Pacific Beat

Chapter 21

They looped through the alley for a block, then came out on the sidewalk, past the reporters who were still hanging around outside the big house. Laurel Kenney stood on the seawall, looking down at the dead and dying fish that continued to float toward the shore.

For once, thought Weir, she looked questionless.

Becky aimed Jim onto the dock just short of her house, let him climb aboard her boat while she took off her heels, then steadied herself on his arm as he eased her aboard the Sea Urchin. It was a thirty-foot Bayliner that Weir had always loved — fast, eager, joyful in motion. They had bought it together when Becky got her PD job and Weir made detective, then she had bought him out before he quit the Sheriff’s and started outfitting Lady Luck, two years later. He noted with pleasure how well Becky had kept her up.

He climbed back out and untied the fines while Becky stripped the canvas cover and turned over the engine. A moment later, they were motoring into the bay, heading south toward the harbor mouth. Becky had put on an old pea coat to cut the breeze. Standing barefoot at the helm with her hair curling back and the black silk of her mourning dress protruding from beneath the tattered coat, she looked, to Jim, wonderful. He stood beside her and felt the reassuring vibration of the motor coming up into his feet.

“Who bought the roses?”

Becky spoke without turning her eyes from the yacht-littered bay in front of her. “They were bought by phone, on a company credit card on Saturday, the day before Mother’s Day. The florist was the Petal Pusher, way up in LA — that’s why it took so long to trace. The company was Cheverton Sewer and Septic of Newport Beach. The man who called it in was Dave Smith.”

“Do you know him?”

“No.”

“Talked to him yet?”

“No way. We’ve got some groundwork to lay.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Wait until we’re outside. I want to get past all this.”

A small sand shark floated by upside down, its pale belly glistening. Along the shore, the body count had grown; the smell on the water was stronger than on land, borne by onshore breeze. Sunlight struggled through a thick spring cloud cover, mixed with pollutants, cast a brownish pall over the city. Jim watched in rapt disbelief as a sea gull labored exhaustedly across this dire sky, then suddenly folded up as if shot and plummeted down into the water. A moment later, Sea Urchin slid by it — nothing but a lifeless mass of feathers with a wing protruding at an unlikely angle.

Becky turned to Weir, her face a mask of anger. “If we can’t turn this to our advantage, we’re the stupidest people I know,” she said. She sighed deeply. “It breaks my heart.”

“How’d you know I was looking at the cops?”

“Just put the pieces together. Ruffs statement, your early-morning visits from Dennison, all the personnel stuff you had up in your room.”

Virginia had provided the intelligence, thought Jim. Should he have assumed she’d spy on him? “How come you didn’t tip the papers?”

Becky glanced at Jim, the tiredness showing in her face. “Because you’d have been on the hot seat, Jim. I’m not without loyalty.”

She’d have put me on the hot seat in a second, thought Jim, if she thought I’d have sat still for it. Weir thought back to his days in the miserable Zihuatanejo jail, the long stinking hours he spent, marinating in the juices of his own regret over Becky. The feeling of being trapped in an eight-by-eight-foot cell while Becky lingered in freedom, unattached, lovely and perhaps even lonely, nearly drove him crazy. He imagined every pivot point he could as he lay there and watched the roaches trace frantic patterns on the walls, relived every moment when they had drifted further, entrenched deeper in opposing positions, or simply — as they had so often toward the end — hurt each other so as not to be hurt first. At each of these events, Weir had paused to imagine what he could have done better, but the sheer volume of those missed opportunities quickly overwhelmed and sunk him further into depression, fear, and hopelessness. In the end, sickness just burned it out of him. He lay trembling cold as the fever finally broke, realizing that he and Becky hadn’t made it because they were simply unable to make it — they were ill-suited, mismatched, star-crossed — whatever you want to call it. It seemed to Jim, in post fever clarity, that somewhere along the line, the trust had disappeared. Toward the end, it was an ugly little war. But the fever hadn’t burned out his desire; it simply had reduced it to elemental constituents. When he had come out of jail, rode the bus north, and finally stood on the ferry and watched the lights of the old neighborhood easing toward him, it was, with regard to Becky, a journey of strange new hope, of wild, impossible expectation. Neither he nor the fever had been able to change the fact that, in the center of his heart, he loved her and he always had.

Sea Urchin motored between the long rock jetties that frame the harbor entrance. The swell and chop met her as she crossed the visible border between bay and open sea, lifting her slightly, welcoming her into the maw of the Pacific.

Becky sat behind the wheel and Jim rested against the shining gunwale. She shook her hair against the wind and gave him a pressed, limited smile. “Cheverton Sewer is owned by Cantrell Development Group, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of PacifiCo. That’s what all the hugger-mugger was at the gathering. We had a couple of paralegals making the connections.”

Weir understood Becky’s smile now: She was trying to conceal her joy. If she linked David Cantrell’s company to Ann’s killer, he could suffer mightily. Becky Flynn and Slow Growth — both heavily opposed by Cantrell — could sail to victory, and Dennison would go down with the losers.

“Before you say anything, Jim, I want you to know we’re going to move very carefully on this. We’ll employ the press when we need them and not until. The way Virginia and I call it — it’s all or nothing.”

“Meaning?”

“We find out who killed Ann, then we use it to our best advantage. We don’t try to capitalize yet. If this Dave Smith killed her, we need him in the bag first.”

“So you offer to defend Goins now.”

“I need it. First, it will give the media something new to cover me on. The Times poll yesterday had me down thirty-nine percent to Dennison’s forty-three. I could use a nudge, two weeks before election. Second, if Goins needs a defense lawyer, he may as well get a good one. Third, if I’m Goins’s counsel, I can hire my investigator to gather evidence that will prove his innocence, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. It’s the only logical way to get to Dave Smith and PacifiCo while I’m a candidate.”

Weir saw it coming.

“Interested?”

“I’m interested in Dave Smith.”

“But not in helping my campaign?”

“As long as they’re one and the same.”

She cast him a long look, some slight amusement lingering beneath its surface. “I just told you they are.”

“Anybody with the number and a verified employee name could have used that card. It could have been stolen, lost, borrowed.”

“Those are all possibilities you’d be looking at. I’m not stupid, or did you forget?”

Weir looked off toward the horizon, one panel of gray set atop another. “You know about Blodgett’s special beat, patrolling the bay for dumpers?”

“Of course I do. Virginia goes out with him sometimes.”

“So did Ann.”

“Funny the things you learn when you stick around home.”

Weir ignored the sucker punch. To Becky, nothing was a sucker punch. He told her about his tail of Blodgett, the forty minutes on the water, the blown head gasket, and the buddy from Cheverton Sewer & Septic.

“You sure?” she asked.

“No, I dreamed it.”

Becky considered. “Dale Blodgett, Cheverton Sewer and Cantrell Development,” she said. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

“It raises the question of Blodgett and Dennison.”

Becky glanced at Weir and nodded. “Some of the stuff he’s pulled... hard to imagine him playing both sides.”

“Dennison could sit still for a lot, with an ear inside Virginia and you.”

Becky shook the hair from her face. “You’ve got that right.”

“How tight are you with him?”

“I’ve always kept my distance. Something about him. Virginia likes him a lot, though.”

“Not like her to read someone wrong.”

“No one’s perfect, Jim.”

“Mom and Ann were with him the night he saw the dumpers. Blodgett told me the boat looked just like this one.”

Becky studied him, open-faced. “And?”

Jim studied her closely. Becky betrayed no emotion he could recognize.

Then she throttled Sea Urchin all the way back and cranked the wheel to starboard. The engine whined, the bow rose, and the little boat threw up a rooster tail of spray that arced and flattened in the wind. She hit the swells hard, riding high and fast. Becky’s expression was one of controlled fury.

She had to scream over the engine and the thumping of Sea Urchin on the water, and the blasting rush of wind. “Do you believe that story? Do you trust Blodgett?”

Weir had to think about it while the spray swirled against his face and the boat charged west. “I’m afraid to!”

“That’s right — you’re goddamned afraid! That’s why you need to get to Dave Smith at Cheverton!”

“I’m not even licensed as a PI!”

“You don’t need no stinking license! I never thought I’d have to plead with you to find out who killed—”

“Shut up, Becky! Just shut up for once in your goddamned life!”

Becky cranked the boat hard to port, cutting a wide angle south, then cinched her into a tighter and tighter pattern, a dizzying concentric rush until Sea Urchin came to rest in a roiling sea of white water and exhaust.

Weir’s ribs ached from the force. When he looked over at Becky, he saw the tears running across the sides of her temples. She cut the engine and buried her face in her hands. “I hate it, Jim,” she said. “I hate what happened and I hate the way I feel and I hate it you don’t trust me and I’m just so goddamned afraid.”

He hesitated a moment, running his hand over her head. “Trade seats,” he said. “I’ll steer.”

They swapped places and Jim took the wheel. Becky huddled inside the worn coat, turning up the collar. Her feet, covered only in nylons, were pushed together for warmth, toes curling against the cool, clean bridge.

“I thought five drinks would keep me warm,” she said.

“Here.” He put an arm around her and brought her close. She nudged up next to him, kind of hunkering into the curve of his ribs, the old position. They used to tease each other about how well they fit. Her hair blew against his cheek. “You’re as bad as I am, holding it all inside.”

“I almost was a Weir, once.”

Jim was still amazed at Becky’s ability to frame him as the perpetrator of their demise, when it suited her. Certainly they had argued about it enough. But the whole topic, to Jim, had been rounded smooth by too much talk, like a stone by water. Yet at the center of it, there was still something jagged and inaccessible. Jim could never figure whether identifying this final truth was really what they needed, or if it was just another mystery best left unsolved. He had long suspected that in certain matters, the truth was overrated. Some things were more important. If he had carried away one bit of treasure from the whole dismal escapade in the Mexican jail, it was that, in order to go on, he had to forgive.

“I know we’ve talked it to death,” he said, “but I forgive you, Becky.” He realized it sounded a little ecclesiastical.

“Well, if it’s any consolation, while you were rotting in jail, I was rotting in freedom. I missed you.”

Jim felt tidal stirrings inside: anger on the ebb, love on the flood. “Maybe we could just forget it all and start again. Fresh.”

She pressed in closer to him but said nothing. Becky the lawyer, he thought, was an unlikely party to such a glib treaty. There was always the fine print. “You should have written to me.”

“I was trying to get over you.”

“And you’re telling me it didn’t work?”

“It was a miserable failure.”

She rested her feet on the deck now, toes still curled under in the nervous way that Becky had. Jim looked at them, fixed on the idea that they were probably the only feet in the world besides his own he could identify without the rest of the body attached. Did this count for something? The boat was clunking in the swells, adrift and at rest.

“I thought about leaving when you did,” she said. “For a while, it seemed you were right just to get out and find something more. I’d always been happy to be in Newport. But with you gone, I looked around and thought, Well, it’s a nice little town, but so what?”

“Don’t tell the voters that.”

“No. After a month or so, it passed. I mean, if you stay involved, it answers a lot of questions for you. Now I’m thirty-seven, I’ve realized that you can’t do everything. For every thing you decide to do, there’s something else you decide to leave undone.”

“Amen to that.”

“I’m changing inside, Jim. I’m getting to want a family. I want to settle in, raise ’em up, all that stuff I didn’t want before.”

“I hope you do all that. The world could use some little versions of you.”

She paused then. “You interested in that kind of thing?”

“Yes, I am.”

“All of you or part of you, Jim? The usual ambivalent mix?”

“Part, I guess, to tell the truth.”

“Which part?”

“The part that’s here right now.”

“But not the one that likes being away, that wants to be diving for somebody’s gold?”

Jim thought it through. “It’s not being away, though I like that. It’s not the diving, really, even though I love it. It’s not even someone else’s gold, although the idea of a few hundred grand in the bank sits rather well with me. It’s dumber than all that. Simpler. It’s... owning my time.”

“Oh, Christ, not that again. We’re all just borrowing, anyway.”

“The illusion of owning my time, then.”

“But couldn’t you have the illusion anywhere? In a nice town with a good girl, maybe a little boy to teach about diving and boats? Trade that for an illusion? You’re a romantic and that’s good. But the real romance is taking a stand, kicking ass to make it work. You gotta admit one thing, Weir — I was never in your face for long. You had a pretty long leash, about as long as one can reasonably get.”

“The length of the leash you offered isn’t exactly a selling point, Becky.”

She groaned, the wind yanking the sound toward shore. “I know. God. A fucking leash.”

For a second, she looked confused. It was an expression he hardly could remember seeing on her. But in that moment, Jim saw for the first time — truly saw and understood — that Becky wasn’t young anymore, that she was no longer the girl he had known, the teenager he had lusted after, the young woman he had come to love and almost married. It seemed a wholly intimate finding. She looked like what she was now: a thirty-seven-year-old woman with no husband and no family and the dictates of biology pulsing away inside, a woman whose primary fear in life is that she is smack-dab in the middle of missing it all.

He told her she was beautiful.

Becky studied him, then squinted out to sea. “I know I could have just stuck by you a little more. But Jim, you’re so... so touchy. You never tell me what you want or what you’re feeling. You’re worse than a Sicilian when it comes to holding a grudge.”

“Guilty, with an explanation.”

“Proceed.”

“Unavoidable genetic defects. Plus, I loved you.”

She smiled, settled closer against his side, and sighed. Jim wasn’t sure whether it was exasperation or something akin to contentment. There was always in Becky an elusive center; she was a moving target. She had turned her face into him and he could feel the softness of her cheek in the crook of his neck. The top of Becky’s head always had been one of his favorite smells. Jim partook.

He leaned his head against hers, closed his eyes for a moment, then gazed through windblown strands of her hair to the horizon. The swells rolled under them, not actually water, but the invisible energy that moves the water.

“Why don’t you find us a reef, Weir?”

He hesitated, weighing the consequences. “I think I will.”

The cabin was musty and cool. Becky opened the curtains over the portholes and locked the door behind them. She looked at Jim with solemn brown eyes and sat on the edge of the narrow berth, hands folded in her lap like a schoolgirl’s. The coat was still pulled up close around her neck, and her hair was a windblown nest.

“You okay?” she asked. “You’re moving funny and you’re carrying.”

“I ran into some irate police last night,” he said. He told her the story.

She listened intently, as Becky was good at doing. Weir almost could see the legal pad in her mind. She deduced that “Dispatch” was someone’s girlfriend, now guilty of impersonating a police officer. She counseled him to bring suit and, in the near future, cover his ass.

“Can we drop it?” he said. “I don’t want to think about that right now.”

She patted the mattress beside her and Jim sat down. He had scarcely settled when her mouth found his and her hand moved up between his thighs. In this, as in all things, he thought, Becky was a fast starter. Through the layers of coat and silk, hose and underwear, Jim prospected, finally stiffening two homesick fingers onto which Becky slid with expressed ease. “Ooohhh Weir, you’re wicked.” Then he found himself disengaged, guided gently onto his back, looking up at her as she got rid of his pants, unfastened a few key buttons and straps, wriggled away her underwear and climbed on.

“Oh, God, what they did to you.”

“I asked you to drop it.”

“Dropped. Dropped forever.”

In the chilly cabin, with the sea air damp around them, their connection formed a warm center, a literal home fire burning. She rested her hands on his stomach and settled. His back was killing him.

For Weir, it was like being shot from a cannon into yesterday. He could anticipate every movement and every pleasure that branched up through him. He was as dead center as a man can get. To Jim, this act suggested a closure around what had happened since they had fallen out, seemed to set aside those years of numb detente as a containable unit, a stage that they had to go through, something to be endured and learned from, as if being apart had been a simple component of coming back together. Beyond all that was the touch of Becky’s fingers on his scrotum, this upward, milking motion of hers. He looked up and saw her in profile, eyes closed, mouth open, her hair sagging in the heavy salt air, still wrapped in the old coat with the dress unbuttoned to reveal beneath the dark layer of silk her pale, smooth body, exposed like a new pearl, working upon him, breasts heavy and round, sweat glistening low on her neck where an artery throbbed fast with blood beneath the shining skin. When Becky came, she balled her free hand into a fist and clenched it beside her straining face like a singer hitting a high note. Jim joined her, a rigid, quaking arc that left nothing of them touching the mattress but the back of Weir’s head, his outstretched palms, the bottoms of his feet, and Becky’s trembling knees.

A few minutes later, Jim was looking at Becky beside him, bathed in the minor sunlight that came through the porthole and landed upon her face. He had forgotten how intimate, how secret, a boat can be. She spoke without opening her eyes, from what he had thought was a deep and satisfied sleep.

“Are you going to find Dave Smith at Cheverton Sewer and Septic, or am I going to have to get someone else?”

“You know the answer to that.”

A small smile crossed her lips. “Two hundred a day is what I told Emmett and Edith.”

Jim considered. “That’ll break them. I’ll take expenses for a week and see what I come up with. And I’ll tell you right now, I haven’t forgotten Horton’s pictures of Ann, or the fact that his physicals match up, or what he did back in Ohio. I call my own shots.”

“No leashes ever again, Weir.”

“Then do me a favor, keep me out of the headlines you’ll be getting.”

She squeezed his hand. “I’m going to hog those. Starting with a press conference tomorrow morning at ten.”

“That sounds like you.”

“Please be there.”

“Okay.”

“I still love you, Jim. I loved you even when I didn’t. I’ve got an idea where we’re going, and I know where I’d like to end up. My heart’s coming back alive, Jim. I want you to stay with me. Stay here in Newport, with me.”

Jim, in the afterglow of love, imagined himself a knight errant, questing for the grail — in this case a man named Dave Smith. He told himself as Sea Urchin rocked under him that he would pursue the matter with all his might, that somehow, solving the larger problem of Ann would set this and all things right.

Voices outside jolted him out of reverie, off the berth and to the porthole. Becky sidled up against the hull, bringing her dress to her breast.

Through the glass, Jim could see the sportfisher, forty feet of glistening white with a swordfish plank, a cabin with blacked-out windows, and the name Enforcer II written in blue script beneath the bow. There were three men on the deck, one on the plank, another two sitting casually in fighting chairs. He recognized Tillis, Hoch, and Oswitz; the others he knew by face but not by name. Six again, he thought, my lucky number.

“Who are they, Jim?”

“Newport cops.”

“Shit.”

Weir climbed into his pants, pulled on his shirt, pulled Poon’s .45 from its holster. He slapped out the clip, checked the six shells waiting like missies in their silos, then shoved it back and slipped the gun into the front waistband of his pants.

By the time he got above decks, Enforcer II had nosed closer. The man on the swordfish plank popped a cigarette into the water, then drew deeply on a bottle. The three men on the deck were all leaning against the gunwale and looking down at him like tourists spotting a whale. They all had drinks in foam cups. The boat’s exhaust puffed white from the stern, billowing against the water. She was thirty feet close before anyone said anything.

“Everything okay down there?” asked Hoch.

“Looks fine to me,” said Weir.

“Thought you might be in distress.”

“I just told you I’m not.”

“Got some company below decks? Female variety, perhaps?”

“None that I’m aware of.”

“That’s funny — smells kind of fishy out here.”

Chuckles came from the boat, carried away quickly by the breeze. She had drifted closer now — twenty feet off Weir’s bow, idling slowly. The man on the plank stood, tossed his bottle overboard, and picked up a rope. It astonished him, very briefly, that these guys would think about boarding. Weir saw clearly that things could get ugly fast.

“Don’t think about coming aboard,” he said.

“Maybe you need our help,” said Tillis. “Engine trouble?”

Becky chose this moment to come on deck, repackaged in her funeral black and pea coat. She waved to the men on Enforcer II. “Hi, guys.”

All six broke into yips and yipes, the idiotic screams that men must learn from Hollywood Indians in Western movies. Weir, in a flash, foresaw the fall of his nation. Enforcer II was close enough now for him to see the CF sticker, the custom rub rail, the pinstriping down the hull. He felt Sea Urchin’s engine rumble behind him, then stall out. Fuckin’ great, he thought. The yips got mightier and the man on the swordfish plank dropped his rope onto the deck of Sea Urchin.

“Tie us up,” he called.

“Not a chance,” said Weir. He threw the coil of rope into the water and cast a quick glance back at Becky. She was working the ignition with an insouciant look on her face, the kind of look that can advance from boredom to panic in a heartbeat. But Becky wouldn’t rattle: She caught him with her brown, unperturbed eyes and tried again to turn over the engine.

“Hey,” she called over the laboring starter. “You guys are Newport pigs, aren’t you?”

Oswitz yelled back. “Just plain old guys trying to help a vessel in distress. We’re looking for a way to be useful, mayor.”

“Then pool your IQ’s and get out. You touch this boat of mine and I’ll sue your ass straight into the twelve-mile bank. Trust me.”

“We trust you, mayor. Got any tits under that coat?”

More yipes and yips. Weir cast a shut-up look back to Becky, but she was visibly riled: a shade redder in the face and this icy glint of murder in her eyes. Becky’s nature was to fuel the fire. “Sure. You’ve never seen one?”

The Sea Urchin’s engine finally caught.

Hoch asked whether someone could come aboard and have a look at them.

Becky said sure, then, to Jim’s absolute disbelief, nosed the boat closer to Enforcer. The man on the swordfish plank dropped onto the deck of Sea Urchin and caught the rethrown rope. Weir was on him in an instant, grabbing a fistful of hair with one hand, jamming the .45 into the man’s ear with the other. He pivoted his prisoner to face Enforcer and called out. “Any excuse’ll do to blow his brains out. One more of you shitcakes boarding this boat comes to mind as a handy example.”

Becky had already put Sea Urchin into reverse and motored back. Enforcer slid momentarily to a thirty-foot distance. There was a look of befuddlement on the faces of the three men on deck. Oswitz actually looked to Hoch, as if for direction.

Jim forced his man’s head down to the deck and put a knee to his neck, jamming the gun in harder. The kid seemed about twenty-five, and scared. Weir’s whole body hurt. “What’s your name?”

He shook his head, then when Jim lowered his weight onto his knee, changed his mind and nodded a frantic yes.

“Name, bubba. Cough it up.”

“No.”

“Don’t know your name?” Jim really bore down now, jamming his knee into the crook of neck. There was an outside chance it might give.

“Needham. It was their idea, I just went along to—”

“Um-hmm, yes, I see, Needham.”

Weir hauled his man up, stood him upright and rabbit-punched him. It was a perfect blow that left Needham shuddering for a helpless moment, during which Weir pushed him overboard. It felt great, as if the report of Weir’s fist on hostile flesh was a form of cutting through the crap and lies, bringing him one step closer to the truth about Ann. Jim watched as he gasped and thrashed in the cold ocean, a wholly rejuvenated young buck.

He turned to Becky. His stomach was nothing but pain. “Step on it, Errol.”