Mangrove Bayou (6 page)

“The boat owner was named John Barrymore?” Troy asked. “Like the actor?”

“There's an actor named John Barrymore?” Con Lohen asked.

“Not any more. He's dead.”

“Yeah, well, so's this one.”

“Had he just had a fight with the wifey?”

Trapper shook his head. “I was just saying that. One of the dumbest things any woman can say to a man with a boat is, ‘It's either me or that damn boat.' The guys will take the boat every time. I see it a lot.”

“Long as you have a boat,” Lohen said, “you can always get another woman. All the women you want. But once you got a woman you can't afford a boat.”

Troy looked at Con Lohen. “Well, Con, thanks for sharing that authentic maritime wisdom.” He turned to George Trapper. “Why don't you stay here on the dock,” Troy said. “Keep away the curious.”

“I really should be supervising this,” Trapper said.

“You are. But let's not trample any more over the scene than we need to. I have to go see. Con, here, has to show me. The doctor has to do his thing. You take charge out here.”

“Well. Sure.” Trapper seemed relieved. “No one else actually knows about this yet. I haven't even told the wife. I didn't know quite what to say.”

“Keep it that way for now. I have an officer on the way. Let him by. No one else.”

The boat had an engine space under the aft sleeping cabin, reached by a hatch set into the cabin flooring there. The hatch was open and, looking down, Troy saw a heavyset man slumped over the engine. The man was wearing a yellow pullover shirt and blue shorts. The engine space was perhaps five feet high, wider at the top than the bottom where the hull curved inward. The engine was a big diesel and it and the transmission and a generator and a lot of piping took up most of the space. There was a foot of water over the flooring down there and Troy saw an electric drill lying in the water next to the body. The cord for the drill came up and out of the hatch. Troy looked and saw that it was unplugged. He leaned in to feel for a pulse. The instant he touched the man's neck he knew he wouldn't find one. The body was cold.

Dr. Vollmer was sitting on the aft cabin double bed next to the open access hatch, writing up some paperwork.

“Well, he's as dead as advertised,” Troy said. “Any timeline yet?”

Vollmer finished filling in a blank and looked up at Troy. “Rigor's really strong. Probably this happened early last night.”

“Cause of death?”

Vollmer stopped writing and looked at Troy. “What do you think?”

“Death by electric drill.”

Vollmer nodded. “We don't call it that. But, yes. Electricity, salt water, and a good ground like an engine block don't do the heart much good. I'll do up some fancy wording for the county M.E. and they'll do an autopsy anyway. But John Barrymore died of heart failure caused by electrocution.”

Vollmer and his assistant left and came back in a few moments with the gurney from the ambulance. Tom VanDyke walked up, his evidence kit slung over his shoulder. “Good timing,” Troy said. “We're just about to get to the good part.”

They waited while Tom took photos. Then they wrestled the body out of the engine space, out the side door of the boat, and onto the gurney on the dock. Hoisting two hundred pounds of dead weight vertically out of the engine space and then through the side door of the boat was hard work and they all sat down on a dock box next to the boat to catch their breath. George Trapper, Troy noted, had vanished. Troy almost smiled. People always had other things to do when it came to looking at dead bodies.

Troy went through Barrymore's pockets and took out a wallet; a pack of cigarettes, now very wet; a cheap lighter and a key ring. He flipped open the wallet. “About fifty bucks here, a couple credit cards. Driver license. It's Barrymore all right. Bag the wallet and we'll go through it all back at the station.” He handed the wallet and keys to Tom VanDyke. Vollmer and his driver rolled the gurney away down the docks.

“Who has the code to that electronic gate?” Troy asked Lohen.

“Me, staff. Members who got boats here.”

“What about contractors, divers, repairmen, those people?” Troy well knew that B.O.A.T. meant Bring Out Another Thousand, and that large boats like these required a small platoon of maintenance and repair people to help the owners. Electronics, metal and fiberglass didn't fare well in an environment of salt water, heat, ultraviolet, high humidity and barnacles.

“Well, sure. Regulars got the code.”

“When is the last time you changed the code?”

Lohen thought. “Well…never, I guess. Why?”

“So you, the current club staff, any former club staff, boat owners, boat owner families and friends, any visiting boat owners from elsewhere who used your transient docks and
their
families and friends, most of the boat maintenance people, and probably half the residents of Mangrove Bayou, can all operate the gate. How many people would you say that was?”

“Now that you put it that way, a lot.”

Troy nodded. “Not much point in having the gate at all.”

Chapter 9

Monday, July 22

Back inside the boat Troy asked Con Lohen, “What did you find when you first saw all this?”

Lohen pointed at the drill cord and at an AC receptacle set into a cabinet-side. “That was plugged in, up here, to the 120-volt shore power line. These boats have both 12-volt DC internal systems and the AC shore power for when they're tied up at docks.”

Troy nodded. “I know the system. Do you have 30-amp or 50-amp shore power?”

“Got both on this dock. Only 30-amp on some of the docks for the smaller boats. He's hooked to the 50-amp. But it doesn't matter. Either one would have killed him.”

“
You unplugged the drill.”

“Damn right. My momma didn't raise no stupid chillens. Not reaching down and grabbing some fella sitting in water over an engine block that makes a perfect ground, with that thing still plugged in.”

“Smart. There's no GFI—a ground fault interrupter—on the circuit? Like you probably have in your bathroom at home?”

“Nope. I guess that's not required.”

“Not required? I guess it's only a very good idea. But it would have set the club back eighty cents per slip. Did you notice anything else that was different from what I'm looking at now?”

“No. But you see that water? That's not right.”

“No. It's not,” Troy said. “But it's not rising.”

Lohen pointed. “Hose came loose. Engine's freshwater-cooled but there's a heat exchanger. This line brings in salt water to that. When this through-hull hose came off, he had a leak straight overside.”

Troy was puzzled. “Why would a hose just come loose like that? It was clamped on.”

“It happens,” Lohen said. “Clamps get old or rusted or weren't put on tight in the first place. Rubber hoses get real hard and don't make a good seal any more. Usually happens when you're underway and got the engine vibration and the water pumping through the hose. Kinda odd for a hose to just let go when the boat's sitting here and the engine's shut down.”

“Unless it came loose just as he pulled into the dock and then he shut down without noticing.”

“It would be pretty obvious,” Lohen said. “It's a one-inch pipe. That makes for a good squirt coming in here. You would hear it in the cabin above. Forward, I don't know.”

“Wouldn't sink the boat, would it?” Troy asked. “He's got bilge pumps.”

“Sure. Automatics. One in here that doesn't seem to be working. Should also be one in the bilge under the main salon. Probably got a manual ‘Whale Gusher' in there somewhere too. A leak here would run the pump all the time, though. It's not running now. Let's look.” Lohen took off his boat shoes and climbed barefoot down into the engine space. Troy nodded; he was a no-socks man himself when he was wearing boat shoes. Lohen felt around in the water for several minutes and came up with a small rag. Troy heard the bilge pump start up and the faint splash overside that always sounded to him like someone taking a giant pee. “Got it.” Lohen said. “This was jammed into the float switch on the bilge pump. Stopped it from working. There's an overflow, so when the water got this high it ran into the main bilge forward and that pump kicked in, pumping the water overboard.”

“Why isn't the hose leaking now?” Tom asked.

Lohen pointed. “Shutoff valve. On proper boats, all through-hulls have stopcocks right up against the hulls to close off any broken hoses. He must have climbed down here and closed the stopcock.”

“So why would he need an electric drill?” Troy asked.

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Damn careless of him too. The drill and leaving a rag where it could get sucked into the bilge pump.”

“Don't know about that,” Lohen said. “Careless, but it happens sometimes.”

“Seems odd to use a 120-volt drill anyway,” Tom said. “That'd be useless away from the dock. I'll bet there's a battery-operated drill somewhere on this boat.”

Con Lohen nodded. “Most owners got cordless tools.”

“Notice something else about the drill?” Troy said to Tom.

Tom looked at the drill. “No. What about it?”

“That's a masonry-drilling bit, not a wood or general-purpose bit.”

Tom looked at it. “Well, I didn't know there was a difference.”

“There is. And that bit is useless on a boat.”

“Had another bit in his pocket?” Tom asked.

“Nope. Nothing in his pockets but what I gave you to bag.”

“Might be some other bit down here still,” Lohen said. “In the water. We can look when it's all pumped out.”

“We'll do that. He probably wouldn't use any sort of drill bit, actually. More likely to have needed a screwdriver bit. Maybe to screw on a new hose clamp. Let's look around the boat a little,” Troy said. He helped Lohen climb up out of the engine space and Lohen put his shoes back on. They started searching the boat.

“So, did John Barrymore have a fight with his wife?” Troy asked Lohen.

“All the time. She's young, pretty, white trash out of Goodland. I think she worked in a laundry. He was Yankee money, old, rich and horny, out of Boston I think. Had that accent anyway.”

“Not a marriage made in heaven, I take it.”

“She twisted him around her little finger. It was sickening to watch. I seen a lot of old guys marrying young girls and it never works out in the long run. But he was full of her, newlyweds I think. Something about turning fifty makes sane men park their brains and pull out their dicks.”

“I don't think you have to be fifty to do that,” Tom said.

Troy glanced sideways at Tom and smiled. “Cynical, and yet so young.”

“This is true,” Lohen said. “And she didn't know squat about boats and wouldn't even try to help. He had to do everything onboard: steer, navigate, even anchor it by himself. When they went out to cruise around, he told me once, she mostly sat in the salon watching TV.” Troy guessed that, to Con Lohen, a wife who wouldn't lower an anchor was a worthless woman.

Searching the boat, they found several battery-operated hand tools, including a drill with an assortment of bits and drivers. There were no other masonry drill bits and no way to know if anything was missing. They found no other corded hand tools that needed 120-volt AC current.

On the back deck it was Troy who found something odd. The swim ladder on the stern was down.

“So what?” Tom asked. “Maybe they were scrubbing the boat bottom or something.”

Con Lohen shook his head. “He had a diver to do that monthly. Leave the ladder down like that and you get barnacles started on it.”

Troy pulled the ladder up by the line attached to it and fastened it in place. “But if you leave the boat this way then once you're in the water you cannot put the ladder back up.”

Lohen looked. “I guess that's right. On this one anyway. You can't push a rope.”

Troy walked back into the salon. He was looking for water, dampness. If someone left by the ladder that person might have come aboard the same way. But the boat, like most boats of this size, had dehumidifiers and air conditioning to both cool the boat and prevent mildew. Both were running and even had there been any drips on the tough outdoor carpet that covered the salon deck, they were long gone by now. Meantime Con Lohen looked in the now-pumped-out engine space for any drill or screwdriver bit. He came up empty too.

“All right,” Troy said. “Tom, bag the drill and the wallet. Use the evidence bags in the Suburban. Dust this boat and that drill for fingerprints. Get Con's here, too, so we can eliminate him.”

“What?” Tom said. “You don't think this was an accident?”

“Probably was. No harm in getting some practice, though.”