The Way Some People Die

Chapter 17

I had questions I wanted to ask Galley Lawrence in private, but the police had got to her first. I always believed in giving the police an official priority, when they got there first. So I stayed on the highway and drove south through Santa Monica.

It was after four o’clock when I reached the Pacific Point Hospital. I passed up the information desk and went straight upstairs to Room 204. Mario Tarantine’s bed was empty. The other bed in the room was occupied by a small boy reading a comic book.

I checked on the room number again, and went down the corridor to the nurses’ station. A gimlet-eyed head nurse looked up from a chart: “Visiting hours are over. We can’t run a hospital if visitors don’t obey regulations.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “Did Mr. Tarantine go home?”

“Mr. who?”

“Tarantine, in 204. Where is he?”

Her sharp little angled face expressed stern disapproval. “Yes, he did go home. Against his doctor’s orders and his own best interests, he put on his clothes last night and walked out of the hospital. I suppose you’re a friend of his?”

“I know him.”

“Well, you can tell him that if he has a relapse, on his own head be it. We can’t run a hospital if patients won’t cooperate.” The waspish buzzing followed me down the corridor.

I drove across town to the end of Sanedres Street, and parked in front of Mrs. Tarantine’s cottage. The late afternoon sun shining through the laurels in the front yard made gold filigree patterns on the worn lawn. I tapped on the glass door and a man’s voice called: “Come in.”

I turned the knob and stepped directly into a small dim living-room. The air in the room smelled of spices and scrubbed floors and rotting flowers. The plaster wall opposite the door was almost covered with a crude painting of a four-masted schooner in full sail. Above the warped mantelpiece a tarnished gold Christ writhed on a dark wood cross.

In front of the dead fireplace, Mario Tarantine was sitting with his legs up on a time-eaten mohair davenport, a white pillow behind his bandaged head. “You again,” was all he said when he saw me.

“Me again. I tried the hospital first. Are you all right?”

“Now that I’m getting some decent food I’m all right. You know what they tried to feed me in that hospital? Chicken broth. Fruit salad. Cottage cheese.” His swollen mouth spat out the words as if he could taste their flavour. “How can I get my strength back on cottage cheese? I just sent Mama down to the butcher shop for the biggest steak she can find.” He smiled painfully, showing his broken front teeth. “What’s the word?”

“About your brother? He’s been getting around. Your boat is gone, but I suppose you know that.”

“The Aztec Queen?” He leaned toward me, heavy-shouldered, the old davenport creaking under his weight. “Gone where?”

“To Mexico, perhaps. Wherever Joe’s gone.”

“For Christ’s sake!” His dark eyes, peering distracted from the ruined face, glanced around the room. His gaze rested on the gilt Christ above the mantel, and dropped. He stood up and moved towards me. “How long has the boat been gone? How do you know Joe took it?”

“I talked to Galley. She dropped him near the yacht basin early this morning, four or five o’clock. Does Joe have a key to the boat?”

“The bastard has my keys. You got a car with you? I got to get down there.”

“I’ll drive you if you’re feeling up to it.”

“I’m feeling up to it. Wait, I’ll get my shoes on.” He shuffled out of the room in stocking feet, and stamped back wearing boots and a leather jacket. “Let’s go.”

He noticed that I was looking at the painted schooner on the wall. It wasn’t a lithograph, as I’d thought at first glance, but a mural painted directly on the plaster, with a black frame painted around it. The colors were garish, made worse by an impossible sunset raying the stiff water, and the draftsmanship was wobbly. Still, the leaning ship looked as if it was moving, and that was something.

“How do you like the picture?” Mario said from the open door. “Joe did it when he was a kid. He wanted to be an artist. Too bad he had to grow up into an all-round heel.”

I saw then that the painting had a signature, carefully painted in script: Joseph Tarantine, 1934. It had a title, too, probably copied from a calendar: When My Ship Comes In.

I drove downhill to the palm-lined boulevard that skirted the seashore, and along it to the dock. Mario directed me to a lot at the base of the breakwater, where I parked beside a weatherbeaten Star boat perched on a trailer. A brisk offshore wind was blowing the sand, and tossing puffs of spray across the concrete breakwater. In its lee a hundred boats lay at their moorings, ranging from waterlogged skiffs to seventy-foot sailing yachts with masts like telephone poles.

Mario looked across the bright water of the basin and groaned out loud. “It’s gone all right. He took my boat.” He sounded ready to cry.

I followed him up the sand-drifted steps to a gray one-room building marked HARBORMASTER. It’s door was locked. We could see through the window that the office was empty.

An old man in a dinghy with an outboard chugged up to the landing platform below. Mario hailed him. “Where’s the Chief?”

The old man’s answer was blown away by the wind. We went down the slanting gangway to the platform, which rose and dropped with the swells. “Where’s Chief Schreiber?”

“He went out on the Coast Guard cutter,” the old man said. “They got a radio call from a San Pedro tuna boat.” He lifted the outboard motor clear of the stern and heaved it onto the dock. “There’s a boat on the rocks at Sanctuary. They said it looks as if it’s breaking up. What happened to your face, chum?”

“Never mind that.” Mario’s hand closed on the old man’s arm. “Did you catch the name of the boat?”

The old man pulled away. “Don’t get excited, friend. Just take it easy. The tuna boat didn’t get close enough to read the name. You lose a boat?”

“You guessed it.”

“It’s a sport-fishing boat with aluminium outriggers.”

Mario turned to me urgently: “Drive me out to Sanctuary, how about it?” The ugly bruises around his eyes were livid against his pallor.

“Don’t you think you better take it easy?”

“When my boat’s breaking up on the rocks? You don’t want to drive me, I’ll take my motorcycle.”

“I’ll drive you,” I said. “How far is it?”

“Less than ten miles. Come on.”

“Is it your boat?” The old man’s question blew after us like a seagull’s cry, and blew away unanswered.

We drove down the coast highway in silence. Mario sat glum beside me, glaring down at his skinned knuckles, which he rapped together fiercely time after time. With his bandage-helmeted head and damaged Latin features, he looked like a wounded gladiator. I hoped he wasn’t going to pass out on my hands.

“Who beat you up, Mario?” I asked him after a while.

It was some time before he answered. When he did, his voice was thick with remembered anger. “There were three of them. Two of them held me while the other one sloughed me. Who they were is my own business. I’ll take care of them personally, one at a time.”

He dug into the pocket of his jacket and brought out a dully gleaming object. I took my eyes from the road to glance at it. It was a curved metal bar of aluminum, about five inches long, with four round fingerholes and a taped grip. Mario slipped it over his fingers and smacked his armed right hand in the open palm of his left. “I’ll take care of them personally,” he growled to himself.

“Put it away,” I said. “It’s a felony to carry knuckles like that. Where did you get it?”

“Took it away from a customer one time. I used to be a bartender in town.” He kissed the cruel edge of the metal and dropped it back in his pocket. “I thought it might come in handy. I’m glad I kept it.”

“You’ll get yourself in worse trouble. Why did they beat you, Mario?”

“It was my lousy brother’s fault,” he said. “He skipped on Friday night and left me holding the bag. They thought I was in it with him. He didn’t even warn me ahead of time. They came aboard the Queen in the middle of the night and dragged me out of my bunk. I couldn’t handle three.”

“Is that the night you and Joe got back from Ensenada?”

He looked at me suspiciously. “What about Ensenada? Joe and me went fishing off Catalina Thursday and Friday. We anchored off the island overnight.”

“Catch anything?”

“Not a damn thing. What’s this about Ensenada, anyway?”

“I heard that Dowser has a Mexican branch. Your loyalty to Dowser is very moving, especially after what he did to your face.”

“I don’t know any Dowser,” he answered unconvincingly. “You wouldn’t be Treasury, would you?”

“I would not. I told you I’m a private detective.”

“What’s your angle? You said you talked to Galley, you must of found her?”

“Your brother slugged me last night. It bothers me, for some reason.” But it was the dead man who lay heavy on my mind.

“I’ll lend you my knucks when I finish with them,” he said. “Turn down the next side road.”

It was a rutted lane, meandering across a high meadow to the lip of a sea-cliff. Near the cliffs edge a grove of eucalyptus, with smooth pink trunks like naked flesh, huddled raggedly in the wind. There were weathered redwood tables for picnickers scattered among the trees. Mario ran down a path toward the edge of the cliff, and I followed him. I could see the moving water through the trees, as bright as mercury, and then the gray Coast Guard cutter a half-mile out from shore. It was headed north, back to Pacific Point.

The path ended in a sagging wooden barrier beyond which the cliff dropped sheer. A hundred feet below, which looked like a hundred yards, the running surges burst on its rocky base. Mario leaned on the barrier, looking down.

Where the surf boiled whitest on the jutting black basalt, the boat lay half-capsized. Wave after wave struck it and almost submerged it, pouring in foam-streaked sheets down its slanting deck. The boat rolled with their punches, and its smashed hull groaned on the rocks. The outriggers flopped loose like broken wings. It was a total loss.

Mario’s body was swaying in sympathy with the boat. I didn’t have to ask if it was his. He groaned when the surf went over it, and his face was wetter than the spray accounted for.

“I wonder what happened to Joe,” I said.

“The bastard wrecked my boat. I hope he drowned.”

A cormorant flew over the water from north to south like a sharp black soul hell-bent. Mario watched it out of sight.