The Narrows (3 page)

“Is he married?”

“Far as I know. I think that’s why he liked the four-day charters. His wife thought he was out there fishing. She probably didn’t know about stopping in Cabo for a Margarita—and I’m not talking about the drink.”

“What about Terry, did he go into town?”

He answered without hesitation.

“Nope, Terry had nothing going in that department and he would never leave the boat. He’d never even step on the dock.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. He just said he didn’t need to. I think he was superstitious about it.”

“How so?”

“You know, the captain stays with the vessel, that sort of thing.”

“What about you?”

“Most of the time I hung with Terry and the boat. Every now and then I’d go to town to one of the bars or something.”

“What about on that last trip?”

“No, I stayed with the boat. I was a little short of bread.”

“So on that last trip, Terry never got off the boat?”

“That’s right.”

“And nobody besides you, Otto and him were ever on the boat, right?”

“That’s—well, not exactly.”

“What do you mean? Who was on the boat?”

“On the second night going into Cabo we got stopped by the
federales
. The Mexican Coast Guard. Two guys came on board and looked around for a few minutes.”

“Why?”

“It’s sort of a routine. Every now and then they stop you, make you pay a little tariff, then they let you go.”

“A bribe?”

“A bribe, a payoff, a bite, whatever you want to call it.”

“And that happened this time.”

“Yeah, Terry gave them fifty bucks when they were in the salon and then they split. It was all pretty fast.”

“Did they search the boat? Did they look at Terry’s medicine?”

“No, it didn’t get to that. That’s what the payoff is for, to avoid all of that.”

I realized I hadn’t been taking notes. A lot of this information was new and worth exploring further but I sensed that I had enough for the moment. I would digest what I had and come back to it. I had a feeling that Buddy Lockridge would give me whatever time I needed, as long as I made him feel like a player in the investigation. I asked him for the exact names and locations of the marinas where they had docked overnight on the trip with Otto and I did write this information in my notebook. I then reconfirmed our appointment on McCaleb’s boat for the next morning. I told him I was taking the first ferry across and he told me he’d be on it as well. I left him there because he said he wanted to go back into the chandlery to pick up some supplies.

As we dumped our coffee cups into the trash can, he wished me luck with the investigation.

“I don’t know what you’re going to find. I don’t know if there is anything to find, but if Terry had help with this, I want you to get whoever it was who helped him. You know what I am saying?”

“Yes, Buddy, I think I know what you are saying. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.”

5

O
N THE PHONE that night from Las Vegas my daughter asked me to tell her a story. Just five years old, she was always wanting me to sing to her or tell her stories. I had more stories than songs in me. She had a scruffy black cat she called No Name and Maddie liked me to make up stories involving great peril and bravery that ended with No Name winning the day by solving the mystery or finding the lost pet or the lost child or teaching a bad man a lesson.

I told her a quick story about No Name finding a lost cat named Cielo Azul. She liked it and asked me for another but I said it was late and I had to go. Then, out of the blue, she asked me if the Burger King and the Dairy Queen were married. I smiled and marveled at how her mind worked. I told her they were married and she asked me if they were happy.

You can become unhinged and cut loose from the world. You can believe you are a permanent outsider. But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself. I have learned this late in life but not too late. It’s never too late. It hurt me to think about the things she would learn about the world. All I knew was that I didn’t want to teach her anything. I felt tainted by the paths I had taken in my life and the things I knew. I had nothing from it I wanted her to have. I just wanted her to teach me.

So I told her, yes, the Burger King and the Dairy Queen were happy and that they had a wonderful life together. I wanted her to have her stories and her fairy tales while she could still believe them. For soon enough, I knew, they would be taken away.

Saying good night to my daughter on the phone felt lonely and out of place. I had just come off of a two-week trip out there and Maddie had gotten used to seeing me and I had gotten used to seeing her. I picked her up at school, I watched her swim, I made dinner for her a few times in the small efficiency apartment I had rented near the airport. At night when her mother played poker in the casinos I took her home and put her to bed, leaving her under the watch of the live-in nanny.

I was a new thing in her life. For her first four years she had never heard of me and I had never heard of her. That was the beauty and difficulty of the relationship. I was struck with sudden fatherhood and reveled in it and did my best. Maddie suddenly had another protector who floated in and out of her life. An extra hug and kiss on the top of the head. But she also knew that this man who had suddenly entered her world was causing her mother a lot of pain and tears. Eleanor and I had tried to keep our discussions and sometimes harsh words away from our daughter but sometimes the walls are thin and kids, I was learning, are the best detectives. They are masterful interpreters of the human vibe.

Eleanor Wish had withheld the ultimate secret from me. A daughter. On the day she finally presented Maddie to me, I thought that everything was right in the world. My world, at least. I saw my salvation in my daughter’s dark eyes, my own eyes. But what I didn’t see that day were the fissures. The cracks below the surface. And they were deep. The happiest day of my life would lead to some of the ugliest days. Days in which I could not get past the secret and what had been kept from me for so many years. Whereas in one moment I thought I had everything I could possibly want from life, I soon learned I was too weak a man to hold it, to carry the betrayal hidden in it in exchange for what I had been given.

Other, better men could do it. I could not. I left the home of Eleanor and Maddie. My Las Vegas home is a one-room efficiency across the parking lot from the place where millionaire and billionaire gamblers park their private jets and head by whispery limos to the casinos. I have one foot in Las Vegas and one remains here in Los Angeles, a place I know I can never leave permanently, not without dying.

After saying good night my daughter handed the phone to her mother, who was on a rare night at home. Our relationship was more strained than it had ever been. We were at odds over our daughter. I didn’t want her to grow up with a mother who worked nights in the casinos. I didn’t want her eating at Burger King for dinner. And I didn’t want her to learn about life in a city that wore its sins on its sleeve.

But I was in no position to change things. I know that I run the risk of seeming ridiculous because I live in a place where the randomness of crime and chaos is always near and poison literally hangs in the air, but I don’t like the idea of my daughter growing up where she is. I see it as the subtle difference between hope and desire. Los Angeles is a place that operates on hope and there is still something pure about that. It helps one see through the dirty air. Vegas is different. To me it operates on desire and on that road is ultimate heartbreak. I don’t want that for my daughter. I don’t even want it for her mother. I am willing to wait, but not that long. As I spend time with my daughter and know her better and love her more, my willingness frays at the middle like a rope bridge crossing a deep chasm.

When Maddie handed the phone back to her mother neither of us had much to say, so we didn’t. I just said I would check in with Maddie the next time I could and we hung up. I put the phone down, feeling an ache inside I was not used to. It wasn’t the ache of loneliness or emptiness. I knew those pains and had learned how to live with them. It was the pain that came with a fear for what the future holds for someone so precious, someone you would lay your own life down for without hesitation.

6

T
HE FIRST FERRY got me to Catalina at 9:30 the next morning. I had called Graciela McCaleb on my cell while I was crossing, so she was waiting for me at the pier. The day was sunny and crisp and I could taste the difference in the smogless air. Graciela smiled at me as I approached the gate where people waited for travelers from the boats.

“Good morning. Thanks for coming.”

“No problem. Thanks for meeting me.”

I had half expected Buddy Lockridge to be with her. I had not seen him on the ferry and figured that maybe he had gone across the night before.

“No Buddy yet?”

“No. Is he coming?”

“I wanted to go over things on the boat with him. He said he would be on the first boat but he didn’t show.”

“Well, they’re running two ferries. The next will be here in forty-five minutes. He’s probably on that. What would you like to do first?”

“I want to go to the boat, start there.”

We walked over to the tenders dock and took a Zodiac with a little one-horsepower engine on it out into the basin where the yachts were lined in rows, tied up to floating mooring balls and moving with the current in a synchronized fashion. Terry’s boat,
The Following Sea
, was second from the end of the second row. An ominous feeling came over me as we approached and then bumped up against the fantail. On this vessel Terry had died. My friend and Graciela’s husband. It used to be one of the tricks of the trade for me to find or manufacture an emotional connection to a case. It helped stoke the fire and gave me that needed edge to go where I had to go, do what I had to do. I knew I would not need to look for that in this case. No manufacturing necessary. It was already part of the deal. The largest part.

I looked at the boat’s name, painted in black letters across the stern, and remembered how Terry had explained it to me once. He had told me that the following sea was the wave you had to watch out for. It came up in your blind spot, hit you from behind. A good philosophy. I had to wonder now why Terry hadn’t seen what and who had come up behind him.

Unsteadily I stepped off the inflatable and onto the boat’s fantail. I reached back for the rope to tie it up. But Graciela stopped me.

“I’m not going on board,” she said.

She shook her head as if to ward off any coercing from me and handed a set of keys toward me. I took them and nodded my head.

“I just don’t want to be on there,” she said. “The one time I went to collect his meds was enough.”

“I understand.”

“This way the Zodiac will be back at the dock for Buddy to use if he shows up.”

“If?”

“He isn’t always that reliable. At least that is what Terry said.”

“And if he doesn’t show up, what do I do?”

“Oh, just flag down a water taxi. They come by about every fifteen minutes. You won’t have a problem. You can just bill me. Which reminds me, we haven’t talked about what I’ll be paying you.”

It was something she had to bring up to make sure, but she knew and I knew that this wasn’t a job for pay.

“That won’t be necessary,” I said. “If I do this, there is only one thing I’d like in return.”

“What’s that?”

“Terry once told me about your daughter. He said you two named her Cielo Azul.”

“That’s right. He picked the name.”

“Did he ever tell you why?”

“He just said he liked it. He said he knew a girl named Cielo Azul once.”

I nodded.

“What I would like for payment for doing this is to meet her someday—when this is all over, I mean.”

That gave Graciela a moment of pause. Then she nodded her agreement.

“She’s a sweetheart. You’ll like meeting her.”

“I’m sure I will.”

“Harry, did you know her? The girl Terry named our daughter after?”

I looked at her a moment and nodded.

“Yes, you could say I knew her. Someday if you’d like I’ll tell you about her.”

She nodded and started to push the Zodiac off the fantail. I helped with my foot.

“The little key opens the salon door,” she said. “The rest you should be able to figure out. I hope you find something that helps.”

I nodded and held up the keys as if they would open every door I would ever encounter. I watched her head back to the dock and then I climbed over the stern and into the cockpit.

Some sort of sense of duty made me climb the ladder to the upper helm before I went inside the boat. I pulled the canvas cover off the control station and stood for a moment next to the wheel and the seat and envisioned the story Buddy Lockridge had told me of Terry collapsing here. It somehow seemed appropriate for him to collapse at the wheel, yet with what I now knew, it also seemed so wrong. I put my hand on the top of the chair as if resting it on someone’s shoulder. I decided that I would find the answers to all of the questions before I finished here.

The small chrome key on the ring Graciela had given me opened the mirrored sliding door that led inside the boat. I left it open to air out the interior. There was a briny, funky smell inside. I traced it to the rods and reels stored on ceiling racks, artificial baits still in place. I guessed that they had not been washed off and properly cared for after the last charter. There had not been time. There had not been a reason.

I wanted to go down the steps to the stateroom in the bow where I knew Terry kept all his investigative files. But I decided to leave that place for last. I decided to begin in the salon and work my way down.

The salon had a functional layout with a couch, chair and coffee table on the right side leading to a chart desk built behind the seat of the interior helm. On the opposite side was a restaurant-style booth with red leather padding. A television was locked down in a partition that separated the booth from the galley and then there was a short stairway I knew led down to the forward staterooms and a bathroom.

The salon was neat and clean. I stood in the middle of the space and just observed it for a half minute before going to the chart station and opening drawers. McCaleb had kept the charter business files here. I found listings of customers and a calendar for charter reservations. There were also records dealing with his collection from Visa and MasterCard, which he evidently accepted from customers as payment. The charter business had a bank account and there was a checkbook in the drawer, too. I checked the register and saw that just about everything that came in went back out again to cover fuel and mooring charges as well as fishing and other charter supplies. There was no record of cash deposits so I concluded that if the business was profitable it was in the unrecorded cash payments from customers, depending on how many of these there were.

In the bottom drawer there was a bad-check file. There were only a few and they were spread out over time, none so large that they could seriously damage the business.

I noticed that in the checkbook and with most of the business records either Buddy Lockridge’s or Graciela’s name was listed as the operator of the charter business. I knew this was because, as Graciela had told me, Terry was seriously limited in what he could earn as official income. If he made over a certain level—which was shockingly low—he was not eligible to receive state and federal medical assistance. If he lost that, he would then end up paying medical expenses himself—a quick route to personal bankruptcy for a transplant recipient.

In the bad-check file I also found a copy of a sheriff’s report unrelated to bad paper. It was a two-month-old incident report stemming from an apparent burglary of
The Following Sea
. The complainant was Buddy Lockridge and the summary indicated that only one thing was taken from the boat, a handheld global positioning system reader. Its value was placed at $300 and the model was listed as a Gulliver 100. An added note said that the complainant could not provide the serial number of the missing device because he had won it in a poker game from a person he could not identify and he had never bothered to write the tracking number down.

Once I had made a quick check through all of the drawers in the chart station I went back to the client files and started going through them more thoroughly, looking carefully at each customer McCaleb and Lockridge had taken on board in the six weeks before Terry’s death. None of the names struck me as curious or suspicious and there were no notations by Terry or Buddy in the file that raised any of those feelings either. Nevertheless, I took a notebook from the back pocket of my blue jeans and wrote a list that showed the name of each client, the number in the party and the date of the charter. Once I had this I was able to see that the charters were by no means regular. A good week for the business was three or four half-day charters. There was one week in which there were no charters at all and another in which there was only one. I was beginning to see Buddy’s point about the need to move the business to the mainland in order to increase the frequency and length of charter bookings. McCaleb was running the charter business as a hobby and that wasn’t the way to make it thrive.

Of course, I knew why he was running it that way. He had another hobby—if you want to call it that—and he needed time to devote to that as well. I was putting the records back into the chart station drawer, with the intention of heading down to the bow to explore Terry’s other hobby, when I heard the salon door roll open behind me.

It was Buddy Lockridge. He had come up on the boat without my hearing the Zodiac’s little engine or feeling its nudge against the fantail. I also hadn’t felt Buddy’s considerable weight as he climbed onto the boat.

“Morning,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“That’s okay. I’ve got a lot to look through here.”

“Find anything interesting yet?”

“Not really. I’m about to go below, check out his files.”

“Cool. I’ll help.”

“Actually, Buddy, where you can help is if maybe you called the man who was the last charter.”

I looked at the last name written on the page in my notebook.

“Otto Woodall. Could you call him and vouch for me and see if I could come by this afternoon to see him?”

“That’s it? You wanted me to come all the way over to make a phone call?”

“No, I have questions for you. I need you here. I just don’t think you should be going through the files down there. Not yet, at least.”

I had a feeling that Buddy Lockridge had probably already perused every file in the bow. But I was playing him this way on purpose. I had to keep him close but distant at the same time. Until I had cleared him to my satisfaction. Yes, he was McCaleb’s partner and had received credit for his efforts to save his fallen friend, but I had seen stranger things in my time. At the moment I had no suspects and that meant I had to suspect everybody.

“Make the call and then come downstairs to see me.”

I left him there and headed down the short set of steps to the lower part of the boat. I had been here before and knew the layout. The two doors on the left side of the hallway led to the head and a storage closet. Straight ahead was a door to the small stateroom in the bow. The door on the right led to the master stateroom, the place where I would have been killed four years before if Terry McCaleb had not leveled a gun and fired on a man about to ambush me. This had occurred moments after I had saved McCaleb from a similar end.

I checked the paneling in the hallway where I remembered two of McCaleb’s shots had splintered the wood. The surface was heavily varnished but I could tell it was newer wood.

The shelves in the storage closet were empty and the bathroom was clean, the overhead vent popped open on the forward deck above. I opened the master stateroom door and looked in but decided to leave it for later. I went to the forward room and had to use a key from the ring Graciela had given me to open the door.

The room was as I had remembered it. Two sets of V-bunks on each side, following the line of the bow. The bunks on the left still functioned as sleeping compartments, their thin mattresses rolled up and held by bungee cords. But on the right the lower bunk had no mattress and had been converted into a desk. The bunk above was where four long cardboard file boxes sat side by side.

McCaleb’s cases. I looked at them for a long and solemn moment. If someone had murdered him, I believed I would find the suspect in there.

“Anytime today.”

I almost jumped. It was Lockridge standing behind me. Once again I had not heard or felt his approach. He was smiling because he liked sneaking up on me.

“Good,” I said. “Maybe after lunch we can head over there. I’ll need a break from this by then anyway.”

I looked down at the desk and saw the white laptop with the recognizable symbol of an apple with a bite out of it in silhouette. I reached down and opened it, unsure of how to proceed.

“Last time I was here, he had a different one.”

“Yeah,” Lockridge said. “He got that one on account of the graphics. He was getting into digital photography and stuff.”

Without my bidding or approval Lockridge reached over and depressed a white button on the computer. It started to hum and then the black screen filled with light.

“What kind of photography?” I asked.

“Oh, you know, amateur stuff mostly. His kids and sunsets and shit. It started with the clients. We started taking their pictures with their trophy fish, you know? And Terry could just come down here and print out eight-by-ten glossies on the spot. There’s a box of cheap-ass frames in here someplace. The client catches a fish, he gets a framed photo. Part of the deal. It worked pretty good. Our gratuities went way up with that.”

The computer finished booting up. The screen was a sky of light blue that made me think of McCaleb’s daughter. Several icons were spread across the field. Right away I noticed one that was a miniature file folder. Underneath it the word PROFILES was printed. I knew that was a folder I wanted to open. Scanning across the bottom of the screen I saw an icon that looked like a camera set in front of a photo of a palm tree. Since the subject had just been photography I pointed to it.

“Is that where the photos are?”