All the beaches in Puerto Rico are public. The luxurious, beachfront hotels and resorts cannot reserve the sand to themselves and their paying guests. In the fashionable Isla Verde area of San Juan, a string of upscale hotels overlooks the ocean. Among them is the El San Juan Hotel. The El San Juan has been a landmark in Puerto Rico for many years. In the old days, tawny oak and deep mahogany set off the elegant atmosphere of the hotel’s lobby area. In those days, in its famed casino, men in dark suits, some wearing tuxedos, played high-stakes craps, accompanied by beautiful women in sequined gowns who stayed close by, hanging on every roll of the dice. Lately, like just about everywhere else, things were different. Renovations at the El San Juan, particularly after its purchase by the Wyndham Group, had replaced many of the older, finer touches with more modern, sleek furnishings. The crowds were also different. These days they wore shorts and golf shirts with the tails hanging loose, not even tucked in. The women looked older and fatter. Where had all the beauties gone? In winter, the hotel was filled with lobster-red New Yorkers, too many of whom brought their noisy kids with them. Walter had a preference for elegant, traditional, older hotels. He felt the same about casinos. Although gambling was not among his favorite pastimes, he enjoyed an occasional visit to a busy casino. He liked looking at the women and he always got a strange buzz around so many desperate people with so much money on the line. Not these days, however. No more big shots and beauties at the tables. The place crawled with children now-thirty-year-olds who made a quarter-mil a year. They wore Nikes and sweat pants from Hugo Boss and tossed money around like it meant nothing. Their mothers played the slots, carefully guarding their plastic pots filled with the bogus coins created for playing the machines. Not even real money anymore. Walter had no use for it. The romance was gone. He remembered when you might actually pay a hundred dollars to stay in a fancy room at a place like the El San Juan. He supposed now it would take five times that and you’d have to share a bathroom with your wife.
Tucker Poesy told him to be standing on the beach in the middle of the sand, halfway between the end of the hotel’s patio and the edge of the surf directly in front of the El San Juan. Three sharp. Empty handed. He was to wear only bathing trunks. No hat, no sunglasses, no towel, nothing but his bathing suit. All that he complied with. He was standing there when she came up beside him. She too wore only a bathing suit, this time a bright yellow string bikini that covered so little of her as to almost not be there. That tiny suit, however, gave her a look far more sexy than when he saw her completely naked. Of course, then she was bound up with duct tape and had a badly swollen jaw, broken or something close to it. Her face looked fine now. No damage.
“Jesus, what the hell happened to you?” she asked, pointing to the still very red scar on his chest and the puffy, jagged one running in a crooked line halfway down his right leg from the knee past his ankle.
“Bypass,” he said. “Scary, huh?”
“Yeah, you look like Frankenstein-like shit.”
“No, I don’t look like shit. Shit is brown and mushy. I’m neither. I’ll give you the Frankenstein. What I look like is someone who’s been sliced up pretty good.”
“You can say that again.”
“You, on the other hand, look spectacular.”
“We don’t have to go into that,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Now that you see I’m harmless, can we go somewhere-more comfortable?”
“Sure,” she said. She had expected this. She knew if there was anything really to be said between them, they couldn’t do it on the beach. What little he already told her was enough to get her here. She wanted to know more. “Let’s walk over to the bar by the pool.”
“Here?” he asked. “At the El San Juan? You told me to come empty handed. I have no money or anything.”
“Don’t fret it. I’m staying here. I’ll sign for anything you drink, you sonofabitch.”
Seated comfortably under a brightly colored beach umbrella that rose up like a plastic tree from a hole in the middle of their table-and with Tucker Poesy’s complete attention-Walter began. He took the saltshaker, moved it to the edge of the table on his left and said, “This is where we begin. This is Schiphol.” She nodded and he knew she understood. Then he reached over, took the peppershaker, moved it to the opposite side of the table. He let it stand there for a moment, perched on the edge. He looked at Tucker Poesy. Neither one of them said a word. Then, gently and with a touch of grace, using the index finger of his right hand, he toppled the peppershaker from the table to the tile patio surface. It rattled about noisily before coming to rest somewhere, where neither of them could see it. “That,” he said referring to the missing condiment, “is where we end.”
“You’re telling me we don’t know where that is, is that it?”
“I’m saying we have been led to believe the end was here.” He pointed to the place the peppershaker had been, for a moment, until he knocked it over. “This is where it was supposed to end for us. Someone meant it to be that way.”
“But there’s more?” she said, not so much as a question but rather to finish his thought. He nodded, a trace of a smile crossing his sun-tanned, leathery face.
“I’m going to tell you what I know and some of what I believe has been going on here. When I’m done, if you think I’m a crazy old fool-well, you’ve bought me a drink and you made a trip to Puerto Rico for nothing. You could do worse. But, if what I say makes sense to you, if you see what I see, we have work to do. You and I need to be the ones who say where that peppershaker ends up.”
“And where is this ‘you and I,’ huh?” she asked.
“There is none,” replied Walter. “Not yet, that is. But there should be. You see, we’ve been had, Ms. Poesy.” Tucker Poesy looked at Walter in disbelief. He could see she was starting to question why she bothered to come all the way to Puerto Rico in the first place. “We’ve been played,” he continued, “like a cheap piano. Someone banged the keys and stomped on the pedals. We’re at each other’s throats, thinking that means something. It’s all bullshit-all of it! I know it now and you should know it too. When you do, then there will be a you and me.”
“Like a cheap piano, Mr. Sherman?”
“Call me Walter, will you?”
“Fine, fine. You call me Tucker if it makes you feel better. Tell me, who’s playing us and, for God’s sake, why?”
“From the day I got hired for this job, you were figured in. I think the plan was all there. All we did was play our roles. Walk on stage when we were told to. We did exactly as we were expected to do.”
“Well, what the fuck are we doing here, today? Looks to me like we’re sitting on the beach in Puerto Rico, with each other. What’s that all about?”
“That is my fault,” said Walter. “I screwed up. Instead of just coming on stage and saying my lines, I bumped into the furniture.”
“Oh, yeah. Just how did you do that?”
“I didn’t kill you.” He saw the chill sweep across her eyes and he only imagined the anger fomenting in her brain. Tucker Poesy was nobody’s fool. She was a stone killer, balls of steel and all that crap. Walter looked in her eyes-she hadn’t said a word-but he was certain she knew he was right. The rest would be easy, he thought.
Walter had never mentioned Tucker Poesy to Isobel. But now he told Tucker everything. He related the story of Isobel’s visitor, the threat to her husband and the fate of Harry Levine. The Lacey Confession was missing, once again, he told her. Whoever killed Harry took it, had it. Working backward, he told Tucker about Abby O’Malley, Sean Dooley-Fuck! she thought. She spotted Walter and Harry in that apartment in Amsterdam and then went off to her hotel thinking they would be there the next day. Dooley actually tried to do something-and also, Walter spoke of Devereaux. Walter’s sense of duty and honor meant he still said nothing about Conchita Crystal. Even though he tried to return the money, she would always be his client. He owed it to her to keep her name out of this.