The Crimes of Jordan Wise (19 page)

The wallet contained $72, three snapshots, and a driver's license, social security card, and U.S. Post Office ID all in the name of Frederick Coder. The address on the Ucense was Hollyoak Street in Yonkers, New York, but the license had been issued in 1977 and the address might or might not be current. There was no street address on the postal identification, but the city was the same.

So his name had been Coder, not Cutter. A small, sly deception in case I had any intention of trying to track him down.

And he'd worked for the Post Office. A mailman? The fact struck me funny. Annalise and a mailman! Some progression she'd gone through. From an accountant and embezzler to a cheating divorce lawyer to a manufacturer of women's clothing to . . . a mailman. From San Francisco to Chicago to Charlotte Amalie to New York City to . . . Yonkers. From a department store buyer to accomplice in a major embezzlement to thief to blackmailer to . . . what? What next, Annalise? Shoplifter, bag lady, hooker? Somebody else's mistress—a truck driver's, a garbage collector's, a pimp's? Yonkers to Harlem or the Bowery? How low can you sink? Not low enough to suit me. Hell wouldn't be low enough to suit me.

It wasn't funny any longer; the anger had begun to burn hot and bitter again. I forced it down, forced the thoughts of her out of my mind. Cold focus. Rigid control.

None of the snapshots was of Annalise. One depicted a much younger Coder (I had to think of him by his real name) in a dark blue suit, and an attractive redheaded woman wearing a white gown and holding a bouquet of flowers. Another in color was of the same redhead, older, heavier, staring at the camera with a tight little leer on her mouth and her middle finger upraised just below the point of her chin. The third was an old black-and-white portrait of a graying, sad-eyed woman. Written on the back of that one in ballpoint pen was "Mom, '62." Fred Coder, the sentimental blackmailer.

Was he still married, screwing Annalise on the side? Possibly, but he hadn't been wearing a wedding ring and he'd implied that he lived alone. And a man would be more likely to keep a photo of an ex-wife giving him the finger than of a current wife making that gesture. Much better for me if he'd been divorced. A wife would likely try to find him when he failed to come home; an ex might never know he'd disappeared, or care if she did know.

I flipped through the folder of traveler's checks. Seven altogether, each in the amount of $50. Except for the "F" and the "C," his signature was an illiterate squiggle like the up-and-down lines on a seismograph or a lie detector graph I'd seen once in a movie. I studied the signature for a time, then located a pen and a pad of paper and tried to duplicate it. The first few attempts, the initials didn't look right, but then I got the hang of it. After a dozen or so, I was able to match the scrawls on the checks fairly closely.

Fatigue had given me a headache, put an abrading graininess in my eyes. I set the alarm clock for two A.M., stripped, shut off the light, and sprawled naked on the bed. I was out in less than a minute.

The alarm dragged me up out of a sticky, restless sleep. I put on the nightstand lamp long enough to take an old pair of blue pants and a dark-blue long-sleeved pullover out of the closet. I dressed in the dark, then rummaged up a clean pair of shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. In the kitchen I reviewed the mental list of items I would need from the house. The flashlight I'd used in the garage earlier. The rubber gloves. A plastic garbage bag. A handful of clean rags. I gathered everything, shut off the light, and went outside.

The wind still blew in noisy glists but it was no longer raining. Some of the humidity was gone; the air had a fresh, sweet taste, the way it does after a storm has passed. Clouds moved sluggishly across the sky now, thick piles of them—cumulonimbus, not rain-swollen cumulus. Here and there you could see a random star shining faintly in a ragged patch of clear. The only lights showing in the neighboring houses were night lights, tiny islands surrounded by restless dark. It would be another couple of hours, I judged, before the cloud cover broke up enough to free the moon and stars.

I shut myself inside the garage. Gloves, garbage bag, rags, and the change of clothes went into the Mini's trunk. The flash beam picked out a folded section of sailcloth I'd planned to use for patching, and the largest shovel among the gardening tools against the back wall. I added the shovel and the torch to the other stuff in the trunk, put the sailcloth on the roof, and left the passenger door standing open.

Back to the house. It was a struggle getting the thing hoisted and slung over my shoulder. Its joints had stiffened with the onset of rigor mortis; I couldn't make it bend all the way in the middle. The dead weight put a staggering strain on my knees as I carried it outside. I stood braced against the door jamb, looking up at the street, listening. No headlights, no engine sounds, nothing but the calls of night birds flying again after the blow. I moved slowly, to keep from stumbling, as I crossed the few yards to the garage.

I eased the thing through the Mini's open passenger door. Getting the legs and arms bent so it would fit low into the seat, the sailcloth draped over and around it to make it look like a shapeless bundle, was a ten-minute chore. I was running sweat by the time I finished.

I waited until I had the Mini out of the driveway onto Quartz Gade before I switched on the headlamps. There was no traffic; I didn't see another car as I came down across Dronningens Gade to Veterans Drive and turned west, and only one, heading in the opposite direction, on the drive to Harwood Highway. The road was deserted in both directions when I made the swing onto the narrow lane that led to the old French cemetery.

What better place to hide a dead thing than in somebody else's grave?

The rusted iron squeaked and sprayed me with rain-wet as I pushed the gates open. I ran back to the car. Just as I shut myself inside again, headlights appeared on the main road, coming from the west.

I hunkered down on the seat. For a few seconds the light glare seemed to fill the Mini. If it'd been a police patrol, they'd have stopped, sure as hell, and I would have been as dead as the thing beside me. But it wasn't. The car whooshed past without slowing down.

I let out the breath I'd been holding, straightened up. When the taillights passed out of sight, the highway was a shiny black smear empty in both directions. I drove ahead into the cemetery. Got out quickly to close the gates again.

It was thick dark in there, a place of indistinct shapes like figures on a nightmare landscape. Not enough light filtered through the cloud gaps for me to make out more than a few feet of the rutted mud-and-gravel lane, and the mist-streaked windshield made it even harder to see. I rolled down the window, leaned my head out. Better, but I had to move ahead at a crawl.

I'd been to the cemetery a few times to walk around looking at headstones and grave markers, and once when I followed an old-fashioned Cha-Cha funeral procession led by a robed priest, the coffin balanced on a donkey cart. I remembered the layout of the place. Visualized it, fixed it in my mind, before I put the Mini in gear and crept forward.

Rain puddles had formed in the ruts; the tires splashed deep into a couple of them. Twice I lost sight of the verge, veered off onto softer ground and barely managed to correct in time to keep from getting stuck. When I reckoned I'd gone far enough, I stopped and shut off the engine and got out with the flashlight.

Pale shifting rays of moonshine came and went among the clouds, enough for me to orient myself. I was near one of the branch lanes that led toward the rear wall. I set off that way on foot, shielding the flash beam with my hand and aiming it downward. The whitewashed tombs seemed to shine faintly, as if with an inner ghost light; the trees were like shadowy, skeletal figures performing weird gyrations. In the night hush, the sound of dripping water rose above the mutter of the wind. My shoes and pantlegs were sodden before I'd gone fifty yards.

The older section I came to was heavily overgrown with grass and vines and gnarled sapodilla and gumbo-limbo trees, all but forgotten. I prowled a short distance through the tangle until I found what I was looking for, under the sprawling branches of a gumbo-limbo and half hidden from the lane by a scabrous tomb. If it hadn't been for the lean of a wooden marker, you wouldn't have been able to tell that there was a grave beneath the thick grass mat. I shone the torch briefly on the marker. So old that the wood was split and insect-pitted, and whatever had been written on it had completely faded away.

I drove the Mini as close to the grave as I could. I pried the thing out of the passenger seat, using the handle of the shovel to loosen one of the stiffened legs, then carried it through the wet grass and dumped it a dozen feet from the grave. To the car again for the shovel and the piece of Dacron and the rubber gloves. When I had the sailcloth spread on the grass, I paced off a distance of six feet back from the marker and dug the rough, shallow outline of a rectangle six feet long by two feet wide. I cut the inside of the rectangle into small squares. These I dug up in three-inch-deep clods, setting them aside under the tree one by one to preserve the tall stalks of grass. Then I scooped out the new grave, shoveling the muddy soil onto the Dacron.

It was hot, filthy work. But not as hard as you might think. The clearing sky now shed enough moonlight and starshine to give me some visibility. The earth was sandy and moist from the rain; the only difficulty I had was chopping through straggles of tree root. I don't know how long it took to open up that six-by-two rectangle to a depth of six feet. There were no visible lights, no sounds except for the wind and the dripping water and the bite of the shovel into the earth—nothing to make me aware of the passage of time.

The muscles in my back and shoulders were on fire by the time I'd gone deep enough to uncover the buried coffin. There wasn't much left of it, just rotted crumbles of wood; the blade sliced through and clanged against something that sounded like bone. I scraped away shreds of wood and flung the pieces up onto the pile of dirt, widening and deepening the hole a little more. The flashlight was hooked onto my belt; I turned it on to take a quick look at the partly exposed skeleton and the grave walls. Deep enough, wide enough.

I climbed out, wet to the skin and covered in slick mud, a quivering in my arms and legs from the strain of digging. For a little time I sat under the gumbo-Umbo with my back against the trunk to rest. When my strength returned, I went to Uft the thing again and haul it to the grave. It wouldn't lie flat when I dropped it in, and I had to get down there with it and use the shovel in a couple of ways I'd rather not talk about. It fitted the space well enough when I finished.

I shoveled and scraped most of the dirt back in. Picked up the ends of the sail and dumped in the rest. Firmed it down, replaced the clods of grass, dragged over a couple of dead tree limbs and some brush and vines. You could still see the seams here and there, tell that somebody had been excavating, but you had to be standing right on the spot. From a distance of a few feet there were no visible signs of disturbance; I put the light on briefly to make sure. If nobody came poking around back here in the next week or so, enough new grass would sprout to hide the seams completely.

I shook out the sailcloth, folded it, took it and the shovel back to the Mini. Off with the gloves and filthy clothing, into the garbage bag with them and the rags I used to scrub mud off my arms and face. On with the clean shirt and shorts. I rested again for a time before I started the engine and got the car turned around.

The highway was deserted when I reached the gates. It stayed that way as I rolled through and closed them behind me and turned toward Charlotte Amalie. My hands were steady on the wheel. I drove slowly, carefully. None of the handful of other cars I passed was a police patrol, and none of the drivers paid any attention to me.

Home safe and sound. Exhalisted, so relieved I was weak and tin-gUng. I admit to a feeling of exhilaration, too—the kind you can't help but feel after a dangerous job well done.

It was full dawn when I crawled into bed for few hours' sleep.