Isle of Dogs

Nineteen

Governor Crimm chalked the tip of his lucky pool cue, cigar smoke hanging in a hazy halo around his head as he tried to make out striped balls on the red felt-covered table that Thomas Jefferson had brought back from France, or so Maude had claimed when she'd discovered it on eBay. Every few minutes, one of the troopers came into the billiards room to give the governor updates. The news was not promising.

Checks of vehicles passing through tollbooths had produced only one car with New York plates, and the driver, clearly Hispanic, had fled. So far, he had not been caught, and the consensus was that he-the heinous serial killer-had left the city, heading north. Other disturbing developments included Trooper Truth's latest essay, which accused Major Trader of being a dishonest, self-serving pirate who was trying to poison the governor. As if things weren't grim enough, Regina had planted herself on a Chippendale commode chair, slurping ice cream she had mixed with homemade Toll House cookies she had helped herself to in the kitchen. She was chewing with her mouth open and talking nonstop, distracting the governor as he peered through his magnifying glass at the pool balls he went after.

"Good shot," Andy said when a red-striped ball bounced off the table. He quickly caught it and discreetly tucked it into a corner pocket.

"You aren't letting me win, are you?" the governor said, chalking his stick again.

"Everybody always lets you win," Regina told her father. "Except me. I refuse to let you win."

Regina was a gifted pool player and between her father's terms as governor, when she was at liberty to come and go as she pleased, she was known in area bars for her trick shots and ruthlessness. The only person who had ever beaten her without cheating was that dumbshit, disrespectful Trooper Macovich.

"Here." Andy offered Regina his pool cue. "I'm not with it tonight. You take over. If you don't mind my asking," he said to the governor as Regina racked up balls, "how did Trader come to work for you?"

"A good question," the governor replied. "It was during my first term as governor, and as I remember it, he was a low man on the totem pole, but I got to know him because he used to stop by the mansion to help out with things, such as supervising the inmates, which is not the most desirable job."

Regina broke, and four solid balls whizzed into four different pockets. "Shit," she complained. "I'm having an off night, too."

Pony had just stepped inside to see if anyone needed a touch more brandy, and he caught what the governor said about inmates. He was hurt. It always wounded him when the First Family implied that just because a person was a convicted felon, he could never be trusted with anything ever again.

"Might I get you another cigar?" Pony asked Governor Crimm in a sullen tone as Regina held the cue behind her back and knocked a ball into two more balls, all three of which spun off at impossible angles and smacked into pockets.

"I must admit, I'm very disappointed to learn that he might have been trying to poison me," the governor added. "I think we should go back to having tasters. Huh, make that scoundrel one, as a matter of fact."

"If you can find him," Andy replied. "My guess is, he's going to disappear and probably already has. It's too bad we don't have any hard evidence on him yet or we could have arrested him before he left the mansion."

"Sounds to me like Trooper Truth has plenty of hard evidence," Crimm commented with an insinuation in his tone. "And that indicates to me this renegade columnist may be Trader's accomplice. How else would Trooper Truth know about my being poisoned, now tell me that, unless he had something to do with it?"

Andy hadn't anticipated this turn in the governor's thoughts, and he got a little worried. If Hammer were subpoenaed and asked under oath if she knew Trooper Truth's identity, she would have to reply truthfully and Andy could find himself in a world of trouble.

As if Crimm were privy to Andy's thoughts, he said, "I need to talk to Superintendent Hammer and find out what she knows."

"I'm sure she'd be happy to talk to you, Governor," Andy said. "But she's had a terrible time getting hold of you and never hears from you."

"Never hears from me?" The governor gave Andy a magnified eye. "I've written her a number of notes, not only about her poor little dog, but inviting her to official functions!"

"She's never gotten them, sir."

"So that damn Trader was interfering with everything!." He was getting very put out.

"Seems to me he's been lying to you from the start," Andy agreed.

"A fresh cigar would be a good idea," the governor said to Pony, who was still waiting patiently in the doorway.

Crimm stubbed out his half-smoked cigar in Regina's ice cream dish, which he mistook for an ashtray. He was getting impatient as his unsportsmanlike daughter tapped one ball after another into the pockets.

"That's why I don't like to play with you," he said to her. "I never get to shoot. I may as well not even be in the room. Tell you what I'm going to do, son." Crimm directed this to Andy. "I'm going to assign you to a special undercover investigation. I want you to find out who Trooper Truth is as quickly as possible and see just what his involvement with Trader might be. And while you're at it, let's get the dentist back and make sure those Tangier people aren't up to any other mischief."

"Why don't you put both Andy and me on a special mission, and I'll help him solve crimes and get bad people off the streets?" Regina suggested as the last solid ball spun across felt, banked several times, and sank out of sight. "Maybe he can teach me to fly, too."

"Maybe Miss Regina and Mister Andy should help out with that fisherman who just burned up," Pony said from the doorway. "I hear things aren't going too well. Some old woman ran over the body, a bicycle, and a tackle box. The troopers are talking about it. They say a mean Hispanic's on the loose and will probably kill some other poor black person the same way."

"And what way might that be?" the governor inquired.

"Spontenuous consumption."

"Well, I 'spect Doctor Sawamatsu will be the judge of that," was Crimm's response.

He had appointed the most recently hired medical examiner himself, and he had the utmost confidence in the infallibility of Dr. Sawamatsu, who had originally come to Virginia for the sole purpose of studying gunshot wounds. His intention had been to take his training back to Japan, but the traffic was so bad there and he was so tired of living in a crowded house with people he didn't know that he lingered in the Commonwealth well beyond the completion of his internship. Then the governor, who was always trying to attract Japanese businesses and tourists to Virginia, called Dr. Sawamatsu one day.

"Doctor Sawamatsu," the governor said, and the doctor would never forget what followed, "let me get your honest opinion about something. As you know, the chief medical-examiner is a woman I'm not especially fond of. All of her staff are Americans, and I'm wondering if I had a Japanese medical examiner in Virginia, would that make a difference?"

"To whom?"

"To these Japanese Fortune 500 companies who keep relocating or never relocate here to begin with-and to

Japanese citizens in general who have yet to discover Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, our many amusement parks and plantations and resorts and so on. As long as they speak English, and all of them do."

Dr. Sawamatsu had to think quickly. He wanted to be a medical examiner in America more than anything else, but he was keenly aware that his patients were not important players in tourism or the business community and rarely had any influence whatsoever, either before they were carried into the morgue or after they left.

"When you have especially sensational cases, it most certainly would make a difference," was Dr. Sawamatsu's reply. "Because of the publicity and the message it would send if the medical examiner were Asian. In such a case, I believe my people would reciprocate and locate their companies and tourists here, providing you give them a tax incentive."

"A tax incentive?"

"A big one."

"What an unusual idea," the governor said, and the minute he got off the phone, he told his cabinet that he planned to make all Japanese businesses and individuals exempt from state taxes. The result was stunning. Within a year, tourism flourished. Railways and Greyhound had to double their staffs and buses, and camera stores began popping up on every corner. Dr. Sawamatsu became an assistant chief medical examiner and received a personal thank-you note from Governor Crimm, which the young doctor framed and hung in his living room, next to the display case of souvenirs he had collected from dead patients who no longer had any need of artificial body parts, suicide or threatening notes, or the wreckage of whatever they had died in or the weapons that had killed them.

We need to get this body out of here," Dr. Sawamatsu was telling the police as he crouched in the dark, pulling on surgical gloves. "Please do not let anyone else run over it."

"Where's the chief?" asked Detective Slipper, who did not share the governor's high opinion of Dr. Sawamatsu. "Why isn't Doctor Scarpetta here? She almost always responds personally to complicated, sensational crime scenes."

"She went to court in Halifax and will not be back until very late," Dr. Sawamatsu replied rather testily. "Now, we must get this body to the morgue right now."

"I'm not sure we can retrieve the stretcher out of the river," Detective Slipper hated to tell him. "We'd have to bring in divers."

"No time. We wrap him in sheets and carry him to the ambulance," Dr. Sawamatsu ordered. "I look at him in the morning. I can't see anything out here."

"Glad I'm not the only one," Lamonia grumpily agreed.

She was in handcuffs and standing by her dented Dodge Dart, not sure what she had done to irritate everybody so much. Trader, of course, was not put out with Lamonia in the least. He was watching the activity through his shattered windshield after a fruitless hour of standing on a bridge, shining a powerful flashlight down into the water, trying to find the crabs and the trout. Trader was deeply grateful that Lamonia had virtually destroyed the crime scene. He watched the medical examiner and paramedics cover the dead fisherman with sheets and carry him away, tucking him into the back of the ambulance, which had a crunched-in tailgate. How could Trader's luck have changed so dramatically, all in one day?

Major Trader's career and entire life were in shambles and always had been, if he were honest with himself. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror and was faced with a reflection that might as well have been his maternal grandfather, also named Major. All of the men in his mother's lineage had been called Major since Anne Bonny had had sex with a pirate and given birth to a son she named Major because it was a higher rank than captain, and she'd never met a pirate ranked higher than captain.

All the Major men bore a resemblance to one another. They were a sturdy lot with ruddy faces, big girths, pale, shifty eyes, and thinning hair. As a child, Trader had enjoyed a spree of pyromania and had never been caught. To this day, no one on Tangier Island knew that little Major was the one who torched a shed on stilts that turned out to be a soft-crab plantation. Thousands of crabs in the midst of molting had been killed, the year's harvest lost, the economy ruined. To make matters worse, the fire could not be contained and spread up several creeks, incinerating scores of bateaus before the blaze was finally extinguished alarmingly close to Hilda Crockett's Chesapeake House, known for its long family-style tables, crab cakes, clam fritters., home-baked bread, ham, and more.

Young Major Trader also became adept at sneaking the family flare gun out of the wading boot where his father hid his liquor. By experimenting with lighter fluid, gasoline, and bourbon, Major realized he could torch places from a distance by filling a milk jug with a flammable liquid and, when nobody was looking, fire a flare at the jug and cause a small explosion, much like what he had done to the fisherman.

Pony also had led a lawless life as a young one, but unlike Trader, Pony lived with remorse and an overwhelming sense of shame and regret. Having grown weary of watching Regina play pool while her father stood idly by, tapping cigar ashes wherever he thought he saw an ashtray, Pony and Andy had wandered out into the garden. They sat on a granite bench in the cold and began to talk.

"May I get you anything, Mister Andy?"

"No. You're really nice to keep asking, but why don't you just take it easy for a while and tell me about yourself. Why do you call yourself Pony?"

"I don't," Pony replied, his breath smoking out and reminding him he longed for a cigarette. "You mind?" He pulled a pack out of his white jacket. "My daddy called me Pony because when my sister was born-she's older than me-she used to tell my daddy she wanted a pony. We couldn't afford a pony, so when I was born a few years later, my daddy named me Pony and says to my sister, 'Now you got a pony.' "

Andy didn't comment as he tried to discern whether the story was heartwarming or simply depressing.

"It's not a name that's helped me out much, you want to know the truth," Pony continued. "The other inmates make comments about it 'til they figure I'll fight 'em if they think for one minute they gonna ride me in the showers, you know what I mean?" He shook his head and grinned, several gold caps gleaming in the dark. "I had my share of scuffles, but I'm stronger than I look. Did some prizefighting when I was younger, know karate pretty good, too."

"How long you in for?" Andy asked.

"Another two years, unless the governor lets me out. And he could, but he won't. Thing is, I do a good job and none of the Crimms want someone else. They're used to me. And if I do a bad job, they'll just send me back to lockup. So I'm kinda stuck." He flicked an ash. "I should never have stole that pack of cigarettes." He shook his head again and sighed.

"You're in jail for stealing a pack of cigarettes?" Andy couldn't believe it.

Pony nodded. "It violated my parole. Before that, it was two pints of apricot brandy at the ABC store. So I pretty much ruined my life over things that ain't good for me anyway. It runs in my family."

"Stealing?" Andy asked.

"Self-destruction. How 'bout you?"

It was rare anyone asked about Andy's life and he had always been cautious about what he revealed.

"Tell me about yourself, Mister Andy," Pony encouraged him to talk. "What about a girl? You got someone special?"

Andy dug his hands into the pockets of his uniform winter jacket and hunched his shoulders against the unseasonable chill as helicopters churned up the night.

Clouds had moved on, and the moon was a sliver that reminded Pony of a gold smile.

"Not at the moment," Andy said. "I was on and off with an older woman I met in Charlotte. But we're finished."

"I guess she still in Charlotte?"

"I don't know where she is. I wanted to be friends, but she's not that way. I don't understand women," Andy confessed. "They're always saying men don't know how to be friends, but when I try to be a friend, they act weird about it."

"That is the truth." Pony slowly nodded his head. "You tell it, brother. Women never say what they want or mean what they say or admit to even wanting-unless it's something they don't want or they want you to think they do or don't want. So they can play you, know what I mean? My wife's a sweet woman when she's not too wore out from doing the First Family's laundry or mad at me for going back to lockup during my vacations and holidays. But to look at it from her side, I know I don't always shoot straight with her, either.

"Sometimes I ought to just come out with it and say, 'I sure do love you, baby.' Or 'You sure do look good to me right now, baby.' Or 'I carry this sickness in my heart, baby, 'cause I know I've spent most of our good years behind bars, and that's not fair to you and you got no idea how much I just ache for you when I'm away like that.' And I guess, Mister Andy, I don't want to admit to her or myself that I probably fucked up my life forever, you know what I'm saying?" He sucked on the cigarette. "You know, it's probably too late and I'll probably never get out of lockup 'cause the governor will forget or the next one will or the one after that.

"And I guess I don't got sense enough to cause trouble in the mansion and maybe get fired and then sue the Comm'wealth for discrim'ation, which would entitle me to lawyers who would take me on for a cause and look into my prison record and discover there's some mess-up in the Department of Corrections computer and I would be a free man. As is, I don't got no money for no lawyer and right now I ain't no cause. My point being, if I did the wrong thing, everything would turn out all right for me."

"I know exactly how you feel," Andy agreed. "But you've still got to do the right thing, Pony. Look at Trooper Truth. He did the right thing by telling the truth about Major Trader, and now the governor suspects Trooper Truth of doing something wrong."

"I hear you. I wish I knew Trooper Truth," Pony said with a sigh. "He sounds like one fine person, and it's 'bout time someone blew the whistle on Trader. I've known all along he's a rotten apple up to no good. Yes sir, I wish I knew Trooper Truth. Maybe he could fix my mess with the Department of Corrections."

"Why don't you call DOC yourself and see if you can get someone to look into the matter?" Andy asked.

" 'Cause I ain't allowed to make no personal calls from the mansion. And they don't listen to inmates, anyhow. Everybody in trouble says there's been a mistake, so why should I be any different?"

Regina was hiding behind an ancient boxwood and heard every word. She had lost interest in pool and wished she had thought to wear a coat when she'd decided to sneak out into the garden and eavesdrop. She had a special talent for spying on others, and was hoping to gather a little intelligence that might be useful to her.

But as she listened to Andy talk to Pony, she felt herself go soft inside and forgot her original motive. She, too, had been frustrated in her occasional efforts to make friends and often felt wrongly accused.

Regina was shivering uncontrollably, her breath rising in frozen clouds. Her stomach was feeling funny, too, and her intestines were tacking this way and that as they filled with an ominous wind that seemed to have gusted up from the sewer.

"If I were you," Andy was saying to Pony, "I'd send Trooper Truth an e-mail and see if he can get to the truth of why you're still in lockup."

"You think he'd do that for me?" Pony noticed that a boxwood was shaking and smoke was rising from it.

"It can't hurt to ask."

"Well, I don't got access to e-mail, either." Pony watched the shaking, smoking boxwood with growing alarm. He thought of the fisherman and panicked. "I think that boxwood over there's about to blow up!" he exclaimed as a loud, dull detonation sounded from behind the shrubs.

Andy sprang from the stone bench and raced over to the smoking, foul-smelling bush as Regina gave up her cover and rose like a mountain.

"What are you doing?" Andy demanded.

"Practicing investigative techniques," she replied as she clutched her huge quivering gut.

"Well, don't you be hiding behind things and looking like you might explode, Miss Reginia," Pony said, weak with relief. "Lord, you had me going for a minute, thought that crazy man had planted a pipe bomb in the garden and we was all gonna burn up."

"It's time for me to go," Andy said.

"Pick me up first thing in the morning so we can start working this case," Regina said. Even when she wasn't feeling well, she had a manner of making suggestions as if she were ordering an air strike. "I'll be waiting for you early."

"Not possible," Andy replied. "I need to go to the morgue first thing to check on what the medical examiner finds in the case of the man who was killed at the river. You certainly don't want to see something like that. It's very unpleasant."

"Of course I want to see it," Regina said with inappropriate enthusiasm.

"It's very, very unpleasant and upsetting." Andy tried to dissuade her. "You ever smelled a dead animal that has flies all over it? Well, it's much worse than that, and the stench has a way of clinging deep up in your sinuses so that every time you get around food, the smell wakes up and makes you quite nauseous. Not to mention the sights and sounds in the morgue."

"I'm going!" Regina would not take no for an answer.

Andy's mood was very dark as he drove through downtown. He was beginning to wish he had never met the Crimms at the steak house the night before. There was no one he would have avoided more arduously than Regina, and now it appeared that he was going to have to be around her constantly. Not to mention, the governor was contemplating that Trooper Truth might be Trader's poisonous accomplice, on top of some psycho's carving Trooper Truth into a dead body and then leaving evidence at Andy's house.

"I've gotten myself into quite a situation," he said over the car phone to Judy Hammer.

"Andy, do you have any idea what time it is?" said Hammer, who had been sound asleep when her phone had startled her back into this world. "You sound very discouraged. What happened?"

Once again, Andy happened to be close to Hammer's Church Hill neighborhood, and she suggested that he drop by at the precise moment Fonny Boy decided to drop by the clinic and check on Dr. Sherman Faux, who was shivering blindly in the folding chair.

"Lord, I ask you for a miracle. Not a big one. Just one tiny miracle," Dr. Faux was praying. "Maybe a spare angel could drop by and get me out of here. I promise I'll move quickly and not take unnecessary time, because I know there are so many people and animals who need Your help far more than I do. But I can't do anybody any good as long as I'm tied up here on this island. And I'm stiff and getting sore in this metal chair. So just one angel, that's all I ask. For maybe an hour or two-however long it takes to get me back to the mainland."

Fonny Boy listened attentively without being detected, because he had known since birth not to make sudden movements that might alert fish and crabs that they were about to be caught. Crabs especially were very wily and had excellent vision. If one didn't keep the wire pot perfectly clean, then the crab wouldn't be able to see all the way through it and would get suspicious as to why a piece of rotten fish was inside a box-shaped tangle of eel grass. Fonny Boy kept the family crab pots impeccably clean and could be as silent as a butterfly when necessary.

He would make the dentist think that God was intervening and answering his prayer, when the truth was, Fonny Boy wanted to take Dr. Faux up on his offer of employment on the mainland. Fonny Boy got up and made not a sound as he left the storeroom, then turned around and walked back inside and shut the door so the dentist could hear him enter.

"Who's there?" Dr. Faux said with hope. "That you, Fonny Boy?"

"Yass."

"Oh, thank God. I'm cold and need to go home, Fonny Boy. How's your tooth? The lidocaine wear off?"

"Yass."

"What about the cotton you swallowed? Any problems with that?"

"Yea!" he talked backward, meaning he'd had no problem yet. "I'll carry you ashore," he added. "There's neither time to get the spyglass and searchlight offer my daddy, and it's right airish out, and you don't have a coat. But we need to scud along now afore all the bateaus head out to fish-up the pots!"

"I don't care about a coat, and we can certainly make do without binoculars or a flashlight!" the dentist exclaimed with joy.

He had tears in his eyes, although Fonny Boy could not see them because of the brackish-smelling bandanna that was still tied around the dentist's head. All these years the dentist had been reimbursed for working or pretending to work on that boy's mouth, and never once had it occurred to Dr. Faux that Fonny Boy was an angel.

"God bless you, son," Dr. Faux whispered as they silently made their way out of the clinic.

"Shhhh," Fonny Boy warned him. "Keep quite."

The island's streets were deserted and dark, and there wasn't a light on in a single house as every Islander slept soundly and golf carts recharged. But Fonny Boy knew that soon enough it would be 3:00 A.M. and the watermen would be heading out to their bateaus, so he and the dentist had best hurry along. If Fonny Boy got caught rescuing Dr. Faux, there would be trouble. For sure, Fonny Boy's mother would march him straightaway to Swain Memorial United Methodist Church, and she would rat on him to Reverend Crockett. Fonny Boy had been in trouble with Reverend Crockett before, and was sick and tired of memorizing Scripture to pay for his sins.

The family bateau was docked only several blocks from the church, and with every step, the silhouette of the church steeple seemed to watch Fonny Boy and follow him. The people of Tangier were God-fearing, and disobedience to one's parents was not tolerated. Although Fonny Boy might be an angel to Dr. Faux, Fonny Boy was openly disobeying his father and mother by sneaking out of the house and letting the dentist go. Furthermore, when Fonny Boy's father arrived to putter out to the crab pots, he would have no means of doing so and would be extremely out of sorts because of his missing bateau.

As Fonny Boy and the dentist descended rickety wooden steps leading down to the bateaus, Fonny Boy worried aloud and nonstop. He was having second thoughts and was terrified to go down that last step, which would surely lead to an entirely new, scary world. The dentist tried to comfort Fonny Boy by telling him that he was feeling the same way the men and boys had felt in December, 1606 as they'd filed down the Black-wall stairs on the Isle of Dogs and boarded the ships. Little Richard Mutton of St. Bride, London, was only fourteen, the same age as Fonny Boy, and no doubt froze on the bottom step, too.

"His family, was they with him?" Fonny Boy whispered.

"Little Richard was the only Mutton on the list of settlers, at least that we know of."

"Then what for did he do it?" Fonny Boy whispered as he imagined Richard Mutton all alone and shivering in the dark as he stared out at three tiny ships that were going to sail all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to an unknown, dangerous world.

"Gold," Dr. Faux replied. "The little Mutton boy, like most of our country's first settlers, felt sure they would find gold or at least silver, just like the Spanish were in the West Indies. And of course, they would be assigned great parcels of land so they could begin farming."

"Who learned you all this?" Fonny Boy asked in awe.

"Some of it was in Trooper Truth the morning before you kidnapped me. And I've always loved Virginia history."

Lights were beginning to fill windows in the small houses across the island, and Fonny Boy jumped into his father's bateau and began to imagine gold and treasure as they sped through the bay in the pitch dark. It would have been a good idea for him to have checked out how much gas was onboard and perhaps brought along an auxiliary tank or two for the hour-and-a-half voyage. As it was, they were five miles west of Tangier and inside restricted area R 6609 when the outboard motor began to hiccup and sputter just before it quit.

"Oh, no," Dr. Faux said as he began to fear that God hadn't answered his prayer after all, but had merely thrown him into worse trouble to punish him for his fraudulent life. "What do we do now, Fonny Boy?"

Every waterman kept a flare gun in his bateau, but Fonny Boy couldn't possibly resort to that because he could not be rescued by his own people and then face the unthinkable punishment that would await him for running away with the dentist. He was also mindful of the military restricted areas all around the island and wasn't sure it was a good idea to shoot something up into the air. What if the military shot back?

"You think the current will eventually drift us to Reedville?" Dr. Faux asked as frigid air began to work its way through his inadequate clothing.

"Nah," Fonny Boy replied.

He began digging around in the various compartments in the bateau, moving aside rope, a rusty pocket knife, several bottles of water, and mosquito repellent, which the dentist used liberally, even though it was too cold for insects to be on the prowl. The compartment under the pilot's seat was secured with a padlock, and Fonny Boy tried to conjure up the combination. Anything of true value, including the flare gun, would be inside that compartment, and although he wasn't certain, he was hopeful that his father might have left the handheld radio in there instead of taking it home.