Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

The World by the Tail by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini is one of the most versatile writers working in the mystery field. Several recent books should interest his fans. Five Star Press has a new collection entitled A “Nameless Detective” Casebook, featuring Mr. Pronzini’s most famous character (from 40 short stories and 28 novels). The most recent Nameless novel is Spook (Carroll & Graf). There’s also a recent stand-alone novel, Alias Man (Walker 2004).

I was sitting in Jocko’s Cafe, at my usual place in front of the open-air window facing Round Bay.

Jocko’s isn’t much. Just your standard back-island roadside bar and grill, mostly frequented by locals black and white and a few slumming tourists, on the southeastern tip of St. John, the smallest of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The road that loops around from Coral Bay ends fifty yards from Jocko’s dirt parking lot. End of the line.

The building is two-storied, made of pink stucco, and flanked by palmettos and elephant’s-ears; bar and food service downstairs, Jocko’s quarters upstairs. The pocked-plaster walls are festooned with nautical paintings, none of them very good, and dozens of snapshots of customers with and without Jocko. The furniture is old and mismatched. There are a couple of ceiling fans, a bleached steer head mounted above the bar, a dartboard, and a blackboard with the daily menu chalked on it. Today’s specials are every day’s specials — conch chowder and callaloo, a pair of West Indian dishes.

That’s because Jocko is West Indian, a native of St. Croix. Plump, hairless, skin as sleek and shiny as a seal’s. In one ear he wears a big gold hoop that gives him a lopsided appearance. He smiles a lot, laughs often — a happy man.

The open-air window frames a view of the narrow inlet and the broad expanse of Round Bay beyond, and if you sit at the table in its exact center you can also see much of the far shore — the villa-spotted hills above Coral Bay, and the jungly slopes of Bordeaux Mountain, the highest point on St. John at 1,277 feet. That table and chair are mine by tacit agreement. On the rare occasions when I’m not in the cafe, Jocko refuses to let anybody else sit there. My seat, my window, my view.

On the scarred tabletop was my usual glass of Arundel Cane Rum. Arundel Estate is the oldest continuously operated distillery in the eastern Caribbean, and the only one that makes rum directly from sugar-cane juice. I won’t drink anything else. Jocko imports it for me from Tortola, once the largest pirate community in the neighboring British Virgins. He does it because he likes me. And he likes me for the same reason he reserves my table: I’m his best customer.

We were the only occupants when the man in the yachting cap came in. He’d been in a couple of times before, once to eat lunch and once to drink a beer and give me a couple of curious looks. Big man in white slacks and a patterned island shirt, with a rough-textured face like something sculpted out of wet sand. The yachting cap didn’t mean anything; he wasn’t off any of the pleasure craft anchored out on Round Bay. One of the slumming tourists from Cruz Bay or Coral Bay.

This time he didn’t sit at the bar. Thirty seconds after he walked in, he was standing between me and the window, looking down and smiling in a tentative way.

I said, “You’re blocking my view.”

“Oh, sorry.” He gestured at one of the empty chairs. “Mind if I join you?”

“Why?”

“No particular reason. I’ve seen you here before — always alone. I thought you might like some company.”

“As long as you don’t block the view.”

He positioned the chair carefully to my left, sat down, and fanned himself with his hand. “Hot.”

“Not so bad today. You should be here in July and August.”

“I’d rather not, thanks. My name’s Talley, John Talley.”

“Paul Anderson.”

“Buy you a drink, Paul?”

“I wouldn’t say no. Arundel Cane Rum, neat.”

“I’ll just have a cold beer. Too hot for rum.” He called out the order to Jocko. “I’m a writer,” he said to me.

“Is that right?”

“Books, stories, magazine articles. Down here from New York to look for material, soak up a little local color.”

“And you think I might qualify in the color department. Rumpled, unshaven, rum-soaked — a character.”

“Well, I’ll admit you interest me.”

Jocko brought the drinks and I had some of mine.

“I’m staying up at Coral Bay,” Talley said. “I like St. John better than St. Thomas and this side of the island better than Cruz Bay. Fewer people, none of the conventional tourist atmosphere.”

“So do I. For the same reasons.”

“Been in the Virgins long?”

“Twenty years. Almost twenty-one.”

“Practically a native. You live out here on the tip?”

I nodded. “Saltbox up by Hansen’s Bay.”

“What’s a saltbox?”

“Small square house. Cheap rent.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I don’t do anything,” I said.

“You mean you’re out of work?”

“No. I mean I don’t do anything. Except come here to Jocko’s every day.”

“Retired?”

“No.”

“Independent means?”

“No.”

“Then how do you make ends meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”

I emptied my glass, watching the pleasure boats. Catamarans, mostly. Ketches, sloops, a couple of yawls. A big motor-sailer flying a British flag was making down around the point from Hurricane Hole. It’d be cool out there on her foredeck. The trades were blowing soft today.

“Sorry if I seem nosy,” Talley said. “Writers tend to be that way. Nature of the beast.”

“You really want to know how I make ends meet?”

“If you want to tell me.”

“I stole some money once,” I said.

“You... what?”

“Embezzled it, to be exact. There’s still a little left. That’s what I live on.”

Talley moved in his chair, making it scrape on the rough tile floor. I wasn’t looking at him, but I could feel the pressure of his eyes.

He said, “Are you serious?”

“I’m always serious.”

“How much money did you embezzle?”

“Nearly half a million dollars.”

“My God! You actually got away with that much?”

“That’s right.”

“When? How long ago?”

“Twenty-one years.”

“And you were never caught?”

“Never close to being caught.”

“How did you do it? Where?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “And talking’s thirsty work.”

He signaled to Jocko.

I didn’t say anything until I had a fresh glass in front of me. Then I said, “I was an accountant for an engineering firm in San Francisco, one of the largest in the west. I worked there for ten years. Lived a quiet life alone in a furnished apartment. No vices. Exemplary record. Completely trustworthy employee.”

“What changed you into an embezzler?”

“Combination of things. A woman I wanted and couldn’t have without a lot of money. Dreams of living a life of luxury in the tropics, never having to work anymore. The realization of how easy it would be, given my position with the firm. The challenge of planning it, setting it up, getting away with it.”

“How did you go about it?”

“My job was in accounts payable,” I said, “authorizing the payment of invoices from the firm’s various subcontractors. I set up several dummy companies and arranged for the submission of monthly invoices of small to moderate sums, never more than a few thousand dollars, and authorized payment into dummy bank accounts. Then I opened a private account in the Cayman Islands and funneled the money into it a little at a time. I went about it all very carefully, very methodically. It took me a year to embezzle a total of $480,000. And to establish an untraceable new identity and make the necessary arrangements to disappear, so I would be free to spend it. When the time came, the Friday afternoon before the annual audit was scheduled, I left San Francisco and spent nearly two months traveling across country by car, train, bus, and plane, using assumed names and different disguises. Then I used my new identity to get to St. Thomas — no trouble at all. Annalise had already been in Charlotte Amalie a month by then—”

“Annalise? Oh, the woman. She was in on it, then?”

“Oh yes. From the first. She found the project as exciting as I did.”

“Project. That’s a nice way of putting it.”

I shrugged. “She rented a villa, a large one at Limetree Beach, and let it be known that her husband would be joining her shortly. By the time I arrived she’d made several friends in the community — she had that knack. I was accepted immediately, without question.”

“You never came under any kind of scrutiny?”

“No. Annalise and I did nothing to call undue attention to ourselves. And I was thinner than I’d been in San Francisco, I’d let my hair grow long and wore a moustache — I looked nothing at all like the embezzling accountant. We had no difficulty settling into the luxury lifestyle I’d always coveted — parties, fine dining, catering servants. I bought an old yawl and learned to sail, and we visited some of the other Caribbean islands, alone and with other couples. I had everything I ever wanted. I thought I had the world by the tail.”

“But then the money ran out, is that it?”

“No. We spent a lot, yes, but I’d also invested a third of the original sum — wisely enough so that we had a steady supplementary income.”

“Then what did happen?” Talley asked.

“For a long time nothing happened. That was the problem.”

“I don’t understand.”

I said, “You can change your financial status, your environment, your lifestyle, but you can’t change your basic nature. You’re still the same person. I led a dull, conservative life in San Francisco. Once the newness and the excitement wore off, I led a dull, conservative life in Charlotte Amalie. Even with the investments, we couldn’t afford to live as we were indefinitely; I began to worry enough to start cutting back. Over a period of time we stopped traveling, stopped giving parties and being invited to parties, stopped going out to restaurants and clubs. The friends we’d made drifted away one by one. I lost interest in sailing and sold the yawl. I had no other hobbies or interests and neither did Annalise. After the sixth year all we were doing was staying home by ourselves, drinking too much and watching the sunsets.”

“How did Annalise deal with that?”

“She hated it. We were barely communicating by then.”

“I suppose eventually she left you.”

“I knew she would. She started going out by herself every night, staying out late, and I just let her do it. One night she didn’t come home at all. I never saw her again.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard rumors that she went to Martinique with the owner of a yacht brokerage.”

“But you didn’t bother to find out.”

“There didn’t seem to be any reason to.”

“What did you do after she left?”

“Nothing for a time. But the villa was too big and too expensive for one person, so I moved to a smaller place. The owner raised the rent after the first year and I moved again, an even smaller place near Frenchtown.”

“Still alone?”

“Yes. There has been no one else in my life since Annalise.”

“How long did you stay on St. Thomas?”

“Another two years. The tourist explosion had started by then and prices had skyrocketed. So I left the island for good.”

“And came over to St. John?”

“No. St. Croix first. But my cottage there was burglarized one night, everything of value I had left stolen — everything except my bank books, which were hidden. That was when I moved to St. John. A bungalow in Coral Bay, then the saltbox at Hansen’s.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A little over four years.”

“End of the line.”

“That’s right,” I said. “End of the line.”

Flies circled listlessly in the hot breeze. Talley made wet circles on the tabletop with his sweating beer bottle.

“That’s quite a story,” he said.

“Meaning you don’t believe it.”

“I don’t know if I do or not. You could have made it all up as a way to cadge free drinks. For all I know you tell it to every tourist who comes in here.”

“Not every tourist. Only the willing listeners and free spenders.”

“So it is just a story.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“All right,” Talley said, “for the sake of argument let’s assume it’s true, all of it or some of it. You must know I could turn you in to the FBI. This is federal territory, you’re an interstate fugitive, and there’s no statute of limitation on federal crimes — you’d probably still go to prison. There might be a reward of some kind, too, even after twenty years. In any case, I could buy myself a lot of free publicity and an article assignment if not a book contract. I told you I was a writer — why open up to me?”

“Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I don’t care anymore.”

“Uh-huh. ‘The Perfect Crime that Wasn’t.’ Not a bad title.”

“But not accurate. The crime was perfect.”

“You really believe that?”

“Yes. It was, but I’m not. That’s the only flaw.”

“Then let me ask you a hypothetical question,” Talley said. “If you had it to do over again, would you still embezzle that money?”

I said without hesitation, “Yes.”

“Even if you knew how things were going to turn out?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not? I got away with stealing close to half a million dollars. For a while I had everything I ever wanted. Would I have been any better off in a dead-end corporate job all those years, living in a furnished apartment in San Francisco?”

“You wouldn’t have ended up an alcoholic fugitive in a place like this.”

“One’s no worse than the other, from my perspective.”

We were silent for a time. Then Talley said, “Well,” and pushed back his chair. “I’d better be moving along.”

I didn’t say anything.

“One more question before I go. What’s your real name?”

“The one I gave you. Paul Anderson.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I might like to talk to you again, Paul. Take some notes.”

“Any time. You know where to find me.”

He went away.

I drank and watched the sunlight sparkle on Round Bay, throw sharp glints off the brightwork on the pleasure craft. After a while Jocko came over and blocked my view.

“You tell that mon how you steal all that money in San Francisco?”

“I told him.”

Big grin. “Beautiful wife, fancy villa in Charlotte Amalie, rich mon’s life before it all go away and you end up here.”

“The whole story.”

“What he say?”

“I don’t think he believed it.”

“Somebody might, someday,” Jocko said. “Wrong mon think you still got plenty money left, he try to steal it from you.”

“Or the law might come and take me away to jail.”

“I don’t like to see that hoppen.”

“Of course not. Then you’d go out of business.”

He laughed

I laughed, too.

The fan hummed, the flies circled. Clouds were beginning to pile up along the crest of Bordeaux Mountain; there might be some rain later on. A sleek blue-and-white yawl came gliding in from the sea. From a distance she looked like the Annalise — a thirty-footer with a clipper bow and enough beam to handle weather in blue water. I watched her for a time, but not very long.

I wondered where Annalise was now, what she was doing. But I didn’t really care.

I wondered how much money I had left. I could look at my bank book when I got back to the saltbox, but I knew I wouldn’t. I didn’t really care.

I wondered if Talley would come back. I wondered if he would contact my old firm in San Francisco, turn me in to the FBI. I hoped he would, but I didn’t really care.

I sat there.

Would I really do it over again if I had the chance? I’d been telling myself I would for so long that saying it out loud to somebody else had become second nature. But it was a lie. And so was the conceit that I had committed a perfect crime. Two more lies in the fabric of falsehoods and deceptions that made up my life.

Jocko brought me another rum. Arundel Cane Rum, the best in the Caribbean, the only kind I would drink. I caught up the glass, emptied it.

“World by the tail, eh, mon?” Jocko said.

“This is my world now,” I said. “Jocko’s Cafe and Arundel rum and what I can see through this window.”

He laughed.

This time I didn’t laugh with him.

Copyright ©; 2005 by Bill Pronzini.