The Incident at Naha

  THE INCIDENT AT NAHA

  M. J. Bosse

  © M. J. Bosse 1972

  M. J. Bosse has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1972 by MacMillan and Co Ltd.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  THE POKER

  THE PRINCE

  THE PEAR

  THE POT

  THE POKER

  Blacks are supposed to be sex maniacs. Like so many beliefs of my parents’ generation, it’s simply not true. Take my Virgil, for example. He’s no wilder in bed than white boys I’ve known. What sets him apart, though, is his tenderness. That lazy Sunday afternoon, we were lying in the tangled sheets and he was stroking my hair with the kind of tenderness that make me feel all right, as the song goes, when we heard this noise from Donald’s apartment above us. “He must have a new girl,” I said, but the words were hardly out of my mouth when something fell up there. “That one’s tough to handle,” I said, laughing. We heard a yell, then a crash of furniture turning over. I raised myself on my elbows and stared at the ceiling. “They’re sure not getting it together.” Then there was a scream, loud but short; and then silence.

  Virgil and I looked at each other, and when we heard nothing else—I mean, not a single sound for a long time—he got out of bed. I watched him slip into jeans and a T shirt, his body still glistening from what we’d been doing earlier. The silence from above began to have the same effect as a lot of violent noise. Without saying a word, Virgil left the apartment on the run. So I got up too and put on my own jeans and one of his T shirts. I took the stairs two at a time up to the next floor, expecting the Wilsons, who live opposite Don, to be out in the hall. Then I remembered they were on vacation. When I got to the landing, I saw that Don’s door was ajar. But instead of running in there, I stood outside and called to Virgil, because that scream and especially the silence afterward had already warned me. When Virgil didn’t answer, I took a deep breath and walked in. Virgil was kneeling over someone stretched out on the floor.

  Everyone says that an art student must look at things—I mean, the way Michelangelo and Rembrandt did in the morgue; so I made myself look. I stood there in the doorway and looked as steadily as I could at all the blood oozing from the mouth and nose of Don Stuart; at his eyes staring up—no longer human, but like blue marbles. He was the first person I had ever seen dead.

  *

  It was dusk, and we hadn’t yet turned the lights on. Virgil sat in the overstuffed armchair where he always studies, and I was curled up on the couch. We hadn’t said a word to each other since leaving the police upstairs. They had been rough on Virgil, at least at first. But when he wants to, Virgil can turn on this English accent acquired at the British Museum, so he turned it on the cops and they let him alone. I mean, they actually conceded that he wasn’t an evil black dope fiend who had just committed a murder and then impudently reported it. As for me, when I told a detective I was an art student, he raised an eyebrow and gave me a nasty little grin. Believe me, there are still people in this world who think you’re a hooker if you’re an art student. Of course, it helped that I wasn’t wearing a bra under Virgil’s T shirt. I think it kind of excited the cops that I was a young blonde living in sin with a black buck. They were less excited about the murder. They talked of it as the work of a dope addict surprised by Don in the act of robbery. They took pictures and fingerprint smears and flipped through some of the papers scattered around the room, but the whole thing seemed to bore hell out of them. They kept glancing at us, and I half expected the bunch of them to troop down and examine our bed of iniquity and try to locate where we stashed our pot.

  What got me, though, was their disregard for Don. They poked and tinkered with him like a broken clock and then walked away. All they really talked about with any interest was the murder weapon. They didn’t find anything in the room that could have caused the massive concussion which killed Don. I wondered if the cops ever thought about the easiness of dying. I mean, how could a guy like Don Stuart, so wonderfully full of life, die so easily? I had cared for him, felt I had known him for longer than three months. He was tall and built on the rangy lines that you expect of someone who has been raised in the sun. He had been studying for a doctorate in history, just like Virgil, and they had served together in Vietnam. Though neither of them spoke much about it, I understood that they had seen a lot of action. Only three months before, I had met Don Stuart at a party, and Virgil through him, and now Don Stuart was dead—murdered, the cops had said, for a few lousy dollars that would buy a fix.

  As we sat there in the twilight, I said it aloud. “Someone like him—killed for a few lousy dollars.”

  Virgil got up from the armchair and walked to the window, thrusting his hands into his back pockets. I had known him long enough to know that this was a gesture of frustration. He stood there a long time in the last light of day. He wears his hair short, but in the natural style, so his head had this lovely round shape in the purple twilight.

  Finally he turned away from the window and went to his triple-tiered pipe rack and pulled out one of the thirty or forty pipes he has. He selected a big one, a Billiard with bird’s-eye grain. Virgil has taught me the names of pipe shapes and all, and I’m proud of remembering them. Suddenly the glow of a match lit up his face, and in that light the strain he was feeling really showed. He and Don had been close friends, and not only that—Don Stuart had saved his life once in Vietnam. I didn’t know the details of it, but Virgil had mentioned it once when Don had come to our place for some wine. I can recall exactly the first time I ever saw them together. It was in Washington Square and they were coming toward me, Virgil shorter but a little more athletic-looking. Don had one hand on Virgil’s shoulder and was whispering to him something about the girl he was going to meet. Friendship between men doesn’t threaten me.

  It was nearly dark now, the only light the orange glow from Virgil’s pipe. I asked him would he dig some music. The Stones? Ten Wheel Drive? The Chambers Brothers?

  Until the pipe was almost smoked down, Virgil said nothing. Then he asked an odd question.

  “What did you think of his apartment?”

  “His apartment?”

  “Yes. What was your impression of it?”

  “Well, it was a mess. The broken chair, all those papers and things.”

  “What things?”

  I tried to recall details that I guess I had already blocked out. “All kinds of things.”

  “No. Only papers.” The light of another match flared in the darkness. “It’s all wrong.”

  We sat again in silence. I had been with Virgil two months, long enough to learn a little patience. Virgil is a Taurus whose concentration you can’t break if you try.

  “Had the killer wanted valuables,” Virgil said finally, “he’d have gone into drawers and closets. But all he touched was the filing cabinet.”

  “I heard the cops say the addict probably panicked and ran when he heard you on the stairs.”

  “Oh yes, their addict.” Virgil’s voice was full of scorn. Don’t ask a man raised in Harlem to accept the opinion of cops. “I want to go back up there.”

  I was going to protest, because it all seemed kind of unnecessary—and awful, too; but something about Virgil stopped me from doing that. In one of the flashes I get, I wondered if Don’s death meant even more to Virgil than the murder of a close friend. Maybe Virgil felt implicated or threatened or something, and this possibility sent a chill up my spine.

  He and Don had once exchanged apartment keys in case of emergency. Virgil got the key then and started up the stairs, w
ith me following silently.

  *

  For the second time that day we were standing in Don’s apartment. I was staring at the carpet where we had found him in his blood, his long, lean body cramped unnaturally. Don would have hated to be seen that way, twisted, and messy. He was the most fastidious guy I have ever known. He was a Virgo with that sign’s love of order. Although the bookcases were absolutely full and objects stood on every table—things like Japanese dolls in glass cases he had picked up in the Orient—the apartment did not seem cluttered. That’s the kind of order Don created. I particularly noticed the bed, made with hospital corners and carefully plumped-up pillows, where, only hours before, he had been sleeping. I had slept with him twice before meeting Virgil. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  Virgil put a finger to his lips and told me to listen for anyone on the stairs. I sat gingerly on the couch, careful not to put my feet on it. Virgil occupied himself at the filing cabinet, taking out papers that the detectives had quickly shuffled through. In feeling around with the experienced hands of cleaning ladies, the cops had been mildly surprised and a little amused to find cuff links taped to the underside of a table, Don’s Purple Heart stuffed into a shoe, and a camera at the bottom of a laundry bag. A cop had said, “Kind of paranoid,” and another had suspiciously sampled with the tip of his finger some spilled sugar on the dining table, I guess to see if it was horse. Otherwise they had treated Don like a nobody. But Virgil was a lot more thorough in his inspection, and I thought he would never finish. Two hours on that couch made me depressed, and I said rather nastily, “If you play Sherlock Holmes, you have to know what to look for. He would walk into a room and know right off.”

  Virgil just grunted. Now and then he would pause to admire Don’s research notes, all typed and catalogued, and tell me what a loss it was that Don had never completed the dissertation, but that was all he said, and I was bored.

  Much later, when I was dozing, Virgil shook me. I saw by the look of his face that he’d found nothing. “Let’s leave,” I said.

  Virgil sat down wearily at the dining table. “I’m still bothered by the sugar,” he said, glaring at the china sugar bowl. “Why was it on the table?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “According to Don’s life-style, it wouldn’t be. First of all, he drank only one cup of coffee in the morning. Never more than one. He had the idea caffeine was deadly.”

  “Come to think of it, he once told me, ‘Get drunk, but don’t drink coffee.’”

  “All right, then. When we found him he was dressed, and the bed was made. Right?”

  I glanced at the bed, having two memories of being in it. “Right,” I said.

  “He had dressed and made his bed, and being an early riser, he’d probably been up for hours before he was killed.”

  Killed: I had this sudden image of him lying there, white-faced, blood like ribbons from his mouth and nose.

  “At least he had part of the day,” I said.

  “And his cup of coffee, his one cup. Finished with the cup, he’d wash and dry and replace it.”

  “Sure; he was a true Virgo.”

  “And the sugar bowl would have gone back into a kitchen cabinet.”

  “I guess so.”

  “But it was here on the table.”

  Now I stared at the china bowl. “Maybe he forgot?”

  “Not Don Stuart. No, there’s only one explanation for the sugar being out.”

  “He offered someone coffee?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But was there a cup on the table too?”

  “I didn’t notice. Anyway, that’s irrelevant. A killer might rinse a cup; he probably would think of that, but not of putting away a sugar bowl.”

  “You’re really going into this,” I said. “So what does it mean if Don gave the killer a cup of coffee?”

  “It means the killer was someone Don knew.” Virgil got up and began replacing all the folders carefully in the filing cabinet. I looked at the perfectly made bed, having two memories of it rumpled, and I would not believe that anybody would intentionally kill Don Stuart. I didn’t want to think about it. What we were doing in his room seemed like a kind of morbid game.

  “Why don’t we leave him alone?” I said, and when Virgil turned from the cabinet with a puzzled look, I added, “It doesn’t seem right to pick over his things.”

  Virgil gave me an odd smile. “Can’t you believe his murder was intentional?”

  “Things like that just don’t happen.”

  “Maybe not in Omaha.” Virgil pushed the file drawer until it clicked shut. Then he sat at the table, propping his chin in his hands, staring at the sugar bowl as if expecting it to tell him something. There was an intensity about him that worried me, and once again I had this awful feeling that somehow Virgil was involved.

  *

  He must have sat that way for ten minutes before getting up with a sigh and wandering around the room, his quick glance taking in everything. He went to Don’s desk and glumly fingered the pipe rack. In the Army, Virgil had switched Don from cigarettes to pipes, a thing that Virgil had always taken a curious pride in having done. “I started him on this one.” From the rack Virgil took a Woodstock, semibent bit, and put it in his pocket. “I won’t let that go.” Then he took out another pipe and turned it slowly, reverently, in the light.

  “That’s a pretty Dublin,” I said.

  “Poker,” he corrected. “Almost a perfect straight-grain. He told me he had a new one, but I hadn’t seen it. Not even broken in yet.” Virgil put that in his pocket too. I yawned and asked couldn’t we leave, but Virgil never answered, just started through the desk drawers for the third time. “No letters,” he said after a while. “Only pens, pencils, and paper. It’s absolutely clean.”

  “There’s your Virgo.” Then I thought of something. “What about a safety-deposit key—did you find any keys?”

  Virgil shook his head. “Don didn’t trust banks. He used to say a true Scotsman handles his own affairs.”

  “Let’s go,” I pleaded, getting more depressed by the minute in that early-morning room.

  Suddenly Virgil, who was still at the desk, bent down and peered at something. He’s a little myopic, and he bent down with the pinched look of a scientist at a microscope. “Today’s the 26th,” he murmured. I could see that he was slowly flipping the tear sheets of the desk calendar. “And this top sheet’s for the 22nd.”

  “So he didn’t tear them off.”

  “But for the 23rd he wrote something. It says prof greene 230, and it says done.”

  “So he had an appointment with a professor and kept it.” I could hardly see Virgil, I was so tired. “Let’s go now.”

  “And for the 24th it says ef cedar bar 615 drunk.”

  “I’m leaving,” I told Virgil, and I got up, yawning, from the couch.

  “Why hadn’t he torn off the 22nd and 23rd if he wrote something for the 24th?”

  “Like, he forgot,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Virgil lifted the calendar and ran his thumb along the stack of pages. “Thick enough for a whole year.” He unscrewed the holders and took off all the sheets. “Look at this. He put the used sheets on the bottom, after they’d accumulated, maybe a week at a time. They’re all here from January first.”

  “Virgos don’t waste anything.”

  “Well, it’s certainly a way of maintaining a yearly diary without buying one.” Virgil removed the bottom section from the calendar base and replaced the screws. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, holding the used pages, and with relief I followed him out of the apartment.

  A few pages from a desk calendar. They were all that remained of a tall young man who would have looked smashingly beautiful coming through a Highland fog in kilts. Now he was laid out on a slab somewhere, pushed into one of those Horn and Hardart cubicles the way it’s done in detective movies.

  I’d had quite enough of this day, thank you, but I couldn’t desert
Virgil now. Something was really driving him, something like fear. He sat in his armchair and lit a pipe, his largest shell-briar Apple, which meant he was ready to go for a long time. I sat on the bed holding the calendar pages, which he asked me to read aloud. Virgil likes me to read to him; it’s a holdover, he says, from Harlem, where what you learn is mostly by listening.

  I rolled some grass from the oregano jar where we keep ours and smoked the joint all the way down before I looked at the notes. I was afraid they would make me cry. But they turned out to be nothing more than very cryptic records of Don’s academic life since his return to New York.

  Virgil quickly broke the shorthand code that Don had used to keep his research schedule and all. For example, glencoe mass sterl v am mackenzie translated into “Glencoe Massacre at the Sterling Library at Yale; see especially a book by A. M. Mackenzie.” That would have taken me a century to decode, but for Virgil it came naturally. And anyway, it had been Virgil who’d encouraged Don to write a dissertation on Scottish clans in the late seventeenth century, I think it was. Scholars have a special affection for one another—I guess because, like lawyers and doctors and all, they have their own jargon.

  But where in all those finicky little notes was Donald Stuart’s taste for anchovies and gin, his love of Japanese movies, his nervous laugh when someone called him miserly or handsome? The only human thing in those pages was the reports he had made on chicks. He had written a girl’s initials and after them the time and place he was going to meet her. Then he wrote in or out and a letter grade. I decoded this system, not Virgil. Maybe it was a crude way to describe his dates, but it was typical of Don’s passion for cataloguing, and anyway it wasn’t for publication. I don’t mind saying I approached the May pages anxiously, and didn’t read aloud the entries that described me. I discovered that Don had written out my entire first name, Judy, which I assume was a compliment. And I felt a twinge of pride because judy was followed by the grade of A, and the second time too. Not many grades were that high. Most of his girls got C or D. As a teacher, Donald Stuart would have been demanding and tough.