The Way Some People Die

Chapter 18

We were waiting at the yacht basin when the Coast Guard cutter docked. As the gray hull nudged the truck-tire buffers along the edge of the dock, two men jumped ashore. One was a tanned young Coast Guard lieutenant in working uniform, apparently the commander of the cutter. The other was a gray-bearded man in ancient suntans without insignia. He had the sea-scoured faded eyes, the air of quiet obstinacy and the occupational pot of an old Navy petty officer.

“The Aztec Queen’s on the rocks at Sanctuary,” he said to Mario.

“I know it. We just got back from there.”

“No chance to salvage it,” the Coast Guard lieutenant said. “Even if we could get in close enough, it wouldn’t be worth it now. It’s breaking up.”

“I know it.”

“Let’s get inside.” The harbormaster iiugged himself. “That’s a cold wind.”

We followed him to his office on the breakwater at the foot of the dock. I sat in on a conference in the barren cubicle, or stood in on it, because there were only three chairs. They had seen nobody aboard the wreck. The skipper of the tuna boat who had reported it in the first place had seen nobody, either. The question was: how did the Aztec Queen get out of the yacht basin and nine miles down the coast?

In offical company, Mario wasn’t outspoken. He said he had no idea. But he looked at me as if he expected me to do the talking.

“Its your boat, isn’t it?” the harbormaster said.

“Sure it’s my boat. I bought it secondhand from Rassi in January.”

“Insured?” the lieutenant asked him.

He shook his head. “I couldn’t afford the premiums.”

“Tough tiddy. What were you using it for?”

“Fishing parties, off and on. Mostly off, in this season. You know that, Chief.” He turned to Schreiber, who was leaning back in his chair against the wall. The coastal-waters chart behind his head showed a round grease spot where he had leaned before.

“Let’s get back on the beam,” he said heavily. “The boat didn’t slip her moorings and steer herself onto the rocks. There must have been somebody aboard her.”

“I know that,” Mario stirred uneasily in his chair. If talking had to be done, he wanted somebody else to do it for him.

“Well, it wasn’t Captain Kidd. Didn’t the engine have a lock on it?”

“Yeah. My brother had the keys, my brother Joe.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Now we’re getting somewhere. Your boat was gone this morning when I come on duty. I thought you took it.”

“I been laid up,” Mario said. “I was in an accident.”

“Yeah, I can see. Looks as if your brother got himself in a worse accident. Did you give him permission to take the boat?”

“He didn’t need permission. He owned an interest in it.”

“Well, it ain’t worth much now,” Schreiber said sententiously. “About two red cents. Are you sure it was your brother took her out?”

“How can I be sure? I was home in bed.”

“Joe was here this morning,” I said. “His wife drove him down before dawn.”

“Did he say he was going out in the boat?” the lieutenant asked.

“He didn’t say anything so far as I know.”

“Where’s his wife now?”

“She’s staying in Santa Monica with her mother. Mrs. Samuel Lawrence.”

Schreiber made a note of the name. “I guess we better get in touch with her. It looks as if her husband’s lost at sea.”

The lieutenant stood up and pulled his visored cap down over his forehead. “I’ll call the sheriffs office. We’ll have to make a search for him.” He peered through the window across the yacht basin; red sunset streamers were unraveling on the horizon. “It’s getting pretty late to do anything tonight. We can’t get to the boat until low tide.”

“Better try, though. There’s an off chance he’s still inside the cabin.” Schreiber turned to Mario: “Your brother have heart attacks or anything like that?”

“Joe isn’t aboard,” Mario answered flatly.

“How do you know?”

“I got a feeling.”

Schreiber rose, shrugging his thick shoulders. “You better go home, boy, and crawl back into the sack. I don’t know how you feel, but you look Godawful.”

We went back to my car and turned toward the city. It lay serene on its terraced slopes in the last of the sunset, a few lights winking on like early stars. The white African buildings lay in the red air like something seen through rose-colored glasses in memory. Everything was still except the sea, which drummed and groaned behind us to the slow blues-beat of time.

I was glad enough for once to get out of hearing of the sea. But I didn’t get far. Mario wouldn’t go home.

He stopped me at a waterfront bar and said he could use a drink. I parked the car and got out. I could use one, too. Below the sea-wall that lined the other side of the boulevard, the surf complained and pounded like a tired heart. The heavy closing door shut out the sound.

A fat old waiter came to the door, shook hands with Mario, lamented like a mother over his face. He seated us in a booth at the back of the room and lit a bottled red candle on our table. The bottle was thickly crusted with the meltings of other candles, like clotted blood. I thought of Dalling in his blood on the floor. He’d be on a mortuary slab by now, or under white light on an autopsy table, with a butterfly incision in his torso. Dalling seemed very distant and long ago.

The waiter finished dabbing at the table with the end of a soiled napkin. “Something to eat, gentleman? Or you want drinks?”

I ordered a steak and a bottle of beer. Mario wanted a double whiskey, straight.

“Aren’t you going to eat? You’ll knock yourself out.”

“We got minestrone tonight, Mario,” the waiter said. “It’s pooty good for a change.”

“I got to save my appetite,” he explained. “Mama is waiting dinner for me.”

“You want to phone your mama?”

“Naw, I don’t want to talk to her.”

The waiter padded away on flat feet.

“What am I going to tell her?” Mario asked no one in particular. “I lost the boat, that’s bad enough, she never wanted me to buy the boat. I was a damn fool, I let Joe talk me into it. I put up all my cash, and now what have I got? Nothing. I’m on the rocks. And I could of bought an interest in this place, you know that? I tended bar here all last fall and I got on fine with the customers. I got on fine with George, the old guy. He’s getting ready to retire and I could of been sitting pretty instead of on my uppers the way I am.”

He was falling into the singsong of a man with a grievance, as if the whisky he ordered had hit him in the emotions before he drank it. George brought our drinks, silencing Mario. I looked around the room he might have bought a piece of. It had more decorations than a briefcase general: strings of colored bulbs above the bar, deer heads and stuffed swordfish, photographs of old baseball teams, paintings of cardboard mountains, German beer-mugs. On a platform over the kitchen door, an eagle with glaring glass eyes was attacking a stuffed mountain-lion. All the group needed to complete it was a stuffed taxidermist.

“The boat is bad enough,” Mario repeated dismally. “What am I going to tell her about Joe? Joe’s always been her favorite, she’ll go nuts if she thinks he’s drowned. She used to drive us crazy when we were kids, worrying about the old man when he was out. It was kind of a relief when the old man died in bed–”

“You said you had a feeling Joe isn’t aboard. Where do you get that feeling?”

He drained his double shot-glass and rapped on the table for another. “Joe’s awful smart. Joe would never get caught. He was shoplifting in the stores before he was out of grade school, and he never got caught. He was the bright young brother, see, he had that innocent look. I tried it once and they hauled me off to Juvenile and Mama said I was disgracing the family. Not Joe.”

The waiter brought his whisky, and told me that my steak would soon be ready.

“Besides,” Mario said, “the bastard can swim like a seal. He used to be a lifeguard on the beach. He’s been a lot of things, most of them lousy. I got a pretty good inkling where Joe is. He isn’t on the Queen and he isn’t on the bottom of the sea. He skipped again and left me holding the bag.”

“How could he skip at sea?”

“He abandoned the Queen, if you want my opinion. He had five hundred in it, I had fifteen. What did it matter to him, he makes big money. The bastard took her out and ditched her, so it would look as if he drowned himself. He probably made a rendezvous with the guy that has the cabin cruiser in Ensenada–” He cut himself off short, peered anxiously into my face.

“Torres?” I said as casually as I could.

His bruises served as a mask for whatever feelings he had. Deliberately, he emptied his second shot-glass, and sipped with fumbling lips at a glass of water. “I don’t know anything about any Torres. I was making it up as I went along, trying to figure how he ditched the boat.”

“Why would he go to all that trouble?”

“Take a look at my face and figure it out for yourself. They did this to me because I’m Joey’s brother, that’s all the reason they had. What would they do to him?” He answered his own question in pantomime, twisting his doubled fists in opposing directions, the way you behead a chicken.

The steak came, and I washed down what I could eat of it with the remnant of my beer. Mario had his third double. He was showing signs of wear, and I decided not to let him have any more. But it turned out that I didn’t have to interfere.

Customers had been drifting in by ones and twos, most of them heading for the bar at the front, where they perched like roosting chickens in a row. I was trying to catch the waiter’s eye, to signal for my check, when a man opened the front door. He stood with his hand on the knob, scanning the bar-flies, a big man with a ten-gallon hat who looked like a rancher in his Saturday suit. Then his glance caught the back of Mario’s bandaged head, and he strode toward us.

Mario half-turned in his seat and saw him coming. “Dammit,” he muttered. “It’s the deputy sheriff.”

The big man laid a hand on his shoulder. “I thought you might be in here. What’s this about your brother? Move over, eh?”

Mario slid reluctantly into the corner. “Your guess is as good as mine. Joe doesn’t tell me his plans.”

The deputy sat down heavily beside him. Mario leaned away as if contact with the law might be contagious.

“You had some trouble with Joe, I hear.”

“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

“Take a look in a mirror, it might stir up your memory.”

“I haven’t seen Joe since last Friday night.”

“Friday night, eh? Was that before or after you got your face ploughed under?”

Mario touched his cheekbones with an oil-grained finger. “Hell, that wasn’t Joe.”

“Who was it?”

“A friend of mine. It was a friendly fight.”

“You got nice friends,” the deputy said with sarcasm. A downward smile drew his sun-wrinkles deeper. “What about Joe?”

“I told you I didn’t see him since Friday night. We got in from a fishing trip and he beat it back to L. A. He lives in L. A. with his wife.”

“If he doesn’t live in Davy Jones’s locker with a mermaid. I heard he dropped out of sight last Friday, hasn’t been back here since.”

“He came back this morning,” I said. “His wife drove him down.”

“Yeah, I mean until this morning. I got in touch with the wife, she’s on her way. She didn’t see the other one, though.”

“What other one?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” he snapped, and turned his flat red face on Mario: “Were you down here this morning? Aboard your boat?”

“I was home in bed. The old lady knows I was home in bed.” Mario looked bewildered, and his words were whisky-slurred.

“Yeah? I was talking to her on the telephone. She didn’t wake up until seven. Your boat went out around four.”

“How do you know that?”

“Trick Curly, he’s a lobsterman, he just got in from the island. You know him?”

“Seen him around.”

“He was up early this morning, and he saw the skiff go out to the Aztec Queen. The skiff is still there, by the way, tied to the moorings. There were two men in it when it passed Trick’s boat.”

“Joe?”

“He couldn’t tell, it was dark. He hailed them but they didn’t answer him. He heard them go aboard, and then the boat went out past the end of the breakwater.” He turned on Mario suddenly, and rasped: “Why didn’t you answer him?”

“Me? Answer who?”

“Trick, when he hailed you in the skiff.”

“For Christ’s sake!” The appalling face looked genuinely appalled. “I was home in bed. I didn’t get up till nine. Mama gave me breakfast in bed, you ask her.”

“I already did. That wouldn’t stop you from sneaking out in the middle of the night and coming down here.”

“Why would I do a crazy thing like that?” His upturned hands moved eloquently in the air.

“There was bad blood between you and Joe,” the deputy said dramatically. “That’s common knowledge. Last week in this very bar you threatened to kill him, in front of witnesses. You told him it would be a public service. If you killed him, it would be the only public service you ever did, Tarantine.”

“I was drunk when I said that,” Mario whined. “I don’t know what happened to him, sheriff, honest to God. He took my boat and wrecked it and now you’re blaming me. It isn’t fair.”

“Aw, shut your yap.”

“Okay, arrest me!” Mario cried. “I’m a sick man, so go ahead and arrest me.”

“Take it easy, Tarantine.” The deputy rose ponderously, his wavering shadow climbing the opposite wall as high as the ceiling. “We haven’t even got a corpus delicti yet. When we do we’ll come and see you. Stick around.”

“I’m not going any place.”

He sat slack and miserable in the corner. The only life in his face came from the small jumping reflections of the candle in the black centers of his eyes. I waited until the deputy was out of sight, and steered him out to my car. Mario cursed steadily under his breath in a mixture of English, bracero Spanish, and Italian.