I COULDN’T WORK IT OUT. I couldn’t formulate a working hypothesis.
There were two big humps I simply could not get over. First, that every suspect stood to lose, and none of them stood to gain, by Girgis’s murder. And, the motive did not equal in value such a drastic act.
There was only one motive available. The hashish trade. And as a motive that just simply wouldn’t hold water. Even if it paid ten times the amount I calculated it was paying, it wouldn’t be worth the chances you took in killing somebody over it. Killing Girgis amounted to the almost certain ruin of the hashish trade itself.
There were only two real suspects. The two hippie boys, and Jim Kirk. There were some peripheral suspicions. Chantal’s involvement with Girgis. The fact that Kronitis owned both boats. But they were negligible. Chantal’s deep shock when she learned of the murder was completely genuine, if I was any judge. And I would bet my bottom dollar that Kronitis did not know about the hashish smuggling until I told him.
Jim Kirk was certainly a suspect. But he simply wouldn’t have killed Girgis over the hashish trade. It wasn’t worth that much to him.
That left the two kids. It was possible they were in it together, but I didn’t believe it. It was more likely crazy Chuck had done it on his own, thinking in his crazy way that he was helping his pal, the same way he had broken that boy’s nose that night, and now Steve was trying to cover up for him hoping to squeak him out of it. Given all the other facts we knew about Chuck, it was a high probability.
That was the only answer I could come up with. And after working on it for eight straight hours, I was inclined to accept it. The thing that bothered me was that it was completely circumstantial.
The only other possibility was that there was another motive, with a vastly greater element of gain in it, which had been so cleverly concealed that I had received no inkling of it at all since I had been here.
In a way I hated it to be Chuck because I hated crazy murders. I would rather it was Kirk. It would have been so much cleaner. So much more human.
It was five A.M. when I locked up my briefcase, and locked it away in the lock-up closet. I had eaten six greasy pork sandwiches that had nearly destroyed what digestion I had left, smoked two packs of cigarettes that put me that much further along the road to lung cancer, drunk five carefully measured drinks that hadn’t helped me at all as I intended they shouldn’t, and I was tired. Chantal had not come by. I made myself a really important drink and went upstairs and went to bed.
It was after ten A.M. when Pekouris arrived down below in the jeep with two other policemen, to check out Sonny Duval. He waved up at me, before they walked down to the dock.
I sat on my porch over the harbor with my coffee, and watched Pekouris show off in his blue suit and row them out, standing up in the skiff with the long, push-type oars. Everybody in Greece, or at least everybody I knew, seemed to be able to row a dinghy like a professional.
The other two officers were strangers I had never seen before.
I watched all three of them climb up Sonny’s ladder. It was hot and sunny where we were at the yacht harbor, but off over Sonny’s caique above the mainland a long bank of dark yellowish cloud was moving down from the northeast, and there was a stillness and absence of breeze that presaged some weather.
Half an hour later they rowed back to the dock and Pekouris drove the jeep over to my side of the vacant lot and parked it in the grass. He left the other two sitting in the sun. On his way up he made an elaborately polite greeting to the leathery Georgina who was pottering around in her hot garden.
“Do you want a drink?” I said when he came in.
He just looked at me.
He had a genius for rubbing me the wrong way.
“Then to hell with you,” I said. “I’ll have one myself without you, then, Pekouris.” I called to the housekeeper. “Mama-san. Ice.”
“I came to ask about your investigations. What have you found out?”
“Not too much,” I said. “I haven’t done too much. Did you find a lot of incriminating evidence on Sonny’s boat?”
He gave me his superior thick-lipped smile. “That was only a routine call. He is, as you say, clean.”
“Well, you upset him enough by it,” I said.
He grinned. “I hope so. He is not a man I find I can like easily. Nor his wife. But he is clean. I did not expect to find anything.”
I smiled. “So you just wanted to blow his mind a little?” I didn’t know if I liked that or not. I guessed I did. “I’ve been doing some homework, though,” I said, “if I haven’t done much else. And I’ve about reached the same conclusion you already arrived at. It looks like it has to be that boy with his machete.”
“I do not think there is any doubt,” Pekouris said.
“He’s got a machete with him here, you know,” I said.
Pekouris nodded.
“Well, just curiosity, but why didn’t you pick him up?”
“He was not there when we were there. He had gone off around to Ayia Paraskevi.”
I didn’t know what it was about him that I just couldn’t cotton to. But I just couldn’t appreciate him. Couldn’t he give a straight answer, once?
“Wouldn’t it have been easy to run around there in a boat and pick him up?” I said patiently.
Pekouris made a nastier than usual smile. “Yes. Yes, it would. But I do not think you understood my Athens directive yesterday, when I told it to you, Davies. I was told by Athens to: Solve it, but solve it fast. The emphasis was on the Fast.”
Apparently calling me just “Davies” like that was some form of slightly more intimate address that meant equality, to him. But to me it sounded condescending, dictatorial, domineering, superior, and snotty. I didn’t like that about him, either.
“I see. So?”
“Well, is it not self-evident? If I pick this boy up now, an American, there would be an enormous publicity in the press, and a long drawn-out court case. I might not even convict him. If he were a Greek.” He shrugged. “It would be a different matter. But he is not. And that is not solving it fast, as my directive ordered me.”
He suddenly looked a little peaked, Pekouris. Like a man being pulled two ways by exactly equal forces. But he wasn’t going to admit that to me. There was his duty as he liked to conceive it, and his duty as his Athens superiors preferred him to conceive it. I wanted to feel sorry for him. But it wasn’t easy.
“I need some real evidence. Or a confession. A confession would be best. That would be perfect.”
“And in the meantime, these two boys may just up and hightail it out of here on a small boat, to Turkey.”
“Highly unlikely. Believe me, they would never get there.” It sounded like a face-saving pronouncement to me. But maybe he could back it up.
“Well,” I said. “Listen, speaking of evidence. I happened to be with someone yesterday.”
Pekouris smiled. “Yes, I know.”
I blinked once at him, slowly. “And this somebody told me something interesting. Not long ago a bunch of these kids stole some goat and killed it and roasted it. This boy Chuck decapitated it with his machete. Fine. But then he went around with the goat’s blood on the machete without washing it off, and bragging about it.”
Pekouris was watching me intently. “Yes? I do not entirely follow your reasoning.”
“Well. If he would do that with goat’s blood, isn’t it just possible he might do the same with human blood?”
Pekouris nodded. “I see. Yes, it’s just possible. Especially with a crazy man.”
“Is there any way of separating and distinguishing dried goat’s blood from dried human blood on a knife?”
“I would have to ask a doctor about that.”
“I don’t know enough, medically.”
“Nor do I. Anyway, do not concern yourself with that. I will find out all about that from our laboratory. It’s an excellent idea.
“But I am not going to arrest the boy and confiscate the machete now. First, I want to find out what the laboratory tells me.”
“Well, I can hardly confiscate it for you,” I said. “Or steal it for me.”
“I do not ask you to,” Pekouris said, humorless to the end. “This just might solve all our problems,” he said, more to himself than to me. Clearly, he meant his problems.
“I’m not holding it up as any great possibility,” I said.
He moved away from the chair he had been standing beside. “I’ll be in touch with you about the laboratory.” He pronounced it like the English: laboratory. Ponderously, in his ponderous way, he moved toward the three steps down into the hallway to the door.
“Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “What about Jim Kirk? What are you doing about him?”
Pekouris turned. “He is being looked into.”
“You know he was in with Girgis, don’t you? He’s a suspect, too, you know.”
He blinked at me solemnly. “No stone is being left unturned, Davies,” he said. He turned and went down the steps.
I watched him go out. Then I walked out to my porch to watch him drive away. He was just about not believable. I watched him climb into the jeep’s driver’s seat, beside his two hot cops, who were still sitting there obediently in the sun.
After he was gone, Sonny Duval walked up along the seawall from the taverna, looking up at me. He didn’t come inside the gate.
“You saw?” he called. “I’ve been given a clean bill of health.”
I just nodded.
“Listen,” he called up. “Will you be wanting the boat? It looks like one of those quick summer storms. We almost never get them. But when we do, they blow like hell for a couple of hours.” As he spoke, the first fingerlings of rising breeze blew dust swirls up from around his feet in the dry graveled road. It was hotter now, if anything. Muggy heat.
I looked off toward the bank of cloud to the northeast. You could see the blue sheets of rain falling from it in long parallelograms. “No, I won’t want it,” I called down.
He shrugged his shoulders up once, then turned and stalked off toward the taverna again. I went inside and picked a book in English off one of the shelves. It was something called Bitter Lemons, by Lawrence Durrell, about Cyprus.
I sat down with it on the porch and told the old Greek woman to bring me some whisky, and that I’d eat lunch there.