern end of the island. People in the village knew him because they had sometimes seen him at the ferry dock, helping tourists with their luggage. Occasionally he had been noticed visiting Madame Dell, who lived with her sultry stepdaughter in a neat little house behind the Majestic Hotel. I had seen him in the village once or twice myself. He had walked with a swagger and worn a bright red bandana. He looked about twenty years old. Apart from that no one knew much about him, for the gulf between the expatriate community and the refugees was total; even the villagers had little to do with the Haitians.

And because the dead man was a refugee nobody paid much attention. “Probably a squabble over rum,” said Burnett when he came into the bank a day or two after the body had been found. The Royal Bahamian Defence Force showed little interest in the matter because the Haitians were not generally involved in the drug trade; you could see that from the poor circumstances in which they lived: they had none of the shiny new boats and fancy clothes of the young men who frequented the Riverside Bar. Besides, the murder had been done with a knife — the long draw of a serrated edge across the throat — and not with the submachine guns and stubby-nosed pistols favored by the Colombian shippers and their island associates.

The body was found near a trail running through the gumwood trees to the swamp they called Fish Mangrove, a dark miasmic place where many of the illegals first came ashore. Half earth, half lagoon, it made a good spot for the little boats to land unseen and unheard. The villagers seldom went there, the expatriates never. People sometimes used the paths that wound through the swamp for courting and sexual liaison. The body had in fact been found by a tourist, someone from the hotel exploring the island.

The dead man’s name was Pierre, and he had lived in a hut on a corner of Burnett’s property, out where the bush was slowly taking over the last of the citrus plantations. Burnett was the last grower on the island still making a go of fruit farming. He was pouring money into the thing, but it didn’t matter; he was rich, a tax exile, glad to be living in the tropics and under the protection of the Bahamian bank laws.

Constable MacMahon had been out to see him the day after the murder was discovered.

“I knew Pierre, of course,” Burnett said — he had come into the bank first thing expressly to tell me this — “but he didn’t work for me. Not regularly anyway. He helped out with big jobs once in a while, repaired my river pier last spring. But Tommas, the poet, he’s the one works for me. A lot of them live out there, you know. Some actually on my property, some not. I told Constable MacMahon he was quite welcome to go out and have a look around. When he came back to the house afterwards — walked right through my bloody papayas — he said he’d be coming to see you. Don’t know why.”

Murder investigation is not the kind of thing in which I am usually involved — it’s the last thing the regional head office would want; it might upset the more discreet element of our clientele — and I hoped Constable MacMahon would not turn up. But he ambled into the bank that afternoon just before closing time. He was a very large man. Even though he had been born and lived in the islands all his life, he seemed never to have got used to the heat. He was sweating heavily. He was our only policeman.

“Recognize this?”

He threw onto my desk a bank passbook. I saw the plastic cover with the address of the local branch embossed on the front, put there with the stamping machine we had acquired in Nassau at great expense. But I could not remember every passbook, every customer, every time someone came into the bank.

Constable MacMahon said the passbook belonged to the dead man. “I found it on a shelf above his bed,” he said. He looked at me and waited.

“You need a court order for me to open bank records,” I said.

“You tell me if I should bother getting one,” said Constable MacMahon.

This was murder, and I hesitated for only a moment. While I was looking through the files I asked Constable MacMahon what he thought had happened.

“Well, it’s not suicide.” An example of the man’s humor. He removed his hat and wiped the top of his large pale head with a handkerchief.

“Robbery?” I said.

“Pierre had nothing worth stealing. He never carried much money. No watch, no jewelry. Madame Dell’s daughter told me that.”

I looked up at this, as though to ask a question.

“There was an understanding between them — that’s the rumor among the Haitians,” he said.

This was quaint usage, not uncommon in the islands, and it was more than merely usage. A certain part of the Haitian community was very formal about these things, very old fashioned.

“An understanding?” I said. Now I was thinking of a motive other than robbery.

“The daughter was at the hotel until almost midnight and she was home with Madame Dell after that,” said Constable MacMahon. “So it wasn’t her.” He had noted my suspicion. “It probably has to do with drugs.” He seemed resentful that the authorities in the capital were not more interested in our murder.

“Surely not,” I said. I had confirmed that the passbook was Pierre’s and now had a record of his current transactions before me. “He didn’t have enough money for someone in the drug trade.”

“Something to do with the tourists then,” said Constable MacMahon doggedly. It was a reasonable guess, for everything on the island was connected with either drugs or the tourists, or both.

“There’s nothing unusual in his bank transactions,” I said. To save Constable MacMahon the trouble of reading the figures upside down, I flipped the page half around on my desk, then waited while he fumbled in the breast pocket of his shirt for his bifocals.

“Lump sum deposits every now and then.” I pointed out the figures with a pencil. “Not so very large, really. That would be consistent with payment for the jobs he did. I believe he rebuilt Burnett’s dock last summer.”

That was how many of the Haitians eked out their living — doing odd jobs and the heavy labor of clearing land and construction, usually on an irregular basis, and usually for pitiful wages. Still, it was better than Haiti. They had crossed the sea in small boats to escape the Tontons Macoute, and they worked hard. Most of the illegal refugees were squatters: they lived in tarpaper shacks and rickety lean-tos which they built on Crown land in the middle of the island. Some had managed to bring a few possessions with them; some even a little money with which to buy the lots on which they lived.

Of the few Haitian families that had houses in the village, Madame Dell was the most prosperous. Her husband had been a professional man, educated in France, who had run afoul of the Duvaliers. She herself was trained as a nurse. As well as taking in laundry, she worked several days a week looking after an old woman from Connecticut who had a villa out on North Point. Madame Dell’s stepdaughter was a waitress at the Majestic Hotel; I had seen her there and she was very beautiful. She had a reputation for keeping to herself, almost sullen: I was surprised she had come to an understanding with anyone. The Haitians were illiterate and ill-clothed and some of them still practiced voodoo, but their culture was more profound, more arcane, and more formal than we knew.

After a couple of days I didn’t think of the murder much. I had not known Pierre and I was inclined to agree with Burnett that it was probably some trivial dispute, the settlement of which had been inflamed by liquor. We sometimes heard shrieks from the woods on Saturday nights. If people wanted to kill one another in the bush, well, there was little that could be done about it.

I mentioned the murder to Madame Dell one morning when she was delivering my crisp white sheets. A shadow crossed her face.

“Mr. Rennison, I don’t know nothing about it,” she said, “but that man, he was no good.” She paused. “Always chasing the woman.” She looked up as she said this and in her eyes there was a stony look.

Winnie, the girl who worked for me behind the counter at the bank, hinted at the same thing: something to do with women, that’s the way the talk among the villagers at Drover’s grocery store had it. And then Healey came over from the regional head office in Nassau for his weekly visit. I met him just after the morning ferry had come in. He was walking up the steps from the government dock with two bottles of dark rum which he customarily brought me.

“I hear Pierre the Stud was murdered in the woods.” The men who worked the ferry had told him; Healey had lived in the islands for several years longer than I had and he knew everyone.

“The Stud?” I said.

“A ladies’ man,” said Healey. “With the Haitians. With the villagers. Even went with some of the tourists, the flabby pink ones who come in on the yachts. He did it for money. That’s what they say.”

Perhaps there was something after all to Constable MacMahon’s idea that the killing was connected with the tourists. After Healey’s visit this theory started to gain credence; at the Yacht Club there was always fascination at the idea of sexual connections between affluent tourists and young men from the bush. Constable MacMahon asked around and was unable to find evidence of any work done by Pierre to account for the larger deposits to his account. The itinerants were sometimes hired by people on other out islands, but Pierre had not owned a boat and no one had lent him one. On the other hand, there were always visiting yachts in the harbor; there would never be a way of finding out what had taken place there. Perhaps one of the women had become attached, and then discovered that Pierre had an understanding with a local girl. Perhaps there had been an irate husband. It seemed a neat explanation and it meant that the murderer was no longer among us. Constable MacMahon was off the hook.

On the weekend there was a big regatta with sailboats from everywhere, and none of us thought of death.

The second murder was two and a half weeks later. Mrs. Rainey, on her way to deliver grouper to Madame Dell as she did every Thursday night late after the fishing boats came in, had heard the stepdaughter wail as she came into the kitchen from the hotel. Together they had seen that Madame Dell had been stabbed through the heart, and there was fear on the island. Pierre had been a drifter; this was different: we all knew Madame Dell. In the village we saw her every day; she was there among us. She did my shirts. Her house was not fifty yards from where I sat in the bank. That night the tourists remained snug aboard their yachts and locked behind the wooden shutters of their cabins and hotel rooms. The villagers stayed home, and the Queen’s Highway and the other paths that wound through the village were empty. At the Poolside Bar of the Majestic Hotel there was no clinking of ice in rum punches on the patio, no banging of Beck’s beer bottles on the iron table tops, no chatter of voices, only the click-clicking of the fronds of the high palms in the warm Atlantic trades.

I came across Constable MacMahon in the post office.

“Are the murders connected?” I asked him.

“I doubt it,” he said.

“What was it this time?”

“Ritual killing,” he said darkly. Constable MacMahon had an answer for everything.

Others said that the murders were the work of a madman. No one was safe: on a small island there is nowhere you can get away to. At the Yacht Club there was talk of exerting influence on the capital to get more attention paid, to get some real police work done, and indeed a day or two later men came from across the channel to take photographs, fingerprints, and measurements with a brand new metal tape.

“The constable thinks the killings are unconnected,” I said to Burnett. We were standing at the Yacht Club bar.

“I don’t know about that,” said Burnett. “The rumor in the village is that they were killed with the same knife. Let me get you another drink.”

Winnie, the girl at the bank, had told me that Madame Dell’s demise involved voodoo.

“But she was a Catholic,” I said.

It made no difference. To the evangelical villagers, it was voodoo. To the expats, it was the work of a maniac. As for the Haitian community, well, one way or another, they probably knew what had happened, but they weren’t saying. The different communities were three solitudes on that little island.

Constable MacMahon came to my house on Sunday morning. I was in bed when he knocked and I answered the door in my dressing gown.

“Sorry to wake you, Mr. Rennison. I wonder if we could talk.”

“Now?”

“It’s about Madame Dell.”

More than a talk it turned out, he wanted me to accompany him down to Madame Dell’s house. He was looking for financial records. I didn’t understand why he wanted me to go with him; why could he not simply bring me the relevant papers?

“Not allowed this time,” he said gloomily. “All these fellows coming from across the channel. Cameras and powders. Can’t touch anything. No sir. Very important this time.”

Bankers are respected in the Bahamas — they are at the heart of the tax-exile, tourist, and even contraband economy — and perhaps he thought my presence would lend him added authority.

When we arrived at Madame Dell’s, people were gathered around watching, for never before had there been anything like this in the village. The Roman Catholic service was over — it was held under the tree at the foot of the government dock — and the entire congregation seemed to have come over to watch these official looking men. There was also a group of Haitians, people from the bush whom I had never seen before, as well as some other villagers. Constable MacMahon was rather put out; he was being shown up as a bumpkin; the murders had got the attention he had wanted but this was the price.

“ ’Scuse me, ’scuse me,” he said gruffly, elbowing his way through the little crowd. I followed close behind.

Madame Dell’s house was small and remarkably tidy. I had never been inside before. We entered by the door which faced the harbor and were in the living room. Up a narrow staircase were two little bedrooms and a bathroom jammed under the sloping roof. I watched while Constable MacMahon went through the contents of the table in Madame Dell’s room. There were some letters, mostly written in French, one or two old documents, also in French, and the bank passbook. There was a checkbook but I told Constable MacMahon not to bother with it, for business on the out islands is conducted almost entirely in cash and the checkbook had hardly been used.

Back downstairs, the kitchen was crowded with the police officers who had come in by boat earlier in the morning. The body had been taken over to Marsh Harbour where they had a morgue, but there were dark brown-red stains on the unpainted wood table and on the floor where the men were working. I had not been prepared for that.

“What have you got there?” said one of the police officers, a man dressed incongruously in a tie and jacket.

“The woman’s bankbook,” said Constable MacMahon. “Found it upstairs.”

“Well, put it back there, will you?”

Constable MacMahon looked at me. His cheeks were burning. I told him it didn’t really matter, I had the account number. He left the room muttering and climbed noisily up the stairs. The police officer in the jacket turned to me.

“You know anyone around here who could translate for us,” he said, “French into English?”

“Most of the Haitians speak English,” I said.

“It’s translation of written material that we need,” said the policeman. They were ahead of Constable MacMahon; they knew about the documents upstairs.

“Fellow called Tommas who lives out by Burnett’s place,” I said. “He is an educated man.”

Constable MacMahon returned. We left by the kitchen door. Behind the house there was a steep bank, covered with scruffy vegetation, at the top of which was the back garden of the Majestic Hotel. A cement walk led from the kitchen door around to the front of the house. We made our way back through the little group of onlookers.

“Bastards,” said Constable MacMahon under his breath. He was still fuming about being sent upstairs.

“What about the daughter?” I asked. “Where was she this time?”

“Working at the hotel. I saw her myself. Dropped in at the dart tournament after dinner. They said at the bar she didn’t leave until almost twelve, when Mrs. Rainey met her.”

“She could have slipped out the back, climbed down the bank here, and been back before anyone noticed,” I said. It would have been difficult but not impossible, especially for someone young and agile.

“I suppose it’s possible,” said Constable MacMahon, casting an eye up the hill, “but tell me, Mr. Rennison, why? Why would she do it? And what about the other murder?”

I could think of an answer to neither question.

At Constable MacMahon’s insistence, we went directly to the bank. As with Pierre’s account, I found nothing particularly unusual. The balance was larger than might have been expected, but I had heard that Madame Dell was one of the Haitians who had brought money with her. There were regular small deposits (payment for work done, no doubt), more or less regular small withdrawals, and four or five larger withdrawals. “Probably for laundry supplies,” I said to Constable MacMahon, “and larger purchases of some kind.”

The total balance had declined somewhat over the past few months. Constable MacMahon stared blankly at the upside-down figures for a few moments, grunted, and left the bank without saying a word.

For all their photographs, fingerprint taking, officious scrutiny, tape measuring, and what we later learned was blood type analysis, the police from New Providence did no better than Constable MacMahon at solving the murders. They appeared to accept — or at least caused no one to challenge — the prevailing view on the island: that the first murder was connected with the drug and tourist trade, and the second somehow with voodoo, even though there was not a whisper of evidence for either explanation. They never did come to see me; they never looked at those few columns of figures.

I was on the ferry on my way to the airport for one of my infrequent trips to Miami when I met Tommas, the poet who lived out by Burnett’s place. He was traveling to New Providence for a meeting of a left-wing exile group; unlike most of the Haitians, he was politically active — he loved Haiti and her mysterious culture. Tommas was older than I was — in his late thirties — and he was, I guessed, rather disdainful of my profession. But I had seen some of his poems — they were in English and were published on newsprint-like paper by a little publishing house in St. Lucia, a thousand miles to the south. He had come to see me shortly after I had come to the islands when he heard I too was a writer. I had been a disappointment to him, both because I did not write poetry and because I fell in so easily with the people at the Yacht Club. He didn’t understand that that was part of my business. But we were not unfriendly.

I made some reference to Madame Dell’s daughter. She was no longer required to remain for questioning and was planning to leave the islands. No doubt it was because the money she had been left, although not a lot, would enable her to leave.

“Man, it has nothing to do with the money,” Tommas said. “She had been dishonored.”

I was puzzled. Was he being overly romantic?

“Dishonored?” I said.

Tommas merely shrugged his shoulders.

“Dishonored by the death of her fiancé?” I said.

But he would say no more.

On the plane to Miami I thought about Tommas’s remark. Dishonored: it was a word from an old novel. And from time to time throughout the day, I thought about the look on Madame Dell’s face when I had asked her about Pierre, and about Winnie, telling me the village gossip that Pierre’s murder had something to do with women. She never said it was the tourists.

I flew back to Marsh Harbour late in the afternoon and took a water taxi across the channel to the village. In the evening I walked along the path past Burnett’s place, through the scruffy silvery woods to Tommas’s hut. The barking of a large German shepherd brought him outside. He calmed the dog. I stood there until finally — and without grace — he invited me into the hut.

“It’s about the translations you did for the police who came over from Nassau,” I said. He shrugged his shoulders, then led me to the wooden table in the corner of the room.

The details were there, in those letters tied with a ribbon which we had seen in Madame Dell’s bureau. I laboriously went over Tommas’s translations. The money had been provided to Madame Dell by the family of her husband — the girl’s father — and was to be paid in six installments, the final payment on the day of the marriage. Of course the efficient men from New Providence would not have known about the rumors in the woods — about the understanding between Pierre and Madame Dell’s daughter. They should not have been so brusque with Constable MacMahon.

“Did she love him?” I said.

“I would say so,” said Tommas. “She slept with him.” He would elaborate no further.

“A dowry?” said Burnett. We were at the Poolside Bar of the Majestic. The waiter brought our drinks — gin and soda for him, beer for me.

“Which Pierre had almost certainly already spent,” I said.

“And the girl killed her mother?”

“Not her mother. Her stepmother. Her wicked stepmother, the person who had killed her lover. Perhaps she found the knife. Who knows?”

“Imagine Madame Dell murdering the fellow for that amount of money in the first place.”

“It may seem small to us, but it was a lot of money to them. Still, I don’t think it was the money,” I said. “It was bad enough that he was seeing other women. But breaking the engagement: he had dishonored the woman, dishonored the family. He broke his promise. He was an adventurer. Breach of contract — like an old novel, but with no recourse to a court of law. So Madame Dell followed him into the mangroves where he used to meet her stepdaughter and killed him in the darkness.”

“Honor and love. A romantic tale,” said Burnett. “How do you know all this?”

“I don’t know for certain. But it’s in the figures.”

I had returned to the bank immediately after visiting Tommas. I took Madame Dell’s and Pierre’s accounts from the files and quickly compared them. The large withdrawals from Madame Dell’s account were followed in all cases a day or two later by deposits in his. Four of Pierre’s deposits were identical to her withdrawals and the fifth was only slightly less.

“Why don’t you go the police?” Burnett asked.

“For the same reason I don’t go to the U.S. tax department about you.”

“How’s that?” Burnett bridled a little, so I quoted the law.

“ ‘No person under Bahamian jurisdiction is permitted to divulge bank information obtained in the course of his or her employment.’ It protects us all,” I said, “even the Haitians.”

Burnett said nothing.

A few days later Madame Dell’s daughter came to see me at my office. She was tall and handsome and even more laconic than I had remembered. I had noticed that some of the other Haitians in the village had started to avoid her. She withdrew all her own money — she would have to wait for the lawyers to get the inheritance — and then she left the bank, and the island too — for Miami, we heard. We never saw her again.

It was a matter of professional curiosity. Before closing the file, I went over the record of transactions in her account. I realized then that what I had told Burnett was wrong, that Tommas, too, had been mistaken. There in the figures were five large deposits. I knew without checking that the amounts were the same, that they had come from Pierre. Madame Dell must have discovered what they were up to — an elaborate scheme to get what I suppose Madame Dell’s daughter no doubt saw as rightfully hers. It was not a question of honor and love. I should have guessed, for I was no poet: it was the money after all.