Color Him Dead Read online

  St. Patricia was a garden closed to visitors. The only flat-lands large enough for a landing field belonged to a planter named Barrington. The only harbor deep enough for cruise ships was also Barrington’s. He liked privacy, and the island’s 40,000 inhabitants had to share it.

  A diesel coaster circled the island twice a week; six ancient trucks rattled over forty miles of pitted asphalt laid by U.S. Army engineers in 1943; two jitney-cabs careened about the capital, their original colors bleached and rusted to a mottled brown.

  Still, visitors came. Junketing students wheedled deck passage on cargo schooners which carried off the booty of the rich volcanic soil: bananas, nutmeg, copra, cocoa and rum. Hardy yachtsmen arrived after sailing fifty miles against the tradewinds. Now and then a chartered floatplane deposited determined sightseers in the shallow harbor of the capital.

  These visitors found a social pyramid as ancient as Egypt. At its bottom were 30,000 blacks, descended from a mixture of African slaves and native Caribs. At the same social level, but not part of it, were two hundred poor whites whose ancestors had been exiled from England in the eighteenth century. These lived in xenophobic poverty in a crumbling village called Hope. The island’s middle class of shopkeepers and small farmers consisted of 5,000 Bengalese Indians descended from indentured laborers who’d been paid off in land. At the peak of the pyramid perched twenty-seven planters of English descent, of whom Barrington was by far the richest. They ruled the island through some 3,000 mixed-blooded managers, foremen, overseers, clerks and bookkeepers. The most powerful of these was Marcel Eudoxie, called Doxie in the island’s French patois. An octoroon of French descent, he was manager of Barrington Estates….

  Doxie sat in the wooden shed of the Customs and Immigration office and tapped his swagger-stick on the toe of a black riding boot. His crossed legs were sheathed in white riding pants, and one brown arm rested on the back of his chair. His red face and bulging eyes made him appear on the verge of a violent rage, but his voice rolled out in a controlled lilt which mocked the man behind the desk:

  “A white man can’t disappear on this island, George. He isn’t staying at a hotel. He couldn’t have spent the last three weeks in the bush. Where is he?”

  The black man leaned back with a creak of his leather crossbelt. He wore black shorts, a short-sleeved white jacket, and knee-length white socks.

  “He has a week left on his visa. He’ll turn up then.”

  Smiling vaguely, Doxie aimed his swagger-stick at the corporal. “I want to know now.”

  The corporal agitated a palm-leaf fan and glanced out the window. A greasy odor of drying copra drifted in from the wharf outside. A street vendor chanted that his mangoes were très-sweet, fresh off the tree. The corporal sighed: “I can’t go out looking—”

  “All right.” Doxie allowed impatience to edge his voice. “Let’s see the book.”

  “You need authorization—”

  “Barrington.”

  “He’s in Europe.”

  “He’ll be back this week.”

  “The madame—?”

  “Miss Edith arrives tomorrow, if you’re concerned.” Doxie rapped his stick on the desk. “The book, George.”

  The corporal placed a black bookkeeping ledger in front of Doxie. The entry was a barren statement of a man’s existence, no more:

  NAME: William D. Seright ORIGIN: Pine Valley,

  Montana, U.S.A. AGE: 32 PURPOSE: Recreation

  Doxie frowned; it was unusual for a single man to come to St. Patricia for recreation. Single men usually went to Barbados or Trinidad. Though the man might be wholly legitimate, Doxie knew he couldn’t risk it. Barrington was a boss who tolerated no looseness, no mysteries, no unclassified strangers. And since his marriage to Edith, he’d been particularly nervous about visitors from the States.

  “You met his plane,” said Doxie. “What did he look like?”

  “Big,” said the corporal, squinting up at the corrugated roof. “Over six feet, about two hundred pounds. Short black hair, short black beard. Fresh sunburn, so he couldn’t have been long in the islands. He had a lame leg, used an aluminum crutch strapped to his arm. He used it awkwardly, and the leg seemed to hurt him. It must have been a recent injury. He traveled light. Binoculars, one bag for his clothes, pencils and sketchpad. He was an artist.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  Doxie stood up, still frowning. A lame artist could perhaps wander about the island without a fixed address, but he’d certainly be noticed and remembered.

  Outside, Doxie’s steel-capped heels clattered on the sidewalk. He passed a ship-chandler’s store and heard a cultivated English voice announcing banana ship schedules. He passed a block-long warehouse, a sign with the name “Barrington” running its length. The name dominated the business street which faced the harbor:

  BARRINGTON DRY GOODS

  BARRINGTON SHIP STORES

  BARRINGTON DRUGS

  BARRINGTON CARGO LINES, LTD.

  BARRINGTON

  BARRINGTON

  BARRINGTON….

  On Doxie’s left, a dozen shallow-draft cargo schooners nosed against a wooden jetty. A ketch tugged at anchor far out in the harbor, sails furled and brightwork sparkling in the morning sun. She was named the Edie III, and Doxie could picture Edith at the wheel, hair blowing and tight shorts cupping her buttocks. He felt a painful tightness in his loins.

  At Barclay’s bank, a mulatto cashier inspected his book and said that no William D. Seright had cashed a check at Barclay’s.

  Inside the fan-cooled comfort of the Commonwealth Club, Doxie found four planters’ wives whose soft buttocks overflowed the dark leather seats. “We haven’t seen a strange man for six months,” said one over her gin fizz. “Why do you suppose we drink?”

  In the Beachcomber Club he talked to a charter-yacht skipper and his brown-faced wife. They’d seen no lame, bearded artist; they were sure he hadn’t taken quarters on a yacht.

  Doxie entered the glassed cubicle of the Esso station, where Hackworth listened with his hatchet face thrust forward, a lock of blue-black hair hanging over his eyes. Then he shook his head; he hadn’t even known there was a tourist on the island, and if Doxie found him, he should say that Hackworth offered a day’s cruise around the island for twenty dollars beewy or twenty-five if he wanted to fish—

  “Or thirty,” interrupted Doxie, “if he wants a woman for company. I know your rates. You have a map of Montana?”

  Hackworth pointed to a map rack at the rear of the room. Doxie shuffled through worn, fly-specked folders until he found Montana. He was surprised to find Pine Valley in the northwest corner; he’d half-expected the man to choose a fictitious origin.

  “That’s ten years old,” said Hackworth. “Try this.”

  Eudoxie opened the new map and felt a wave of admiration for Seright. Pine Valley was now a pale blue inkblot marked Pine Lake. They’d dammed the river and covered the town; the residents had scattered, and who could say whether or not William D. Seright had been born there? If the man was a fake, he was a clever one.

  He folded the map thoughtfully. Since the man was not carousing with his own kind, perhaps—

  “Hack, have any of the girls retired?”

  Hackworth laughed. “They never retire, they just lower their rates.”

  “I was thinking one of them might have taken in a boarder.”

  Hackworth frowned. “Leta hasn’t been around for two, three weeks. She may have hooked a steady, you know. She’s got a shack on Powerhouse Road….”

  Doxie smelled the black slum before he reached it: a privy-stink mingled with the cachet of dead animals and rotting vegetables. He turned up Powerhouse Road, his boot heels sinking into dirty gray sand. Black shingle shacks shouldered each other for position behind a black-crusted ditch buzzing with flies. Toothless old women squatted in purple-shadowed doorways, gumming their pipes and staring. He met a naked boy dragging a dead rat by a string tied
around its neck. Ahead, a woman squatted on her haunches with her gray tent of a dress touching the ground all around her. She rose as Eudoxie approached, steadied the basket of breadfruit on her head, and stepped away from the damp Rorschach she had left in the sand.

  “Bo ju, ‘Sieur ‘Doxie,” she said.

  “Bo ju,” he answered curtly, disliking the taste of patois in his mouth.

  Leta’s house was set back from the road, leaving a two-foot space between her tigolete stick fence and the shingled front wall. Doxie walked between two stunted banana trees, pushed open the front door, and stepped into the single room. It held only a table, two chairs, a sagging bed, a radio, a dresser laden with bottles, and a rack of gaudy, spangled dresses. He stepped through the back door and found two black girls laboring in the pounded earth courtyard; one ironed a man’s white shirt on a wooden table; the other squatted before a washbasin and rubbed a pair of lathered shorts against her wrist. Doxie was certain Leta had a man; she could hire the girls and save her strength to serve in other ways.

  “Where’s Leta?”

  Both girls jumped and rolled back their eyes to look at him. After a frozen moment the girl with the iron said:

  “She go to buy stores.”

  “Her new man must be rich,” said Doxie.

  “He blanc,“ said the girl, as though that were a complete answer.

  “Where does he live?”

  No answer. They returned to their work with sudden intensity.

  With a quick stride he reached the girl ironing, seized her wrist, and jerked her to her feet. She stared with eyes round and white. He twisted her arm until she gasped.

  “I do’ know where he livin', ‘Sieur Doxie. Leta she bring he clothes and buy he stores but she never tell.”

  “Does he live in town?”

  “You mus’ ask Leta. She say nothing to me, truly.” He increased the pressure; she bit her lip and spoke quickly. “I’m thinking he not in town, for Leta take the bus to visit him.” She tugged feebly. “Please, ‘sieur, if the shirt burn Leta split my face.”

  Eudoxie released her and walked to the girl at the washbasin. She bent her head and scrubbed furiously. Eudoxie peered down the front of her dress and saw the bouncing play of two small brown breasts. He seized the wiry mat of her hair and turned her face up to his.

  “No doubt you’re as dumb as she is.”

  “Yes, ‘sieur,” she answered gravely.

  He grunted and went back inside. A search of the room turned up nothing to indicate the man had ever been in Leta’s house. He studied a folder containing snapshots of a dozen soldiers, airmen, sailors, men in yachting clothes and tourists with peeling noses and garish shirts. These were Leta’s clients, but there was no dark man with a beard.

  Then he found something which made him certain that Leta’s man was Seright—a drawing of Leta bathing nude in the sea. Surf feathered itself around her knees; diamond droplets sparkled in the tight-woven mat between her thighs. A cascade of ink-black hair fell to her shoulders and clung wetly to her throat. Her lips were parted to show the upper row of even white teeth. So the man was really an artist. Doxie started to fold the drawing, then noticed the hazy background. That shadowed peak with its halo of clouds … it looked like Point du Cap, on the northern tip of the island. Then this picture must have been drawn—

  Well, well. So he’d gone to Barrington’s Isle, right on Edith’s doorstep. The innocent, stupid fool. Hadn’t anyone told him?

  An hour later Doxie stepped out of his Vauxhall and walked onto the beach near the fishing village of Petit Islat. A .45 automatic hung inside his trousers, attached to a belt-clip holster. He uncased his binoculars and raised them to his eyes.

  Barrington’s Isle rose in isolated splendor across three miles of rip tides, whirlpools, shifting sand and jagged rocks. It looked vaguely like a saddle. Its western end rose in sheer cliffs to a 200-foot-high plateau, and the walls of the old French fort rose another 30 feet above that. A flight of stone steps led down to the narrow neck of the island, where a square white shack rested on a concrete platform. The Army had built it as a radar station during the war, then abandoned it. Doxie saw two gaping holes where boards had been removed from the windows; he remembered that they’d been intact on his last inspection six weeks ago….

  Well, Seright, I’ve found your hiding place.

  He moved the glasses, looking for the man. From the shack, the island mounded upward in the shape of a woman’s breast. On its thin mantle of soil grew stunted guava trees and shoulder-high grass. From its summit thrust a nipple of black basalt crowned by a stone watchtower. Eudoxie recalled endless hours of standing there with a Husqvarna .270 rifle in his hand, plunking the water ahead of fishermen who came too close. But that had been before Edith.

  He aimed the glasses at the point where the island thrust a dimpled shoulder toward the northeast. There an accident of ocean currents had deposited a tiny crescent of salt-white sand. Above it waved tall palms. Behind it Barrington had built a pleasure-dome of imported, rose-colored granite for his imported American bride.

  The man was nowhere in sight. He would have to be flushed out before Edith reclaimed her gilded cage.

  For an instant the binoculars clouded with an image of Edith, laughing the taunt which scraped his nerves like sandpaper, calling him “Peeper,” despite his protests that if it weren’t him, her husband would get someone less congenial—

  “Or more virile?” she asked with a twist of her lips. “My husband likes a monopoly, Dox. He wouldn’t leave me on this island with anyone resembling a man.”

  He lowered the glasses and turned back toward his car. Seright could remain one more night, then Edith could witness his ejection. Let her taunt him then; at least she would see that he was a man.

  TWO

  Drew awoke to the smell of burning charcoal and French coffee. So … Leta had come to start her day in the lean-to kitchen. She’d gotten up before dawn to ride eight miles by bus, three miles by rowboat across a turbulent channel, just to have his coffee ready when he woke up.

  Through the window Drew saw the sun lying like a flattened orange on top of Point du Cap; he heard the fishing fleet dragging the net across from Petty-lay. Their paddles slapped the water like distant, listless applause.

  He sat up on the coconut straw mattress, groped for an Anchor Special, and put it in his mouth. No matches. He considered having Leta bring them. No, that’s thinking like a cripple. Get ‘em yourself. He weighed that in his mind. The crutch rested against the foot of the bed; he would have to crawl down there, get out of bed and onto the crutch, hobble into the other room, retrieve the matches, hobble back….

  “Screw it,” he mumbled, and lay back. He watched a cottony cloud pass over the island, squeezed dry of rain. Another day of changeless West Indian weather, one day melting into the other like a box of chocolates in the sun. He yawned and closed his eyes; he saw his poster hanging in the Billings post office, a clean white sheet glaring from a yellowed gallery of wanted men. His eyes had glowered and his lips had turned down in sullen trapped hate. The scar had pulled his dark brows into a permanent scowl, lending conviction to the chilling italics below his picture: This man is a killer, armed and dangerous.

  He’d changed since that mug shot; the sun had burned away his pallor, and the beard covered most of the scar. He rubbed his palm over his stomach and felt three hard ridges of muscle. Those five starving months in the mountains had trimmed away the spongy prison flesh, bringing him nearer one-eighty than the two-twenty shown on his poster. He looked down at his hands. The left was bigger than the right and thickly callused where his palm gripped the crutch. He kicked off the sheet and looked at his leg. The calf muscle looked shriveled, and there was a long red scar where he’d opened it up with a pocketknife to release a river of yellow pus and white bone fragments. He tried to wriggle his left foot, but the nerve impulse fizzled out somewhere between the knee and the ankle. The foot lay like the foot of a puppet whose str
ings had been cut.

  Oh well, he couldn’t kick. He had a new identity, purchased for twenty bucks in a Denver tattoo parlor. He had 200 dollars left of the thousand he’d gotten from Barr Massu. “Don’t be a dead hero,” he’d told the sweating PR man, “you owe me five hundred in back salary. Call the rest of it severance pay.” Apparently the scare had stuck, for there’d been no alarm. And now, after following a cold trail from Jamaica to the Bahamas to Barbados, he had tracked Edith to her final resting place. Even if the leg fell off at the knee and he never left this island alive, at least he’d see to that.

  “Leta,” he called.

  A moment later her bare feet whispered on the concrete floor. She set a steaming cup of coffee on the hand-hewn chair beside his bed; she’d been changing from her town clothes, and wore only a silk half-slip and gold earrings. Traces of rice powder clung to her cheeks. In her eyes he saw the light which always greeted him in the morning: love, lust, mother affection—he didn’t know, he’d lost the art of gauging a woman’s emotion. She straightened, stirring the air with a smell of sun-warmed flesh and the tang of the sea. She stood with her arms behind her back, breasts lifted high and pointing at sharp angles to each other. “The world is coming short, Dudu,“ she said.

  He frowned, trying to plumb the semantic depths of her patois. Though she pronounced English perfectly, an occasional jumbling of sentence structure and a too-careful movement of her lips betrayed the fact that the language had not been born with her. The world is coming short? That had an ominous sound, a hint of impending doom.

  “What the hell does it mean?” he asked finally.

  “Your visa will finished in five days. You wished me to tell you.”

  He felt his stomach tighten at the thought of exposing himself again, so soon, to the authorities. But it would have to be done, unless Edith returned before that. “Okay, hand me my pants.”