Public Enemy Page 8

  Susannah drove them through Austin in her circa early eighties 450 SEL, the car spewing toxic diesel exhaust as it puttered along Sixth Street, Susannah chattering the whole way about Austin’s music scene and the film festival they held there in the spring. When they hit the campus, Susannah pointed out a few passing landmarks before slipping into her reserved space in one of the faculty lots.

  “We’re here,” she said through a toothy grin, “Island Man.”

  Cooper had a dive bag containing the pictures Riley had given him and a change of clothes for a one-night stay-along with his canvas bag of loot, which had required the Secret Service ID card he’d been trying out lately to get him through Houston customs without causing a four-alarm panic. He’d told the U.S. Customs supervisor he was part of a National Security Council task force, and that the artifacts were seized contraband. He provided a phone number and the name of a deputy secretary in the State Department in case the customs supervisor saw fit to delay him unnecessarily and verify what he’d just been told. The guy didn’t place a verification call on the spot; Cooper assumed he dialed the number as soon as Cooper left the customs wing in the airport, but remained in view of the closed-circuit cameras. Cooper knew the call would yield the proper verification.

  They came into the E.P. Schoch building, home of the department of archaeology, and Cooper saw that it looked pretty much like every other graduate school building he’d seen-classroom doors, bulletin boards, semigloss concrete floors, a lot of natural light, and a few fluorescent fixtures that added little to the illumination equation. Susannah took him to the basement, unlocked a door that said LAB 14 on an orange plaque, reached in, flipped on a bank of lights, and exposed a room that looked like Cooper expected a place called LAB 14 to look: a series of long soapstone countertops populated with microscopes, racks of tools and flasks, textbooks, and the usual implements of note taking and calculation.

  He swung his bags onto the teaching slab, an island built perpendicular to the counters meant for the students. Susannah went behind the island, opened a drawer, and came out with some glasses, brushes, and a series of tools Cooper couldn’t identify.

  Then she put the glasses on and dropped them down her nose in a way that made her look a little older, though considerably more appealing.

  “Whattaya got for me?” she said.

  Cooper opened his two bags, stacked the pictures in front of her, and stood the three gold objects on the counter behind the pictures. He’d left the priestess idol on his shelf to ward off evil spirits like Cap’n Roy and Ronnie while he was gone.

  “The pictures are of the whole set,” he said. “There’s literally a boatload of these things, some the size of the real deals here, some bigger than this table, some a lot smaller than what I brought.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’d like to know from what period they originate. What region, tribe, whatever, too. If they’re real, that is. Presuming that’s something you can determine. I want to know mainly so I can figure out what they’re worth and who would want to buy them. I suppose if you can answer my last two questions, I don’t really care about the others.”

  Susannah began her examination of the pictures. After the first few, she started making little “hm” and “mmph” sounds while she looked them over. Following something like three rounds of such noises, she said, still looking at the photographs, “Did you steal these, Island Man? Or am I not supposed to ask.”

  Cooper admired the way she asked the question: jovial and deferential, giving him the chance to shoot down what she was implying, but still asking the question. He found a stool and pulled it under him.

  “You’re not supposed to ask,” he said.

  She took some closer looks at selected shots with a magnifying glass, moving it around, leaning down and peering through it. As she leaned forward, Cooper noticed, and remembered, the sheer, unadulterated size of her breasts. They were drooping loosely inside the cotton summer dress she wore. Susannah dressed like a Jimi Hendrix fan from the sixties, all the way down to the Birkenstocks; keeping bangs in the front, on this particular week she’d twisted the rest of her hair into a French braid that ran to the top of her ass. If he remembered correctly, she’d claimed to be in her late thirties when he’d met her. She could easily pass for early thirties, at least from the right angle-more than he could say for himself, from any angle whatsoever.

  Susannah eyed him after pulling up from one of her magnifying-glass looks.

  “You can have them if you like,” she said.

  She refocused on her work, taking a look at the originals he’d lined up on the countertop, lifting the gold box, turning it upside down and around, running her finger across one of the symbols inscribed on its base. She set it back down, picked up, examined, and returned the other two originals, then came back at the box, taking it and heading to the back corner of the room, where some microscope-looking pieces of equipment were clustered on a stretch of countertop beneath a periodic table of the elements on the wall.

  “You ever take a walk around the campus here?” she asked him from the corner, not bothering to look up from whatever she had begun working on.

  “Here?” Cooper said. “No.”

  “You’ll like it. Some of the finest-looking coeds anywhere in the country. Probably in the world. Blows me away sometimes.”

  Cooper realized she was asking him to skedaddle.

  “How long do you need?”

  “Probably take me two hours. You’ll be able to take your collection home with you, but it’ll take a couple days to get results on some of the tests I’ll do. Even before you leave, though, I should be able to answer most of your questions.”

  She continued to work on whatever it was she was working on.

  Cooper stood, paused, almost said something, decided not to, shrugged, and took his leave of LAB 14, destined for a stroll around the campus of the University of Texas.

  Cooper had worn pressed beige khaki shorts, a white polo shirt with stitched monotone patterns of tropical flowers, and a dressier pair of Reefs-brown leather with a buckle-to help him clear the customs check. It was warm in Austin, but not BVI warm, so he felt a little chill strolling from one quad to the next. He didn’t give a shit about the University of Texas coeds, and instead decided he’d use the two hours to get a dose of exercise. The dressy Reefs, which he’d almost never worn, weren’t as comfortable as his other pair, but he managed to avoid any blistering on his stroll, Cooper choosing a course he figured would take him on the widest possible loop around the campus.

  On the return leg he checked a directory and found his way to the university’s main library, called the Flawn Academic Center. He ducked into the air-conditioned building, feeling the icy chill on his sweaty arms, and found the periodicals archive without asking for help. On a card beside each monitor, the workstations in the archive displayed a list of the periodicals the UT system was able to search, dating back to 1994. He found the system didn’t require a password for use, so he plugged in three keywords as a string, and in a little under a minute the system returned just under three dozen hits. He scanned the headlines, chose nine articles that appeared relevant to his intentions, and punched the Print icon for each article. It took him a few minutes to find the printer the workstations delivered to, but when he did, Cooper walked around behind a vacant librarian’s counter and snatched the pages he’d printed off the device. He then made his way to the big study room he’d seen near the front entrance and sat down to read.

  Each of the articles covered a slightly different angle on the same political scandal. With a pencil and a few slips of notepaper, he took down a few lines of notes, mostly pertaining to a pair of names that either recurred in or, in some cases, were the subjects of the articles he’d printed. When he was finished reading, he tossed the articles in a wastebasket, pocketed the two slips of notepaper he’d filled, and walked back outside to complete his exercise loop.

  “You on island time?”

&nb
sp; Cooper checked his watch for the first time that day. It had been four and one-half hours since he’d left the lab.

  “Live slow, mon,” he said.

  Susannah, who had been reading a thick, well-worn book while perched on one of the stools, set down the book and stood.

  “I’m finished with what you wanted me to do,” she said. “So what do you say? You want to see the bats?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The bats. Come on. I’ll show you. You’ve never seen anything like this. And when we’re finished, maybe you can bat me around for a while.”

  She giggled and made for the door.

  Cooper gathered his dive bag and canvas sack, discovering that she’d already replaced the photos and artifacts and zipped them up inside the bags. He came over to her by the door. Susannah’s hand rested on the light switch; she had long fingers and strong hands. While he stood there, his chest brushed against one pillowy breast; he could hear her breathing too, the two of them standing in the doorway where the sounds they made were bounced back at them by the doorjamb.

  His flight back to St. Thomas wasn’t until nine-fifteen tomorrow morning.

  “Whatever the hell you’re talking about with the bats,” he said, “let’s do it.”

  She flipped off the lights, locked the door, started toward the stairs, then spun, ran at him, leaped into the air, wrapped her legs around his waist, and emitted a high-pitched squeal that Cooper decided was Susannah’s version of a rebel yell.

  10

  Riley was at the Conch Bay dock again, reclined in his seat in the patrol boat, goddamn cap pulled down over his eyes as though he’d motored over for no better reason than to have a nap. Coming into the lagoon, Cooper switched over to the dinghy and cut a mean stripe past a couple of SCUBA students on his way to the pier. This time he didn’t waste any effort on the game of get-the-cop-to-skedaddle it had turned out he was pretty shitty at playing. Instead, he tied off his boat and punched the sole of one of his sandals against the side of Riley’s boat. It made a satisfying thuk, as though he might have succeeded in dislodging a piece of the boat’s chrome trim from the hull.

  “What now?” he said.

  Riley poked up the brim of his hat.

  “Smuggler,” he said, “turn up dead.”

  It took Cooper a couple seconds.

  “Po Keeler, you mean,” he said.

  “Yeah, mon.”

  “Clearly you’re operating under the flawed assumption that I give two shits.”

  Riley didn’t say anything.

  “It happen inside?”

  “No.”

  Cooper nodded. “You let him out, then.”

  “Yesterday noon.”

  “When did he ‘turn up’?”

  “’Bout seven A.M. today.”

  Cooper thought about the deal Po Keeler had been wanting to make with Cap’n Roy. He thought that he could connect some dots were the mood to strike. Not that the mood had hit, but it was easy enough: Busted smuggler bribes top local law enforcement official; top local law enforcement official releases smuggler from prison; busted smuggler turns up dead. Coincidence wasn’t being too friendly with Cap’n Roy Gillespie.

  It occurred to Cooper that Cap’n Roy might have recorded the conversation he’d held with Keeler-probably had-almost beyond a doubt, he decided. Meaning it might be that Riley was here on a public relations mission-that he’d come to smooth out the suspicious wrinkles on the otherwise starched-and-pressed bribery-and-murder scheme Cap’n Roy had conducted before realizing he should check the prison tapes. At which point he learned that Keeler had vetted his payoff idea with Cooper before taking his shot with Cap’n Roy.

  “So what do you want, Riley?” Cooper said. “Actually, let’s skip the theatrics: what is it our esteemed chief minister is too busy to come and ask me in person?”

  Riley surprised Cooper by actually answering his question.

  “Look pretty bad on Cap’n Roy,” he said, “if that smuggler’s body turn up and people find out about it. People like the Coast Guard, even-especially them, since Cap’n Roy just finished arrangin’ the man’s release. He asked me to bring you up to the pine scrub, where we found him, and that’s about all he said to do or say. But you and I both know the chief minister’s thinkin’ ’bout a favor you did for him some time back. Thinkin’ maybe you be up for pullin’ something ’bout the same, one more time around.”

  “Christ,” Cooper said.

  “Yeah, mon,” Riley said.

  “Maybe I should put up a sign on my bungalow: ‘Cooper’s Disposal Service.’ Why wrap a body in a rug and take it down to the local dump when you’ve got me hanging around? A one-man dead-body transfer station.”

  Riley kind of shrugged with his head. There wasn’t, Cooper supposed, much for him to add.

  “What do you think, Riley?”

  When Riley didn’t say anything for a moment, Cooper said, “And don’t waste my time with the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force party line. A lot of Roy’s predecessors, fellow superior officers of yours, have done worse. His being a cop, especially a BVI cop, doesn’t put him beyond reproach in the slightest-so don’t give me a whitewash. I want to know what you think.”

  “Yeah,” Riley said after looking at Cooper for a while. “You right about that-some done worse.”

  Cooper waited.

  “And I know you’re saying if he did it, well then, you’re out,” Riley said. “You know-if that be the case, you don’t want the first part of it. But if it’s seeming like he didn’t do it, then, yeah, mon, maybe you might come by and lend a hand.”

  “‘Might,’” Cooper said, “being the key word. Go on, Lieutenant.”

  Riley aimed his eyes right at Cooper’s, and Cooper saw some hardness in them-accepting the challenge he’d just been offered by Cooper’s use of his rank-and a softness too, maybe something in there showing that Riley was a little disappointed in his boss, whether in what the man had done, or in the way he’d handled it.

  When he was finished looking at Cooper with those couple of things in his eyes, Riley shook his head.

  “No, mon. No way.”

  Cooper kept looking back at him.

  “Either way,” Cooper said, “Minister Roy is getting himself in pretty deep.”

  After another little while of looking at him, Riley gave Cooper a nod.

  “Power to the people,” Riley said.

  Cooper stood still for a moment, thinking he was liking Lieutenant Riley more and more, and wondering, among other things, how the hell he would succeed in convincing the medical examiner of the city of Charlotte Amalie, USVI-even though the man happened to be on his list of fully extortable targets-to toss the second clandestine homicide victim in as many years into the incinerator without that coroner asking anybody in the government that employed him for permission to do it.

  Then he climbed back into his dinghy, unlashed its line, and fired up the Evinrude for another big-wake ride past the unsuspecting SCUBA pupils on the way back to his Apache.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said to Riley, “in that shit bucket you call a patrol boat. I’ll handle my own transportation this time.”

  The afternoon was sticky and dank, one of those overcast days that stunted your attitude and made your skin crawl-the heat, a sopping humidity, and no sun breaking through the whole day long. Made you wonder why people came or lived here-made you notice all the grunge and grit, the streets behind the hotels, the rummies looking for a quarter, the squalid neighborhoods beginning to overtake the streets currently under the reign of the luxury resorts.

  Two hundred feet up a pine-forested hill behind an inlet called Hurricane Hole, Cooper surveyed the very dead body of the belonger-to-the-rich, Po Keeler. Amid a sea of pine needles, ferns, and seemingly misplaced desert scrub, Keeler, with his too-gritty tan and unkempt hair, was splayed out, kind of folded up and bent unnaturally, as though he’d been thrown or rolled here. The stand of pines in which Keeler lay was strewn
with plastic bottles, a KFC bucket, some crinkled waxed-paper wrappers, and, farther up the hill, a white plastic garbage bag that had once been packed full but appeared to have been ripped open and raided since, Cooper thinking probably by the black squirrels that usually got into everything.

  Above the plastic garbage bag, the hill grew rapidly steep, until, another hundred feet up, Cooper could see the railing of a turn in the road that passed by on its path to the prison.

  He knew Keeler looked as if he’d been tossed here because he had. The turn in the road above was known locally as the Dump, a spot where locals who’d fallen behind on their monthly garbage payments came by after dark and flipped a Hefty sack or two out the window as they made the hairpin turn and kept going. Anything with food in it, in fact just about everything at all was torn to shreds and mostly removed by the local wildlife; once or twice a week, somebody from Roy’s posse or the parks and recreation squad came in here with an ATV and raked up the remains.

  The rake job on today’s remains would be a little more labor intensive.

  Cooper and Riley had moored in Hurricane Hole, called that because that’s what it was: a small, murky bay somebody once dredged out of the pine scrub, the place where anybody who motored over fast enough to win the first-come, first-serve rule stored their boats during stormy weather. Two of Cap’n Roy’s Marine Base cops had been waiting for them, sporting the force’s single, fat-wheeled ATV, which they’d parked in a way that blocked the view of the body from the turn in the road. When Cooper showed up after the climb up from Hurricane Hole, the Marine Base cops had removed the camouflage-green tarp they’d previously laid over the body, so that Cooper could get a look.

  Cooper saw enough to determine, for what it was worth, that Keeler had been capped at least twice: there was a bloody mess on the front of his polo shirt and a jagged little hole in his forehead. The aim of the shot that had tagged him in the forehead appeared notably precise. Makes it pretty easy, Cooper thought, to conclude that it had been a professional who’d aced the once-bonded yacht-transport man.