Choke

by Stuart Woods

  “Where you headed, guys?” Tommy called out.

  Another suntanned boat bum on deck, who seemed to be giving the orders, looked down at Tommy and his street clothes, his leather shoes, with utter contempt. “The South Seas, guy,” he said witheringly.

  Tommy held up his badge and grinned. “Permission to come aboard?”

  The boat bum’s face fell. “Okay.” He turned to the man on the pontoon. “Make those lines fast again.”

  Tommy and Daryl climbed aboard. “Who are you?” he asked, “and what are you doing aboard the Carras yacht?”

  “I’m Jim Bowles; we’re moving the yacht to Fort Lauderdale to sell her. I do ferry work for the broker.”

  “Mind if I have a look around?”

  “Not at all,” the man said, anxious to be cooperative now.

  Tommy walked down into the saloon and looked around him at the mahogany paneling and the expensive furniture. “This is some way to travel, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll say,” Daryl replied.

  “Follow me.” Tommy walked aft to the engine room and looked around.

  “This is where the deed was done, huh?” Daryl asked.

  “Yeah, it is.” He walked further aft to the rear of the engines. “And this is where the exhaust was connected to the diving tanks.”

  “Tommy, would the exhaust from the engine have enough pressure to pack fumes into a tank of compressed air?”

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said, “but look here.” He pointed to the compressor. “If he connected the exhaust hose directly to the compressor intake, the compressor would do the work. That’s how it had to be done.”

  “Right,” Daryl said quietly. He placed a hand on the exhaust pipe. “So the tubing we’ve got would fit inside this hose, and the other end would go over the intake for the compressor?” He placed a hand on the compressor’s intake hose.

  “That’s the drill.”

  Daryl nodded. “Makes sense; I guess I was hoping to find something new about all this.”

  “Well,” Tommy said, pointing to the two hose clips holding the exhaust tubing to the overboard pipe, “if all Chuck had to do was to put this back onto that exhaust pipe, it certainly couldn’t have taken him forty-five minutes to do the job, as Clare swore. It didn’t take that long to do the time when I was on board, and it didn’t the second time.”

  “Anyway, the engine wouldn’t be running when he was making that kind of repair,” Daryl observed.

  “Let’s take a look around this tub,” Tommy said.

  The two detectives went forward again to the saloon.

  “You guys going to be much longer?” the ferry skipper called from on deck.

  “Yeah, we are,” Tommy called back. “We’ll let you know when we’re done.”

  They went to the forward cabin and began a search, working aft, just as they had on Chuck Chandler’s boat. Half an hour later, Daryl called Tommy over to look at something in the aft owner’s cabin. “Look at this,” he said, pointing to what seemed to be a cupboard opening. “There’s no knob or pull on it.”

  Tommy reached down and pushed the panel; it sprang open. There was nothing inside the exposed locker, but there were spring clips fixed to the inside of the cupboard door. “What do you make of that?” Tommy asked.

  Daryl reached inside his jacket, produced his nine-millimeter automatic, and pressed the pistol into the spring clips. “I think that’s what it’s for,” he said.

  Tommy looked at the king-size berth. “If Harry slept on this side, that would put a weapon right at hand for him, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but where’s the weapon?” Daryl asked. “You see any when we searched the Carras house?”

  “Nope.” Tommy began going through the lockers in the cabin, and he came across one containing wet suits and diving gear, including spare tanks of various sizes. “Guess Harry was an enthusiastic diver, huh? He was ready for anything, except breathing carbon monoxide.” He picked up a compressed-air spear gun and felt the tip. “I wouldn’t like to take one of these in the gut.”

  “I get your point,” Daryl said.

  Tommy groaned. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Back in the car, Tommy said, “Let’s go down to the Olde Island Racquet Club. I’d like to talk to Victor.”

  “How come?”

  “Remember, when we were searching Chuck’s car, he said he’d left the trunk locked, but it had been unlocked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was just wondering how somebody else might have had access to Chuck’s car keys, and…”

  “Chuck’s locker in the clubhouse, right?”

  “Right.”

  Victor finished a lesson, got a Coke from the machine, and headed to where Tommy and Daryl were sitting at a table at courtside.

  “Let me talk to Victor alone, okay?” Tommy said.

  “Sure; I’ll go over to the hotel and pick up a paper,” Daryl replied.

  “Take your time.”

  Victor sat down as Daryl left. “How’s it going, Tommy? Haven’t seen you on the courts lately; don’t want you to get rusty.”

  “Been busy as hell, Victor, until this morning. Daryl wanted a paper, so I thought I’d take a load off for a few minutes. You teaching a lot lately?”

  “Yeah, especially since Chuck has been taking some time off. I hope you guys are making some headway toward clearing him. I don’t believe for a minute he could have had anything to do with Harry’s death.”

  “That’s good,” Tommy replied. “You know Chuck well?”

  “Not intimately, but we have a beer now and then.”

  “How about the Carrases?”

  “I knew them from here.” He nodded toward the courts. “Chuck and I had dinner with them once, and of course, we were all out together snorkling that day.”

  “Yeah, we were. What kind of a life do you have in Key West, Victor?”

  “Not bad, I guess. Merk and I get the best of the weather here in winter, then we head to Santa Fe for the summers. It’s a nice combination.”

  “Got a girl in Key West?”

  “Nobody special. I sort of like cruising the tourists. You have a few nice nights together, then they’re gone until next year. I got a little black book that would stand me in good stead in just about any major city in the United States, I guess.”

  “They come from all over, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “Victor, did you ever see Clare Carras alone? Without Harry, I mean.”

  “I gave her a couple of lessons, but when Chuck came he took over the better players.”

  “No, I mean alone like at her house.”

  “Nope.” He looked at Tommy appraisingly. “Hey, wait a minute, Tommy; she’s way out of my league. The Chuck Chandlers of this world service the Clare Carrases; ol’ Victor has to be content with the secretaries on vacation. That woman would chew me up and spit me out in five minutes.”

  “You’re a good judge of character, Victor,” Tommy said.

  “Once, in my youth, I got mixed up with somebody like that. It cost me a good job at a great tennis club. If I hadn’t blown that I’d be knocking down a hundred and fifty grand a year.”

  “Do you regret that, Victor?”

  Victor smiled. “Not really.” He waved a hand at the three courts. “This is more my speed.”

  “No ambition?”

  Victor shook his head. “Merk is the one with the ambition. He’s always dreaming about opening up a chain of these places-a hundred, hundred and fifty.”

  Tommy looked at Victor with interest. “Merk’s ambitious, huh? Does he have any hope of pulling it off?”

  “Not without a major investor, and so far, he hasn’t been able to come up with one. Tell you the truth, I keep hoping he’ll sell me this club. It would suit me, I think; keep me going in my old age, which ain’t all that far away.”

  “Merk’s a good-looking guy; what sort of social life does he have?”

  “Merk seems to read a lot,” Vi
ctor said. “We have a beer now and again, but he’s always home early.”

  “Married?”

  “Divorced. She took him pretty good, or he might have had that chain of tennis clubs by now.”

  “Does he have any friends?”

  “Just me, I guess. He’s the quiet type.”

  “Yeah. How much time do you spend in the clubhouse, Victor?”

  “Hardly any,” Victor replied. “I’m out here all day, then I head for home or the bars when the day’s over. Merk’s the office guy; he’s in there all day, keeping the books and selling equipment. Once in a while he’ll do a lesson, if we’re shorthanded, but mostly he’s in there bent over a desk.”

  Tommy looked toward the club. “He in there now?”

  “He went to the post office, I think. Oops, here comes my next lesson. See you later.”

  “Victor,” Tommy said.

  Victor stopped and turned. “You were smart to stay away from Clare Carras. Look what’s happened to Chuck.”

  Victor grinned. “The secret to happiness, I think, is knowing your limitations.”

  Tommy watched Victor trot on court to meet his client, an elderly man in whites, then got up and walked into the clubhouse. The place was deserted. He walked into Merk’s office and looked around. Nothing but a desk, a computer, and a telephone. He opened another door, and it led to the small locker room where he’d searched Chuck’s locker. On one wall of the office was a small key safe. Tommy opened it and browsed. He came up with one labeled “Master, lockers.” He put the key back and left the club. Daryl was waiting for him in the parking lot.

  “What do you think?” Daryl asked. “Is Victor in this somehow?”

  “I don’t think so,” Tommy said. “Like Chuck Chandler, he doesn’t strike me as the type. What do you know about Merk, the guy who runs the place?”

  “Not much.”

  “Neither does anybody else.”

  42

  Daryl shifted his weight and switched radio stations for something that would keep him awake. He had followed Merk Connor home from the tennis club three hours before, and Merk was still inside. Daryl could see him occasionally as he moved around the little shotgun Conch house. A little legwork had told him that after his divorce, Merk had moved here from a larger house in a better neighborhood.

  Daryl glanced at his watch; another forty-five minutes before he was relieved by Tommy. When he looked back at the house, all the lights were off. It was a little early for bedtime, he thought. Then, as he watched, there was the movement of a shadow behind the house, and a figure vaulting over a low fence and disappearing toward the next street. Daryl got the car started and quickly drove around the block. At the next intersection he got out of the car, ran to the corner, and looked around a building. The street was nearly deserted, but he saw a familiar figure turn another corner ahead, toward Duval Street.

  Daryl got back into the car, drove straight ahead until he came to Duval, turned the corner, and pulled up at the curb, leaving the engine running. Half a minute later, Merk walked into Duval and started down the street at a rapid pace, headed toward the western end of the island. Daryl followed slowly, just close enough to see that sometime after arriving home from work, Merk had changed into fresh clothes.

  Daryl was holding up traffic now, so he pulled over, flipped down the sun visor to expose the car’s ID to the foot patrolmen handing out parking tickets, and continued to follow Merk on foot. Merk never window-shopped or slowed down; he seemed to know exactly where he was going and was in a hurry to get there. He was getting closer and closer to Dey Street and Clare Carras.

  From a block back, Daryl saw Merk suddenly turn into a building, and he resisted the temptation to run to catch up. It took him a full minute to make up the distance and find that Merk had turned into a bar. Daryl pushed open the door and walked in.

  People turned and looked at him as if they’d been expecting him to arrive. He tried not to appear to be looking for anybody; instead, he ambled up to the bar and ordered a beer. When the bartender had poured it, he allowed himself to lean on the bar and take a good look around for Merk. Suddenly it came to him that he was in a gay bar, and that Merk was not present. At the other end of the bar, he spotted another door to the side street. Cursing under his breath, he left and headed toward the door.

  “Don’t rush off,” a man at the bar said as he passed.

  Rushing was all Daryl felt like doing. He pushed open the door and emerged into the side street, looking both ways. Merk was nowhere in sight. Had he noticed Daryl following him and deliberately lost him, or had he just taken a shortcut?

  Daryl ran back to the corner and back down Duval Street to his car. He got it started and turned right at the next intersection, heading for Dey Street. The bar had been only a block and a half from Clare Carras’s house.

  He cruised slowly down Dey Street, waiting for her house to come into view. Just as it did, the living room lights upstairs went off. A moment later there was a glow from behind the fence from approximately where Clare’s bedroom was located. Daryl drove around the corner into Elizabeth Street, parked, and called Tommy on his portable phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Tommy, it’s Daryl. Merk stayed home for better than three hours, then suddenly left the house by the back door and walked over to Duval Street.”

  “Did you follow him?”

  “Yeah, to a bar that turned out to be full of extremely graceful young men, but he wasn’t there. There was a back door, and by the time I figured it out, he had disappeared.”

  “How far was the place from the Carras house?”

  “A little more than a block. I drove around there just in time to see the living room lights go off and what looked like her bedroom light go on.”

  “Bingo!” Tommy said. “I think we’ve found our man.”

  “I’m around the corner from the house now; are you going to relieve me?”

  “I think we’ll let it go for tonight,” Tommy said. “No telling what time he’ll come out of there, and it would take more than the two of us to watch all four sides of the house. I’ll see you at the station tomorrow morning, okay? We’ll do some checking on Merk.”

  “See you tomorrow,” Daryl said. He started the car and headed for home.

  Tommy arrived at the station the following morning to find Daryl there ahead of him, working at a computer terminal.

  “Hi,” the younger man said. “I’m logged on to the state crime computer right now; it’s doing a search on Merk.”

  “You’re sure he left the bar before you did last night?”

  “I’m sure; the place wasn’t all that crowded, and I looked at every face.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oops, looks like we came up empty,” Daryl said.

  “No record,” the computer screen read.

  “Try the FBI computer,” Tommy said. “I’m going to get some coffee.”

  “Right. Bring me some, will you?”

  Tommy walked into the little kitchenette and poured two cups of coffee, black for himself, milk and two sugars for Daryl. One day the kid would learn about coffee, Tommy thought, about how much better it was without all that stuff in it. He returned to the squad room and looked over Daryl’s shoulder.

  “Bingo,” Daryl said, hitting the keystrokes for a printout.

  Tommy grabbed the sheet as it came out of the printer. “Well, well,” he said. “Mild-mannered Merk wasn’t always so mild-mannered. He had two arrests for assault with a deadly weapon in 1970, in California, no convictions, and lookahere, he got a year for battery in L.A. a few months later and served four months on the county farm. He was picked up on a parole violation, what looks like a barroom brawl a couple of months after that. Then nothing; I guess he’s been clean since then.”

  “How old is the guy?” Daryl asked.

  Tommy looked at the sheet for Merk’s date of birth. “Fifty-one, why?”

  “That would make him the right age for military service dur
ing the Vietnam War, wouldn’t it?”

  “Daryl, you amaze and astound me. Get off a request to the Department of Defense; let’s see if he has a service record.”

  Daryl began typing out the request on the computer. “This’ll take a while,” he said. “We’ll be lucky if we get a reply today.”

  “Mark it urgent,” Tommy said. “Say it’s for an investigation of a serious crime.”

  Daryl finished the request and sent it out by modem. “Maybe that’ll move them a little quicker.”

  “Maybe, but let’s not count on it.” Tommy thought for a minute. “While we’re at it, why don’t we run the record checks on Victor and Chuck. You never know.”

  “Okay,” Daryl said, and began typing.

  Tommy sat down and sipped his coffee, drumming his fingers on the desk, trying not to think of anything in particular. Sometimes his mind came up with stuff when it was just idling.

  After a few minutes, Daryl swiveled around in his chair. “Nothing on either the FBI or Florida state computers. They’re squeaky clean, both of ‘em.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Tommy said.

  “Tommy,” Daryl said, “do you always think that people you like wouldn’t commit a crime?”

  Tommy shook his head. “As a matter of fact, I’m in the habit of thinking the worst of everybody, until they prove me wrong.”

  “Even me?”

  Tommy grinned. “Especially you, kid.”

  43

  When Tommy arrived in the squad room the next morning a secretary handed him an envelope. “This came in late yesterday,” she said.

  Daryl arrived while Tommy was opening the envelope. “What’s that?” he asked.

  Tommy looked at the sheaf of papers. “It’s a digest of Merk Connor’s service record.”

  “Read me the juicy parts,” Daryl said.

  Tommy started through the document. “He was drafted in ‘66, right out of college; he went to OCS and got into Special Services.”

  “You mean like the Green Berets? Was he in Vietnam?”

  “No, like the entertainment and sports services. Yeah, he was in Vietnam, running a tennis program at an officer’s club in Saigon.”