The Narrows Page 3

  Lockridge nodded emphatically.

  "Oh, yeah, he was popping his pills right and left. Every morning and every night. We'd been out on a lot of charters together. It was his ritual-he set his watch by it: He never missed. And he didn't on this trip either."

  I made a few more notes just to keep silent so that Lockridge might keep talking. But he didn't.

  "Did he say anything'about them tasting different, or him feeling different after taking them?"

  "Is that what this is about? You people are trying to say Terry took the wrong pills and then not have to pay the insurance? If I had known that, I would've never agreed to talk to you."

  He started to get up from his bench. I reached over and gripped his arm.

  "Sit down, Buddy. That's not what this is about. I don't work for the insurance company."

  He dropped heavily back onto the bench and looked at his arm where I had gripped it.

  "Then what is it about?"

  "You already know what it's about. I'm just making sure Terry's death was what it was supposed to be."

  "Supposed to be?"

  I realized that I had used an unfortunate choice of words.

  "What I'm trying to say is that I want to make sure he didn't have any help." Lockridge studied me for a long moment and slowly nodded.

  "You mean like the pills were tainted or messed with?"

  "Maybe."

  Lockridge set his jaw tightly with resolve. It looked genuine to me.

  "You need any help?"

  "I might need some, yeah. I'm going over to Catalina tomorrow morning. I'm going to look at the boat. Can you meet me there?"

  "Absolutely."

  He seemed excited and I knew I would eventually drop a rock on that but for now I wanted his full cooperation.

  "Good. Now let me ask a few more questions. Tell me about the charter party. Did you know this guy Otto beforehand?"

  "Oh, yeah, we take Otto out a couple times a year. He lives over there on the island, that's the only reason why we got the multiday charter. See, that was the problem with the business but Terror never cared. He just was happy to sit there in that little harbor and wait on half days."

  "Slow down a second, Buddy. What are you talking about?"

  "I'm talking about Terry keeping the boat over there on that island. What we got over there were people who are visiting Catalina and want to go fishing for a few hours. We didn't get the big charters. The three-, four-, five-day jobs where you make the good money. Otto was the exception because he lives over there and he wanted to go fishing off Mexico a couple times a year and get his ashes hauled in the process." Lockridge was giving me more information and avenues of questioning than I could handle at once. I stayed on McCaleb but would definitely come back to Otto, their charter client.

  "You're saying that Terry was content to sort of be small-time."

  "Exactly. I kept telling him, 'Move the charter over here to the mainland, put out some ads and get some serious work.' But he didn't want to."

  "Did you ever ask him why?"

  "Sure, he wanted to stay on the island. He didn't want to be away from the family all the time. And he wanted time to work on his files."

  "You mean his old cases?"

  "Yeah, that and some new ones."

  "What new ones?"

  "I don't know. He was always clipping articles out of the newspaper and sticking them in files, making phone calls, things like that."

  "On the boat?"

  "Yeah, on the boat. Graciela wouldn't allow it in the house. He told me that, that she didn't like him doing it. Sometimes it got to the point he was sleeping on the boat at night. At the end. I think it was because of the files. He'd get obsessed with something and she'd end up telling him to stay on the boat until he got over it."

  "He told you that?"

  "He didn't have to."

  "Any case or file you remember he was interested in lately?"

  "No, he no longer included me in that stuff. I helped him work on his heart case and then he sort of shut me out of that stuff."

  "Did that bother you?"

  "Not really. I mean, I was willing to help. Chasing bad guys is more interesting than chasing fish, but I knew that was his world and not mine."

  It sounded too much like a stock answer, like he was repeating an explanation McCaleb had once given to him. I decided to leave it at that but I knew this was a subject I would come back to with him.

  "Okay, let's go back to Otto. You fished with him how many times?"

  "This was our third-no, fourth-trip."

  "Always down to Mexico?"

  "Pretty much."

  "What does he do for a living that he can afford to do this?"

  "He's retired. Thinks he's Zane Grey and wants to go sportfishing, catch a black marlin and put it up on his wall. He can afford it. He told me he was a salesman, but I never asked what he sold."

  "Retired? How old is he?"

  "I don't know, midsixties."

  "Retired from where?"

  "Just across the water. Long Beach, I think."

  "What did you mean a minute ago when you said he liked to go fishing and get his ashes hauled?"

  "I meant exactly that. We took him fishing and when we'd stop off in Cabo, he always had something on the side."

  "So each night on this last trip, you guys brought the boat into port, always to Cabo." "The first two nights in Cabo and then the third night we made it to San Diego."

  "Who chose those places?"

  "Well, Otto wanted to go to Cabo, and San Diego was just the halfway point on the trip back. We always take it slow going back."

  "What happened in Cabo with Otto?"

  "I told you, he had a little something on the side down there. Both nights he got cleaned up and went into town. I think he was meeting a senorita there. He had made some calls on his cell phone."

  "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 federates. 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 feel
ing 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."

  CHAPTER 5

  On 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.

  CHAPTER 6

  The 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 ca
me 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."