Perhaps ten feet from the top, I looked down the mountainside, realizing the edge was only inches from my feet, and fear melted every bone in my body like water on a wafer. I just collapsed on the path. I lay on the ground, pressing my face into the dirt and gasping for air, wanting to sink into the mountain and feel the comforting arms of earth hold me in warm embrace. My mind was racing. I couldn’t figure out how to get up, or how to get down to the lift. Then my girlfriend was beside me. She bent close and whispered that she would help me down. I rose to my hands and knees, turned slowly on the path, and crawled down to the lift. Normally my sense of manhood would be shattered by this show of wimpish behavior. But the fear was so great that I had no embarrassment, only gratitude. And now it was happening again.
The Sheriff just looked at me, as if he could see the collapse of my physical systems. But he said nothing. Then he started to fill the space with words.
“You see, we can’t figure out how he would hit the back of his head if he went overboard tied to a fish. Maybe he hit the rub rail or something as he went over. Anyway Doc Winters will figure it out.”
The Sheriff was starting to ease up a bit, realizing I was still struggling with composure.
“Normally, you’d receive a written copy of the autopsy in four to six weeks,” he said. “But if you can stick around, I should be able to tell you what happened in a day or two.”
Pulling myself together, I asked, “You all had an inquest, didn’t you? What did that determine?”
“Well, there you go,” he said. “The Captain said there wasn’t anyone else on the boat. Normally, he has a first mate to help bait the hooks and all that. But apparently your brother said he was a fisherman and didn’t need any help, especially if the Captain would cut the price. So just the two of them went out.”
“That doesn’t sound right to me,” I said. “I just started running my own boat, but I know Captains don’t like to go out without a mate. Although sometimes the mate gets drunk and over sleeps, so the Captain doesn’t have much choice. And I don’t know any Captain who would cut the price either. A day of fishing is a day of fishing.”
“Well, that’s what the captain testified. Of course, if your brother was killed, then all bets are off. We better try to find that captain… and the first mate that didn’t show.”
“What do you mean killed?”
“Well,” the Sheriff said, “if Doc Winters doesn’t find any water in his lungs, he might not have drowned.”
I couldn’t concentrate. “You mean,” I said, “that hit on the head may have killed him?”
“Maybe. But we don’t want to rush this. We’ll know tomorrow.”
“Can I take his clothes and stuff?”
“I think we better wait. We’ll need it for the investigation.”
“Let’s go do the identification,” I said. “I think I need to go for a walk and think about all this.”
“There is one other thing that seems a little strange,” the Sheriff said.
Oh no. I could feel my heart sink again. Now what was I going to learn? Maybe I should have brought Martha with me. No, this would drive her crazy. I started wondering if I should call her, or what to do if she calls me.
“That other thing relates to his shoes,” the Sheriff said. “Do you know what kind of shoes he wore?”
“Shoes?” I repeated, a little edgy from the Sheriff’s habit of asking me questions I couldn’t possibly answer. “I have no idea.”
“When we found him, he had one tennis shoe on his left foot,” the Sheriff said. “The strange thing, though, it was blue with yellow dots.”
“What do you mean,” I asked.
“Does that seem normal? He had on cut off blue jeans and a blue denim shirt. Pretty basic stuff.”
“That sounds about right,” I said, “but blue tennis shoes with polka dots are definitely out of character. On the other hand he’s an outgoing guy, and a crazy waterman. He was here on a vacation of sorts, so who knows.”
“One other thing,” the Sheriff said. “We think it’s a woman’s shoe. Pretty hard to tell if it fits because of the condition of the body. But it was on his foot, and I’d guess about a size eight.”
“I don’t know his size, but it’s probably not too big. He was average height,” I said. My references to Jimmy kept alternating between present tense and past tense as the picture in my mind fluctuated between the brother I knew so well, and the body on the beach. And then the Sheriff produced the shoe.
“I can’t take this out of the bag,” he said, holding a plastic bag that he pulled from under his desk, “because it may be evidence. The State boys are going to look for evidence, DNA or whatever they can pull out. But does this look familiar to you?”
I nodded no.
“I should have told you this first, but I have to ask you not to tell anyone about this polka dot shoe business,” the Sheriff said. “We’re withholding it from the press. God only knows what kind of story those boys would make of this. And if somebody gave him this shoe, we don’t want to scare them off.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“This raises an awful lot of questions. We went looking for that Captain yesterday afternoon and it seems he’s taken his boat south, or at least it’s gone from the marina and nobody seems to know where. Seems nobody really knows much about that Captain either. Not a local boy.”
“What are the questions?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t want to get into that. But the doc can tell a lot of things in that autopsy.” The Sheriff paused as if in afterthought. “You know about diatones. There’s jillions of them in the water. They’re the skeletal remains of plankton, and they differ depending on the water they’re in. Almost like a DNA for water. Doc can take a little water from your brother’s lungs, if there is any, and tell us just about where it came from. He might even be able to tell us if the body drowns in one place and was thrown overboard in another. Hard telling what else he can find.”
“What else?”
“Down here we get a lot of drowning. Doc can test something called ‘pupal cases,’ which I guess are bugs, and tell you within four or five days when the person drowned, even if it was two or three years ago.”
“That’s great Sheriff,” I said, “but what now?”
“You go make that identification,” he said. “Then we’ll get the autopsy. Then you can go home while we conduct an investigation. In the meantime, you be thinking about anything we should know about that shoe, or about why Jimmy Shannon would have been hit over the head.”
Doc Winters had been the local doctor for nearly 20 years, but his real love was being the county medical examiner. He made himself an authority on drowning, which was virtually a necessity in a county with hundreds of miles of shoreline. He was very matter of fact, an attitude he had learned from the families of his victims. Emotions in this situation could be wide ranging, and he found it best to be quick and factual.
“Mr. Shannon,” he said, “I’ll show you your brother. Just his face. It’s not pretty, because of the time in water. But I think you can handle it.”
He pulled back the sheet, and I recognized the face only by the outlines of his form. I had seen my brother in every contortion imaginable, in bed, in the water, in wrestling squabbles when I squeezed his head so hard his nose was twisted around his mouth. But nothing like this. I just nodded and turned away.
Doc Winters replaced the sheet and turned me to the door. When we got back to the doc’s office, I dared to ask about Jimmy’s body, the condition and all. I think it was the nibbled and dibbled on my mind. Doc Winters looked me over before answering.
“Mr. Shannon,” he said, “normally the bodies never come back. The fish just eat them up, or at least they eat where there aren’t any clothes. The old fishermen here used to talk about bringing back the big tuna lashed to their boat, and when they got back the tuna was ‘apple cored.’ Kind of like the ‘old man and the sea.’ That means the sharks ate the body and l
eft nothing but the head and the tail fin. It’s different with people. Usually the bodies come back with only their middle uneaten because of their clothes. Your brother was lucky… at least in that regard.”
Then he realized how all that must sound, saying only, “I’m sorry.”
Doc Winters had a red leather couch in his office that was along the wall near his desk. He motioned for me to have a seat, rubbed his hand through his thin white hair, and massaged his eyes as if the strain of identification had blurred his vision. The couch looked soft and low and I was afraid once I got down, I would have trouble getting up. But it was the only place to sit. I suspected the doc had comforted a lot of people on this couch, and it was relaxing on purpose. So I made myself comfortable while Doc Winters moved behind his desk, slid some papers around what looked like handwritten notes, and glanced over to see if I was ready.
“Mr. Shannon,” he said, “we are going to find out what happened to your brother, and the Sheriff is going to find out who did it.”
“You mean you already know it was murder?” I exclaimed.
“Here’s what we know. Your brother has a big gash on the back of his head. There are marks on his wrist consistent with a fishing line or a wire leader, and that blue shoe with the yellow spots tells me something isn’t quite kosher about that fishing trip. But we have a lot of tests to make and we’ll find out. First, we want to know if he drowned or if the head trauma did him in. And that shoe got me to thinking, maybe we ought to run some other tests. We might need to check for sexual activity. Maybe it was more than just tuna that got that boy all excited.”
“You mean a woman?” I asked dumbly.
“Well, it seems to me that someone else was on that boat.”
The doc pushed his chair back and crossed his fingers in his lap. I had nothing more to say. As feared, it was a struggle to raise myself off the couch.
Chapter Eight
Margot Lillian Wildman saw the wake of a ski boat roll silently under her husband’s charter boat berthed at the Bayfront. She braced herself on the deck of the Lil, gently touching the diesel engine cover in the center of the boat and righting herself almost imperceptibly, never interrupting her conversation with the clients. Her wide brimmed straw hat pulled firmly over short brown hair gave her a breezy look, almost festive, in this row of work boats filled with fishing parties. Most of the men wore blue jeans and knit shirts with company names over the pocket, faded by long days in the sun. And Lillian, wife of the boat’s Captain, might have seemed more natural in similarly basic work clothes. But that was not her style. Although her visits to the Lil were few, she always arrived like a butterfly, climbing over the transom as if the wind might lift her at any moment to a far away place. Her brightness always lifted my spirits.
A group of five clients with tennis shoes and faded shirts had gathered on the boat. The welcoming hand of a computer engineer from Washington, D.C. studied her as she introduced herself.
“Hello,” she said, “I’m Lil, Pete’s wife, and he invited me to join you gentlemen today. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Hell no, we’re delighted to have you,” the engineer said. “It’s a treat.”
“This is my Mother’s Day present,” Lil said. “Opening day of the season. It’s a treat for me.”
Pete’s charter license allowed six clients on board, in addition to the captain and a deck hand. One member of the party had cancelled, and Pete waited until the last day before inviting Lil to join the group. She didn’t mind, of course, knowing that they couldn’t afford to turn down any paying guests. And it was still a treat because she loved to fish and didn’t get many opportunities.
Pete had been on board for at least an hour, preparing the rods and selecting lures for striped bass. He poured Lil a cup of coffee from his thermos, which she took in both hands so it wouldn’t spill if the wake from another passing boat hit their bow. She shifted the cup to one hand and introduced herself with the other. The guests were waiting for introductions and her shapely figure did not go unnoticed. But they seemed like a friendly bunch. Lil didn’t fit the mold for most watermen wives, who might be expected to appear in jeans and tennis shoes with a tee shirt that said Swamp Circle Saloon on the chest. Rather, she wore pastels. Pink shorts and a pale blue blouse with sandals that she might kick off once they got underway. She looked more ready for a stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue than a day on the Bay.
Pete and Lil were the future of life as watermen. Their new 42-foot workboat was bare bones in terms of amenities, but cost over two hundred thousand dollars. Pete borrowed the money just as a computer company would borrow to bring out its new software package. He had a business plan that told him exactly how many customers would be needed, on how many days, rain or shine, to breakeven. He knew what his costs would be right down to the eels he bought every morning from PJ’s bait shop. And if I asked, I bet he could tell me how many pounds of fish it would take to satisfy a month of fishing parties, although poundage doesn’t count as much as quantity in the eyes of a “yellow jacket.” The boys who fished in their new yellow slickers wanted pictures of fish to show their wives and friends.
The Lil was docked next to the Martha Claire, and I watched her unload her party every day, at noon for the half-day trip. Pete charged six hundred dollars a day for a party of six, with three hundred to be paid in advance and another three hundred at the end of the day. I knew this was the future, but still, it wasn’t crabbing. It wasn’t fishing, really. It was entertainment and marketing, but Pete had made the transition so smoothly that most people didn’t notice the change. They still crowded the dock at four o’clock each afternoon to view the catch, and watch Pete move his big filet knife so effortlessly through the fish that it seemed like a lady taking off her fur coat. The skin just peeled away and the white meat of the fish sparkled like a patch of snow in the midday sun. The fish were still the main act, and Pete never brought his laptop on the boat.
Pete liked showing his city clients my working crab boat next door. It was like presenting a 1932 Packard at the auto show, giving the twenty first century customers a look at history. I might have resented that if Pete wasn’t such a generous and genuine fellow. He stood on his deck with no hat, hair tousled, and wearing a snappy new tee shirt with his logo on the front. It was a large striped bass about to be reeled in by a bikini clad blonde on the stern deck of his boat. Underneath it said: Join the Lil, Charter Boat Fishing, PeteWildman.com.
“I see the Martha Claire is stoked up and raring to go,” Pete said on the morning we first met. I was stacking crab pots on the aft deck, aware of the activity next door, and wondering if the captain would acknowledge my presence. Pete did it with gusto. He walked to the center of his fishing party, which was stowing its jackets for the day and finding positions along the gunnels, and he shouted to me with a voice loud enough to call everyone to attention. HELLO, MARTHA CLAIRE. The show was on.
Pete reached across the sliver of water between our boats and shook hands. “Glad to meet you Ned Shannon,” he said. “I knew your brother well, and I look forward to sharing the pier.”
Before I could acknowledge, he turned back to his group. “This is Mr. Neddie Shannon,” he said to the party. “He’s trying to be a real waterman. A crabber. Sadly, he used to be a lawyer, but now he’s recovering. This is his twelve step plan. As you can see he’s getting his crab pots ready. There’s the bait, in that white bucket. And when we get out in the Bay, I’ll show you his buoys. Those are the colorful corks bobbing in the water that mark his crab pots. You all can help make sure I don’t hit any of them.”
The boys laughed gently, feeling the camaraderie between fishermen, although I had said little. Pete was just starting a banter these boys would know for the next several hours, or however long it took to make their catch.
“Don’t let me get a crab line in my prop,” Pete said to his clients. “Because my beautiful wife refuses to dive in and cut us loose.” Their eyes flickered at the prospect of see
ing through Lil’s wet shirt. And Lil joined the act as naturally as a glance at her watch. “Not a chance, boys,” she said. “One of you will have to go over the side.”
Lil cut off suggestive humor pretty quickly. She had grown up around watermen and knew that such talk could escalate rapidly into rowdy behavior, or erroneous conclusions about women’s attitudes. Low cut blouses, short skirts, and jokes about sex were magnets for a lecherous mentality. Several of Pete’s friends had made suggestive comments to Lil about her figure, and she always turned away. She often said to Pete, “Men are so weak.” Letting him know that she expected more from him, and that she knew all men are susceptible to temptation.
Pete had a wide smile that seldom vanished. Watermen would tell of once seeing Pete in anger when a client lost control of his reel, creating a bird’s nest of monofilament. But he was never heard to yell at Lil, or swear in public, or exhibit bitterness toward the government, all staples of a normal Captain. Pete liked that title, Captain; used it when referring to himself; and always signed his name as Captain Pete.
Since we met, I have watched Captain Pete steer the Lil into the slip next to me without ever touching the pilings. His Caterpillar diesel responds to touch like pushing a pen across expensive paper. The boat grunts deep and soft, like a cat in a basket. As Pete spins the wheel, the stern adjusts just a foot or two, and the boat moves backward like a drawer into a cabinet, stopping without ever touching. I remember my brother telling me that boating is not a contact sport. “Never let it touch the dock,” he said. I dreamed of the day I could do it, even with Vinnie helping me.
Death in the Polka Dot Shoes Page 9
