The New Black Mask Quarterly (No 1)

Arthur Lyons Trouble in Paradise

Jacob Asch was introduced in Arthur Lyons’s first novel, The Dead Are Discreet (1974), and in the eight Asch novels since, Lyons has written so convincingly about crime that he has been engaged as a consultant by the Los Angeles Police Department.

“Trouble in Paradise,” Lyons reports, “was inspired by a true case I learned of while doing research for a book in the Caribbean. Being a scuba diver myself, I was fascinated by the case, and although my version of what happened differs from the outcome of the actual case, I feel that this is the way it could have come down. It is the only Jacob Asch story in print.”

Arthur Lyons lives in Palm Springs, California, where he operates a restaurant called Lyons’ English Grill. He is thirty-nine.

“That whore did it,” John Anixter pro-claimed angrily. “I know she did. I want you to prove it.”

He was a tall and gristly forty-odd, with a long, rectangular face and brown hair that was deciding to be gray. His eyes were pale blue and had a no-nonsense expression in them. His dress was no-nonsense, too; a gray worsted suit, a white shirt, and a gray and blue striped tie. His hands were jewelryless except for an inexpensive Seiko watch. All in all, he looked no more than a fairly prosperous businessman; I would have had no idea he was worth $8 million if Harry Scranton hadn’t told me.

Harry was an attorney for whose firm I occasionally did investigative work and the one who had recommended me to Anixter. All that he had told me about the man, except for how much money he had, was that he had made it dabbling in the commodities market before starting up his own successful commodities brokerage firm, and that he was a hell of a nice guy. Oh yeah, he also told me that the man’s son had recently died in an accident, which was why he wanted to see me.

“What whore is that, Mr. Anixter?”

His face flushed. “The one Chip married. He couldn’t see what she was, but it was obvious to me the first time I laid eyes on her.”

“Chip was your son?”

He nodded, then turned and looked out the window. The office was plush, with elm burl walls adorned by deco light sconces and furnished with big, cushy chairs with great wide arms. “When I cut Chip off,” Anixter said, looking down the fourteen floors to the streets of Century City, “I thought for sure she would take the hint and leave, but she found another way to work it.”

He was trucking now and I was peddling slowly behind on my bicycle. I peddled harder, trying to catch up. “Work what?”

He turned and gave me a solemn look. “Three months ago, my son took out a life insurance policy worth $300,000, with her as the beneficiary. Two months later, Chip died under mysterious circumstances while scuba diving in the Caribbean. The authorities in St. Maarten have declared it an accident, but I’m certain that woman had something to do with it. Chip was an experienced diver and a super athlete. Scuba was one of his passions. She probably worked some sort of deal with the scuba instructor to do away with Chip and split the money.”

“Was an autopsy performed?”

“You have to have a body to perform an autopsy.”

“They never found his body?”

He shook his head. “All they found was his diving gear and swim trunks. Both were pretty chewed up.”

“Sharks?”

He shrugged.

One thing I have found with parents whose children have died unnaturally, murder is always a preferable alternative to suicide or accidental death. With the former comes a truckload of guilt and with the latter comes a capricious and uncaring universe.

“The insurance company has to have investigators on it, Mr. Anixter—”

He waved a hand in exasperation and sat back down at the desk. “There’s nothing they can do. Chip’s death is officially an accident. In the absence of new evidence, they’re going to have to pay off.” Two knots of muscle rose on his jawline, just below his ears. “I’ll see that bitch in hell before I let her collect a bounty on my son’s life.”

“How long were they married?”

“Five months.” He leaned back in his chair, and his brow furrowed. “My son was a screw-up, Mr. Asch.”

“The only thing he ever showed any interest in was fast cars and faster women. A lot if it was my fault, probably. I wasn’t the best father in the world. My wife — Chip’s mother — died when he was only nine and I was too busy trying to keep the business going to give him the supervision he needed. When he was a teenager, I had to get him out of one scrape after another. I always thought he would straighten up, even after he quit college and drifted from one job to another. I offered him a position with my company, but he said he had to ‘find himself,’ whatever that means. But when he came to me and said he intended to marry that tramp, that was the last straw.”

He paused, but he wasn’t through yet. He came forward and rested his forearm on the desk.

“I’ve worked my butt off my whole life, Mr. Asch. I came up from nothing and struggled to put something together. Too damned hard to sit back and watch it squandered on some fortune-hunting hooker. I told Chip if he wanted to marry the girl, fine, but he could support her on his own, because he wouldn’t get one more dime from me, before or after I died. We both said things we shouldn’t have. That was the last time I saw him.” Coldness in the blue eyes softened; guilt tugged at his features.

“You called the woman a hooker,” I said. “Did you mean that literally?” He gave a look of distaste. “They all hook in places like that.”

“Places like what?”

“The Paradise,” he said, folding his hands on the desk top. “It’s a topless bar on Beverly Boulevard. She was dancing there when Chip met her.”

I wrote it down. “What’s her first name?”

“Rhonda,” he said, as if he did not like the sound of the word.

“Where is she living now?”

“In Chip’s apartment.” He recited the address, then looked at me appraisingly as if I were a pork belly for which he was trying to guess tomorrow’s market value. “Harry says you’re good.”

Never one to deal well with flattery, I said nothing.

“That bitch took away my only son,” he said through pursed lips. “I don’t care how much money it takes, I want her nailed for it.”

It sounded as if he had lost his son years ago and wanted me to help him pin his guilt on the woman. For two hundred a day plus expenses, I was willing to at least try.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

Chip and Rhonda Anixter had gotten married in September, in Westwood, and I obtained a copy of the marriage license from the Hall of Records downtown. Her maiden name was Rhonda Jo Banks, and she was twenty-eight, two years older than Chip. She had been born in Arizona, had completed high school, and listed her occupation as “dancer.” I figured that was as good a place to start as any.

The Paradise was on Beverly Boulevard, on the edge of the Silver Lake district, in the middle of a fatigued city block of laundromats and seedy-looking Mexican and Vietnamese restaurants. From the outside, it looked like a dirty plywood and plaster box, covered with cartoon paintings of leggy, scantily-clad girls. Inside, it was a dirty plywood and plaster box with real girls instead of cartoons. The cartoons looked better.

The place was built like a dog pit, with tables set around the perimeters of the sunken dance floor, where an anemic-looking redhead in nothing but a G-string was gyrating listlessly to a Michael Jackson tune. “Flashdance” it wasn’t.

Afternoon trade was sparse and I had no trouble securing a table. Passing myself off as an old acquaintance of Rhonda’s, it took one hour, five beers and twenty-eight dollars in “tips” spread between the bartender and a bovine brunette named Noreen to find out Rhonda had not been around much since she’d gotten married. Noreen was particularly talkative, especially after I picked up some latent hostility from her and assumed the role of one of Rhonda’s jilted exboyfriends.

“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” she said in a snide tone, the hostility becoming less latent as she talked. “You’re in some good company. She was going out with the owner of the club, Arnie Phalen, when she met that rich kid. The minute she found the kid had bucks, she dumped Arnie on his ass. Strutted around here bragging how she was going to set herself up for life with that score. I guess the joke was on her.”

“Why is that?”

The corners of her mouth turned up in a selfsatisfied leer. “She came back in a few months ago, crying to Arnie about how the kid was broke. The kid’s old man was the one with the money and he’d cut them off on account of her I guess. He had about as much use for her as a case of herpes.”

“She been back in since then?” I asked, sipping my beer.

“Naw,” she said, waving a hand disparagingly. “She’s too good for this place. All she did when she worked here was bitch her whole shift about what a dive this place was and how she was gonna make a score and get out She must have thought she was Grace Fucking Kelly or something, the way she acted.”

“Arnie around now?” I asked casually.

She shook her dark, ratted hair. “He doesn’t come in till around seven.” She looked down at the blond dancing in the pit and said, “I’m up.” I took out my wallet. “Thanks for the conversation, Noreen,” I said, and left her an extra five as a tip, just for public relations in case I needed to talk to her again.

Her changebox snapped up the bill and she smiled warmly. She had a live one now. “My shift is over at six,” she said. “Stop back then and maybe we can have a drink or something.”

“Maybe I’ll do that.”

When I left, she was moving her big body to Bob Seger’s “Fire Down Below,” and she threw me a few hip-pumps and breast-flops as I went out the door.

The Anixter’s ex-connubial love nest was in a new, two-story, vanilla-colored apartment building on a tree-lined street of apartments scissored out of the same nondescript mold. After making sure that the red Porsche Carrera John Anixter had bought his son for his twenty-first birthday was in its slot in the garage, I went back around front, and through the glass doors. At the edge of the swimming-pool courtyard, I stopped.

A lone woman was sunning herself in one of the deck chairs by the pool, and I knew instinctively it was Rhonda. She had on a tiny string bikini, and her tanned body glistened with oil. She had a hard, flat stomach and long, slim legs, and maybe a little too much in the chest department, but being the magnanimous person that I was, I figured I could live with that. Her face, although not as spectacular as her body, was a solid 8, framed by a mane of ash blond hair. She shifted languorously onto her stomach and I wiped a hand across my chin and checked for drool. I could see why Chip had ignored his father’s advice.

Figuring that if she intended to go out anywhere it wouldn’t be for a while, I went back to the car and drove to Carl’s Jr., where I grabbed a quick infusion of cholesterol with cheese, and was back in place across the street within half an hour. I found a jazz station and settled back with my styrofoam cup of coffee. Shadows lengthened, cars went by, cars pulled in and out of the driveway to the apartment building, but she was not in any of them. It was almost dark when a black Corvette cruised by slowly, and parked in a space a few cars up.

There was something about the man who got out of the Vette that attracted my attention. Maybe part of it was the shades he was still wearing, despite the thickening dusk; the sun is always shining when you’re cool. He was short and weaselly-looking, with a thin, olive-complected face and oily black hair slicked straight back from his high forehead. To go with the shades, he wore a gray sports jacket over a black shirt, jeans and white tennis shoes. He didn’t notice me watching him across the street; he was a man on a mission.

I waited until he was through the glass doors of the building before I got out of the car and followed. By the time I got to the mailboxes, he was on the other side of the pool, disappearing through a door into the building. The door opened into a corridor and he was standing in front of a door halfway down it. He glanced at me as I went past him, pretending to be looking at apartment numbers, and then Rhonda Anixter’s door opened and he went inside.

I hurried back outside. The Corvette was locked, so I contented myself with taking down the plate number, and went back to my car. At two-fifteen, I was rudely awakened by the sound of an engine starting. I slouched down while the Corvette flipped a U and roared up the block toward Overland. I pulled out with my lights off and drove that way until we picked up some traffic. He got on the freeway at Overland and headed north to the Wilshire exit, where he got off. At Barrington he made a right and half a dozen blocks up, turned into the driveway of a single-roofed, ranch-style house with a lot of trees in the front yard.

He had taken off his shades and was locking up the Corvette when I drove past. The house was dark and there was a yellow compact of some sort parked in front of the Vette. Up the block, I stopped and jotted down the address, counted to one thousand, then went back on foot

At the neighbor’s hedge, I crouched down and peeked into the front yard of the house. There was no sign of Mr. Cool, and I assumed from the faint glow behind the curtains of the living room window that he had gone inside. I stood up and sauntered by as if it were perfectly normal to be out for a casual stroll at three in the morning, then went into a crouch on the other side of the driveway and used the body of the Corvette as a cover to reach the yellow car.

It was a Nissan. I took down the plate number, then duck-walked to the door on the passenger side. It was locked, of course. My flash located the registration attached to the sun visor in a leather-framed case. I leaned close to the window to get a look.

Barbara Phalen. Arnie Phalen’s wife? Maybe Phalen was making a comeback, now that Chip was out of the picture. Maybe he had never left.

I snapped off the flash and something hard and small and cold pressed against the back of my head. The hammer clicking back sounded like a sonic boom.

“Just straighten up nice and easy, asshole,” a voice said quietly.

I did as I was told. I didn’t know what caliber the gun was, but at that range, a pellet gun would have muddled some of my fondest memories.

“If you’re thinking of getting cute,” the voice said, “you’ll never think again.” A hand slammed me into the car and the gun moved down to poke me in the kidney.

“Easy.” I said, the pain straightening me up.

“Fuck you. Stand back and spread your feet and put your hands on the top of the car.”

I did it and his free hand patted me down. It brushed my wallet and plucked it from my inside pocket. The pressure of the gun went away as he stepped back to inspect it. “Turn around,” he said after a moment.

Without the shades he lost some of his weaselly look. He was not bad looking, in fact, in a greasy kind of way. His eyes were dark and deeply set. In the dim light from the house, they were devoid of any emotion except for a mildly contemptuous curiosity. “All right, peeper, what the hell are you doing sneaking around here?” The corner of his mouth twitched.

“I’m on a case.”

“What case?”

I considered that for a moment. “A little girl hired me to track down her lost Lhasa Apso. Named ‘Button, as in ‘cute as a?’ Maybe you’ve seen him. About a foot tall, blond hair, brown eyes—”

The twitch stopped and tightened into an angry line. He pointed the gun at my head again. “You know who you’re fucking with, asshole? I could have you made into an ashtray if I wanted to. Now, I’m gonna ask you again: What case?”

I pointed at the gun. “Why don’t you put that thing down? I have trouble talking when I’m nervous.” I was sweating; he seemed to like that.

One side of his mouth lifted into a lopsided, self-confident sneer. “You’ll find a way.”

I had nothing to lose, so I threw out a guess. “Your wife hired me to find out where you go when you’re supposed to be watching tits bounce up and down. I wonder what she’s going to say when I tell her you’re watching them okay, but the wrong set?”

The confidence on his face dried up and flaked off like a month-old Christmas tree. “You’re a liar.”

It was my turn to smile. “Let’s get her out here and ask her.”

He shot a troubled look at the house, then back at me.

“Of course, I’m always open for a better offer.”

“What kind of an offer?” he asked in a clipped voice.

“That’s open for discussion.”

The porch light above the front door went on and his head snapped around. A woman’s voice called out from the crack in the door: “Arnie?”

I looked at Phalen’s panicked face. He was the one who was sweating now. “Well?”

“Get out of here,” he whispered, his voice thick with hate.

I held out my hand. “My wallet.”

He hesitated, and Barbara Phalen called out again: “Arnie?”

“Coming, hon,” he called back, and tossed the wallet at me. In a hoarse whisper, he said: “Move your ass out of here. Quick.”

“I’ll be in touch,” I told him, and hurried down the driveway. At the sidewalk, I turned left and used the other side of the street to circle back to my car so she wouldn’t see me.

All the way home, I chewed myself out for my carelessness. But it was more than just the fact that Phalen and Rhonda now knew they were being watched that bothered me; it was Phalen himself. The man was bad news, I could feel it. Maybe it was the comfortable way he handled a .38 or the dead eyes and the hard sneer, or the silent, deadly way he’d pounced on me. And now he knew who I was. I figured I’d better find out who he was before he made good on his threat and I wound up a receptacle for some Mustache Pete’s cigar.

I got up at nine, not wanting to. I’d spent a fitful night being pursued by various people and things, and although I didn’t remember exactly who they were or why they were pursuing me, there had been a lot of running and jumping done, and I woke up exhausted. Figuring that if I was going to be chased around in my sleep I should probably know by whom, I went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee and drank half of it before calling Sheriff’s Homicide.

Al Herrera sounded chipper when he picked up the phone. I was glad to hear that; the last few times we’d talked he had sounded as if he were ripe for a stress disability.

Al and I went way back to my reporting days at the Chronicle, and if I had changed a lot since then, he hadn’t. He was still the same thick-skinned, straight-shooting, 100 percent cop, which was probably to his detriment. He took the job too seriously and had nearly suffered a couple of emotional and marital breakdowns because of it. “Jake boy, where you been keeping yourself?”

“On my knees, Al, looking through keyholes. How are things with you?”

“Great, if you like being up to your ass in dead bodies.”

After the obligatory small talk — how’s the wife and kids, that sort of thing — I sprung it. “Al, I need a favor—”

“Of course. Why else would you call?”

I told him that for a Mexican, he did a passable imitation of a Jewish mother, then gave him all the information I had on Phalen and Rhonda Anixter and asked him to run them for priors.

“And you need it done yesterday, right?”

“Today would be all right.”

He said he would be in the field until four or so and to call back then and I hung up and thought about my next step. Deciding a little soft-shoe might be appropriate, I dropped another quarter and dialed Rhonda Anixter’s number. Her voice was as sultry as her body — husky and vaporous.

“Mrs. Rhonda Anixter?”

“Yes?”

“This is Bob Exley at the Collection Department of Pacific Bell. I’m calling to inform you, Mrs. Anixter, that unless we receive immediate payment for last month’s bill, your phone will be disconnected on the first—”

The huskiness turned into a growl. “What the hell are you talking about? I paid that bill two weeks ago.”

“What was the date and number of the check and at what bank do you have your checking account?”

“Security National, West L.A. Pico branch,” she said in a vexed voice. “I’ll have to look up the number.”

“Just a minute, Mrs. Anixter, that may not be necessary. Running this through again, I see that the computer posted your check late, for some reason. I’m very sorry to have bothered you.”

“Sure you are,” she said in a nasty tone, and hung up.

I called Troy Wilcox. Troy was chief loan officer at L.A. First Federal, and two years ago, while working on an entirely different matter, I’d saved his ass when I tumbled onto a man who had skipped on a $75,000 bank loan Troy had okayed for him. Ever since, Troy had always been pleased to help me out with a favor when I needed one. And just as he would be pleased to do me a favor, the people at Security National would be pleased to do him one. There is no such thing as privileged information in the banking fraternity.

I was batting a thousand today; Troy was in a good mood, too. I gave him Rhonda Anixter’s name and told him him I needed to know if she had written any checks for sizeable amounts in the past two months, and if so, to whom. He told me to get back to him a little before three, that he should have the information by then.

Since there didn’t seem to be anything else to do until that time, I went home to pack.

Both Al and Troy were ready for me when I got back to them that afternoon, and on the red-eye to Miami, I mulled over what they had given me.

Chip and Rhonda’s joint account at Security National showed a balance of $746.98. Only two checks of any sizeable amount had been written by either of them in the past two months, one on September 1 to Wynee World Travel for $3500, which would have been for the Caribbean trip, and another a week later to “Cash,” for $2000, which was more than likely for vacation spending money. I hadn’t really expected Troy to come up with anything incriminating; if Rhonda Anixter had paid someone to kill her husband and make it look like an accident, she wouldn’t have been likely to write him a check from their joint account.

Al’s stuff was more interesting. Rhonda had no record in California, but the Vice boys knew all about Phalen. Besides being the owner on record of the Paradise, Phalen was part-owner and front man for two other topless bars that were suspected of being laundries for mob money; he was also the main man at New Eros, a distributor of hard-core porn films and magazines. He had been popped three times — for extortion, pandering, and burning with intent to defraud an insurer — but never convicted. That last one particularly interested me. The arrest report had been filed by the Sheriff’s Office, and I asked Al if he could pull it for me. After three-and-a-half minutes of bitching and moaning about how busy he was, he finally agreed, but said it would take a couple of days. I told him I’d be in touch, threw my bag in the car, and drove out to LAX.

My flight didn’t leave until eleven-ten, and the three double-vodkas I absorbed in the airport terminal bar and the two more I ingested on the plane allowed me to sleep straight through to Miami. After a two-hour layover there and another three hours on an Eastern 727, I was sober, awake, and buckling up for a landing in St. Maarten.

From the air, one side of the island didn’t look any different from the other — it just looked like one tiny green teardrop surrounded by a blue-green sea that seemed to change color on a whim — but according to the Caribbean guidebook I’d picked up in the Miami airport gift shop, St. Maarten/St. Martin had the distinction of being the smallest island in the world with two sovereignties. The French and Dutch both settled the island in the early 1600s, and legend had it that instead of fighting for possession, they’d decided to divvy it up by a walking contest. One man from each side walked around the island in opposite directions, and where they met determined the border. I hoped the resolution of my current case would be as peaceful.

I checked in at the Sheraton near the airport and caught a cab into Philipsburg, the Dutch capital. It was a cloudless, balmy day in the small, dusty town strung out along a sandbar that ran between the sea and a large salt marsh. Front Street, the main drag, was narrow and congested with cars and people, and the cab seemed to make about four feet an hour.

I tried to get into the laid-back Caribbean mentality by sightseeing out the window.

The town had an eclectic ambiance to it, which was a nice way of saying it was a mish-mash of architectural styles. Modern glass-sheeted shopping malls were stuck between old, pastel painted, colonial-style buildings and slat wood, front-porched houses. No matter how different the buildings were in appearance, they all had the same function — to sell to the shorts-clad, window-gaping army of tourists laden with cameras and chicly imprinted shopping bags as they thronged the sun-drenched sidewalks.

The police station was one of the older colonial buildings, at the end of Front Street. After identifying myself to the desk sergeant, I was turned over to a surly black cop named Cribbs who had handled the Anixter investigation. His attitude thawed a bit when I assured him I had not come all this way to question his competence, rather to consult his expertise.

Chip Anixter’s diving equipment was in a storage room in back. There was a weight belt, an air tank with the regulator still attached, and what was left of a pair of trunks. The trunks were shredded but the eight or nine cuts in the weight belt looked too clean to have been made by any fish. When I mentioned that to Cribbs, he just shrugged, and said in his West Indian accent, “You ever see a shark’s teeth? They are as sharp as razor blades.” There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing with him. Besides the lacerations in the weight belt and the fact that the tank was empty of air when it was found, the equipment checked out okay and did not seem to have been tampered with in any way.

The diving instructor Chip had gone down with, Stuart Murphy, was a California transplant who had come to St. Maarten eight years ago and started Mako Water Sports, an operation specializing in recreational dives. Except for Chip, the company had a perfect safety record, and Cribbs considered Murphy beyond suspicion. As for Rhonda Anixter, Cribbs thought her “cold” considering what had happened, but that was no crime. She couldn’t have had anything to do with the accident, because she had never left the boat during the dive. The entire incident was an unfortunate accident, but that was all it was. I thanked him and left.

Mako Water Sports was in a small wooden building that sat at the edge of a yacht marina. The desk inside was surrounded by racks of life vests, regulators, and air tanks. The man sitting behind it was a rangy, freckled, beachy type with a bleached-out mustache and pink splotches on his prematurely balding head where the skin had sunburned and peeled off. He wore swim trunks and a short-sleeved shirt covered with red hibiscus.

“I’m looking for Stu Murphy.”

“You’ve found him,” he said, smiling broadly. He had a lot of nice, white teeth.

“My name is Asch.” I handed him a card. “I’m down here working on the Anixter case. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you could spare a little time—” He looked at the card and frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t. I’m very busy.”

I looked around the room. There didn’t seem to be too much happening in it.

“I told everything I know to the police,” he said, picking up my skeptical look. “Why don’t you talk to them?”

“I did. They absolved you of all guilt in the matter. That’s not why I’m here. There is a lot of insurance money involved and Chip’s father is concerned that his son’s death might have been the result of foul play. Was there anything that struck you as peculiar about his disappearance?”

“Yeah,” he said sourly. “The whole damned thing. Believe it or not, mister, I’m not used to having my clients disappear on me.”

“That wasn’t what I was implying.”

He made a face and let out a breath. “Look, I don’t mean to sound rude. But all I want is to put this thing behind me.” He waved a hand at the room. “It wasn’t exactly the greatest publicity for my business, as you can see.”

I took out my wallet, extracted a fifty-dollar bill, and laid it on the desk in front of him. “Would that cover a quick run out to where Chip disappeared? No equipment. We wouldn’t even have to break the surface.”

“What do you expect to see from the surface?”

“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully.

He looked at the money, bit his lip thoughtfully, then put his hand over the bill and slid it toward him. He stood and went over to the rack of life vests, selected one, and tossed it at me. “You’d better put this on. If I lose one more client, I might as well close this place up and go back to the States.”

The trade winds were kicking up a good chop and my clothes were soaked by the time Murphy killed the engine of the speedboat and dropped anchor. “This is it,” he said.

We were two or three miles offshore and the water was dark blue, not green as it was in the sandy shallows closer to the island. The sunlight was clean and hard and glinted white off the surface of the sea. I looked down.

“How can you tell this is the exact spot?”

He smiled cryptically. “It’s my business.”

I let it go at that. “You two went down alone?”

He nodded. “He didn’t want to out with a group. Wanted a more personal dive, he said.”

“What kind of a diver was he? Good?”

The welcome warmth of the sun seeped through my wet clothes, taking the chill off.

“So he said. He was certified.”

“So what happened?”

“Good question. One minute, he was behind me, the next, he wasn’t. The only thing I can think of is that he got absorbed in something and got carried away by the current without realizing. It’s pretty strong here.”

“If the current is so strong, why did you pick this spot to dive?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “He did.”

“When was that?”

“The day before, when he came into the office. He said a friend of his wife who dove around here all the time recommended it.”

A mill wheel in my mind turned a notch and caught. “A friend of his wife?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Did he mention a name?”

“I don’t think so. I would’ve remembered if it was anybody local. Anybody local would’ve known there are better places to dive around here.”

The boat rocked in the waves and I put a hand on the windshield to steady myself. “Which way does the current run here?”

He waved a hand toward the green mountains of St. Maarten.

“Where did you find his gear?”

Again, he waved toward the island. “About four hundred yards from here.”

“I saw the stuff,” I said. “Cribbs seems to think a shark did the damage.”

“That’s possible,” he said. “They’re around.”

“Did you see one hanging around that day?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve seen them materalize like ghosts, out of nowhere.”

“The cuts in the weight belt looked more like they’d been made by a knife—”

“That’s possible, too. Anixter had a knife and he was out of air. The buckle on the belt was still fastened when I found it. Maybe it got stuck and he panicked and tried to cut it off. I’ve seen divers do screwier things in situations like that.”

“He cut off his trunks, too?”

He said nothing to that, just shrugged.

“Was that his own equipment?”

“No. It was mine.”

“How about his wife? Was she certified too?”

“No. She said she’d been down a couple of times, but didn’t like it. She just went along for the ride.”

“And she never left the boat the entire time you were under?”

“That’s one thing I’m positive about.”

“Did you see any other boats in the area?”

“Not that I remember.”

“You say the current is strong here. Strong enough to carry a man to shore?”

I went on with the train of thought. “Say a diver had been dropped off here earlier. Would it have been possible for him to have been waiting down there without you seeing him?”

“Maybe, if he was careful, and didn’t breathe a lot.” His eyes widened as the idea crystalized in his mind. “You think that’s what happened? You think somebody was waiting down there?”

“I’m just looking at all the possibilities.”

“Then what happened to the body?”

“If there were signs of violence on it, knife wounds, for instance, they would have to keep it from being found,” I speculated. “Who else knew where you were going to dive?”

“My partner, Sonny. But he had a group out that afternoon—”

“Don’t worry, I don’t consider him a suspect.”

He shrugged. “As far as I know, only the four of us knew.”

“How did Mrs. Anixter act when you told her you couldn’t find her husband?”

He looked at me strangely. “That was something that always bothered me.”

“Why?”

“When I came up with his equipment, she got hysterical. Cried and wailed all the way back to shore. She only stopped long enough to ask one question.”

“What was that?”

“She wanted to know what the waiting period was before someone was declared legally dead.”

The entire flight back to L.A. my thoughts drifted as unrelentingly toward the solution as that St. Maarten current ran toward shore. No matter how hard I tried to swim in other directions, I wound up heading the same way.

It was almost ten in the evening when I pulled into my parking slot in front of my apartment, dog-tired and suffering from an intense case of heartburn from the catered cardboard the Eastern stewardess had jokingly referred to as “dinner.” All I wanted was to make myself a strong drink and crawl into bed. I was definitely not in the mood for company; especially the two movie-extra heavies who detached themselves from the shadows and materialized on each side of my car.

They yanked open the doors and the one on the passenger’s side stuck a .45 Browning automatic in my face. He was big and beefy and had a wide, loose face that gravity had gone to work on. The face didn’t smile. “He’ll drive,” was all he said.

The one on the driver’s side nudged me, and I moved over to keep from being sat on. They wedged me in firmly between them and the driver backed my car out of the driveway. The gun was jammed up under my rib cage, making it hard to breathe. The driver turned right onto Pacific and headed toward the Marina. He was slimmer than the other one, with a bony brow and a nose that someone had rearranged onto the side of his face, then decided it looked better where it had been, and moved it back again.

“Where are we going?” I asked, trying to sound calm. I wasn’t calm. I was scared. Very scared. Nobody answered.

He got onto Washington. Longingly, I watched the tall, lighted office buildings of Marina del Rey passing outside the window. I thought about the couples and swinging singles out there in their favorite watering holes, drinking and dancing and performing their birdlike courtship rituals, trying to get the magic going for a night. They weren’t exactly my kind of joints, but I wasn’t so narrow-minded that I wasn’t willing to bend a rule for an evening. “You guys want to pick up some chicks? I know a great place right over here—”

The gun barrel tried to find the seat behind my back and I sucked in some air and shut up. We got onto Lincoln and crossed Ballona Creek and the buildings were gone as we headed into the barren brown hills. The driver turned off onto a dirt road and we churned up dust for a short distance until he pulled up and stopped in front of a fence at the edge of the runway of a private industrial airport. They opened the doors and got out; the driver had a gun now too, a .38. “Out,” the sagging-faced man said.

There were no stars, just a limitless blackness. The red lights bordering the runway blinked in sequence, away from us, beckoning planes from the dark and lonely sky.

“Okay,” Saggy Face asked. “Who are you working for?”

“Truth, justice, and the American way,” I said, I don’t know why.

Nose Job stepped in fast and brought a hook from somewhere south of Tierra del Fuego that sent me to my knees, gasping for air like a sick guppy. He bent down and grabbed me under the arms, hoisted me up easily and leaned me against the car. Saggy Face leaned close, his breath hot and moist in my face. He was chewing a mint; I guess there’s always something to be thankful for, if you just look for it.

He jammed his gun in my crotch. That didn’t feel too good, either, but I couldn’t work up enough breath to tell him. “Now listen, shit-for-brains,” he said, “we can dance all night if you want, but we’ve all got better things to do, including you, I imagine. Now, I’m gonna ask you one more time: Who are you working for?”

I had to admit, he was a hell of a debater. “John Anixter,” I gasped, barely.

He nodded and smiled and stepped back. He nodded at Nose Job, who put away his gun and grabbed my wrist before I had a chance to resist. He yanked my hand out and held it on the hood of my car while Saggy Face brought the barrel of the .45 down on it. I screamed as the pain shot halfway up my arm to my elbow, then I slid down the side of the car.

All I could do was cradle the hand and rock back and forth in the dirt as Saggy Face hovered over me and said: “The nuns used to do that to me in school when I did something I shouldn’ta. You been doing something you shouldn’ta, Asch. You been sticking your nose in other people’s private business. I think we both know who I mean. Now if you keep it up, we’re gonna have to come back and visit, and if we do, it ain’t gonna be a slap on the wrist, it’s gonna be traction-time. You get where I’m coming from?”

I might have said yes, I’m not sure. My hand felt as if it were full of broken glass.

“We’ll leave your car back at your apartment,” he said, and they got into the car and drove away, leaving me there.

I watched my taillights recede down the road and stood up. A cold, damp fog had begun to roll in from the ocean, chilling the sweat on my face and making me shiver. Maybe it would numb my swelling hand. I took a deep breath and started off. It was going to be a long, cold walk home, but I didn’t mind. I kind of enjoyed being by myself.

I woke up groggy from the pain pills the E.R. doctor had given me. I also had a headache, which got worse when I reached up and smacked myself with the cast I’d forgotten about that was holding my two broken metacarpals in place. I swore and rubbed my head with my good hand, then got up and made coffee. I made extra noise doing that, thinking about how I owed those guys and how I would more than likely never get the chance to repay them.

After three cups, I’d cleared enough cobwebs to call Al. He had Phalen’s arrest report. I thought about telling him about my dance partners last night, but rejected the idea. He would have just wanted me to waste a lot of time looking at mug shots, and I wasn’t in the mood. It wouldn’t have done any good, anyway. Even if I could have identified them, they would have had six witnesses who had been playing poker with them last night, my car was outside where they had thoughtfully dropped it, and there was no way to prove that my hand had not been stepped on when I’d bent down to pick up a quarter from the sidewalk. My blood pressure went up ten points when I thought about it, but I kept my mouth shut and took down what Al gave me.

Phalen had been arrested after the fire department had found evidence of arson in the grease fire that completely destroyed his Encino restaurant, Arnie’s Greenhouse. Traces of accelerants, possibly gasoline, had been found in the kitchen area where the fire had started, but Phalen claimed that those were possibly cleaning solvents which had been kept in a closet there. The case was weak, but it had been filed, anyway.

I thanked Al and called a friend of mine at Hooper Holms. The Hooper Holms Casualty Index in Morristown, New Jersey, contains the names of more than six million individuals and lists their insurance histories. The purpose is to spot insurance fraud. They had Phalen’s name. Before moving to California, Phalen had owned two buildings in Baltimore that had mysteriously gone up in flames. No legal charges had ever been brought against him in those cases and the insurance claims had been paid.

Arnie the Torch. With three fires to his credit in the past ten years, one more business going up in smoke would certainly bring him more heat than just the combustible kind. Maybe he figured it was time to humanize him claim base.

I called Anixter and gave him a report. When I told him about my welcome home committee, he sounded shocked. “My God. Are you all right?”

“A broken hand. They were just administering an object lesson. They let me know that next time, the damage would be more extensive.”

“You think they were working for this Phalen character?”

“Yeah, I think. And now he knows I’m working for you, not his wife.”

“Have you told the police?”

“It wouldn’t do any good—”

“But if he and Rhonda have been carrying on an affair all this time, and he’s the kind of man you say he is, they could have plotted Chip’s death from the beginning. He could have targeted Chip as a mark and sent her after him.”

That thought had crossed my mind. Phalen certainly had the connections and the experience, and his mind seemed to run in those directions. “It’s possible,” I said, more to keep him from running off on that track than anything. “Did Chip own his own scuba gear, Mr. Anixter?”

“Huh? Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“I should be. I paid enough for it. Why?”

I bypassed the question. “I’d like to put a twenty-four hour surveillance on both the woman and Phalen, Mr. Anixter, but that would run into some money—”

“I told you I don’t care what it costs,” he snapped.

My kind of client. I told him I’d keep in touch, then called Transcontinental Life. The agent handling the Anixter claim was named Manning and I repeated what I’d learned to him, then asked if he could send an investigator over to Rhonda Anixter’s apartment and on some pretext ask to see Chip’s diving gear. When he asked what I was looking for, I told him I basically wanted an inventory of what was there. He said it should be no problem, and promised to get right on it.

I called some people I knew and arranged for round-the-clock surveillance on both Rhonda and Phalen, warning them to be careful, then called the phone company. I told the service rep that my name was Chip Anixter and that I’d just gotten my phone bill and noticed I’d been billed for a call to Fort Lauderdale I’d never made. I gave her Rhonda’s number and she came back on the line and said she could find no record of any such call billed to that number. Indignantly, I asked what calls had been made in the past month that she did have a record for, and she read off a list. I took them down and hung up.

Out of the sixteen toll calls Rhonda had made, two were to a number in Yuma, Arizona, seven were to a number in Los Angeles, and four to a Hollywood number. I started dialing. The Hollywood number, as I suspected, was the Paradise; all the calls had been made since she had returned from the Caribbean. The Los Angeles number belonged to the law firm of Sadler, Bacon, and Pitts, Rhonda’s attorneys. A woman named Zelda Banks answered the Yuma number when I called and it took a four-second scam to find out she was Rhonda’s mother.

Manning called back after lunch. “There’s nothing there,” he said. “She told my guy that she trashed the stuff after the accident. Too painful for her to keep, she said.”

I couldn’t help grinning.

“Another little item of note,” he went on. “She’s got a new attorney. A young, Beverly Hills fire-breather named Cohen. We’ve come up against him before in a couple of questionable fire claims. He’s already talking a five-figure lawsuit for damages unless we can show good cause why her claim shouldn’t be paid.”

“When did this happen?”

“We were notified of the change of counsel this morning, right after I talked to you.”

“How long would a lawsuit take to settle?”

“Months, years, who knows?”

“Tell them they’re going to have to sue. Tell them there’s new evidence to dispute the validity of the claim.”

“But there isn’t, really—”

“They don’t know that. Besides, there might be, if we can drag this thing out.”

“I don’t know if the company will go for it—”

“Do what you can do.”

He promised to try. I sat there, thinking about it, then went down to my car and drove downtown. Arnie Phalen’s arson case was listed in the index of the Superior Court. I took down the number and gave it to the clerk, who came back with a file. There wasn’t much in the file. The case had been dropped in preliminary for lack of evidence. Harold Cohen must have done a good job representing his client.

Phalen must have thought Rhonda’s attorney was a little weak and put his own man in to push a little harder. I couldn’t blame him, really; he was merely protecting his investment. Just as he had been protecting it when he’d sent his goons to break my hand.

There wasn’t much to do now but wait, so I went home, took a pain pill, made myself a drink, and started.

The waiting ran into a week. Harold Cohen screamed and threatened, but Transcontinental stood firm. Phalen stayed away from Rhonda, but he visited Cohen’s office twice during the week.

I was taking the Monday morning shift at Rhonda Anixter’s apartment when the Porsche pulled out of the driveway and headed down the street. I put the glazed doughnut I was eating down on the front seat and followed her to I-10, where she headed east. She drove fast and it was hard to keep up in my old Dodge, but I managed to keep her in sight all the way to the Harbor freeway. She lost me there, but I had a pretty good idea where she was going. I confirmed it when I pulled up across from the Paradise and saw the Porsche parked in the lot.

Twenty minutes later, she came through the front door and headed to her car. She was wearing big sunglasses and had her hair up, but even without makeup she made me drool. It made me sad that this was as close as I would ever get to her, playing Peeping Tom, but then I guess we all have our roles to play in life. Maybe I should brown-nose the Director more...

She turned right out of the driveway and headed toward Vermont, but two blocks up she suddenly pulled over to the curb, so I had to drive past her and park in the next block. I watched through my rear window as she got out of the Porsche and went to the curbside mailbox. Her body looked spectacular in a red tube top and tightfitting jeans, but my eyes were on the businesssized envelope she pulled out of her purse and dropped into the box.

She got back into her car and I waited until she had turned on Vermont before I got the fifteen colored blotters from the trunk of my car and walked back to the mailbox.

The pickup time marked on the box was 4:15, two hours away. I opened the mailbox, dropped in the blotters and went back to my car. 1 stopped at a nearby greasy spoon and killed some time downing a tuna fish sandwich and four cups of coffee, and was back at the mailbox by quarter to four.

The mail truck pulled up at 4:21, by my watch, but then my watch may have been a little fast. The mailman was opening the box when I trotted up, wearing my most worried expression. “Excuse me—”

He looked up, startled. “Huh?”

He was young, with shoulder-length dark hair and a beard. I hoped his attitude matched his appearance. What I needed was a little hang-loose flexibility, someone who would be willing to bend the rules a little to help out a fellow human being in distress.

I pointed up the street, and tried to put urgency in my voice. “I just live up the street here at 1015. I mailed a letter this afternoon and I’m sure I sent it to the wrong address. It’s a check, and Jesus Christ, if it gets into the wrong hands and gets cashed, I’d be up shit’s creek.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what I can do about it—”

“If I could just take a look at the letter and see, I’d know whether to cancel the check or not—”

He frowned, his mouth following the lines of his mustache. “I can’t go looking through all this mail—”

“You won’t have to,” I assured him. “After I mailed it and realized what I’d done, I took some blotters and dropped them in the box. The letter should be right below them.”

He looked doubtful. “I don’t know...”

“Look, I don’t have to touch anything. I know that’s probably against the postal regulations. You can read me the address. I don’t want the letter back or anything. I just want to know whether I should call the bank and cancel the check. I mean, if the check gets into the wrong hands, man, I’ll really be screwed.”

He bit his lip and made a sloughing motion with his shoulders. “I guess it’d be okay.”

“I really appreciate this,” I said truthfully.

The blotters were near the top of the pile of mail. He took the letter directly below them and picked it up, holding it away from me so I couldn’t see it. “Charles Albertson?”

That was probably it. For some reason, they always seemed to use their own first names or the same initials. The lack of imagination of the typical criminal mind never ceased to depress me. “That’s the one.”

“Two thirty-four Montvue Road,” he read. “Old Towne, Montserrat.”

“That takes a load off my mind, thanks,” I said. “That’s the right address.” He handed me back my blotters and I thanked him again and jotted down the address in my notebook on the way to the car. I called my travel agent from a pay phone down the street and booked the first flight out of Miami, with connections to Antigua and Montserrat. Then I called Barbara Phalen and filled her in about her husband’s affair with Rhonda Anixter. I figured I might as well have something nice to think about on the plane.

Montserrat was a green and rugged island paradise of forested mountains, manicured fields, and black sand beaches. Old Towne was a collection of affluent hillside houses overlooking a golf course and the sea. Two thirty-four Montvue was a pink house with a white shingle roof, surrounded by a white wrought iron fence festooned with flowers. I told my cab driver to wait for me and went up the walk to the front door.

The day was hot and sunny and the front door was wide open to let in the cool breeze that blew steadily from the ocean. I stepped inside and called out: “Hello?”

I heard his thongs slapping the tile floor before he appeared around the corner dressed in a pair of swim trunks. He had the unintelligent good looks and the lean, tanned body of a bid who surfed a lot and played volleyball on the beach and little else. His curly blond hair was wet.

“Hello, Chip.” I looked around the place. It was light and airy, with whitewashed walls and rattan furniture. A swimming pool was visible out back through the open louvered doors. No wonder he needed money. “I can say one tiling for you; you set yourself up well. What’s the rent like?”

He stared at me, open-mouthed. The words were barely audible. “Who are you?”

“A detective hired by your father.”

His expression turned to disgust and he threw both hands into the air and let them fall to his sides. “Shit. Dear old Dad. He even had to fuck this up—”

He was reverting to form — a whiner. “You’re lucky he did. Rhonda had no intention of bringing that $300,000 to you. Why should she when she could have it all? You’re legally dead and if you suddenly turned up alive, you’d be prosecuted for insurance fraud. By that time, she’d be long gone. She only agreed to send you money because she wanted to keep you placated and underground.”

“How did you know about the money?” he asked, surprised.

“I got a look at the envelope it’s being sent in. I knew that if the insurance settlement was held up long enough, you’d more than likely run out of money and have to send for some.” I paused. I wanted to savor the look on his face when I told him. “She got it from Arnie Phalen.”

His eyes widened. “Phalen?”

“He’s in for a piece now. He found out what the scam was and cut himself in. She’s even using his attorney. They’ve been having a good time together since you’ve been gone, by the way.”

His hands clenched into fists and he stepped toward me. “You’re a liar—”

I wasn’t going to stand for any of that stuff; I figured I could handle him one-handed if I had to. I sidestepped him and put my good hand on his chest and shoved him back, hard. His foot hit the bottom of one of the rattan chairs and he lost his balance and sat down. I moved forward so that he couldn’t get up without being hit. He didn’t try.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “You were had, boy, from the moment she set her sights on you. Your old man was right. She was only after the money.”

He stared up at me hatefully, like a beaten dog.

“Shit.”

“That’s what you’re in.” I turned and started toward the door.

“Hey!” he shouted after me. “Where are you going?”

I stopped and turned around. “To find a beach somewhere. I’ve been in the Caribbean twice in a week, and I don’t even have a tan.”

He jumped up out of the chair and his hand jerked up. “Wait. What about me?”

I shrugged. “I was hired to find out what happened to you, not babysit. I don’t think I’d care for that job.” I held up my cast. “You’re not my favorite person, boy. It’s because of you I have this.”

I started to go, then turned back.

“My advice to you would be to get your tail back to ‘dear old Dad’ as fast as you can and start doing some serious brown-nosing, because you’re going to need his money to pay for your lawyer. If you lay it out for the insurance company now, you might just get off with probation.”

I left him standing there and took the cab to the airport, where I called John Anixter. The phone connection was lousy, but it was good enough to get the message across. He sounded very happy at first to learn his son was alive, then he just got plain mad. He told me to “let the snot-nosed little sonofabitch find his own way back,” and informed me I could expect a bonus when I got back.

I caught a LIAT puddle-jumper back to Antigua and checked into a quaint, two-hundred-year-old hotel in Nelson’s dockyard on the isolated side of the island and spent the next four days soaking up some serious sun and a lot of rum punches and listening to the gentle lilt of steel bands. If there was trouble in paradise, it wasn’t going to find me.