I gathered up Coder's belongings and packed them into the suitcase, double-checking to make sure I had everything before I left the room. Tourists often carry their own bags in a hotel like the Caribbean; I attracted no attention on my way to the desk.
Both clerks, a man and a woman, were native blacks. All to the good. The woman waited on me. Professional smile, and only the briefest of eye contact when I put the key down and said, "Checking out, please."
She got the bill from the file, studied it for a few seconds before making eye contact again. "Is anything wrong, Mr. Cotler?"
"Wrong?"
"Your room is reserved for two more days."
She said it without suspicion. That and her calling me Mr. Cotler put me at ease. There'd been only a slight chance that any of the hotel staff would know I wasn't Fred Cotler; too many tourists come and go for them to equate names with faces. And West Indian blacks tend to regard snowbirds the same way Annalise had regarded natives, though not necessarily for the same reason—not as individuals but as see-through members of a class and race to be dealt with and immediately forgotten. If by some quirk the woman had noticed I wasn't Cotler, I would have told her he'd asked me to check out for him. As it was, I said, "No, no, nothing wrong. Just have to cut the vacation short, is all. Business reasons."
"I'm sorry you'll be leaving us so soon." taught to say that, and the next by-rote sentence: "Will you need help with your luggage?"
"Not necessary."
She slid the bill around for me to look at. The only charges on it other than the room rate were a $38 bar and room service tab—no long-distance phone calls. The total came to just under $300.
"Will you be paying by credit card, sir?"
"No," I said, "traveler's checks."
I signed all seven left in the folder. She glanced at the top one to make sure the signatures matched—just a glance—and after that looked only at the denomination on the rest as she counted them. She shuffled the checks together, put them into a cash drawer. Gave me another see-through smile along with the change and a copy of the bill.
"Please come and see us again, Mr. Cotler."
Not in this life, I thought, and smiled back at her, and walked out carrying all that was left of Fred Coder's short visit to St. Thomas.
Two problems solved, provisionally. What happened next was up to luck or fate or whatever you wanted to call it. And up to what Annalise did when Cotler failed to return with the blackmail money.
Annalise.
I let myself think about her then. The anger had gone cold. For the time being I could consider her and her role in all this with unemotional detachment.
I tried to put myself in her position, to think as she would think. She would probably call the Hotel Caribbean eventually, and when she was told that Cotler had checked out, she might call the airline to ask if he'd used his ticket or taken another flight. But they wouldn't tell her anything. Airline passenger manifests are confidential as far as the general public is concerned; government and law enforcement agencies could get the information, no one else. I'd checked on that, too, when I called American and verified their economy cancellation policy.
What would she think then? The obvious was that Cotler had gotten the payoff, maybe even a bigger payoff than they'd planned, and run out on her with it. She might believe that, if she wasn't too sure of him and if he had little money and no other valuables or ties in Yonkers. Even if she had doubts, it wouldn't occur to her that I could be responsible. To her I would always be Jordan Wise, accountant—a passive personality in spite of the Amthor crime and the Richard Laidlaw persona, a man incapable of violence. I would have said the same about myself before Cotler. She wouldn't contact me. Still wouldn't want me to know she was in on the extortion. And she wouldn't go to the police. For all her craving for excitement and danger, and all her drunken antics, Annalise was fiercely self-protective. The same as I was.
Still, she had an unpredictable side. Her sudden disappearance the previous year proved that. It was possible she'd do something unexpected, something brazen and foolish and threatening to both of us.
Time would tell. All I could do was wait and see.
I was too restless to return to my daily routine, and I wasn't about to sit around counting the hours. The Weather Center forecast was for clear skies and winds of from ten to fifteen knots, good sailing weather, so I took Windrunner out the next morning. Coder's suitcase went along with me, hidden inside a large cardboard box for transport and then stowed belowdecks. And when I was out near the Kingfish Banks, no other boats in sight, I weighted it with a couple of heavy and dispensable wrenches and consigned it to the briny deep.
The course I'd set was for Laidlaw Cay. I anchored just inside the reef on the lee side. Swam, fished, watched the nesting terns and frigate birds, napped under one of the screw palms. An hour before sunset I rowed back to the yawl, ate my supper on deck while the rainbow colors appeared and shifted and blended like patterns in a kaleidoscope. After dark, I sat with my back to the deckhouse and sipped Arundel and watched the constellations in the night sky. It was so clear the stars in the Milky Way burned like points of white fire.
Two more days and nights at sea, and the restlessness was gone and I was poison-free again.
Shortly after docking, I talked to Bone. He was the best source I knew of local news. Nothing had happened in the three-plus days I'd been gone that I didn't want to hear about. Later I read through recent issues of the Virgin Islands Daily News and the St. Thomas Source, just to make sure.
A week passed.
Two weeks.
Still no mention in the papers or on the radio of anything amiss at the old French cemetery. Or of a missing snowbird named Fred Cotler. No one called, or wrote, or came to see me except Bone.
I moved out of the Quartz Gade villa the first week in December. If the cleaning crew noted the gouge in the floor tile or the blood spots on the chair fabric, they didn't report it; I heard nothing from the real estate agent or the absentee owners. A short time later, I received a check for the full amount of the cleaning deposit.
By then I knew I was going to get away with the Cotler crime, too.
ST. THOMAS
1983-1984
ITHOUGHT YOU'D ASK about my emotional state in the aftermath of the Cotler crime. Did I have nightmares about what I'd done? Daymares? Did I suffer remorse, guilt, any of the other so-called murderer's torments?
The answers are all no.
My emotional state, once the initial dose of blackmailer's poison had been flushed out, was no different than it had been before Cotler showed up on the island.
I told you I'm not religious; I don't believe in mortal sin or any of the other biblical covenants, or in divine punishment. I do believe that morality, like love, is a private thing defined by and suited to each individual. I've freely admitted to my dark side, but like Bone, I also have my own code of ethics. I've always adhered to that code, and within its boundaries I was and still am a moral man.
No, I don't consider myself a murderer. How many of those who have taken a human life, for any reason, ever look at themselves in the mirror and think that they've committed a mortal sin? Damn few. No man, unless he's a homicidal psychotic, ever thinks of himself as an evildoer. If you called him one to his face, chances are he'd be shocked. So would I.