Pacific Beat

Chapter 11

A late-evening breeze picked up, pushing flat-bottomed clouds west along the horizon while a pale white sun dropped into the Pacific. A palm tree rattled silver as Jim parked under it, across from Dale Blodgett’s house in north Newport. He was on the upper peninsula, Sixtieth Street, not far from where the mouth of the Santa Ana River forms the northern limit of the city. He’d passed three NBPD units on the short way here, wondering how the crooks had a chance in this town. Whoever took Ann had made it look easy.

Jim cut his lights and compared the mug shot of Blodgett with the face of the man who now bent in his driveway, lowering a trailored thirty-foot Chris-Craft into place behind a new Ford pickup. It was Blodgett, his face lit theatrically by the utility light that hung from the fore gunwale of the boat. The Chris-Craft, Duty Free, was set up as a sportfisher, Jim saw — a live-bait tank, two fighting chairs, a harpoon plank extending from the bow. Sixty thousand dollars’ worth of toys, he thought. Not bad for a police sergeant with a family who likes to work alone.

Jim got out, walked across the street, and started up the driveway. He’d gone only two steps when the air filled with a huffing sound undercut by a metallic whine, and a shining black shape shot toward him from his right. Weir hunched down and brought up his hands as the whine spun higher and the shape hurtled faster.

Blodgett’s voice was so loud, Weir could feel it hit his chest. “KNIGHT... DOWN.”

The dark rocket dropped as if shot. It lay growling up at Weir, a hypnotic collage of fangs, lips, furious eyes, flattened ears.

Jim’s heart was in his throat. Only now did he sense the weakness in his legs, feel the cool surge of panic breaking into his face.

Dale Blodgett looked at him from under the utility light. He was a tall, heavy man with a strong neck and a flattop haircut grown long at the sides in the manner of fifties tough guys. His face was a veteran: A thin scar ran perpendicular to his lower lip; a fighter’s mass of tissue clung to each brow. The left eyelid was heavier than the right, giving him an expression somewhere between sleepiness and sly humor. He had a barrel chest and a wide belly that didn’t look soft. “Do you have some business here, son?”

“I’m Jim Weir. Ann Cruz’s brother.”

“Knight,” he said warmly. “Friend.”

The change was instant: Knight’s muscles loosened, his tail thumped the cement, the snarling mouth closed, and Knight looked at Weir, then to his master, ashamed.

“Good boy,” said Blodgett. “Good Knight. Your nuts back in place, Jim?”

“It might be a few minutes.”

“Had a guy faint one time. The chain only reaches ten feet, though; he’d have choked himself silly if you’d have stayed where you are.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“I’ve been broken into three times here on the peninsula. I think some of the locals know I’m a cop, make a game out of it. I’ve been broken into exactly zero times since Knight became my burglar alarm.” Blodgett smiled, a tight little smile that revealed large crooked teeth. The heavy left eye seemed to glitter, almost gaily.

Jim moved in a widish arc around Knight, who gazed up at him with subdued but very apparent interest. Something in Knight’s face admitted that friend or not, he’d have a nice time tearing Weir’s throat out. Jim had never been a huge fan of the Doberman.

Blodgett came forward and they shook hands. “I’m sorry about Ann. I didn’t know her very well, but I really did like her.”

“Thank you. She was a fine woman.”

Blodgett gave him a cop-to-cop look, a mixture of genuine sympathy with an undercurrent of disgust in it. These swine, it said, it’s them and us. “I’ve got some coffee in the thermos.”

“Sure.”

“What can I help you with?”

“I’m doing what I can on my own, following up. It might be as much for myself as it is for Ann, or Ray.”

Blodgett nodded and handed Weir the steaming plastic cup. “I’m not a friend of Ray Cruz’s, but my heart goes straight out to him. I understand what you mean.” Blodgett waited, looking at Weir appraisingly, his left eye recessed, unrevealing.

“Can we talk here?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“There’s some suspicion a cop might have done it.”

Blodgett nodded. “I read Ruff’s statement. Everybody did, even though the chief tried to sit on it. You can’t very well hide something like that from a whole police department.”

“No,” said Weir. “If it leaked as far as me, I’m sure you guys were on to it before. What do you think?”

Blodgett shook his head and leaned up against the boat. “I can’t put any faith in it. Mackie’s always given us a hard time. He’s always too drunk to see straight. We all got a laugh out of that ‘statement,’ to tell you the truth.”

“What if he was right?”

Blodgett looked at Knight, who looked at Weir. “Then it’s one helluva dark day for the Newport cops.”

“Not as dark as it was for Ann.”

“No, you’re right about that. Jim, I hope you didn’t come here expecting me to talk about the men I work with. That’s not something I’d do, not with you, not with anyone on the outside.” The heavy left eye seemed almost to be laughing.

“Maybe we could just stay hypothetical a minute.”

“We never left hypothetical, Mr. Weir.”

“Okay, try this: Say someone on the force was hired to kill Ann. She knew too much about something — toxic dumping in the bay. Big money passed hands; a bad cop took it. Say Mackie Ruff saw exactly what he says he did. Say you’re me. How would you smoke him out?”

Blodgett considered, staring at Jim. Then he shook his head, turned to the trailer hitch, and bent down to hook up the cable fittings. “You’d have to know who was on, first. Then you’d have to know who was solo. There’s no evidence of two perps, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So, you find the solos whose physicals match up with the Crime Lab evidence. If Robbins has anything good from the scene, you could make a move — if it matched up.”

“If there wasn’t enough?”

Blodgett completed the connection and straightened up. “Then you as hypothetical investigator ought to figure you don’t have a hypothetical case.”

“But remember, if it was a cop, he’d clean up the scene. He’d know what to do, how to sanitize it.”

Blodgett smiled again — big uneven teeth, left eye merrily inscrutable behind the heavy lid. He shook out a cigarette and lit it. “Nobody can clean up everything.”

“Say he left enough to limit the field. Two solos who might have done it — according to the evidence.”

“Then you get the Dispatch tape, check the Citation Books and Activity Logs — see who was where, when.”

“And you find that each one had, say, half an hour unaccounted for, when she was killed.”

Blodgett’s expression flattened. The left eye was nearly closed, and the other fastened a suspicious beam on Jim’s face. Breeze hissed through the fronds of the palm tree by the driveway. “There are a couple of things you’re saying here, Weir, that I don’t like the sound of very much. One is that Dennison, or maybe your friend Raymond, was stupid enough to let go of the Dispatch tape and the Crime Lab reports. The other is, you’ve done all your hypothetical detective work, and landed on me.”

“Maybe I landed on a couple of people that aren’t you. Maybe that’s why I came to you first.”

“You ready to name names?”

“I could.”

Blodgett approached Weir now, a wide-stepping, arms-at-the-side movement. He was smooth for being heavy. His battered face, this close under the utility light, was even more battle-hardened. The kind of man, thought Weir, who was far more menacing at fifty than he probably was at twenty. Jim relaxed himself and felt the adrenaline mounting inside. Blodgett’s thick forefinger tapped lightly against his chest. “Don’t do that. Don’t say a name to me. If you’ve really come that far, go straight to Dennison, or the DA, or the grand jury. I don’t want to know. I’ve worked with some of those guys for sixteen years, and nobody standing in my driveway is going to finger one of them to me. We stand together, Weir; it’s them and us. Right now, you’re them.” He stepped back. “Still hypothetical?”

“Always was.”

A strange smile crossed Blodgett’s face, neither mirthful nor unforgiving. He sighed heavily. “I’ll give you something straight now, because I like your mother and I liked Ann, and you seem all right yourself. The night that Ann was killed, I was having coffee on PCH, at the café just south of the bridge. The fog was thick and the night was slow. The two other north-end units were there, too — Sims and Lansing, Blakemore and Nolan. At midnight, a patrol car came off the bridge, heading south, toward the Back Bay. Whoever it was, was way out of beat, because we were the whole north end — Lansing, Sims, Blake, Noley, and me. I couldn’t see it very well because of the fog, but it looked like one of ours.”

“Midnight exactly?”

“Midnight exactly. It might have been a security unit, that’s possible. It could have been a car from another department, for that matter. But it was coming off the peninsula, where Ann worked, and heading for the bay, where she died. It wasn’t moving fast and it wasn’t moving slow; it just kept with the traffic. That isn’t make-believe, Weir — it’s fact. And it’s all I’m going to say to you. I already don’t feel good about it.”

“Thank you.” Jim set the coffee cup on the Ford’s bed.

“Don’t come around here anymore. It’s nothing personal.”

“I understand you and Mom and Annie cruised the bay a few times. Toxic Waste patrol.”

“That’s right.”

“Did she ever tell you she was being followed?”

Blodgett stared at Weir for a long moment. “No. I didn’t know her very well. Out on patrol, we’d talk about the tides and the fish and who’d be a big enough asshole to dump into the bay. Nothing about being followed.”

“Did you find something out there that would make someone need to shut Annie up?”

Blodgett looked at Weir, running a hand over the heavy muscles in his arm. “I don’t think so. We’ve gotten some trace solvent. But Ann wasn’t the only one who knew. There’s Virginia and me and Dennison.”

“Mom thinks Dennison was scared about the patrol — what you might come up with.”

“And he’d use a cop to snuff her? What about everyone else? Ann was the least involved.”

“And the most vulnerable.”

“Doesn’t wash with me. I’ll let you know if something does.”

“Thanks again, Sergeant. See ya, Knight.”

The dog stared at him.

“Good luck,” said Blodgett.

Jim cruised the upper peninsula, looping in a wide pattern back toward Blodgett’s. The duplexes huddled close against the chilly night and the waves slapped crisply on the beach. Through the alleys, he could see the sand, paired crescents of shadow and pale light disappearing into darkness toward the water. The parked cars glistened with condensation, windshields clouded. He came toward Blodgett’s place from the opposite direction, parked five houses down, and cut his lights. Sunk down in the seat, he could see the glow of the utility light and the outline of the boat between the upper curve of his steering wheel and the dash.

An hour and a half later, Blodgett’s driveway went dark. Twenty minutes after that, the red back-up lights of the trailer glowed through the fog and the rig backed gently into the street. Blodgett cut the turn perfectly, easing the truck into a pivot that left it pointed away from Jim, heading toward Ocean Boulevard. Weir started up the engine and moved tentatively, duplicating the right turn with plenty of night between them.

Weir hoped that the Chris-Craft was big enough to cut Blodgett’s vision down to the sideview mirrors. Blodgett backtracked Pacific Coast Highway, cut across on Superior, and headed up into the industrial zone that separates Newport from Costa Mesa. Weir let a couple of cars between them. Following the sportfisher was like following a white elephant. The body and tranny shops slipped by, the custom-paint places, the machine shops and boat yards — chain link, modular buildings, trailers, security lights, watchdogs.

Blodgett turned left on Placentia, then right on Halyard. Jim drove past, then doubled back in time to see the boat disappearing through a chain-link gate topped with three strands of barbed wire. Two men slid the gate shut as the trailer wobbled past, then retreated to the dark confines. Weir parked past the entrance, across the way.

The compound was surrounded by the chain link and barbed wire. Behind it were a low one-story building with small windows, two modular “offices” that looked new, and a large lot filled with pump trucks, generators, drilling rigs, small Cats, mobile heavy-duty auxiliary pumps, and a few pickups. A plain black and white sign atop the one-story building read CHEVERTON SEWER & SEPTIC — EST. 1959. There was a new Corvette parked outside one of the offices. Weir lost sight of Blodgett’s boat as it moved past the heavy equipment and the fog closed in behind.

Ten minutes turned into twenty, then thirty. Jim listened to the radio again. Five minutes later, the two men opened the gate again and out came Blodgett’s rig. The trailer sat a little heavier on its springs, thought Weir, but it was hard to be sure. The deck of the boat was covered with a blue tarp. Tall shapes suggested themselves beneath the canvas. When Blodgett had made a ponderous left turn back onto Placentia, Jim started up and followed.

They left the industrial zone, followed Newport Boulevard west, then negotiated the loop-around bridge that left them southbound on Coast Highway. The same bridge that Blodgett’s phantom cop car used, thought Weir, the same bridge that Ann and her man had taken that night. The lights of the restaurants smeared by in the fog; the traffic signal ahead pleaded a faint and stranded yellow. There were four cars ahead of him. Blodgett has his hands full with the rig and the fog, he thought, as the boat lurched ahead, moving south still, toward the Back Bay.

Down Pacific Coast Highway now, past the yacht brokers and coffee shops, the restaurants and clubs, onto the Bay Bridge, to Jim’s right the static glitter of houselights in the fog, to his left the water of the bay widening, deepening, spreading darkly toward the eastern reaches where it doubles in salinity, seeps into the mud that never dries, stagnates around grasses for which it provides no nourishment, advances with mullet and catfish that prowl the uneasy bottom for food, moving farther east into a final exhausted eddy that leaves it flat and spent, prey to hours of unhurried sun.

At Jamboree, Blodgett’s boat turned left, then again at Back Bay Drive, continuing past the Newporter resort and golf course. Jim followed another quarter mile east, headlights off now, along the dark estuary, until the truck angled to its left, stopped while Blodgett unlocked a chain-link gate, then climbed back in and guided his rig into a wide turnaround that ended in a dock.

Weir pulled off the road, climbed the minor elevation of a hillock, and parked. Through the fog, Blodgett’s boat formed visibly, then vanished. Jim could hear doors opening and closing, scraps of voices blown to him in the breeze. So, he picked up a fishing buddy at Cheverton Sewer & Septic, he thought, ready for a night run off the twelve-mile bank? Weir got out, shut his door quietly, and moved toward an untended row of oleander that sheltered the dock entry from the road. Squatting amid the poisonous foliage, he could see the truck backing Duty Free onto the ramp, Blodgett driving and his buddy — a short man in a flannel shirt and a baseball cap — already aboard. A moment later, the ship was afloat, its propeller pulling it back into the bay. Blodgett left the truck on the ramp, climbed onto the dock, and ran out to the end. Duty Free glided in to pick him up, accelerating noisily. Within seconds, she had entered the fog, leaving for Weir only the departing growl of an overworked, poorly maintained engine.

Jim walked down to Blodgett’s truck, boot heels sliding in the sand, and climbed the fence. Blodgett is the kind of guy, he thought, who’s got a burglar alarm on everything. Jim peered through Knight’s smudges on the passenger-side window: an empty cup of coffee on the dash, a few compact discs scattered on the seat, a police radio fastened beneath the CD player. For a moment, he stood on the dock and looked toward the other side, but the fog choked off his eyesight at a hundred yards. Half a mile across, he thought, is where Ann went in. The water lapped against the pilings and a low-flying seabird hissed past invisibly above him.

Forty minutes later — it was 11:55 — Duty Free appeared mid-bay, engine clanking horribly, trailing smoke that mingled quickly in the fog. She labored into dock. Then, the reverse of what happened before: Blodgett off at dock’s end, Baseball Cap and Knight bringing the boat in close and finally running her up onto the trailer while Blodgett, knee-deep in water, helped to guide her on. Within five minutes, they were back in the truck and the stern of Duty Free was clearing the bay. Whatever was under the tarp was still there now. Jim watched the water steaming off the taillights as Blodgett followed the loop that would bring him to the gate, then back to the road. Weir let his truck roll down the hill, shifted to second, popped the clutch, and rumbled along the road well ahead of Duty Free.

He pulled off on a utility road by the golf course and waited. Two minutes later, Blodgett drove by, faster now, the boat swaying heavily upon its trailer. So, Weir thought, a sportfisher with no fishing rods, no tackle, no landing net, no game bags, no gaff. Two fishermen without a fish. A trip that took two hours to get ready for, and forty minutes to complete. If they weren’t after fish, what were they after?

He watched the trailer moving along the bayfront, heading for Jamboree Road.