Color Him Dead (11 page)

“He’s the one I want. Bring him here.”

Leta was back in ten minutes without the man, but with instructions to meet him in a rum shop called The Cabaret. Drew found it huddled against the rear of a banana shed smelling of fish and copra, noisy with the chant-and-shuffle of banana loaders. He stepped into a musty interior containing a wooden bar and shelves filled with unlabeled rum bottles. Above the bar protruded a girl’s head, topped by a black beret. She gave him a sullen, sleepy look when he asked for Guillard D’Arco, then pointed toward a door at the rear of the shop. A sign above it read:
do not sleep on these tables.

He pushed open the door and found himself in a dimly-lit room with a half-dozen scattered tables. Without warning, a meaty forearm clamped him around the neck and jerked him against a massive chest. Drew kicked backward with his good leg, but the grip tightened until he could no longer breathe. He let himself go limp, felt the hands slapping his pockets, felt his belt pulled loose and his trousers jerked down to his knees. He struggled silently and ferociously against the grip, and in a moment he was free, on his hands and knees. He looked up at the black mountain who stood with Drew’s gun holster in his hands, its two broken straps dangling.

Panting, Drew groped for his crutch and spoke through clenched teeth. “Chaka, why don’t you buy your own goddam gun?”

Chaka showed no sign of his recent exertion. “Why you leave Marie’s? You think you can move on this island without my people seeing you?”

Drew got to his feet and jerked up his pants. “I was thinking it over.”

“You think better in town?”

“Yes.”

Chaka frowned, then shrugged. “So what do you say?”

“I’ll do it.”

The giant smiled. “You say that now that your gun is gone.”

“I’ll kill Ian Barrington for you. Okay? Now give my gun back.” Chaka started to take out the magazine and Drew said: “Loaded.”

Chaka shook his head, and Drew felt a crawling impatience. “Look, you’re acting like a thumb-fingered dolt. If it’s going to work, I’ve got to operate without you breathing down my neck. That means you’ve got to trust me. You might as well start now, otherwise I walk out.”

Chaka looked at him but made no move to return the gun. Drew turned his back and took two steps toward the door, his back tingled. A new voice froze him in his tracks.

“You’ve reached an impasse, Chaka. My turn now.”

The voice was deep, with a musical lilt, as though the speaker were not only mocking the world but himself as well. Drew turned to see a tall slim man almost invisible in a black suit. His ebony face had sharp, Caucasian features. He kept one hand in his jacket pocket; the other held a cigarette lighter to a cigarette between his lips.

“I am Guillard D’Arco,” he said, stepping out of the shadows. “Call me Gil. Chaka told me about you, and when Leta said you wanted to see me, I thought to relieve Chaka’s worry at the same time.”

“You’re the real leader, then?”

Chaka broke in. “No.”

“Each of us has an independent following,” said the tall man. “Chaka’s people are young and violent, mine are—”

“Women and old men,” said Chaka.

Guillard smiled without looking at Chaka. “—are willing to accept slower success with less risk. I’ve been attempting a legal approach through the Independence Party. People come to rallies, but only to listen. Half the men owe their livelihood to Barrington, and nobody votes for me who values his job. So, until I can destroy this money power, my aims have temporarily merged with Chaka’s.” He waved his hand negligently. “You understand that, having told you all this, we must have your co-operation—or your silence.”

“Hell, I said I’d do it. But only under certain conditions. First the gun.”

“The gun, the gun. Give him the gun, Chaka, then let’s sit down and hear his conditions.”

Seated on a bench at a scarred table, Drew felt better with the gun weighting his side pocket. Chaka rumbled an order in patois, and the girl slouched in with a rum bottle and three glasses.

Drew poured rum into his glass and thought of the revolution: Fire, riots, chaos … a man who expected it could work unseen and get away before anyone knew what had happened.

“About those other conditions,” he said. “I have only three days left on my visa. Can you fix it up for another month?”

Guillard looked at Chaka, who nodded. “Thomas arrange it. Give me the card.”

Drew handed over the folded square of paper. “And I want a record of Edith Barrington’s trial two years ago.”

Guillard raised his brows, then turned to Chaka. “The transcript is in my office. Tell the girl you want number six in the Barrington file.” When the giant had gone, Guillard looked intently at Drew. “He follows my advice because I understand the whites. I presume your quarrel with Barrington concerns the woman. I wonder if she’s worth it.”

Drew shrugged. “Maybe you don’t know her well enough.”

“Possibly not,” said Guillard. “When I heard that Ian was bringing a wife home from one of his trips, I visualized one of those bony, cold-handed sporting-set women whom the Barrington men had always chosen to strengthen their dynasty. Then I met her at a government function—one of those mixed affairs where you can’t help feeling everybody’s looking at your feet to see if you’ve got your shoes on. I couldn’t place her. She spoke Parisian French and English with no local accent at all; she ignored all questions about her origin, and I admit I ceased to care. For the first time I wondered if there wasn’t something worth learning about white women. She was vibrant and intelligent, and I thought, Here is a tigress to match the old lion. But that was before her troubles began.”

“Troubles?” said Drew.

“She didn’t fit the tight female society of the plantocracy. Mrs. Barrington started romping in those ancestral beds, and their ranks closed like a steel gate. They treated her with frigid correctness, but the husbands had enough warmth to make up for it. I suppose the women fought that too, in their own way.” He chuckled. “I laugh to think of those fat flatulent females introducing a pathetic quiver to the act of copulation, crying out in counterfeit orgasms….”

Guillard trailed off as though the words had not really stopped, but continued inside his head. After a moment he went on:

“… Can’t blame her really. Ian was nearing fifty and preoccupied with his so-called servant girls. But he wasn’t so preoccupied that he didn’t know what his wife was doing—and with whom. One of her lovers had two cargo schooners running between here and Barbados. Ian, with five schooners, cut his rates so low the man lost money. Had to sell one ship, and not long afterward the other caught fire in the harbor and burned. You can see the hull still lying there. Another man who took an interest in her had to sell his plantation and leave the island: Ian refused to ship his cargo, so his bananas lay on the dock and rotted. One by one the men here decided that Mrs. Barrington just wasn’t worth the risk. Her only contacts were with tourists and newcomers who didn’t know the score. But Ian wasn’t satisfied. He built her a house on Barrington’s Isle and installed Doxie as a watchdog. Ian visited her once a month. Then came a row about his girls back in the bush. One of them sneaked off to town and came back diseased, so Ian moved the harem to the island too. Built the girls a wooden barracks about a hundred yards behind his wife’s house. He still visited his wife once a month, but he used to see the girls every other night. You get the picture? She hears his boat coming and going, and she sits in the big house and twiddles her thumbs while a bug-eyed man with no urge watches her like a weasel. Everybody thought, well, Ian’s won again, he’s killed another free spirit. But we were wrong … ah, here it is. You can read it yourself.”

Drew turned to see Chaka walk in and throw a manila envelope down on the table. Drew opened it and started reading. Vaguely he was aware that Chaka had departed on another mission, but the transcript commanded his full attention.

The case against Edith had hinged upon the testimony of one Millicent Deterville. She testified that she had seen Edith peer in the window of the dormitory on the night of September 4. She had run to the window just as the flames shot up. A minute later the dormitory was surrounded by flames twelve feet high, whipped through the shoulder-high grass by a high wind. She had been the first one out, but the heat had sucked away her breath, and she had fainted.

Edith’s defense counsel cross-examined.

The prosecution objected, and defense replied that he intended to show that Millicent Deterville was in a sense a mistress of Ian Barrington, and thus might have cause to lie about Edith’s part in it, and at the very least was not of unimpeachable morals. The objection was sustained however, and Millicent dismissed from the stand. Next the prosecution called Albert Montres to the stand, who gave his occupation as fisherman and chauffeur.

“Albert?” Drew looked up. “Is that—Chaka?”

Gil nodded. “That is Chaka. They choose their own names, but in court they must use the one listed on the birth records. You know, of course, that Millicent Deterville also calls herself Leta.”

The news sent a physical shock through Drew. “She never told me.”

“Possibly she dislikes the name.”

“I mean, about being one of Barrington’s girls.”

“Oh. Perhaps she wanted to forget. Or she was ashamed.”

Drew thought of Leta’s fear of Barrington, of Edith, and her refusal to spend the night on the island. Leta was now more understandable, and, though Drew had no time to consider why, more interesting.

Turning back to the transcript, Drew learned that Albert—or Chaka—had been on the island that night and had seen the fire. He had found Edith standing outside the circle of flames. He testified:

Again the defense tried to impugn the reliability of the witness, establishing the fact that Chaka had been using the island as a transfer point for smuggled rum, and had been present that night only because he had to accept delivery of a shipment. It was a feeble defense, and Edith’s man did little with it; to Drew it seemed that he did very little with anything.

“Odd,” he mused, “that a man like Barrington couldn’t get his wife off the hook.”

Guillard nodded. “A curious case altogether. For years I had been trying to get Barrington through his weakness for these adolescent girls. I could find fathers angry that their daughters had been put into his harem. I could persuade them to charge Barrington with carnal knowledge. But suddenly the father would turn up with a new house and a good job with the Barrington organization. The charges were dropped. Then came two deaths, and I began working on behalf of the girls’ families, persuading Chaka and Leta to testify. I expected trouble from Ian, but there was none. I began to realize I was playing into his hands for reasons I didn’t know—until later.”

“What were they?”

“Look at the evidence. His wife, getting wilder and wilder while he built the fences higher and higher. I think finally she wanted escape. Permanent escape. He didn’t like that. He wanted a way to hold her, so he set it all up—”

“Burned the harem himself, you mean?”

“No, but he surely knew she’d do something like that when he put it there. After that it was simple—get her committed, released into his care. Then if she ran away, she would be not just a runaway wife, she would be a poor demented woman who had to be returned to her husband for her own good. Simple, you see?”

Drew nodded, forcing down a feeling of pity for Edith. Chaka returned and flipped a square of cardboard on the table.

“You have any trouble?” asked Drew, picking it up.

Chaka drank a half-glass of rum and vented a Gargantuan belch. “No.”

“I expected Doxie to report me.”

“Not if you know Doxie,” said Guillard. “He’s out to prove something, and he won’t want you to leave until he’s proved it. In Doxie’s book, that could mean going out in a box.”

Drew felt a twinge of annoyance. Why didn’t the red man find some other way to prove himself? He folded the visa into his wallet. He didn’t bother to thank the men; they had performed a service and expected a service in return. Guillard might have been reading his thoughts, for at that moment he said:

“Before you go, Seright, we would like certain details from you. Such as how, when and where.”

Drew struggled to make his words convincing, aware that his plan hinged on their acceptance of him. “How? I plan to … gain Ian Barrington’s confidence, catch him off guard, and shoot him. After that I’ll hide the body and get out before anybody knows he’s dead.”

“It won’t do.” Guillard got up, paced the room with the smooth rhythm of a black leopard. “No. It must be known the moment he is dead, so we can coordinate our own movements. You must kill him in the presence of witnesses.”

“I wouldn’t get ten yards.”

“Not if you use that little toy you carry. But we can provide you with a thirty-caliber rifle with a telescopic sight. You can shoot him from sufficient distance to make your getaway. But then Chaka’s men will be keeping the authorities too busy to think about you.”

Drew turned to Chaka. “You have guns for all your men?”

“Yes.”

“Your men have shot them?”

Chaka looked down into his glass. “They understand the guns. They will shoot them … when the time comes. We cannot spare the bullets for practice.”